The Chicago Cubs week of missed opportunities

The just-concluded nine-game home stand of the Chicago Cubs shows how close the team is to contending status in the NL Central.

But it also shows how frustratingly far the Cubs are from closing the remaining gap.

The Cubs went 4-5 in nine games at home against the two division powerhouses, the Milwaukee Brewers and St. Louis Cardinals. They could just as easily have gone 8-1.

Two of their five losses came in extra innings of games they led late. Two others came by margins of one and two runs, also in games they led late.

Chicago Cubs are close but not quite there yet

Had they held on to win those four games – an entirely plausible scenario — Chicago would have closed out the week within one game of .500 on the season and just five and one-half games out of the division lead. More intriguingly, they would be only one game out of a playoff spot.

They also would have won 11 of 15 against the Brewers and Cardinals this season.

That could very easily have been the situation in which the Cubs awoke Monday morning to find themselves. With the exception of Friday’s 14-5 blowout loss, these were Chicago’s late-game win expectancies in the week’s four defeats.

           Game                                 Win expectancy                               Outcome

• Game 1 Monday              51 percent, top of the 7th            Milwaukee 7-6
• Game 2 Monday              69 percent, bottom of the 7th    Milwaukee 3-1
• Game 2 Saturday            65 percent, bottom of the 8th    St. Louis 7-4 (10 innings)
• Sunday                               88 percent, bottom of the 8th    St. Louis 5-3 (11 innings)

In those four losses, the Cubs out-hit the Brewers and Cardinals by a collective 41-34. So it would be reasonable – and also somewhat accurate – to blame the bullpen for those missed opportunities.

The Cubs’ pen pitched 17 innings in those four defeats, allowing 13 runs, 11 of them earned. That’s a collective 5.82 ERA. In all four of those games, the bullpen produced a negative Win Probability Added. It was, in short, a large portion of the problem.

But it was not the only problem. Cubs hitters ought to come in for their share of the blame.

In those same four losses, the Cubs stranded39 baserunners. A total of 25 were stranded in scoring position, 16 of whom got there with fewer than two out. Their more successful opponents only left 28 runners on base.

Is it possible to twist that frustrating set of results into an argument that the Cubs are actually division contenders in 2022? Probably not. Both the bullpen and left on base numbers are real, and they’re not going anywhere.

The club’s 57 percent save percentage is well below the 65 percent MLB average. That’s not entirely the bullpen’s fault. The team’s Average Leverage Index – a measure of how pressurized bullpen situations are – is 1.031 on a scale where 1.00 equals average. Only a half dozen teams in MLB consistently expose their pens to more stressful situations.

The Cubs are also sixth in the majors in runners left on base, averaging a hair under seven stranded runners every game.

So there are both chronic run-production and mound issues of which this week’s results was nothing more than symptomatic.

For wanna-be hopeful Cubs fans, the other nagging problem is that Willson Contreras remains solidly on course to be a free agent at season’s end. That means it only makes sense for the club to make baseball’s best offensive threat behind the plate available in a trade sometime in the next two months.

It is simply not possible to paint a realistic scenario for the future that includes Contreras as part of a winning Cubs team.

In short, the Chicago Cubs showed against the  Cardinals and Brewers both how close they are to the top of the division and how slippery the remainder of the climb toward that division peak is likely to be.