I was thinking about the season preview I did at the tail end of spring training, and as we look at the standings today, a day that the Cubs have off as they travel to Pittsburgh for another road trip that doesn’t suck as much as the last one (we hope), we find the Chicago North Side Baseball Club has a 17-12 record. This 17-12 record may not seem too impressive until you look over at the > .500 column, where the Cubs are also 17-12. That’s right, every single team the Cubs have played so far this season has a record of .500 or better, including the Athletics who had some trouble with the White Sox and probably aren’t going to be a .500 team much longer, but that shows you the level of competition the Cubs had to deal with thus far. Given the splits, the Cubs have a .
500 or better record against every team except the Phillies in that last frustrating series, but we knew that team wasn’t as bad as their middling record thus far showed. Based on my preseason prediction of the Cubs generating a 19-12 record by the end of April (not including the May 1 game in Pittsburgh), that’s pretty cool, although I admit I was a bit optimistic and yet the team has exceeded many expectations.
Not much has changed on the leaderboards (B-Ref, Fangraphs) although the recent offensive sputtering against some extremely good Phillies pitchers have dropped the Cubs some in the rankings.
I liked how the Cubs tried to churn through their at-bats even though Aaron Nola threw mostly strikes, and that last game could have been different, though it probably wasn’t Brujan’s fault that they lost as much as we want to complain.
The odds still favor the Cubs winning the division with a 65.4% chance of making the playoffs in any capacity, and it may get easier with the Reds and Cardinals beating each other up this week while the Cubs take on the Pirates, albeit with Paul Skenes likely in the final game.
As has been said in many interviews, the Cubs know they have been fortunate to bank these wins in a tough opening stretch and that MLB competition is such that they cannot let up for any opponent lest they lose games they should theoretically win.
So we hope that they will continue to win series where they can, and prevent skids from getting too long. It’s been encouraging so far, and I do feel like the grinding aspect of the offense plus the improvements we are seeing from the pitching staff can keep the Cubs afloat through the rest of the season, which on paper is at least not as grueling as in these first 29 games.
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