Cubs star Kyle Tucker fouled off the first two pitches he saw Tuesday — a pair of splitters, one on the outer third of the plate and the other on the inner third.
When he’s in a groove, Tucker usually puts one of those in play. But instead, continuing to battle an offensive slump, he found himself in an 0-2 count. He watched the next pitch, a high fastball, but then whiffed on a third splitter at the bottom of the strike zone.
“I feel like I’m still swinging at the pitches I want to and taking the ones I don’t want to swing at,” he said this week. “Pitches over the plate, I just end up fouling off, or might swing and miss at times. And then I just end up getting in worse counts, and kind of just doesn’t work out from there. But I still swing at the [right] pitches. I just need to figure out how to put those forward.”
Tucker isn’t the only Cubs hitter in a rut. Though Seiya Suzuki’s breakout performance Wednesday helped propel the Cubs to a strong offensive day in the series finale against the Reds, the Cubs have been in the bottom third of the majors in run-scoring since the All-Star break.
Meanwhile, the Brewers have been surging. After taking two out of three against the Cubs last week, they went on a six-game winning streak. On Tuesday, they put the finishing touches on their best 60-game stretch (44-16) in any season in franchise history. They entered Thursday with the best record in MLB (70-44) and a four-game lead on the Cubs in the NL Central.
“This is a very good offensive baseball team,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said this week of pulling out of a collective slump. “It will happen.”
The specter of last season’s seven-week collective slump is hard to ignore. But the Cubs added Tucker, the caliber of hitter that can carry a team through a rut, this offseason in an effort to avoid repeating history.
He just has to get out of his own offensive dip.
Tucker posted a .295 slugging percentage in the month of July. His plate discipline still was getting him on base, at a .380 clip, but it was a dramatic drop-off from his torrid offensive start to the season.
“It sucks,” Tucker said. “But at the same time, we’ve got another game the next day. So you’ve got to, each at-bat, try to refocus and try and do what you want that at-bat, and do what you can to move runners over, try to get them in. So regardless of how you’ve been doing over a stretch of time, you just try to do whatever you can to win that game.”
Counsell gave Tucker the day off Wednesday, leading into the Thursday off day.
“He’s got very high expectations of himself, and when he doesn’t meet him, he’s frustrated,” Counsell said. “So this is just a mental break, nothing physical. Super confident that he’s going to get it back going and he’s going to have a great last 50 games.”
Tucker also battled through a jammed finger that kept him out of the starting lineup for two consecutive games in early June. Even playing through the discomfort, he recorded a .982 OPS that month.
“I know it did bother him for a while,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said this week. “I don’t know whether it still bothers him, whether it created some bad habits along the way — compensating and things like that. But there’s no question that when you look at his numbers, it’s had an impact on him, for sure. Sometimes these small injuries, they can do that.”
Tucker downplayed the impact.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ve got to go to my job regardless of how I feel. So I’m just trying to just continue that as best I can.”
