needs surgery on his left elbow<\/a>. Even Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodgers\u2019 two-way superstar, is mired in an offensive slump.<\/p>\nAll things considered, the first-place Cubs (24-12) are in excellent shape \u2014 even with Horton recovering from season-ending surgery on his right elbow, Steele dealing with a flexor strain in his left elbow, and nearly all of the club\u2019s high-leverage relievers spending time on the injured list during the first six weeks of the season.<\/p>\n
In the heat of the moment, none of that matters. Not when the press box high above Wrigley Field starts to shake and the postgame light show begins and \u201cGo, Cubs, Go\u201d plays on the sound system, like it did late Tuesday night following a 3-2 walk-off victory over the Cincinnati Reds that lasted 10 innings.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou just make yourself hard to beat,\u201d Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. \u201cYou develop this resilience and this hard-to-beat mentality. It creates a belief system when we\u2019re down in the eighth: \u2018We got a shot.\u2019 And it\u2019s not always like that. Comebacks and late-inning stuff create that. Sometimes, you just need to see it to believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s still early, but this looks like a group with staying power, a roster worthy of further investment above the $244 million luxury tax threshold, a real World Series contender.<\/p>\n
There shouldn\u2019t be any internal debate about which direction to go before the Aug. 3 trade deadline. The question is forming around the extent to which the Cubs will be buyers and how much of the farm system an analytical front office is willing to mortgage. For Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer, the focus remains on pitching, pitching and more pitching.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a summer of working through our internal guys, but external is going to be a real thing as we go on,\u201d Hoyer said. \u201cIt\u2019s also May, and it takes a while for those things to happen. We\u2019ve been looking really consistently for small transactions, but anything bigger is going to have to wait. We\u2019re going to have to get healthy and handle those things internally.\u201d<\/p>\n
Executives looking to shake things up could also accelerate that process. In firing manager Rob Thomson last week, Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski, who\u2019s approaching 50 years in professional baseball, indicated this is the earliest point in a season that he has fielded trade calls.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just the Phillies, whose downturn included a 10-game losing streak against the red-hot Cubs and Atlanta Braves in April. Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, a former Cubs executive, fired Alex Cora after 27 games and dismissed a group of coaches seen as loyal to the World Series-winning manager.<\/p>\n
The negativity around the New York Mets \u2014 whose recent 12-game losing streak included a weekend sweep at Wrigley Field \u2014 is another unpredictable variable.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s always talk between teams,\u201d Hoyer said. \u201cBut in general, trades of significance are pretty rare early in the year. And I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to change.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a grinding offense, spectacular defense and steady pitching, the Cubs have already posted two separate winning streaks (10 games and the current seven-game run) longer than their longest winning streak last season (five games), when they finished with a 92-70 record and qualified for the playoffs for the first time since 2020.<\/p>\n
The organization accomplished that goal with a restrained approach at last summer\u2019s trade deadline, a strategy that will be difficult to justify again.<\/p>\n
Avoiding the wild-card round would better position the entire pitching staff for the rest of October, allowing Counsell to reset his bullpen and arrange Shota Imanaga, Edward Cabrera, Matthew Boyd and Jameson Taillon as he sees fit, assuming those starters stay healthy.<\/p>\n
Gaining home-field advantage would be valuable, considering the quirks and intricacies of playing at the Friendly Confines. The energy is palpable in Wrigleyville, where the Cubs have won 13 consecutive games and already celebrated five walk-off victories.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast spring, we did a good job of openly talking about how we got to use Wrigley to our advantage,\u201d said Taillon, who kept his team in Tuesday\u2019s game by allowing only two runs across 5 2\/3 innings. \u201cWe have to find ways to win when the wind\u2019s blowing in, when it\u2019s blowing out, when guys are losing stuff in the lights and the sun.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were really good at home last year, and we\u2019ve kind of picked up where we left off. I\u2019ve seen some guys on other teams drop fly balls and popups. You see us play pretty clean baseball here.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fans coming alive in big situations \u2014 some of these teams aren\u2019t completely used to that. We are. We\u2019re spoiled. We get to play with it every night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Big crowds keep showing up, and different players keep stepping up. Ryan Rolison, an offseason waiver claim who began the season with Triple-A Iowa, threw a scoreless 10th inning to notch his third win in less than two weeks. Michael Busch blasted a tying homer in the eighth inning and later hit the chopper that crossed up Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz, allowing Dansby Swanson to race from second base to score the winning run.<\/p>\n
Looking ahead, Chicago\u2019s entire infield \u2014 Busch, Swanson, Alex Bregman and Nico Hoerner \u2014 remains under club control through at least 2029. Pete Crow-Armstrong (24), Matt Shaw (24) and Mois\u00e9s Ballesteros (22) give the Cubs a solid foundation of young talent for the future.<\/p>\n
The organization can afford to deal from a pool of prospects that is much deeper in position players \u2014 Kevin Alc\u00e1ntara, Pedro Ram\u00edrez, Jefferson Rojas and Josiah Hartshorn, to name a few \u2014 than pitchers.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also this sense that the Cubs are only scratching the surface of what they can be this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re still not fully clicking \u2014 and we\u2019re not fully healthy \u2014 and we\u2019re winning games,\u201d Taillon said. \u201cIn years past, we\u2019ve kind of had a problem with, like, we\u2019d hit and we won\u2019t pitch, or we\u2019ll pitch and we won\u2019t hit. Right now, we\u2019re just finding a way to win baseball games.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO \u2014 In an ideal world, the Chicago Cubs might have lined up Cade Horton and Justin Steele…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[479,363,99],"class_list":["post-626967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-chicago-cubs","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}