So, about the Brewers and the Cubs …
Make that the Cubs and the Brewers.
The order has flipped. The tables have turned. South sits above North again in this sweet little rivalry, as it should most of the time, if not always.
This must be what Cubs manager Craig Counsell was getting at last September when he assessed the “big, daunting gap” between his old, small-market team and his new, major-market one — buried 10 games back in the division standings — and said, “I think it’s important that you reflect on the season, [and] if I sit here and say we need to be better, that reflection needs to create some changes.”
Changes? On June 17, 2024, the Cubs were a last-place team at 34-39, already 8½ games behind the first-place Brewers. A year later, they opened their first home series of the season against the Brewers with a record of 44-28, one game behind the Mets for the best mark in the National League. Maybe they should reflect more often.
A year ago at this very time, the Brewers were 42-30 and just beginning to round into runaway form. They ended up having the best bullpen in the National League, stealing more bases than all but one team in baseball and outperforming the Cubs in essentially every offensive category, even home runs, despite the modest power in first-year skipper Pat Murphy’s lineup.
Those Brewers far surpassed expectations, winning 93 games. The Cubs flopped, meanwhile, reeling to a 21-34 record in May and June and finishing with only 83 wins despite strong starting pitching and the presence of Counsell, on whom president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer had staked his own reputation.
“The results weren’t matching up with how we felt [our] talent was,” said pitcher Jameson Taillon, who will take the bump Wednesday.
The rivalry has been one of baseball’s streakier ones. The Brewers owned it from 2011 through 2013, going 36-16 against the Cubs. The Cubs won the season series five straight years from 2014 through 2018, piling up a head-to-head record of 57-39. Since that run, though, the Cubs have had the better of it only once (in 2022, going 10-9) in six seasons. The Brewers’ surprisingly easy 2024 flex under Murphy — who’d been Counsell’s longtime bench coach — was worthy of serious bragging rights.
In recent years, the Brewers haven’t just put up more “Ws” than the Cubs. They’ve also had a seeming edge when they’ve needed it. As Taillon put it, they simply have a rare knack for coming through in “the big moments.” More than one Cub has likened the Brewers to the American League’s Rays, who in recent years raised doing more with less almost to an art form.
The Brewers continue to deliver in that vein. After a ragged 21-25 start, they went 18-9 to remain relatively in range of the first-place Cubs, who came into this series with a 5½-game lead. While the Cubs were winning three of four against the Pirates to begin this homestand, the Brewers were taking three of four from the Cardinals, who suddenly are on the verge of being smoked out of contention before the All-Star break.
The Cardinals and Reds rolled out of bed Tuesday with identical 37-35 records. Isn’t it against the law, or at least a violation of baseball norms, to give up on an above-.500 team in June? But it could end up being only the Brewers — their frequent tormentors — the Cubs have to worry about.
“This is a team that’s been on top of the division for most of the last five or six years,” Counsell said. “So these are important games.”
There’s a chance, of course, the remainder of the season will reveal that not even the Brewers have a shot to hang with the Cubs, who opened this series on a pace to win 99 games. That would be the franchise’s second-highest mark since the 1935 team went 100-54 en route to the World Series. Historians claim there was a certain 103-win Cubs team in 2016, and we’ll take them at their word.
The Cubs took the field Tuesday trailing only the Dodgers among all big-league teams in runs scored; the Brewers ranked 12th. The Cubs were fourth in OPS; the Brewers were 25th. The power gap (97 homers for the Cubs, 65 for the Brewers) was huge, as was the bullpen gap (3.16 ERA for the Cubs, 4.28 for the Brewers). The Cubs had even surpassed the Brewers in stolen bases — 90 to 89 — and the back-and-forth between the top two NL teams in that department might be fun to monitor the rest of the way.
Starting pitching is the only area of significance in which the Brewers have an edge so far over the Cubs, who lost Justin Steele right out of the gates and have their fingers crossed Shota Imanaga will get back to business without further setbacks. It’s almost the reverse of last year, when the Brewers excelled despite the heavy absences of Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff.
As it stands, the script has flipped between the Brewers and the Cubs.
Make that the Cubs and the Brewers.
“With the roster we have, we definitely should win the division,” Taillon said. “But you obviously have to go out and play the games. It’s not like you can say we should go steamroll everyone. There’s a lot of good talent in this division, but our roster is built to win — and it’s built to win right now.”
