Cubs take series against Pirates with Milwaukee looming

It is dangerous in any sport to look too far ahead, but Cubs fans can be forgiven for feeling a bit preoccupied during this weekend’s series at Wrigley Field against the Pirates. On its own, this was a solid three-game set; the Cubs bounced back from a Friday loss and won the next two days to move to 17 games above .500. After going .500 in June, they went 14-10 in July and are just one game under .500 in August with Sunday’s 4-3 win over Pittsburgh. Under normal circumstances, this should be a baseball team cruising toward a division title.

But there is the problem of the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Cubs have a five-game series against the Brewers looming in the coming week, and it’s enough pressure that these are the top two teams in the division. Pile on a whole lot more because Milwaukee has been winning at an ungodly rate since the beginning of June and especially of late; they were on the verge of coming to Chicago riding a 15-game winning streak until the Reds managed to beat them in extra innings in Cincinnati on Sunday.

Because of how much the Brewers keep winning, the Cubs being 17 games above .500 is only good enough for second place in the National League Central and eight games behind their northern rivals.

“I think everybody in baseball is aware of how well they’re playing,” Ian Happ said. “That doesn’t change what we do day in and day out. I think it’s been a bigger topic for everybody else than it has been for us. We’re worried about what’s going on in this clubhouse.”

Still, it’s not just been that the Brewers are winning so much, but how. They’ve hit on nearly every possible outlier result over the last couple of months, and pretty much always in their favor. The dictates of the baseball gods wouldn’t seem to allow this, and yet it keeps happening. Even their losses are scary. Sunday’s game was a close one, and it included a two-run, go-ahead homer in the ninth inning by William Contreras that eventually got erased in extra innings.

Happ said he and his teammates are aware that the Brewers have been practically unbeatable for a long time, but the fact that they have had almost nothing but good luck hasn’t been a topic in the Cubs clubhouse. That said, even though it has been out of the Cubs’ control over the last couple of weeks, it is still hard to tune out what the Brewers have been doing.

“It’s tough, it’s kind of in your face in a way,” Dansby Swanson said. They’ve been doing some pretty incredible things over there. Just the consistency and finding ways to win each and every day. We’ve just got to show up and do what we do.”

For what it’s worth, the Cubs have gone 4-4 with a +8 run differential against the Brewers so far this season, and three of those wins have come at Wrigley. It would seem to bode well for the Cubs that they will finish their head-to-head matchups against the Brewers at the Friendly Confines.

After those five games, however, the Cubs have nothing to do but keeping trying to stack wins against the teams they are playing. Like the past two-and-a-half weeks, they cannot control what happens with the Brewers, whether it seems to contain some element of voodoo in Milwaukee’s favor or not. The Cubs will have to grind out more series wins like they did against Pittsburgh over the weekend.

Both Happ and Swanson factored into Sunday’s win, Happ knocked in the first run of the game in the second inning and then moved Carson Kelly to third base on a double in the eighth for Swanson to drive in with a sacrifice fly for the go-ahead run.

Another encouraging sign in Sunday’s game was Javier Assad’s performance. Making his second start since returning on August 12 from an oblique injury, Assad limited the Pirates to one run in four innings. A good step forward from his start against the Blue Jays in Toronto last week, when he gave up four runs on eight hits in four innings. His outing on Sunday allowed manager Craig Counsell to limit his bullpen use somewhat, needing Taylor Rogers, Ben Brown, Caleb Thielbar, and Andrew Kittredge to cover the last five innings. And almost three of those innings were Brown, so the other three relievers didn’t have to throw a lot of pitches. Counsell said rookie Cade Horton will start the first game of Monday’s doubleheader, but after that, the rest of the rotation plans are unknown, and he will undoubtedly need the full strength of his bullpen to take at least three of the next five games.

A team is always trying to win that day’s game, but there is also the reality that a doubleheader the next day means saving arms is important. Even more so when that doubleheader is against the hottest team in baseball, that has the best record in baseball, and that is ahead of you in the division standings.

All the same, a five-game sweep would still leave the Cubs behind Milwaukee by a few games, and as the dust settles on Sunday’s results around the league, the Cubs will have a comfortable lead in the wild card race at about five games. And yet, that might still be a hard pill for fans to swallow. The Brewers have won the division four times in the last seven seasons, and the Cubs have only done so once in that span, in the truncated 2020 season. Otherwise, it’s been since 2017, also the last year the Cubs won a playoff game. Chasing down the Brewers and reclaiming the division lead would sit a lot better in Wrigleyville.

“We’re excited for the series,” Counsell said. “We’re getting to a point in the season where the number of games we’ve got left means the games are important, and wins are helpful.”