Count Jed Hoyer among the legions of Cubs fans who spent the last five weeks wondering what the heck was going on with this offense.
“The offense has been a challenge, overall,” the Cubs’ team president said Tuesday. “It shouldn’t be, in general. We should score plenty of runs, but that hasn’t been the case.
“As a team, we need to score more runs. And especially we need to hit in leverage situations. That hasn’t happened.”
A night later, it did happen. The Cubs exploded for eight runs, seven of them coming in the second inning, as they bested the Rockies to secure back-to-back series wins.
“That inning, for so many reasons, was so good for everybody,” said shortstop Dansby Swanson, whose home run as part of the rally got not a monkey, but a blue whale off his back. “That’s what we’ve been so good at in the past is having those big innings, really making pitchers work to get outs, using the ballpark to our advantage.
“That’s what we do. To have an inning happen like that felt really good for everybody involved.”
Offensive performances like Wednesday’s are the kind that vaulted the Cubs to the top of the NL Central earlier in the season and had them looking capable of delivering on their championship-level expectations.
Then, a freefall. Even after Wednesday’s win, the Cubs are just 12-24 in their last 36 games since May 9, a stretch that’s seen the power go out in a lineup built for October.
Players and coaches have spent those weeks sincerely describing their attempts to work their way out of a team-wide slump. The results haven’t come frequently enough, giving ample time for folks to wonder what could be crippling the lineup.
Hoyer has wondered, too.
“For better or worse, we’ve spent five weeks having that discussion of, ‘Too much [work]? Too little? Do you do things differently?’” Hoyer said. “There are times you want [to ask], ‘Are they overly serious? Are they doing too much?’ We’ve asked all those questions.
“I’ll be happy when we’re not having those conversations, because they’ve taken up a lot of time.”
Wednesday night was more like it, of course.
The Cubs sent 11 batters to the plate in the second inning, banging out seven hits and scoring seven runs. Utility man Matt Shaw tripled, slugger Seiya Suzuki and catcher Carson Kelly doubled, and Swanson homered.
It was a keep-the-line-moving kind of inning that’s been so rare for the Cubs the last few weeks, but something they’ve known themselves capable of delivering on a regular basis.
“We haven’t had an inning like that, it feels like, for a long time,” manager Craig Counsell said.
Most importantly, perhaps, Cubs hitters had four hits, in that inning alone, with runners in scoring position, a bugaboo that’s been zeroed in on as the root of all their offensive evils. The Cubs woke up Wednesday with the second lowest batting average in baseball with runners in scoring position, hitting just .220 on the season. Since May 9, the day after they completed their second 10-game win streak this year, that number is just .177.
How could a lineup with such accomplished hitters post such hideous situational numbers?
“If, theoretically, there’s no psychological component to those things, they should revert back to the mean,” Hoyer said. “When it becomes something people are worried or thinking about, it can become its own problem.
“You always wonder that when the group is struggling in high-leverage situations. You wonder if that’s something that guys feel. If you look at our numbers, … guys in high-leverage situations have been poor. So you kind of wonder, ‘That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Is that a psychological thing? Is that a change in thought process?’”
Again, more questions. And not enough answers.
For one night, the bats looked back at Wrigley Field. But the Cubs have been through a few big moments in the last couple weeks, only for those to prove mirages.
So was this the turning point? Has this offense put its struggles in the rearview mirror?
“I’m not going to buy into that yet,” center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong said. “I want to keep stacking [wins].”