CHICAGO — In an ideal world, the Chicago Cubs might have lined up Cade Horton and Justin Steele at the front of their playoff rotation, unleashing two homegrown pitchers with unique stuff and competitive edges to their personalities. The reality of a 162-game season, though, hits hard and fast.
The managers of the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies, two big-market teams with playoff expectations, were fired before the end of April. The No. 1 projected free agent this coming winter, Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, needs surgery on his left elbow. Even Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ two-way superstar, is mired in an offensive slump.
All things considered, the first-place Cubs (24-12) are in excellent shape — even with Horton recovering from season-ending surgery on his right elbow, Steele dealing with a flexor strain in his left elbow, and nearly all of the club’s high-leverage relievers spending time on the injured list during the first six weeks of the season.
In the heat of the moment, none of that matters. Not when the press box high above Wrigley Field starts to shake and the postgame light show begins and “Go, Cubs, Go” plays on the sound system, like it did late Tuesday night following a 3-2 walk-off victory over the Cincinnati Reds that lasted 10 innings.
“You just make yourself hard to beat,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “You develop this resilience and this hard-to-beat mentality. It creates a belief system when we’re down in the eighth: ‘We got a shot.’ And it’s not always like that. Comebacks and late-inning stuff create that. Sometimes, you just need to see it to believe it.”
It’s still early, but this looks like a group with staying power, a roster worthy of further investment above the $244 million luxury tax threshold, a real World Series contender.
There shouldn’t be any internal debate about which direction to go before the Aug. 3 trade deadline. The question is forming around the extent to which the Cubs will be buyers and how much of the farm system an analytical front office is willing to mortgage. For Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer, the focus remains on pitching, pitching and more pitching.
“It’s going to be a summer of working through our internal guys, but external is going to be a real thing as we go on,” Hoyer said. “It’s also May, and it takes a while for those things to happen. We’ve been looking really consistently for small transactions, but anything bigger is going to have to wait. We’re going to have to get healthy and handle those things internally.”
Executives looking to shake things up could also accelerate that process. In firing manager Rob Thomson last week, Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski, who’s approaching 50 years in professional baseball, indicated this is the earliest point in a season that he has fielded trade calls.
It’s not just the Phillies, whose downturn included a 10-game losing streak against the red-hot Cubs and Atlanta Braves in April. Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, a former Cubs executive, fired Alex Cora after 27 games and dismissed a group of coaches seen as loyal to the World Series-winning manager.
The negativity around the New York Mets — whose recent 12-game losing streak included a weekend sweep at Wrigley Field — is another unpredictable variable.
“There’s always talk between teams,” Hoyer said. “But in general, trades of significance are pretty rare early in the year. And I don’t think that’s going to change.”
With a grinding offense, spectacular defense and steady pitching, the Cubs have already posted two separate winning streaks (10 games and the current seven-game run) longer than their longest winning streak last season (five games), when they finished with a 92-70 record and qualified for the playoffs for the first time since 2020.
The organization accomplished that goal with a restrained approach at last summer’s trade deadline, a strategy that will be difficult to justify again.
Avoiding the wild-card round would better position the entire pitching staff for the rest of October, allowing Counsell to reset his bullpen and arrange Shota Imanaga, Edward Cabrera, Matthew Boyd and Jameson Taillon as he sees fit, assuming those starters stay healthy.
Gaining home-field advantage would be valuable, considering the quirks and intricacies of playing at the Friendly Confines. The energy is palpable in Wrigleyville, where the Cubs have won 13 consecutive games and already celebrated five walk-off victories.
“Last spring, we did a good job of openly talking about how we got to use Wrigley to our advantage,” said Taillon, who kept his team in Tuesday’s game by allowing only two runs across 5 2/3 innings. “We have to find ways to win when the wind’s blowing in, when it’s blowing out, when guys are losing stuff in the lights and the sun.
“We were really good at home last year, and we’ve kind of picked up where we left off. I’ve seen some guys on other teams drop fly balls and popups. You see us play pretty clean baseball here.
“The fans coming alive in big situations — some of these teams aren’t completely used to that. We are. We’re spoiled. We get to play with it every night.”
Big crowds keep showing up, and different players keep stepping up. Ryan Rolison, an offseason waiver claim who began the season with Triple-A Iowa, threw a scoreless 10th inning to notch his third win in less than two weeks. Michael Busch blasted a tying homer in the eighth inning and later hit the chopper that crossed up Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz, allowing Dansby Swanson to race from second base to score the winning run.
Looking ahead, Chicago’s entire infield — Busch, Swanson, Alex Bregman and Nico Hoerner — remains under club control through at least 2029. Pete Crow-Armstrong (24), Matt Shaw (24) and Moisés Ballesteros (22) give the Cubs a solid foundation of young talent for the future.
The organization can afford to deal from a pool of prospects that is much deeper in position players — Kevin Alcántara, Pedro Ramírez, Jefferson Rojas and Josiah Hartshorn, to name a few — than pitchers.
There’s also this sense that the Cubs are only scratching the surface of what they can be this year.
“We’re still not fully clicking — and we’re not fully healthy — and we’re winning games,” Taillon said. “In years past, we’ve kind of had a problem with, like, we’d hit and we won’t pitch, or we’ll pitch and we won’t hit. Right now, we’re just finding a way to win baseball games.”