Column: Chicago Cubs belt 6 home runs in a 13-4 rout of the Atlanta Braves. Was it an anomaly or a sign of things to come?

Paul Sullivan, Chicago Tribune
·5 min read
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Shawon Dunston spent the first two months of the 1989 season hitting under .200, so when the Chicago Cubs shortstop finally got to .203 on June 4th, his teammates celebrated by giving him a commemorative baseball with their signatures on it.

Those were different times, of course. Players could poke fun of each other’s struggles — and often did — without fear of getting a reprimand from the human resources department.

Anything to loosen things up was considered a good thing.

That probably wouldn’t work with today’s millennial players, and if all the Cubs hitting under .200 were handed autographed balls for finally getting over the Mendoza line, it could get costly for the Rickettses.

But the Cubs desperately needed something or someone to shake them out of their early-season offensive funk, and they found it Saturday in the Atlanta Braves pitching staff.

Hitting six home runs in a 13-4 win over the Braves was not only an anomaly, it came with the wind blowing in at Wrigley Field and from a team that began the day with the lowest batting average and slugging percentage in the majors.

Whether Saturday’s surge was a trend or an outlier remains to be seen, but the Cubs hope it’s a reminder they have too much talent to believe the current struggles were unfixable.

“It feels like it was bound to happen,” third baseman Kris Bryant said. “I like to look at baseball as a law-of-average game, and we just weren’t getting it done. And now we did today. And it feels good.”

Bryant and Willson Contreras hit two home runs apiece, and the Cubs set season highs in runs and hits (14) while improving to 6-8. Bryant went 3-for-5 and Anthony Rizzo 3-for-4.

It’s only one game, but the Cubs let out what Bryant called “a collective sigh of relief” afterward.

“That’s what we feel this lineup is like on any given night,” manager David Ross said, adding it was a “well-needed” outburst.

The Cubs already were under consideration as one of the least entertaining teams in franchise history, even with many of the same characters from the only championship team of our lifetimes. Even the worst Cubs teams usually had a hitter or two who made them watchable, but this was a total team meltdown.

The Cubs entered the day ranked last in the majors in average (.166), on-base percentage (.267) and slugging percentage (.307) and were second to last in runs scored (34), averaging only five hits per game.

With the exceptions of Contreras (.257), Bryant (.220) and Jason Heyward (.205), no one in the starting lineup was hitting over .200.

Contreras, whose game-winning home run and retaliatory trip around the bases against the Milwaukee Brewers on Tuesday provided the biggest highlight of the young season, hit a pair of 400-plus-foot solo homers in his first two at-bats off Braves starter Huascar Ynoa to get the party rolling.

The Cubs catcher and No. 2 hitter has homered in three consecutive games and become the emotional centrifuge of this team.

“Going back to Milwaukee, he seems to be very passionate right now,” Bryant said. “It’s really fun to see him go out there and care so much and have some success too.”

Javier Báez hit a three-run homer in a four-run third, and Bryant added a two-run shot and David Bote a twothree-run blast in the five-run fifth to turn it into a laugher. Bryant and Bote finished with four RBIs each

Crooked numbers were an endangered species for the Cubs. Before Saturday, they had scored one or no runs in 95% of their 116 innings and more than two runs only once — a four-run inning against the Brewers on April 5 at Wrigley, when Contreras, Báez and Bote all homered off Brett Anderson.

The Cubs always have had veterans who started slowly, most notably Ryne Sandberg, who was famous for ice-cold Aprils.

Báez , hitting .192 with 25 strikeouts and only one walk in 52 at-bats, is another.

“Usually I start slow,” he said. “My first half is about making adjustments. … Last year was two months, it wasn’t a full year, and I was in a rush to make adjustments.”

Having in-game video this season has helped after it was banned in 2020 because of the Houston Astros cheating scandal.

“Everyone is on the iPads and seeing the movement (in pitches) we need to see,” Baez said.

With the exception of the 1997 team that started 0-14, no Cubs offense has looked this bad in early April. In fact, the only team in major-league history with a worse average through 13 games was the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who hit a combined .161 during a 1-12 start on their way to a 119-loss season.

“Tough game, a very tough game,” Bryant said. “And it’s only getting tougher.”

This team bears no resemblance to the ’03 Tigers, and going 6-8 in spite of this touchless offense could be considered a miracle.

And at least the Cubs can look to Dunston’s saga in 1989 for proof a happy ending is still attainable.

After Dunston climbed over the .200 mark, a couple of Cubs fans showed up the next day waving a 30-by-40-inch sign with a removable numbers that updated his average after every at-bat. He wound up hitting .278 and helping lead the “Boys of Zimmer” to a division title, while the Shawon-O-Meter became part of Cubs legend.

The 2021 Cubs don’t need a Joc-O-Meter, a Rizz-O-Meter or a Happ-O-Meter vying for attention in the socially distanced bleachers to turn things around for Pederson, Rizzo and Ian Happ.

But they do need the players to loosen up a bit, and perhaps good things will happen.