ST. LOUIS — What sort of mindset do the Cubs have in the wake of a 10-game losing streak?
“The rest of the story is yet to be written, and it can be written in any sort of way. None of us know how it’s going to go,” lefty starter Matthew Boyd told the Sun-Times on Friday. “But I tell you what, we all do believe we are, if not the best team, one of the best teams in baseball.”
Well, it didn’t ding their confidence.
The extended losing stretch came to a merciful end Wednesday night in Pittsburgh, but the shock of a 10-game skid that followed a pair of 10-game winning streaks has fans feeling whiplash.
This season has been less a roller-coaster ride and more a Tower of Terror. Roller coasters have inclines and declines. The Cubs have gone straight up and, more recently, straight down.
“This has been a more extreme baseball team,” manager Craig Counsell said before Friday’s date with the rival Cardinals. “If you do this long enough, you think it’s going to be very even, and sometimes it’s not. We’ve got to live with that.”
The Cubs would prefer things to be slightly less jarring from here on out. They have championship-level expectations and will need to build some consistency over a lengthy summer of baseball if they’re going to meet them.
They are no longer, according to the standings, what Boyd says they are, one of the best teams in the sport. They left that distinction behind with the slide.
They meet a rival Redbird group — supposedly rebuilding but doing enough winning that they’re jockeying with the Cubs in the all-teams-above-.500 NL Central — with work to do to get back to the top of the heap.
Who knows if the division will remain a gauntlet of winners. But if the Cubs are going to do what they were projected to — not only dispatching of these upstart Cardinals but somehow finding a way to topple the first-place Brewers — they’ll need to take a lesson or two from the 10-game nightmare they just woke up from.
“You never want to go through them, but it’s those valleys that do make you better,” Boyd said. “It’s times like that 10-game losing streak that you can look back on and use it to make yourself better and move forward and say, ‘Let’s make adjustments and grow from these things and, hopefully, not let them happen again.’”
“These kinds of things, they almost bring you a little bit closer,” designated hitter Michael Conforto told the Sun-Times. “Everybody had a rough patch in there, and when those things happen, you’ve got guys picking each other up and meeting up to talk about the game, talk about what’s not going right. It’s an opportunity for the guys to get even closer than they were before, going through something like that.”
Itching to pitch
Sidelined for weeks while recovering from knee surgery, Boyd, the Cubs’ Opening Day starter, will make a rehab start with Triple-A Iowa on Sunday.
Suffice to say, he’s ready to get back on the mound.
“I’m super excited to just go compete,” he said. “You try to compete in everything you do, whether it’s rehab or in a game. It’s a lot more fun to do it between the white lines.”
