Cubs’ skid won’t end until offense comes back to life

When or if the Cubs turn things around, it’s going to come down to the offense. Though the pitching staff has suffered myriad injuries, none of that matters all that much when the team isn’t scoring runs. In May, the Cubs ranked 27th in OPS, with or without runners in scoring position.

The problem has been a lack of slugging, whether there are runners on base or not. In May, the Cubs offense hit just 25 home runs while the pitching staff gave up 46. Any offense needs more than just the longball to win games, but a timely extra base hit is often the missing piece. Stringing together multiple baserunners a walk or a single at a time to generate a run is very difficult.

These struggles were best typified in the ninth inning of Tuesday’s 2-1 loss to the Athletics. The first two batters reached, but from there, Alex Bregman struck out, Seiya Suzuki flew out to right, and Ian Happ popped out to shallow center field. That, in a nutshell, is why the Cubs went 13-16 in May and are off to an 0-2 start to June to drop to just two games above .500 after being a whopping 15 games above that mark as recently as May 8. The bottom dropped out quickly.

And, as frustrating as it might be, there is no magic bullet, no switch that can be flipped to make the offense’s collective scuffling stop.

“That’s one of the most challenging things about our game,” manager Craig Counsell said. “Sometimes you do have to wait for things to happen as much as you do want to put your finger on it and say, ‘Change it.’ The game makes you wait, makes you sit in discomfort for a little while.”

The discomfort continued on Wednesday night, as the Cubs dropped the second game of their home series against the A’s, this one in extras and despite holding a lead as late as the eighth inning. It’s tempting to point a finger at the bullpen in this case and put the blame on Caleb Thielbar for giving up two runs in the eighth, but the reality is that the offense was effectively shut down after the fourth inning.

The Cubs left runners stranded on the corners to end the fourth, and from there, they got only three other baserunners, and just one of those in scoring position.

“I just think it comes down to a lack of execution,” Bregman said. “All of us have to be better in here, and it starts with me.”

There is no lone culprit when it comes to the Cubs’ offensive woes, but Bregman is among a small group of hitters who the team needs to come through in order to get the offense going again. Bregman had the strikeout in the ninth inning of Tuesday’s series opener, and then he flew out to right to end Wednesday’s game with the tying run standing on third base.

There were encouraging signs of life from a couple of the other Cubs hitters badly in need of a spark. Suzuki homered in the second inning — his first longball since May 8 — to put the Cubs on the board, but he was otherwise quiet at the plate on Wednesday. Suzuki has struggled most of the season; he has a .724 OPS after Wednesday’s game, which would be his lowest since coming to the Cubs in 2022.

“I’m not worried about him, I’ll tell you that,” Happ said of Suzuki. “Dude had 30 homers and 100 RBIs last year. He’s one of the best hitters in baseball. Watch his swing, watch his batting practice. Sometimes you get matchups, you get weeks where things aren’t rolling. It goes for everybody, everybody goes through that.

“But I have all the faith in the world that at the end of the year his baseball card’s going to look a lot like it has the last four seasons, which is really, really good performance from a middle of the lineup bat.”

Maybe the hits and runs will come again, and maybe soon. But in the meantime, the Cubs have all but eliminated the hot start that at one point had them boasting the best record in baseball. In their last 46 games, the Cubs have gone 20-3 and then 5-18. That initial surge gave them a buffer that, sure, keeps them two games above .500 even with the almost month-long slide they’ve been on, but it’s hard not to see shades of the 1985 and 2004 Cubs seasons the longer this goes on.

“We’re still in a place where if it hadn’t been as much up and down, I don’t know if it would be feeling as tough as it has,” Happ said. “But playing as well as we did early has given us a cushion to weather this. You play poorly early and have this and the season’s over. We’re not in that spot at all.”

But two games above .500 means the cushion the Cubs built up is getting pretty thin. There are 100 games remaining this season, so on paper the Cubs have a lot of time remaining to right the proverbial ship. But now that it’s been four weeks since his team has won a series, Counsell has run through nearly every realistic option he has to do that himself.

Whether that’s been giving off days to veterans like Happ and Dansby Swanson or shuffling the order, like moving Pete Crow-Armstrong to the top and Michael Busch down to the bottom third, there isn’t a whole lot else Counsell can do himself. Some might argue that more at-bats for prospects Pedro Ramirez and Kevin Alcantara — both called up during the last homestand — are in order, and that might do something to provide a bit of a spark, but at the end of the day, the offense won’t go until veteran bats like Bregman, Suzuki, and Happ get going more consistently.

“We’re not playing well enough to win a lot of baseball games. You have to earn it, and we’re not earning it,” Counsell said. “It’s not some string of massive bad luck, we’re not earning wins. Flat out.”

The last four weeks of Cubs baseball are probably harder for the team and for fans to stomach because of how good the team looked in late April and early May. There’s the belief and even expectation that there’s a lot more the Cubs are capable of, and instead they’re missing chances over and over again.

“We have opportunities to make this a great season, [but] as you lengthen this stretch, you make it a little harder on yourself,” Counsell said.