Cubs take back-to-back series against top NL teams

A baseball season has natural ebbs and flows, and the 2026 Cubs can be defined in some ways by how extreme the swings between good and bad have been. As they close out June and enter the month of July, the Cubs are riding a stretch of wins.

The primary driver behind whether things are going well or not seems to be the offense. When the Cubs were stringing together multiple 10-game winning streaks in the early going, the Cubs had the top-ranked offense in baseball. And when they were sinking to a barely above .500 record in May, they were 19th. Since June 11th, they’re back to being the top-ranked offense in baseball.

Wednesday’s 23-3 drubbing of the Padres that capped off a series sweep was an exhibition of the offense at its pinnacle.

“A lot of good at-bats, all the guys up and down the lineup consistently today,” Dansby Swanson said. “That’s when we are at our best, and we’re just going to continue to work towards that.”

Swanson was the most productive of the group on Wednesday, hitting three home runs and driving in eight baserunners. In his last 10 games, Swanson has 26 RBI, which is a Cubs franchise record. He’s batted .333 with an .895 slugging percentage in his last 15 games, a far cry from the hitter who was struggling to keep his batting average above .170 just a few weeks ago.

“That’s kind of the beauty of it,” Swanson said of his bounce back at the plate. “It’s why we keep coming back to this game, now matter how tough it may be at times. You just want to show up every day and give it your best effort. This game seems to reward doing the right things, and the end of the day, we’re here to win.”

Swanson’s cold spell at the plate was as puzzling as his recent hot stretch has been, and making sense of why either extreme is just as puzzling to those around Swanson as it has been to him.

“We never have baseball figured out,” manager Craig Counsell said. “I think this tells you that. He probably went through the roughest patch of his career, and on the other side of it is the best stretch of his career. You figure it out.”

Swanson is obviously just one part of the offense, but his hot and cold stretches are representative of what the team has gone through as a whole. So far, the 2026 Cubs are capable of going on a 22-3 stretch, a 7-22 one, and then winning 15 of their last 19. As puzzling as Swanson’s ups and downs have been at the plate, perhaps even harder to figure out is whether or not the Cubs are more like the team that’s played the last three weeks or the one that played the four weeks prior.

That means the question going forward will be whether that cold stretch in May and early June was an aberration. If so, the 2026 Cubs might look on the whole like the team that’s taken back-to-back series against teams at the top of the National League.

The key to not sinking back into a 7-22 type stretch again might be not making too much of the highs in the same way as the Cubs were good about keeping the lows in healthy perspective. It could be tempting to make too much of series wins against the Brewers and Padres, but in the locker room at least, they’re not doing that.

“We played a good series. We played a good game today, and we have a tough task on Friday [against the Cardinals],” Counsell said. “We’re playing against very good major league players, and there’s nothing to carry forward. We’ve got to earn a win on Friday.”

That mindsight is probably the right one, but the Cubs did more than just flash hot bats in the heart of summer this week. They picked up three wins against a team that came into the series tied with them for a wild card spot. Though it might still be early to start eyeing playoff standings, this series win secured a tiebreaker over San Diego should the two teams remain in competition for a postseason berth come the end of September.

But in the immediate future, as Counsell pointed out, it’s just about the Cardinals. The Cubs went 1-2 when they traveled to St. Louis at the end of May, and going into the upcoming series at Wrigley, they have a 2.5 lead over them in the division, but the Cardinals sit in the third wild card spot. As with the Padres, there’s an opportunity to build some distance that could pay dividends in September.

In order for the Cubs to keep looking like the more recent version of themselves, the offense will have to carry the load. The pitching staff has been worn thin by injuries, and it will take quite some time before they get fully healthy again — or at least as close to that as possible — so production at the plate will be crucial.

Wednesday’s game was certainly an extreme; the Cubs tied a franchise record with eight home runs, but it also demonstrated that this is an offense that’s capable of shouldering the weight of making up for a injury-riddled pitching staff.

“It’s a little bit of everything, with guys working walks, going deep into counts. Obviously the slugging was there,” Michael Conforto — who homered twice on Wednesday — said. “There’s some positive, grindy at-bats in there […] Just everything about the way that his lineup shows up, it all kind of came to a head today where the guys were putting the ball in the air and hitting it hard and had a lot of traffic out there. It’s a good combo for us.”

It’s worth noting that going into Wednesday, the Cubs had the second-ranked offense in baseball in fWAR, and that includes the team-wide cold stretch that lasted for a month. That might be reason enough to believe that the bad month of baseball was the outlier, and the Cubs are more like the one we’ve seen over the last three weeks.