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Cubs have righted the ship, but need their ace to climb on board
- Updated: July 30, 2016
10:12 AM ET
CHICAGO — The version of the Chicago Cubs that overpowered the National League for the first few weeks of the 2016 season is gone. It is not coming back. But the new edition of the Cubs, the one that’s played since the All-Star break, is a pretty good replacement. In fact it’s championship-portrait, with one very important brush stroke left to make.
That start was, indeed, amazing. Unreal even. When the Cubs won 25 of their first 31 games, Cubs president Theo Epstein told an overexcited media, “This is not baseball reality. Baseball reality is it’s really hard to win a single big-league game. That’s why we celebrate them so much.”
That was on May 10, and a few hours after Epstein spoke, the Cubs beat San Diego 8-7 to improve their record to 25-6 — a 130-win pace that would have obliterated the all-time record.
To that point, the offense had averaged 6.2 runs per game, a pace of 1,003 runs. During the 162-game era, only the 1999 Cleveland Indians have scored more, and they did so in one of the most offense-friendly seasons in history. Meanwhile, the Cubs’ pitching and defense had combined to allow just 2.8 runs per game, a figure that translates to 465 runs allowed. That would have topped the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals’ record for the era, and the Redbirds established that record in the Year of the Pitcher.
The point: The Cubs were playing fantasy baseball. To have maintained those early trends, they would have been arguably both the greatest run-scoring and the greatest run-prevention team of the last 55 years, maybe ever. They’re good, really good, but that just doesn’t happen. So it’s been no surprise that Epstein’s words turned out to be prescient.
Of course, for a while there, it was looking like Epstein’s foresight was a little too on-the-nose. When the Cubs staggered into the All-Star break on the heels of a 7-15 stretch, their fan base, conditioned over 108 years for disappointment, began to get jittery. For that matter, so did the Cubs.
“I …
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