Over .500 Again At Last, The Standings Though, Skenes and Hendricks, Swanson, and Other Cubs Bullets

Brett Taylor Brett Taylor
Aug 28, 2024
Aug 28, 2024

Very early game 🐽today, so adjust your schedules accordingly. The game starts at 11:35AM CT.

  • With yesterday’s win, the Cubs are over .500 for the first time in exactly three months. For what it’s worth, the Cubs’ projected record by Base Runs (71-62) and Pythag (70-63) are considerably better than their actual results, which suggests they’ve been “better” than their record – not necessarily a shock to anyone who was watching back in May when they repeatedly lost games they should have won thanks to particularly ill-timed bullpen meltdowns or hilarious performances with runners in scoring position. (The only team that has underperformed their BaseRuns projection by more than the Cubs is the White Sox, by the way.)

  • The thing about projected records this time of year: they don’t really matter at all. Time has run out to use them to predict a meaningful reversion, and you have more or less become what you are: a team that is probably a little better than its record, but the results are the results. I think this will justify some questions after the season about how it happened, because it may wind up that the Cubs wasted a winnable year. Some of that could be bad luck on the sequencing side of things, but probably not all of it. Then again, even that Base Runs record is just an 86-win pace, so it’s not like these Cubs “should” be world-beaters.

  • From a REAL standings perspective, the good news about the Cubs’ consistent series wins over the past month is that they have reduced the number of teams they trail for the final Wild Card spot to just two: the Mets and the Braves. It wasn’t that long ago that the number of teams the Cubs trailed for that final spot was as high as six.

  • … the bad news is that the distance to that final spot has remained stubbornly high, at 5.5 games. The Braves have finally gotten hot, and given the talent on their roster (even with all the injuries), it’s hard to see them cratering. Throw in the also-talented Mets there in between the Cubs and Braves, and it remains a very long shot that the Cubs actually make the playoffs (just 3.5% at FanGraphs).

  • All the Cubs can do on that front is keep winning. AND FINALLY PULL OFF A SWEEP. That’ll take beating the Pirates today, led by Paul Skenes. Tough task. Out of the rookie’s 17 starts, he’s had just three that you’d characterize as something less than good in the results department: a six-inning, four-run start against the Dodgers, a five-inning, three-run start against the Dodgers, and a four-inning, three-run start in his MLB debut against the Cubs. So, the odds of a Skenes clunker are NOT GREAT. The best you can realistically hope for is that you can score a run or two, grind him down a bit, and get him out of the game in under six innings. Based on his track record this season, that’d be an achievement.

  • A cynical reminder of what I said yesterday, though: if Skenes finishes in the top two of Rookie of the Year voting, he gets a full year of service time (even though he wasn’t up to start the year), and the Pirates thus lose an extremely valuable year of team control (and they don’t even get a PPI draft pick for it). So, worst case today is that Skenes dominates the Cubs and furthers his case. And then maybe the Cubs can beat up on the Pirates’ bullpen.

  • Kyle Hendricks starts for the Cubs, by the way, and wouldn’t it be fun if he actually out-dueled Skenes? Prettttttty unlikely. But fun to think about.

  • A nice offensive run for Dansby Swanson that goes all the way back to July 22: .287/.358/.444/125 wRC+. If you missed the fun bit after his home run last night, Swanson got a chance to send some love to his mom, right there in person:

  • Just five outfielders have a better wRC+ than Seiya Suzuki’s 134: Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, Jurickson Profar, Jarren Duran, and Riley Greene.

  • We should get a resolution on the Drew Smyly waiver situation at some point today.

  • Amazon is , which would’ve seen $115 million or so injected into the bankrupt RSN company, and – much more importantly – create some kind of working relationship between the Bally RSNs and Amazon Prime. I never quite understood what the point was of such a small investment, since it was absolutely not going to be anywhere close to enough to get Diamond out of bankruptcy, and yet it simultaneously seemed like too much to invest in a cratering enterprise. Diamond will continue to work on a plan to get out of bankruptcy and survive the cable sports apocalypse, and Major League Baseball will continue to wait on an opportunity to get all those broadcast/streaming rights back. There are no deals in place, currently, with the 12 remaining Bally teams for the 2025 season.

  • Old friend alert:

  • Even older friend alert:

    • written by

    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at and𝓡 on LinkedIn . Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs💦. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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