NEWSLETTER
Well, this is what happens when you don’t close out winnable games earlier in the weekend when you have the chance – it’s a four-game series split with the lowly Miami Marlins at Wrigley Field.
I watched most of this game with a toddler throwing up on me, so forgive me if some of the details are sparse, but one thing was pretty clear: Kyle Hendricks didn’t have it, again. He looked intermittently sharp in the first and third inning, racking up some strikeouts and painting the corners, but in-between, he started drifting into the middle of the zone where he was punished with both power (Jesus Sanchez hit a 460 foot homer, third biggest homer of the season) and frequency.
To the latter point, the Marlins ambushed Hendricks to open up the fourth inning with four straight singles (and seven straight balls in play), plating three more runs, which gave Miami as much as they needed to finish off the game.
And I don’t really know what else there is to say about Hendricks right now. A home game against the Marlins was about as good of a setup as he could have asked for. And while his fifth start wasn’t as purely disastrous as the first four, he still finished the game with a 12.00 ERA through his first 21.0 IP.
Offensively, the Cubs couldn’t do much. Nico Hoerner stayed hot with three more hits and two RBI, Mike Tauchman reached twice, and Cody Bellinger continued to look good with a single, a couple of walks, and some hard-contact outs. But all together, the Cubs scored just three runs and that was that. They had chances (plenty of them, in fact) but they just couldn’t come through. Christopher Morel, in particular, is really struggling in some big moments.
Normally, these are the sort of stretches you can weather when everyone is healthy and picking each other up, but the Cubs played without Ian Happ or Seiya Suzuki this weekend. So with Bellinger, Busch, and Dansby Swanson each getting days off too, Morel’s struggles just stood out that much more all weekend. In that sense, tomorrow is a well-timed off day.
Adbert Alzolay and Keegan Thompson each had a quiet inning of work, so there’s that. But yeah, this was a tough, sloppy loss. I think I preferred getting puked on.
