The offense heads to the off-season one day early in a 3-0 loss.
I love baseball. That’s the whole story really. Every now and then, that love will flicker. As I’ve moved through the years from someone who watched every inning he could through the season to someone who listened a lot to someone who monitors the game through apps and social media, my love of the game hasn’t ever died. It can be a grind at times. There are mornings that I have to drag myself to the keyboard. And I’m always totally wiped by the time the season ends.
And yet, it’s just a cool thing when you see things for the first time. Sometimes it is a little thing. I’ve never searched for a photo of Caleb Kilian before. That is, he’s never been a Superhero before. Let me go one step further, he’s only ever been a Billy Goat before.
It’s funny, I sometimes end up with a different perspective of a player than you all do. If a player doesn’t end up in the top three or the bottom three, I’m often not really registering their performance. I’ll register the slump of a player because of the cadence of the same guy ending up with a string of negatives. So if a guy’s slump involves more 1-5 days than 0-4, I might pick up on the struggles faster than the narrative around the team does. I see the trend of them moving up or down the standings.
Michael Busch was a great example of that this year. For a long time he was at or near the top of H&G among hitters. But in August and September, almost every appearance he had here was negative. That ends up being a fun one, because going to the numbers, he had a .226/.308/.421 over the final two months. That’s a wRC+ of 106. So he was still producing. He had 23 runs and 25 runs batted in over that stretch. But prior to August, that line was .259/.348/.449 (wRC+ 125).
I suspect the grind of a full season at the major league level got to Busch a little bit. It’ll be interesting to see what an offseason program and time off does for him. Does he take even a small step forward in 2025? That could be huge for this team. He was a solid productive bat this year. Could he move from a 21/73 player to a 25/90 player? Yeah, I believe that’s in there. He had a strong enough season to have been a Rookie of the Year candidate many times in the past. This season, there were so many good rookie performances, he isn’t even the best rookie on his own team.
The bigger, more intriguing storyline of the weekend, and Caleb Kilian was a part of it, was the Cubs run of 27 consecutive scoreless innings against the Reds offense. I’m sure it has happened before, but I can’t remember the Cubs shutting a team out in a three-game series. Sadly, the Cubs didn’t score in nine innings either, and then the 10th got away. What a cool accomplishment that would have been to close out a season.
But then, isn’t the storyline of this Cubs season coming up short? Often just short. They allowed three in the 10th and avoided this being yet another one run loss. But this might as well have been a one run loss. Indeed, one run anywhere along the first nine innings almost certainly wins the game. (I will always acknowledge that any change in the score changes the flow of everything thereafter.)
And so, the Cubs finish with 83 wins. Exactly what they did a year earlier. The path was different but the destination the same. The stretch of postseason-less baseball continues on the north side. The pitching finishes strong. There again, we get something unique. How crazy is it that a team will be remembered both for blowing a ton of leads and for strong pitching. It is more nuanced than just a good rotation and a bad bullpen. By and large the bullpen’s final numbers are pretty good. But, too often, they weren’t good enough when it mattered most.
The offense finishes with a whimper. They did draw seven walks, four of those by Busch. But they only managed three hits over 10 innings. The offensive results are so stratified. Sometime a juggernaut. Sometimes overmatched and ineffective. They’ve got to be much better as a group next year. While it is completely fair to remembering this team for the bullpen failures, it bears noting that a few runs here and there changes the whole season. If the margin hadn’t always been razor thin, perhaps the bullpen protects a few more leads.
This team needed six more wins. Well, probably seven because of where the losses fell. This team lost its tiebreakers to nearly every one of the NL contenders. It wasn’t exactly solving the secrets of the universe in saying that the team needs to be built to win 90. You need 90 to be the floor.
The moral of that story is that the Cubs may have lost a number of games on the margins, they need to be more than marginally better. 90 wins is almost 10 percent better than they’ve been the last two years. You don’t improve by seven wins by cleaning up around the edges. You get that much better by significant upgrades at 2-4 significant parts of the roster.
