NEWSLETTER
In my mind, I’ve long marked the final month of 2018 as the door closing on the Cubs’ last competitive window. And specifically, the Game 163 the Cubs lost against the Brewers to lose the division, and then the Wild Card Game loss to the Rockies that followed.
Sure, the Cubs tried to run it back in 2019, but that team was wildly underwhelming. Sure, they made the playoffs in 2020, but that was the pandemic season and it just doesn’t feel like it counted. Then the rebuild kicked in for 2021 and 2022, and the team wasn’t quite there in 2023.
That isn’t to say the Milwaukee Brewers, who chased the Cubs down in 2018 to force a Game 163 and then won that game at Wrigley Field, are the ones who shut the door on the Cubs, but I have kind of always associated those things in my mind.
Thankfully, we’re five years removed from that ugly stretch and disappointing Game 163, so I can HALF chuckle when Erik Kratz revealed that the Brewers knew all the pitches the Cubs were calling that year whenever Willson Contreras was catching:
@foulterritory The Cubs and Royals had painfully obvious pitch-calling methods 😭 #mlb #baseball #chicagocubs #kansascityroyals ♬ original sound – Foul Territory
Oof. So much oof packed into one little tidbit. So, because the Cubs wanted to call the pitches from the bench for Contreras’s starts, and because the way they did it was so PAINFULLY OBVIOUS, the Brewers knew what was coming. Kratz isn’t 100% on which coach it was, but he guessed it was the bench coach, which would’ve been Brandon Hyde – who went on to have great success managing the Orioles.
Consider that, if the Brewers knew how to steal those signs so easily, isn’t it possible that lots of other teams picked up on it, too? Famously, the pitching results were always considerably worse with Contreras behind the plate, which was usually attributed to a combination of flukey stuff and poor pitch-framing. But the inability to call a game at that time? Maybe that was a factor, too.
The Cubs won 95 games that year, so clearly it wasn’t burning them too badly all season. But maybe it took a little time to pick up on it? The Brewers beat the Cubs 5 out of 7 games in September and October, though they didn’t necessarily score a ton of runs in those games. Then again, in the five of those games started by Contreras, the Brewers averaged over five runs a game, and the Brewers won four of those five games.
Also, although Kratz was never much of a hitter in his big league career, including that 2018 season with the Brewers, his wRC+ was 18 points higher against the Cubs that year than it was against the rest of the league.
Unclear, by the way, if the Cubs were still giving away signs in 2019, when that whole Yu Darvish-Christian Yelich dustup happened. Kratz was only with the Brewers in 2018.
At least now the Cubs have manager Craig Counsell on their side, avoiding these kinds of pitfalls (this version of sign-stealing would still work even in a PitchCom era) and maybe stealing some signs from the other team (in legal ways, of course) …
