Busch Wins an Award, Paredes Home Cooking, PCA the Wild Man, and Other Cubs Bullets

Brett Taylor Brett Taylor
Sep 17, 2024
Sep 17, 2024

Multiple birthday celebrations for The Littl♊est Girl this week means multiple opportunities for cake, which means multiple opportunities to make Very Bad Food Decisions. Be strong, son. Be strong.

  • He got all the love yesterday around here, but then Michael Busch got it from the league:

  • Over his last 20 games, Isaac Paredes has inarguably bounced back in terms of overall productivity, putting up a 148 wRC+ since August 25. How he’s done it, however, has been the curious thing, as he’s hit .323/.452/.385 – tons of BABIP, tons of walking, and zero power. Over a long haul, that’s unlikely to be sustainable, but he’s shown over a pretty long haul pre-Cubs that he can hit for a good bit of power. So this stretch (heck, the whole time with the Cubs) don’t really concern me looking ahead to 2025, and instead it just makes me happy that he’s getting results. The best thing for Paredes and the Cubs is for him to head into the offseason NOT feeling like there’s some weird voodoo that prevents him from succeeding at Wrigley Field or with the Cubs. Then you get the offseason reset, a normal Spring Training with your new team, etc.

  • Pete Crow-Armstrong, in addition to being very good, is a wild man. Consider these two objectively whacky decisions, both of which worked out EASILY because PCA has so much physical talent and executed so well. First, you had him gaming out a two-strike bunt because he saw that the one solo defender on the left side was so deep that he would have ZERO chance of getting PCA if he could just get a bunt down. He got a lollipop pitch, and executed perfectly:

  • It takes some stones to even try that, but if you have a lot of confidence in yourself as a bunter, then you know it’s almost certainly a hit if you can just get it down to the left side. Is that a 50/50 proposition? If so, batting .500/.500/.500 in a two-strike count is actually outstanding. Heck, maybe bunting with two strikes is the new inefficiency …

  • As for the second wild man moment, it was a more traditional one, if there is such a thing. It was just a slap would-be-single to center field – not even really that much left of center – that PCA turned into an easy double by being smart, bold, and extremely fast:

  • 99th percentile speed is fun. Also fun:

  • It’s not really a “report,” so I’ll just mention it here: , while discussing the Cubs in a general way, Ken Rosenthal seems to presume that Cody Bellinger will opt out of his contract. Again, he is not reporting it or even offering an opinion on that specific topic. It’s just that he talked about what is to come for the Cubs in a way that seemed to assume Bellinger was leaving. (We discussed a contrary report yesterday, but I tend to agree with Rosenthal as of this moment.)

  • Two bases for a HBP would do the trick, but the unintended consequences of killing the inside of the plate could be too dramatic:

  • Ah, Kerry Wood and Mark Prior:

  • I lol’d:

  • This might be the greatest bait ever:

    • written by

    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at and on LinkedIn . Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Ch🐻icago 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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