The Cubs’ season ended with the same ugly question hanging over the offense, and it’s one Jed Hoyer is likely to hear again when he meets with reporters in the coming days.
This was supposed to be a lineup good enough to carry Chicago, or at least keep it from collapsing when the margin tightened. Instead, the Cubs went quiet at the worst possible time, and the Wild Card sweep by the Padres only sharpened the bigger issue: this wasn’t just one cold week.
For all the numbers that paint the Cubs as one of baseball’s best offenses, the story gets messier once Pete Crow-Armstrong’s MVP campaign is taken into account. More important than the season-long metrics is where the breakdowns happened.
The Cubs’ offense didn’t just sputter in the abstract. It cracked in May, and it cracked again when everything mattered most.
The warning signs were there long before the postseason arrived. Since July 30, the Cubs have lost 14 straight games when they did not hit a home run. That’s a revealing split for a team Hoyer built not to live and die by the long ball, yet that’s exactly what Chicago became over the final two months: boom or bust, nothing in between.
The situational hitting never steadied, either. The Cubs spent much of the season struggling with runners in scoring position, and the late-season numbers only made the problem louder. Before Nico Hoerner’s RBI on Wednesday night, the Cubs had gone 2-for-66 with runners in scoring position over their previous eight games.
The Wild Card series was even worse. Chicago finished 8-for-62 with runners in scoring position and posted an OPS+ of 7. However anyone wants to slice it, the result was the same: the offense disappeared.
That’s what makes this hard to wave away as a bad week. A one-off slump can be explained.
But when the same kind of collapse keeps showing up, and keeps showing up in October, it stops being a blip. It becomes the problem the Cubs have still not solved.
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