Believe it or not, the Brewers finally lost.
Not that they didn’t try to stage another ridiculous comeback Sunday, turning a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 lead with a clutch ninth-inning homer. But the Reds got them in extra innings. The streak is dead.
Meanwhile, the Cubs managed to take advantage of a rare opportunity to gain ground on their division rivals, who with a pair of double-digit win streaks since the start of July have sprinted out to a big lead in the NL Central.
It was a 4-3 win over the Pirates at Wrigley Field that got the Cubs within eight games of the first-place Brewers, who come to the North Side for a pivotal five-game series, beginning with Monday’s doubleheader.
“It’s tough [to ignore what the Brewers have done]. It’s kind of in your face, in a way,” shortstop Dansby Swanson said. “They’ve been doing some pretty incredible things, just the consistency and finding ways to win each and every day.
“We’ve got to show up and do what we do. At the end of the day, in order for this team to get to where it wants to get to, we’ve got to consistently play better. We’ve got to consistently show up with a winning attitude and make things happen.”
The Cubs made things happen Sunday, even if they didn’t solve the offensive woes that have plagued them throughout the month of August. They got an unearned run after a fielding error, tied the game on a pop up that dropped in front of a diving outfielder and scored the winning run on Swanson’s bases-loaded sacrifice fly. They played good defense and ran the bases well, season-long hallmarks of this team.
They had only six hits, but it was enough to give them their first series win in four tries.
They won two out of three against the last-place Pirates despite totaling nine runs on a low-scoring weekend. The Cubs have played 15 games in August and scored more than four runs in just three of them.
Even though they managed to dent the Brewers’ division lead by a game, the Cubs head into five games in four days against their rivals in much the same place they’ve been: searching for an offensive breakout.
“It feels like offensively we’ve been doing a lot of really good things , it just hasn’t equated to runs being put on the board in the manner we obviously would like,” Swanson said. “But nonetheless, impressive by the group to continue finding a way to get wins.
“There’s a lot of confidence that can be built from guys continuing to go out there and do what it takes in order to win the game.”
Finding different ways to win was a theme during the first half of the season, when the slow-to-arrive summer conditions and inward-blowing winds – back Sunday, even as passing jets participating in the Air and Water Show reminded that it’s mid August – meant the Cubs couldn’t just mash their way to victory every day.
Two low-scoring, one-run wins in as many days showed the Cubs still have that in them, even if the bats aren’t hot like they were earlier in the campaign.
Still, it figures an offensive awakening will have to happen this week if they’re going to keep the Central race interesting.
“A 1 [versus] 2 series like this, something that has a lot of attention, it’s obviously going to be a great atmosphere. You have to do the little things right,” left fielder Ian Happ said. “They’re a good team, they play fundamental baseball, they run the bases well, they play defense well, they pitch it. For us, we have to go out and play our game and be really sound fundamentally.
“We’ve got a lot of guys who are professionals and doing it at a high level, and it’s going to show up.”
Though the schedule informs there’s a lot of baseball remaining, five head-to-head meetings this week make it feel like it might be now or never.
