Column: If the Chicago Cubs hope to contend this season, their weekend series against the Milwaukee Brewers could be a big one

Paul Sullivan, Chicago Tribune
·5 min read
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The Chicago Cubs pulled their team batting average over .200 Wednesday with a 16-4 rout of the New York Mets, an accomplishment that went virtually unnoticed among all the celebrating.

It took 17 games to get there, and they still have a way to go to rise from abysmal to mediocre, but you have to start somewhere.

Manager David Ross voiced patience in his hitters as they endured a horrendous slump to start the season, declining to tinker with what wasn’t working. A difficult decision on Joc Pederson’s playing time was avoided Thursday when the Cubs put the struggling left fielder on the 10-day injured list with left wrist tendinitis and called up Nico Hoerner from their alternate site in South Bend, Ind.

It appears as though Ross’ patience finally is being rewarded, but we won’t know until we see how they fare against the Milwaukee Brewers staff this weekend in a three-game series at Wrigley Field.

If the Cubs are able to contend, a reasonable goal considering the lack of powerhouse teams in the National League Central, they might look back on this stretch as one in which they learned how to survive even as they all struggled.

They still haven’t proved they’re anything more than a .500 team, but with the glaring lack of hitting and only one strong outing from their ace, Kyle Hendricks, they just as easily could have been seven or eight games under .500 on Thursday instead of 8-9 heading into the series finale against the Mets.

That’s why the three-game series against the Brewers could carry a bit more significance than your run-of-the-mill, late-April matchup between division rivals who dislike each other.

Because of reasons no one really can comprehend, the schedule-makers decided the Cubs and Brewers would play each other in three of the first seven series of the 2021 season — or almost half (nine) of the Cubs’ first 21 games. By Sunday night they’ll have seen more of Craig Counsell and Brandon Woodruff than some members of their own families.

The Brewers so far have taken advantage of the Cubs’ contact issues behind two of the top starters in the game, Corbin Burnes and Woodruff. Burnes and Woodruff have dominated the Cubs in their three combined starts, allowing one run on six hits over 19 innings with 24 strikeouts.

The Cubs will miss Burnes in the weekend series, just as they were fortunate to dodge Mets ace Jacob deGrom Thursday night after he was pushed back a day in the rotation.

You could argue this is the worst time for the Cubs to be facing the Brewers again, and you might be right. The Brewers are coming off a three-game sweep of the Padres in San Diego and have the third-ranked staff in the majors with a 2.71 ERA, while the Cubs are just beginning to find their bearings after the brutal offensive start.

The first-place Brewers have won four of the first six games against the Cubs, while their pitchers have held Cubs hitters to a .129 average. Javier Baez is hitting .091 with 11 strikeouts in 23 plate appearances against the Brewers, while Anthony Rizzo is 3-for-22 (.136) and David Bote 2-for-15 (.133).

If not for Willson Contreras’ clutch home run last week in a 3-2 win in Milwaukee, the Brewers would’ve swept that series. Contreras has been the focal point of the season series, getting hit three times, stalking toward reliever Brad Boxberger — causing a benches-clearing incident — and celebrating his go-ahead home run last week as if he were going to Disneyland.

Hendricks, who struggled in two of his first three starts, takes the mound Friday afternoon with a chance to shake off his “Sunday Night Baseball” flop. Perhaps the most shocking thing of the Cubs season was watching the Atlanta Braves pound Hendricks, who became the first pitcher in franchise history to serve up four home runs in the first inning in a 13-4 loss.

Everyone gets a mulligan, and as consistent as Hendricks has been over the last six years, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. But that won’t last forever, and as the designated ace in the post-Yu Darvish era, he’s expected to do better.

Ross said at the start of spring training that he would be less patient managing in his second season at the helm. That hasn’t been apparent yet, but he sat Jason Heyward against a left-hander for the second straight game Thursday night, and team President Jed Hoyer’s much-discussed decision to sign Pederson as a regular left fielder instead of a platoon player could be revisited if Pederson doesn’t show some improvement against left-handers when he returns. He was 1-for-13 versus lefties going into Thursday’s game, while Heyward was 2-for-11.

Ross spoke of giving his players time to “clear their heads” when they’re in the middle of a tough stretch but also said he wanted to reward Matt Duffy for a good night by giving him another start at third, which moved Kris Bryant to right.

So Pederson doesn’t have to worry — yet.

“I talked to Joc probably as much as I’ve talked to anybody,” Ross said. “We’ve got a plan in place where we’ll find out the best way for him to succeed. Sometimes it’s about getting other players in the lineup, and when you feel like some matchups are good, giving them a little run, a guy might be working on some stuff. There’s going to be an ebb and flow to that process throughout the season. There are no hard and fast rules we’ve established.”

An hour later, the Cubs announced Pederson was injured.

The ebbs and flows of the long season are what make baseball such a great game — and why survival is all that matters for the Cubs right now.