Repeats a rare feat in baseball
Cubs, Indians face bumpy road so far
One day after spraining his ankle, reigning National League MVP Kris Bryant articulated a truth that was still just as potent for his Chicago Cubs before he stepped awk- wardly on the third-base bag at Nationals Park.
“This year’s just been kind of weird for all of us,” he said.
For Bryant and the Cubs, a team that has accumulated 200 wins in the last two seasons and won the franchise’s first World Series title since 1908, “weird” fits the bill.
Historically, though, the season could be more aptly described as normal — not only for the Cubs, but also for the Cleveland Indians, the team that came one game shy of claiming a World Series championship for itself.
After all, Bryant expressed another truth that day: It’s hard to repeat.
The last team to do so was the New York Yankees, when they won the World Series in 1998, 1999 and 2000. Before that, it was the Toronto Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993. You have to go back to the 1970s for the next instance, when the Yankees won in 1977 and 1978.
And since 1960, a reigning pennant winner has made it back to the World Series 25 times, with the Yankees doing it in nine such instances.
Now, the Cubs aren’t exactly bucking the trend. At the 2016 All- Star break, they were 53-35. By the end of the year, they had never spent a single game under .500, their longest losing streak was five games and they were shut out just six times.
But with three games left until the All- Star break, the Cubs are under water again. An 11-2 loss to the first-place Milwaukee Brewers on Thursday at Wrigley Field put them 41⁄ games behind in the 2 NL Central.
Their longest winning streak is five games, and they’ve been shut out seven times.
Manager Joe Maddon expressed hope Wednesday that his club could still “do something really spectacular” in the second half. Yet the only recurring theme is underperformance — or at least an inability to approach 2016’s standards.
Last year, Bryant had 25 home runs, 65 RBI and a .962 on-base plus slugging by the break. Right now, he’s at 16, 34 and .893.
Through the first half last year, right-hander Jake Arrieta’s 2.68 ERA was 10th best in the majors, and he paired that with 121 strikeouts. This season, that ERA has ballooned to 4.33, and he has posted 22 fewer strikeouts.
Perhaps most disconcerting, Arrieta has exited a game before the fifth inning five times. Last season, that didn’t happen once.
If 2016 looked easy, 2017 has been arrhythmic.
“It’s been slightly different, honestly, just because we’ve been up and down so frequently,” Arrieta said. “As soon as we get on a roll, we kind of hit a skid. … It’s just been this back-andforth, sort of, roller coaster that we’ve been dealing with.”
Just look at the second half of June.
World Series hero Kyle Schwarber was demoted to Class AAA on June 22, batting .171, and was recalled in time for Thursday’s game. He went 0-for-4, his average dropping to .168.
One week following Schwarber’s demotion, after the Washington Nationals stole seven bases against the Cubs, the club released veteran catcher Miguel Montero because of his postgame comments criticizing Arrieta’s ability to hold runners.
A day later, Bryant went down with an ankle sprain. He made a quick return, but outfielder Jason Heyward, utility man Ben Zobrist and starting pitchers Kyle Hendricks and Brett Anderson have all spent extended time on the DL this year.
The crew left to right the ship features eight players 25 or younger, a fact easy to overlook given the Cubs’ success the previous two seasons.
“The lack of identity to me is obviously it’s a new group of guys trying to come together,” Maddon said. “There’s a lot of younger players attempting to make their mark on the major league level. I get it. I see it. I look at the lineup. I understand it.
“You have a bunch of young players searching for their major league identity individually, beyond just trying to become the repeat champions of 2017. It’s a different group than was anticipated. You’ve just got to be patient as we put them back together.”
Maddon continues to hope that the injuries will become an odd sort of blessing — shaping the Cubs into a team full of experienced stars with young contributors who gained invaluable experience during this first half.
But losing is humbling nonetheless, and even Bryant — in just his third season — couldn’t help but wax philosophical.
In his rookie of the year season of 2015, the Cubs hovered around .500 before going 42-18 in August and September. Now, like then, Bryant says part of the process involves waiting — for a “good run of wins” that he thinks the Cubs are due for.
The difficult part, though, is that waiting was easier to sell when your franchise hadn’t won a World Series since 1908. The Cubs fan base, in some cases, had literally been waiting a lifetime.
“The difference between then and now is that the expectations weren’t as high,” Bryant says. “After winning a World Series, the expectations are through the roof.
“But before that we hadn’t done anything, and we were just kind of coming up and fans were excited. I guess the biggest difference is the expectations. We always knew that we could win.”
Then, of course, there are the Indians — a team navigating similar valleys but with no accompanying championship rings.
The Indians led the American League Central entering Thursday’s games, though the Kansas City Royals were within a halfgame and the Minnesota Twins were 11⁄ games 2 back.
And while they stumbled out of the gate, the Indians managed to win 11 of 16 in the second half of June and were 44-39 through Wednesday — which could end up not being far off from their 52-36 first-half record in 2016.
Among those 11 wins, though, the four against the Twins from June 16 to June 18 were the most important. The Indians swept the series to take the division lead, and, like the Cubs, part of the process was patience. Fortunately for the Indians, patience is starting to pay off sooner.
“We have so many games left that everybody was like, ‘We’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine,’ ” shortstop Francisco Lindor said of the first two months of the season. “So it’s like, ‘All right, man, this is it, we’re playing against the Twins and they’re two games ahead of us and we got four games.’ The mind-set changes. It’s that time of the year to go.”
Still, creating space has been difficult. The Indians gave back almost all of their lead when the Twins swept them in a three-game series in Cleveland a week later.
A sustained run of excellence — such as the 14game winning streak that gave them control of the division in June 2016 — has been absent, partly because of inconsistent pitching.
As it stands, the Indians’ team ERA of 3.86 is nearly identical to 2016’s 3.84 —
“As soon as we get on a roll, we kind of hit a skid. … It’s just been this back-and-forth, sort of, roller coaster that we’ve been dealing with.” Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta
which was good for second in the AL.
Yet that number can be deceiving.
While right-handers Corey Kluber and Carlos Carrasco are having All- Starcaliber seasons, other members of the staff haven’t been so fortunate as they cope, for the first time, with pitching the season after going all the way to Game 7 of the World Series.
Josh Tomlin’s ERA has jumped from 4.40 to 6.17, Trevor Bauer’s from 4.26 to 5.24 and Danny Salazar’s from 3.87 to 5.40 before he was put on the DL with a shoulder injury in early June. Last season, no one among that Indians starting rotation had an ERA above 4.40.
“You play longer, you play more games, and then spring training comes,” reliever Zach McAllister says. “It’s a short offseason, so it’s an adjustment, but again, we’re all professionals here, we’re all prepared, and sometimes we’re not successful.”
As for the offensive end, the Indians are better off than last year in some ways. While their runs total is down, they are drawing more walks, have more extra-base hits, get on base more and have 127 fewer strikeouts.
There’s no way to know if the second half of June was a fluke, if the Indians will reap the benefits of a different brand of offensive production, or if they will fall prey to a fluctuating stable of starting pitchers.
And it’s still too soon to tell if Maddon’s vision of an experienced yet youthful roster that can make a late run at a historically difficult feat is a reasonable expectation.
But as Bryant said, part of the process is waiting. And for these two clubs — for better or for worse — it’s a long way from October.