Cubs manager Craig Counsell wasn’t trying to downplay the 10 games that separate his team and the National League Central champion Brewers.
“I think the message sent is that there’s a big gap,” Counsell said after the Cubs’ loss the day before had clinched the division for the Brewers. “They’re ahead of us by a lot. And it’s a talented team on and off the field. It’s a talented team, but there’s a big gap. And we’ve got room to make up. There’s no question about it.”
Then the Cubs eked out a 7-6 victory Thursday against a Nationals team that is still very much in rebuild mode.
Counsell had been careful not to pontificate about the team’s standing in the division until the race was decided. What good would it have done for the man at the helm to prematurely take the wind out of his players’ sails?
The Brewers, thanks to the Cubs’ loss to the Athletics on Wednesday afternoon, became the first team to clinch a playoff berth. With an 87-64 record, before they beat the Phillies that night for good measure, the Brewers officially closed one avenue into the postseason for the Cubs.
With the Cubs seven games behind the Mets and Diamondbacks, the wild-card route is so unlikely that even Counsell admitted that losing two out of three to the A’s this week put his team “in a nearly impossible situation.”
The Cubs’ back-and-forth game against the Nats hammered home that point even more.
The Cubs got a game-tying two-run home run from Seiya Suzuki in the third inning — his 21st homer of the season, a career high. But Joey Gallo’s three-run homer off Drew Smyly in the sixth wiped out the lead the Cubs had taken with a fifth-inning rally.
The Cubs finally took a lead that would stand in the seventh with singles from Ian Happ, Dansby Swanson and Cody Bellinger and a run-scoring groundout from Isaac Paredes.
The narrow win, however, proved that even second place in the division is far from guaranteed. The Cubs were only able to pull out of their tie with the Cardinals with the help of the Pirates, who beat St. Louis 3-2.
Meanwhile, the Brewers are free to start preparing for the postseason: getting rest for players who need it, lining up their rotation, competing for seeding.
Looking ahead, Counsell said the space the Brewers have put between themselves and the rest of the division “makes it daunting.”
“They’ve created a gap the last two years in the division,” he said. “So we’ve got room to go, man. We’ve got work to do, for sure.”
Counsell, of course, was part of that process last year. His Brewers helped eliminate the Cubs from playoff contention in the last weekend of the regular season even while resting their top starters with a playoff berth already clinched.
Then the accomplished manager, known for getting the most out of his teams in small-market Milwaukee, left for the promise of a new challenge with the division rival down the road.
“We should try to be building 90-win teams here,” Counsell said. “That’s what you have to do; that’s the playoff standard. That’s what you’ve got to get to be safely in the playoffs, safely in the tournament. So from that perspective, we’ve got a ways to go.”
The large-market Cubs have the resources to do that. But this year, they brought back a largely unchanged roster, betting on internal improvement and the Counsell effect to top the 83 wins that got them just shy of a playoff berth last year.
This year, the Diamondbacks and Mets, who occupy the second and third NL wild-card spots, already had 84 wins entering Thursday.
Let that be a lesson for next year.