The night the Cubs were officially eliminated from the NL Central race, they received another stark reminder about their beleaguered bullpen:
“We’re not going to survive if we don’t have multiple guys we can count on,” manager Craig Counsell said Tuesday after a 6-3 loss to the Braves at Wrigley Field.
Counsell’s former team, the Brewers, clinched their fourth straight division title in Pittsburgh as his current team suffered through another bullpen meltdown, with right-handed relievers Jacob Webb and Edward Cabrera each serving up a two-run homer in the late innings against a playoff-caliber lineup.
Postseason survival is predicated on that sort of thing not happening, not with any sort of frequency, but that has been the story for the Cubs down the stretch.
With 10 games left on their regular-season schedule, it’s unclear which relievers they’ll be able to count on when the lights get even brighter in October.
It has been a particularly brutal stretch for Webb, who was so good as the Cubs’ go-to reliever earlier in the summer, at one point stringing together 24 consecutive scoreless appearances.
But the game-flipping homer he allowed in the seventh inning Tuesday, sending the Cubs from up a run to down a run, was the fourth long ball he has allowed in his last eight outings. His record dropped to 6-5 with the loss.
Cabrera was in his first relief appearance as a Cub, just back from a lengthy stint on the injured list dealing with blister issues as the Cubs try to find out in the waning days of the season if he can be a useful piece in a playoff bullpen.
Although his 2 1/3 innings were mostly good Tuesday, the homer he gave up in the ninth significantly dinged any chances at a comeback.
Of course, plenty contributes to such defeats, and the Cubs’ best-in-baseball bats couldn’t muster more than three runs and five singles on the evening, with their final dozen hitters going down in order.
But the glare of September baseball can’t help but illuminate their apparent Achilles’ heel — a relief corps that has been under the magnifying glass since Webb coughed up the first of two back-breaking walk-off homers on a road trip in late August.
In October, when the use of pitchers becomes a different beast with everything on the line, it will be impossible to survive performances like this one.
“We’ve got to put together 27 outs,” Counsell said. “We’ve got to get guys pitching well, and we’ve got to have guys we can count on, multiple guys we can count on.”