The Cubs Love To Get Crooked
Against the Dodgers last night, the Cubs gave up three runs in the top of the first, scored five runs in the bottom of the first, and none of it really mattered, because what happens at the beginning of a Cubs game has little bearing on what happens at the end. There is no lead so great it can’t be frittered away. There is no deficit too imposing. In the span of five days, they’ve won two of the wackiest games of the MLB season to stay on top of the NL Central. “It’s a fun team to watch play, that’s what I’d tell you,” manager Craig Counsell said after Tuesday’s 11-10 walk-off win, wearing a slightly rattled and unconvincing smile.
Counsell had just watched his team dig themselves out of trouble two times on a night where trouble started early. Leadoff hitter Shohei Ohtani reached on error in the first plate appearance of the game, his routine grounder ricocheting off third baseman Gage Workman’s glove. The Cubs would pay a few batters later, when the newly sluggerish Tommy Edman socked a two-out three-run homer to dead center. The first dig was quick: By the time the Dodgers came back up to bat at the top of the second, the Cubs had tagged starter Dustin May for five runs on a few extra-base hits, one of them a well-placed RBI bloop double courtesy of Pete Crow-Armstrong. He would tack on a few more runs in the fifth, this time with a much harder-hit ball, a two-run homer to make the lead a comfortable 7-4. That’s a little joke for you: The word “comfortable” has no place in a blog about the Cubs.
Indeed, it got uncomfortable fast when Will Smith crushed a Shota Imanaga splitter to make it 7-5 in the sixth. Then it was the Dodgers who started to get comfortable: In the top of the seventh, Cubs reliever Brad Keller loaded the bases to bring up Teoscar Hernández, who poked a grounder to Workman, who attempted to beat Ohtani to third base and start a double play but accomplished neither because the ball was rolling around some five feet behind him. A run scored, and everyone was safe. Three hard-fought outs later, the Dodgers were up 10-7. It feels silly to list the game’s various middle-inning crises, when, as previously mentioned, they never seem to matter. Kyle Tucker made it a game again with a two-run shot to right in the bottom of the eighth. Cubs reporter Andy Martínez noted that the ball hit by catcher Miguel Amaya into the outfield basket, with two outs and no one on in the bottom of the ninth, would not be a homer in 29 of 30 major league ballparks. The Cubs happened to be playing in the one remaining place. There were blessedly no more outs left to mess around with when Ian Happ scored his team’s zombie runner with a walk-off single in the 10th.
“This homestand, they’ve done some amazing things and some resilient things, most importantly,” Counsell said. The eight-game homestand began Friday with an even weirder game against the Arizona Diamondbacks, in which the Cubs allowed 10 runs in the eighth inning before they came back to win, 13-11. The teams ended up combining for seven home runs, two of them grand slams. “There’s 27 outs in a game, and this kind of proves it,” Counsell said after the Diamondbacks game, not knowing the universe would soon require more proof.
“Fun” tends to follow teams with a top offense and a shaky bullpen, and that’s mostly what’s going on here. By wRC+, the Cubs lineup ranks second in baseball behind only the Yankees, who began their season with a 36-run series against the Brewers but have calmed down a bit. The team’s plain old run totals are something to behold: In 25 games, the Cubs have scored 156 runs. Some of the production owes to expected sources: Tucker has been every bit the contract-year five-tool superstar the team traded for this offseason. Others are a little more surprising—namely, the catcher tandem. Amaya played hero on Tuesday night, but he splits the job with Carson Kelly, a former Diamondback who drove in five runs in that wild game against a team that waived him. (On a team with a pair of athletic outfielders in Tucker and Crow-Armstrong, Kelly was also an unlikely player to hit for the first Cubs cycle since 1993, which he did against the A’s on March 31.) Meanwhile, the bullpen is still being reshuffled after some offseason turnover. For the moment, their 5.34 ERA ranks fourth-worst in baseball.
But Friday’s game against the Diamondbacks and Tuesday’s game against the Dodgers hint at a third culprit: In both games, the 25-year-old rookie infielder Workman spent some eventful innings at the hot corner. Though the play was not scored an error, Workman let a Randal Grichuk chopper slip under his glove to extend the ultimately-not-that-fateful 10-run Diamondbacks inning. Workman had more runway than most rookies; as a Rule 5 draft selection, he must stay on the major-league active roster for the entire season, or else be sent back to the team he was taken from. But he appears to have used it all up: The Cubs designated Workman for assignment Wednesday afternoon. If any other teams are looking to spice up their games, here’s a player worth considering. It is said that great athletes bring out the best in their teammates, and he certainly demanded no less.
