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For Cubs worriers: Is the momentum gone?
- Updated: October 1, 2016
CHICAGO — They say a baseball team’s momentum is only as good as its next day’s starting pitcher.
The Cubs just might be riding momentum all the way through October and into November, if necessary, if that’s true.
Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks, Jake Arrieta and John Lackey will be an edge against every opponent the Cubs face.
They’re not dependent on any one starter but have four who can frustrate the game’s best hitters. They’d still have the best starters in the postseason if you substituted No. 5 starter Jason Hammel for any of the other four.
The Cubs have quality and they have quantity, which along with state-of-the-art fielding is why they’ve gone 38-16 since July 31, just as Arrieta and Lester were the biggest reasons they went 44-18 after July in 2015.
No team can match this supply of effective, healthy starting pitchers. Manager Joe Maddon has subtly limited their workloads since June, when they first captured a double-digit lead in the National League Central, and they all seem to have plenty of gas in the tank.
That’s huge.
Just look around Major League Baseball at all the impact starters who have been sidelined or diminished by health concerns.
The Mets are missing three of the four starters who rolled through the Cubs in the NL Championship Series last season. The Nationals are missing Stephen Strasburg but won’t get any sympathy from the Indians, who are deciding whether to replace both Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar or try to get by with three starting pitchers.
The Red Sox and Rangers are loaded at the front of the rotation, but things get dicey when they get past the 1-2 combinations of Rick Porcello-David Price and Cole Hamels-Yu Darvish, respectively. The …
