SAN DIEGO – The Cubs had to face reality Wednesday night.
They had to face failure.
A team with World Series expectations, in the end, couldn’t come close to sniffing the Fall Classic, their stay in the postseason not even making it to the month of October.
Swept by a red-hot Padres team, the Cubs got to witness a team playing like a championship contender while they watched their own contending season end with a whimper.
Indeed, they played like contenders for large swaths of the summer. A fast start featured a pair of 10-game winning streaks. They scored more runs than any other team during the regular season. They played the best defense in baseball and watched Pete Crow-Armstrong turn in an MVP campaign.
But their roller-coaster season’s last dip came at precisely the wrong time, the bats going quiet and producing just 16 runs in the final eight games they played.
The Cubs weren’t good enough, certainly not against the Padres and, ultimately, not this year.
“Horrible,” Alex Bregman said, describing the feeling of swift elimination. “The goal is to win, and we didn’t play well enough to do that. It’s time to look in the mirror and get better.
“I look at it as a failure. We need to win.”
Perhaps the results would have been different had Crow-Armstrong and Bregman, the Cubs’ two best hitters, delivered.
Instead of turning in the types of clutch, signature moments they did all summer, they were rendered non-factors by Padres pitching, combining to go 0-for-15 with eight strikeouts in two nights.
“I’m feeling pretty disappointed in myself,” Crow-Armstrong said. “You could look at the scoreboard, you could look at the stat sheet, wherever you get your numbers from, and it is clear to see that I didn’t contribute.”
“Both of us are pissed off,” Bregman said. “We need to play better and figure out a way to get better in every way.”
But just as the Cubs’ regular-season successes weren’t the sole responsibility of one or two players, neither were their postseason failures. Baseball’s highest-scoring lineup was shutout in Game 1 and scored one run in Game 2. The team’s first and only extra-base hit of the series was Nico Hoerner’s ninth-inning double in Game 2.
While the pitching was far from pristine – Matthew Boyd served up first-inning homers to Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado in Game 1, and Daniel Palencia was crushed for a back-breaker off the bat of Gavin Sheets in Game 2 – no performance could have produced a victory with the offense sputtering the way it did.
The Padres are on fire, and they looked the part of a championship contender in every way the Cubs did not. They hit. They pitched. They did everything right.
The Padres were the team the Cubs believed themselves to be.
“We don’t feel like we got beat by a team that’s better than us, but they’re a team that’s playing way better right now. That’s baseball, and those two categories are interchangeable,” Boyd said. “We didn’t get to where we wanted to go. We didn’t get to where we knew we were capable of going. It doesn’t mean it’s a failure, but it’s still hard.
“Sometimes the better team doesn’t win, it’s just the team that plays better. And that’s what happened. They did things right in all facets, and we didn’t. It’s on all of us.”
And so instead of an NLDS rematch with the rival Brewers, the Cubs are left to wonder what might have been and deal with an even earlier playoff exit than a year ago.
A good season? Sure. But not a good enough one for a team with championship-level aspirations. Not even close.
“It’d be silly to say that we shouldn’t be proud of what we’ve done, as a group, collectively, what we’ve been able to accomplish,” Dansby Swanson said. “At the same time, I know that we’re so winning-oriented, that there’s a big chunk of us that feels like this was a failure, too.
“We did a lot of good things, but we didn’t do it good enough to win.”