As the All-Star Break is coming to an end, I thought this would be the perfect time to do the 2nd temperature check of the season. This season has been an absolute rollercoaster, and I have some excitement for the last stretch of the season.
First of all, lets give Craig Counsell and the rest of the coaching staff their flowers. They took a team that was sitting at .500 after having TWO separate 10 game win streaks, an offense that was struggling to say the least, and a pitching staff that is essentially a Triple-A bullpen with starters that are performing well below their ability and got them to 12 games about .500 at the all star break. While there are some decisions that I don’t quite understand (like having Pedro Ramirez only take an at-bat every couple games) it clearly was working and they need to be given credit for that.
Secondly, and honestly probably the most obvious. Pete Crow-Armstrong has been carrying this team. Even during the stretch of losses and bad offense, when there was a win, most of the time it was because PCA willed it. He was the cubs lone All-Star and should have been starting. The improvements he has made this year at the plate has been tremendous and I don’t think anybody predicted it. I was predicting him to have a career similar to Javier Baez, a free swinging guy who will strike out a lot, but will hit the ball HARD. He has absolutely been hitting rockets, but his plate discipline is now above league average, and that has been a world of difference for him. Last year in 2025, he had a 4.5% walk rate, which sat in the bottom 4% of the MLB according to Baseball Savant. This year, his walk rate sits at 11.2%. Him getting on base more means more stolen bases and more opportunities for the batters behind him in the order (Seiya, Bregman, Busch, Kelly) to get him home. And with his speed, you don’t need much. Going back to his hard hits, this is still similar to last year. PCA has improved his bat speed every year he has been in the MLB and that has allowed him to keep hitting the ball hard. With his improved plate discipline and bat speed, I do not see a fall-off like that happened last year after the all star break. He will be a 30-30 player as long as his approach stays consistent. All of this to say, he was a GLOVE FIRST prospect. And he, along with a lot of his teammates, may be playing some of the best defense I’ve ever seen.
PCA is second in all of baseball in Outs Above Average, only getting beaten out by Bobby Witt Jr. Dansby Swanson is 8th among all infielders for OAA, and his middle infield teammate, Nico Hoerner, is sitting at 11th. Alex Bregman and Michael Busch are at 33rd and 34th, which puts the entire Cubs infield in the top 35 in OAA. The middle infield being as elite as it is has made life easy for some of the more ground ball heavy pitchers. Dansby specifically has made several game saving/winning diving catches that has somewhat offset how much he has struggled at the plate most of this year. Nico has been Nico at second base as well, having insane range and also picking up Dansby whenever he lays out for the ball. The corners of the outfield have been good, but not great. Seiya, when he is in right field instead of DH, has been MUCH improved from years past. I would get nervous last year and early this year whenever a ball was hit in his direction. There had been many moments where he would just drop fly balls that most people that have played baseball would catch. This year has been a different story. He is taking better angles to the ball and catching everything that he is supposed to catch, and then making a few great diving/sliding plays. Ian Happ, especially by his standards, is having a down year in left field. His OAA is at -1 right now, and while he only has 1 error to this point, there are just some plays we are accustomed to him making that he hasn’t this year. Hopefully he can get back to the gold glove level defense in left that we are used to. Overall though, the defense has been exceptional and even the players that are playing below their own standard are still playing average/above average defense.
I have talked about a lot of good things from the first half of the season, but there are plenty of things that the Cubs need to improve if they are going to try and catch the Brewers for 1st in the NL Central. First of all, they need consistency at the plate from their hitters. While this can apply to everybody, I am going to emphasize Nico Hoerner and Alex Bregman. First, Nico will never be a home run hitter, and he doesn’t need to be with guys like Michael Busch, Seiya Suzuki and PCA on the team. What he does need to do his make good contact and get on base. Which he has historically been one of the best in baseball at, I would say second to Luis Arraez. But this year has been a different story. He started the year HOT. He hit 4 home runs in April and was sitting at a clean .300 batting average with a .376 OBP. Since then, he has hit 0 home runs and his batting average for the year is all the way down to .233, which is unacceptable for a guy that doesn’t hit home runs. He has been the victim of some bad luck, with an expected batting average of .280. But this is a league of results, and his results have been subpar at best. He changed his approach during the first half of the season, wanting to pull the ball in the air more and hit more home runs. But he is not that kind of player and I don’t think he will ever be that kind of player. His bat speed and barrel % is among the lowest in the league, which is standard for him year in and year out. With this change in approach, he started flying out to left a lot more, and even the balls you think he hits really hard, most of the time are barely scratching the warning track. Watching games before the all star break, he seemed to be doing a better job of getting a little more on top of the ball and hitting line drives, but many of them would be hit right at the defense, resulting in outs, so I can only hope he makes some adjustments to get those line drives into the outfield. And now, Alex Bregman. Oh boy, he was bad during the first half of the season. While his numbers would say he was around a league average hitter, his $175 million deal would suggest that he’s a star. He has some encouraging advanced stats, such as a high squared up%, low chase rate and low whiff rate. But this is accompanied by a low hard hit % and a low barrel %. Like I said for Nico, if he isn’t going to hit homeruns, then he NEEDS to hit at a high average. In July he has only hit for a .220 average, and June he was at .200. Now, in the last few games before the break, you could see something shift. He was hitting the ball a lot harder, he was hitting more line drives. He has 4 doubles in July through 10 games, when he only had 3 doubles in the entire month of June. Hopefully he gets on a heater during the second half of the year and can become someone that the Cubs can rely on. Otherwise, I’m not sure how Craig Counsell can keep justifying batting him 2nd or 3rd in the lineup.
Lastly, there has to be improvement from the pitching staff. Some of the struggle has been due to injury, as Cade Horton is out for the foreseeable future, Justin Steele probably will not pitch as a starter this year, and Ben Brown, who has been a very welcome surprise ace this year, has been out with a neck injury for an extended period of time. Matthew Boyd and Edward Cabrera have both had stints on the IL, but also have been okay at best when they are pitching. As a team, the Cubs have a 4.33 ERA. Not awful, but not great either. This puts them 21st in baseball for team ERA. The biggest issue besides injuries for this staff has been homeruns, which does not surprise me. There are lots of fly ball pitchers, mostly Boyd and Shota Imanaga. Wrigley has been unfriendly to pitchers lately, with the wind blowing out. But if the Cubs are going to make some noise in the Central, the pitchers need to start getting the ball on the ground more. The Cubs attempted to improve on the front, trading for David Peterson, one of the more ground ball heavy pitchers in the league. While the results haven’t been great so far, he can hopefully provide a different style of pitching that this staff has lacked. Like I said, the bullpen has essentially been a Triple A staff due to injuries, so you can only expect so much from them. There have been a few good arms to come from that though, such as Jacob Webb, Ryan Rolison and Trent Thornton. If the Cubs bullpen can start getting healthier and the starters get back to even average, then I think it will make a run at first place in the Central much easier.
The first half of the season was the definition of a rollercoaster, and with the trade deadline looming, it will be interesting to see what the Cubs will choose to do. Will they get more above average bullpen rentals like they did last year, or will they go big and get a top end starter like Skubal. This seems unlikely, but hey, one can hope!
