I’m thinking of a baseball team.
With a little more than a week to go in the season, they were comfortably in a wild card spot, having gotten there with multiple long winning streaks. Then… they just stopped scoring runs. They went on the road at the end of the season and could barely muster anything crossing the plate. The team’s fans were beside themselves. What would happen to this club that at times seemed so dominant?
Oh, you think I’m talking about this year’s Cubs.
Nope, I’m talking about the
2022 Phillies, who with 12 games to go were 83-67 (psst… so were this year’s Cubs after 150 games). Then those Phillies lost five in a row. That streak included coming into Wrigley Field and being swept by a bad Cubs team and scoring just three runs in that series. I vividly remember talking to a couple of Phillies fans at Wrigley after that series was over and, well, I can’t post the language they used referring to their team.
Those Phillies then righted their ship, a little, winning four of five. Then they got shut out 10-0 by the Astros on the season’s penultimate day (in fact, they nearly got no-hit by Justin Verlander and two Houston relievers, including old friend Hector Neris, finally breaking up that effort in the ninth). They lost the next day, too, backing into the postseason when the Brewers lost.
Those Phillies then traveled to St. Louis for a Wild Card series and were losing 2-0 with one out in the ninth in the first game when seven of their next eight hitters reached base. They scored six runs in that inning and won 6-3.
That was the first of 10 wins in 12 games for Philadelphia, which included winning Game 1 of the World Series in Houston, against that same team that had nearly knocked them out entirely a few weeks earlier.
Ultimately the Astros won the World Series that year. (Incidentally, Alex Bregman batted .294/.379/.569 with three home runs in 12 postseason games for Houston in 2022; his solid postseason performance is one of the reasons the Cubs signed him.)
Now the Cubs are in a similar situation to those Phillies. Not identical, of course, but the clubs are quite similar. The 2022 Phillies were a slugging team near the top of MLB in offensive categories. They had a mediocre pitching staff that ranked 23rd in reliever ERA and had 22 blown saves, and their save leader — Corey Knebel, remember him from his Brewers days? — had just 12, with four of those blown saves.
This pretty much describes the 2026 Cubs, no? In fact, this year’s Cubs rank even higher than the 2022 Phillies in almost every offensive category. They were first this year in runs, SLG, OPS, OPS+, total bases and walks (a franchise record 674), and rank third in home runs. They also rank first in runners left on base, and I could cite RISP numbers but leaving a lot of runners also means that, well, you have a lot of runners in the first place. That’s what happens when you lead the league in walks and are sixth in hits.
This sort of offense shows in the Cubs’ record in “blowout” games (defined at baseball-reference.com as games won by five or more runs). They are 35-16 in those games, which is excellent. But they’re just 23-21 in one-run games, and that’s on the pitching staff, which has been horrific most of the year. How bad? This bad:
The Cubs pitching staff is one of the worst in MLB (only four teams, then Nationals, Royals, A’s and Rockies had as bad or worse pitching WAR), and if they didn’t lead the league in hitting WAR by a significant margin — 11 WAR over the Dodgers! — they’d be down near the bottom of the list. Instead, they rank third overall, behind only the Dodgers and Brewers.
Injuries are a big part of that. Only Shōta Imanaga, of all the starters, didn’t have a single day on the injured list, making 31 starts and throwing 173.1 innings, producing 2.0 bWAR. Even at that, the Cubs’ leader in bWAR (2.2) was Ben Brown, who threw only 68 innings and didn’t throw a single pitch after June 19. Brown’s injury was one of the major factors in making this pitching staff so awful. This Cubs team had a franchise-record 14 different pitchers record saves this year, including Corbin Martin (!), who posted a 10.80 ERA in seven games for the team in 2026.
Many of you will rightly criticize Cubs President of Baseball Operations Jed Hoyer for this patchwork bullpen that posted just 35 saves, with 23 blown saves. Granted and stipulated, the signings of Phil Maton (who was awful thanks to a knee injury, which he pitched through instead of having it taken care of) and Hunter Harvey (who threw only four innings for the team this year) were both wasted money.
But you know what, relievers are fickle and fungible. Last year Hoyer was praised for putting together a solid relief corps that included castoffs like Brad Keller, Drew Pomeranz and Caleb Thielbar, all of whom were very good in 2025 (total 3.6 bWAR, which is half of what the entire Cubs staff put together this year). Hoyer tried a reunion with Thielbar this year; that didn’t work. Neither did six games of Pomeranz in 2026 after the Angels released him.
The larger issue is pitching development for the Cubs. Other teams seem to crank out endless lines of guys from their minor league systems throwing 98+. The Cubs don’t.
That’s a topic for another day, though. Today’s is: Why not the Cubs this year? We saw them run off a pair of 10-game winning streaks early in the year. (And then a 10-game losing streak.) We have seen them dominate games with their offense. They scored in double figures 21 times in 2026, the sixth-most such games for any Cubs team in the Modern Era (they also did it 22 times last year, and two of those years, 1929 and 1930, were juiced-ball offensive seasons). This sort of offense might, just might, be enough to overcome the shortcomings of this mediocre pitching staff.
When the postseason starts, things tend to reset from the regular season. Last year’s Brewers, for example, scored a bunch of runs in their first two Division Series games against the Cubs, then stopped hitting, scoring only 10 total runs in the next seven games, squeaking by the Cubs in that series, then getting swept in the NLCS by the Dodgers. There are tons of postseason examples just like this. In recent years, the 2024 Mets won a Division Series over a better Phillies team because Philly stopped hitting. The 84-78 Diamondbacks did it to the 100-62 Dodgers in 2023, outscoring them in a Division Series sweep 19-6.
Circling back to that 2022 Phillies team, they won two of the first three World Series games from the Astros and then… well, just stopped hitting, scoring only three total runs in the next three games as Houston won the Series. The point here is — at least the Phillies got to the World Series. I think this Cubs team can do that too, or even win the whole thing, if they hit like they are capable of. Let’s hope they start that tomorrow against the Padres. Go Cubs.