I could allow you to wish that two of the three of Cody Bellinger, Michael Busch and Pete Crow-Armstrong take significant steps forward in 2025. But if I’m giving you that, then I have to acknowledge that at least a couple of the people who did do well this year might not next year. That’s the trick of hoping that development provides some of what you are looking for. Due to injuries or whatever, performance fluctuates in both directions.
The Cubs need to add at least two star-level players, preferably one a superstar, without significantly downgrading the performance of the remainder of the team. I’m strangely left with less optimism than I have been in a few years. The needle is pointing sideways. This team progressed a fair bit late in 2022 and then has been stuck in competitive but not playoff caliber position since then. The road forward is rough and fraught with peril. The wrong move will put you further away.
Improving the margins is easy. Improving the talent center is tricky. You have to nail your scouting and analysis to improve in the heart of things. Even if you were able to sign a superstar player like Juan Soto, what are the subsequent moves? You know Soto will be one of the most highly sought after players this offseason.
No easy decisions moving forward. Let’s go the three stars of game 162.
Three Stars:
- Caleb Kilian. 20 batters faced, 15 outs recorded. Three hits, two walks. Finishing on a high note.
- Hayden Wesneski. Six batters faced, six outs recorded, despite allowing a single. Two pitchers who could help by taking a step forward and being contributors in some capacity.
- Michael Busch. I’ll give credit where it’s due for getting on base four times in a game. Though he did make the last out of the game as the tying run.
Game 162, September 29: Reds 3, Cubs 0 (83-79)
Fangraphs
Reminder: Heroes and Goats are determined by WPA scores and are in no way subjective.
THREE HEROES:
- Superhero: Caleb Kilian (.276). 5 IP, 20 BF, 3 H, 2 BB, 4 K, WP
- Hero: Nate Pearson (.223). 1⅓ IP, 5 BF, H, K
- Sidekick: Hayden Wesneski (.160). 2 IP, 6 BF, H, K
THREE GOATS:
- Billy Goat: Ethan Roberts (-.409). IP, 3 H, BB, 3 R (L 1-1)
- Goat: Christian Bethancourt (-.246). 0-4
- Kid: Pete Crow-Armstrong (-.159). 0-3
WPA Play of the Game: Elly De La Cruz tripled with two on and one out in the 10th. That drove in the first two runs of the game and set up the third. (.457)
*Cubs Play of the Game: Ethan Robers picked Noelvi Marte off to start the 10th inning, eliminating the ghost runner. (.221)
Cubs Player of the Game:
Yesterday’s Winner: Kyle Hendricks received 288 of 297 votes. It’s been a bit since we recorded close to 300 votes and particularly so on a Sunday morning. A little extra traffic for a turn back the clock performance. Love it.
Rizzo Award Cumulative Standings: (Top 5/Bottom 5)
The award is named for Anthony Rizzo, who finished first in this category three of the first four years it was in existence and four times overall. He also recorded the highest season total ever at +65.5. The point scale is three points for a Superhero down to negative three points for a Billy Goat.
- Shōta Imanaga +23.5
- Seiya Suzuki +20.5
- Jameson Taillon +18
- Christian Bethancourt/Porter Hodge +14
- Jordan Wicks -10.5
- Patrick Wisdom -11
- Miles Mastrobuoni -12
- Isaac Paredes -14
- Christopher Morel -20.5
*So little drama to the finish. Kudos to Shōta Imanaga who led almost all season.
**Kilian up to 0, Pearson up to +5, Wesneski up to -3.5. Roberts down to +3, Bethancourt falls into a tie for fourth. PCA down to -6.5.
Up Next: One more bit of housekeeping to conclude the season. I will deliver the final H&G standings and a listing of the top and bottom 10 individual games of the season as determined by WPA.
I’ll say it for the first time here, thanks to all of you who have followed. I know a number of you are here more or less every day. You keep me going on those tough mornings and I appreciate you for it.
I’m far enough in life that I don’t take anything for granted, but I expect to be here doing this again in 2025. If time allows, I’ll try to drop in a story or two over the offseason, please drop in and say hello.