Cubs move within a game of .500, inching back into wild card race

The Chicago Cubs’ task is simple right now: Keep winning baseball games. 

They’ve done a good job at that recently. Since July 1, they’re 20-14. With Saturday’s 3-1 win over the Chicago White Sox, they’ve have climbed within a game of .500 at 59-60, and they’re also only 3.5 games out of a National League wild card spot. If they can open next week’s series against the Cleveland Guardians with a win, they’ll will be at .500 for the first time since June 5.

Slowly but surely, the Cubs are making up the ground lost earlier this year.

“We dug ourselves a hole, and we’re trying to dig out of it,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “We’re trying to put ourselves within striking distance here and just keep playing good baseball.”

The losing records the Cubs put up in May and June have been well-document, but that’s the reason why they’re in this position. To be trying to claw back into the playoff race in the second week of August isn’t easy because the number of games is so limited. 

When the Cubs begin their series in Cleveland on Monday, they’ll have just 42 games left. Long enough to get back into a postseason spot, but not long enough to have another extended stretch of bad play.

“There’s time,” Counsell said. “But we’ve got to play good baseball, and we know we don’t have much room for error.”

Saturday could have been a stumbling block in the Cubs’ forward progress.

They left 12 runners total on base and stranded at least one runner in every inning except the ninth. They fell behind, 1-0, in the second inning on an uncharacteristic fielding miscue by Nico Hoerner and only tied the game in the fifth because Sox shortstop Brooks Baldwin made his own blunder by not making an attempt at Cody Bellinger, who ran from first to home on a double by Isaac Paredes.

On the mound, Justin Steele delivered a quality start, tossing six innings with six hits, two walks and eight strikeouts, but he worked around traffic in every inning except the fifth. He needed 101 pitches to get through six and said after the game his command felt really good all night, but the Sox put together challenging at-bats.

“They did a really good job of fouling pitches off,” Steele said. “That [Andrew] Vaughn at-bat, especially. Get him to two strikes and then he’s fouling off everything that’s pretty competitive pitches. You finally get to a point where I just needed a result.”

Vaughn’s at-bat in the first inning lasted 10 pitches, and he’d fouled off four straight full-count pitches, so Steele decided to challenge Vaughn with a slider and let the chips fall where they may. Whether Vaughn swung or took the pitch for a walk, Steele needed some sort of an outcome. He did give him the free pass but was able to get out of the inning against the next batter with a strikeout. 

That one at-bat in the first inning was characteristic of how Steele felt against several of the Sox batters, even if they weren’t able to string a few together and score more than the one run.

“There were quite a few of them who strung together really good at bats and got my pitch count up,” Steele said.

But despite the challenges on the mound, Steele’s final line for the night was still good. On the whole, the Cubs were similar. They stranded runners, made two errors on defense, but still got the result they wanted thanks to timely hitting in the eighth inning. 

Hoerner led off that frame with a walk, Dansby Swanson singled, Pete Crow-Armstrong executed a sacrifice bunt to move them both into scoring position, and then Miguel Amaya delivered the go-ahead base hit to left field. The Cubs got the win, even if the process of getting there wasn’t pretty.

Everyone looking in from the outside might be cataloging every win and monitoring each step the Cubs take up the wild card standings, but not everyone in the locker room is. Steele said he might not know precisely what the Cubs’ record is on any given day, but there is a definite mood shift in the clubhouse over the last few weeks. Others, like Hoerner, do have a somewhat closer eye on where the team stands in the playoff race.

“I know where we are, for sure. It does still feel like it is within our grasp,” he said. “But as far as controlling what we can, it doesn’t feel like we’re watching the scoreboard making sure that other teams are losing. The first thing you can do is control your end of it, and I think we’ve done a nice job of that lately.”

This is the Cubs’ reality for the next seven weeks. They have to keep finding ways to win, with little time left to move ahead of the other teams in the wild card race. The margin for error will keep shrinking, even if they keep winning.

“We put ourselves in a hole with how we played for an extended stretch,” Hoerner said. “But I do think you’re seeing a very complete version of us right now as far as starting pitching, bullpen, defense and a full lineup. So I think we’re in a good spot.”