The Cubs had a chance to finish off the Brewers on Tuesday night, and the bullpen let it slip right through its fingers.
Chicago carried a 3-1 lead into the ninth in Milwaukee, but Jacob Webb couldn’t finish the job. After getting Joey Ortiz on strikeout and Garrett Mitchell on one pitch, Webb allowed Christian Yelich to reach on a pinch-hit single.
Then Jackson Chourio jumped on the next changeup and sent it into the left-field seats to tie the game at 3-3. It was Webb’s seventh blown save of the year, and it came with him one out away from his ninth save.
The Brewers kept answering every Cubs push, and they finally won it in the bottom of the 10th. Caleb Thielbar got just one out while facing four batters in the extra frame, and Luis Lara delivered the walk-off hit after two singles.
Chicago’s offense did enough to create a win, but not enough to make the night comfortable. The Cubs managed only seven hits, though three came in the top of the ninth. Jacob Misiorowski kept dealing for Milwaukee, striking out nine Cubs in 6.1 innings as he added another strong outing to his Cy-Young campaign.
The big swing for Chicago came from Carson Kelly, who was pinch-hitting for Miguel Amaya after the Cubs loaded the bases in the ninth. Kelly came through with a ball off the wall to give Chicago a 3-1 lead. It was the Cubs’ lone hit from the bottom half of the lineup.
Still, the night was shaped just as much by what didn’t happen. Alex Bregman, Ian Happ, Matt Shaw, Tyrone Taylor and Miguel Amaya all went 0-for, and only Kelly and Seiya Suzuki collected extra-base hits. The Cubs are now 6-13 in games where Bregman, Suzuki and Crow-Armstrong don’t drive in a run, and when Happ, Shaw and Amaya pile up seven strikeouts while the top of the order produces nothing, the margin for error disappears fast.
Suzuki had one of the game’s best moments in the field when he fired a throw to the plate that helped keep the game tied 1-1. Amaya made the play at home to finish it off, and the assist was Suzuki’s eighth of the season, a career high for the Gold Glove candidate.
But Suzuki also had a costly mistake on the bases. In the 10th, he was thrown out at third trying to advance on a fly ball, and the Brewers turned the double play. Former Cubs infielder Jason Kipnis criticized the decision on Marquee’s postgame show.
There were some useful innings from the Cubs’ pitching staff along the way. Aaron Civale covered the sixth and seventh, and Ryan Rolison came up with a key strikeout to end the eighth. But with three weeks left in the regular season, the bullpen picture still looks unsettled, and that’s the part that has to get fixed now.
The bigger problem has been building for a while. Since August 1, only the Mariners have had a worse bullpen than the Cubs, whose group has posted 0.5 fWAR.
The Mariners are also the only bullpen with a higher HR/FB than Chicago’s 16.1 percent in that span. The Cubs are short on swing-and-miss, they’ve had trouble escaping jams with runners on, and Craig Counsell has been mixing and matching in high-leverage spots because there isn’t one obvious shutdown arm.
After the loss, Counsell stood by his relievers.
"These are our guys. They're gonna get the outs.
You go through tough stretches in the season ... It tests you ... when you get knocked down and you can get back up, that's an even better feeling."
The Cubs did get some help elsewhere, with the Phillies also losing, leaving Chicago just a half-game back for the final Wild Card spot. But they now sit nine games behind the top spot in the division, so the focus has shifted to home-field advantage in the Wild Card series.
The concern is clear: the Cubs can’t keep giving away games like this and expect the bullpen problem to solve itself. Counsell has three weeks to settle on his trusted arms, and Chicago will be watching closely for additions like Edward Cabrera and Shelby Miller.
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