The Chicago Cubs have been getting slashed, bashed, and brutalized over the last several days as their team-wide slump extends past mid-August.
The frustration seemed to have come to a head after the team’s 7-0 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers on Monday, pushing them back to 9 games behind the first place Brewers in the NL Central Division.
Symbolic of the Cubs’ fall is the full-on collapse of right fielder Kyle Tucker and the organization’s inability and perceived unwillingness to address the issue and help him get back on track.
Kyle Tucker’s slump and what it says about the Chicago Cubs leadership
With his 0-4 in Monday’s game, Tucker is now hitting .189 since July 1, with only 1 home run and 10 RBIs in that stretch of time. In August, he’s been even worse, with a .148 average and just 1 RBI.
Amid a second game full of booing at Wrigley Field, someone in the Cubs organization finally addressed the Tucker situation beyond a “He’s a good hitter, he’ll be fine” response.
“We will take a step back and try to figure this out with him,” manager Craig Counsell told media after the game. “We will give him some days off to reset him hopefully.”
Some have theorized that the slump was caused by an injury that led to a mechanical hiccup. Whatever the case, though, the consensus opinion among fans and media has been that Tucker should’ve been moved to the IL for a physical and mental reset a long time ago. The feeling is that the analytics-driven Cubs waited too long to act. They are now well beyond the reach of first place and just suffered a thrashing at the hands of the Brewers in the first game of what was supposed to be a crucial 5-game series.
No fire in Counsell and no fire in this team
The critics have not been shy to take their shots at Counsell and the entire Chicago baseball philosophy.
“My takeaway from this has nothing to do with Kyle Tucker and everything to do with how the Cubs organization is just reacting again and late to the party again,” lamented Sam Olbur of the Locked on Cubs podcast. “They continue, literally as early as this morning, from their president of baseball operations to say ‘Yeah, he’s a good hitter, he’ll come out of it…The numbers say this, the projections say this.” Do the projections account for when someone is broken? Do the projections account for when somebody has a serious mechanical issue that has then affected them mentally?
“These are numbers. We’re humans. And sometimes you need to put out the human element and say… ‘Maybe we should sit down, talk to him, talk to his representation about a two-week [break]…Sometimes you need a breather and I can’t believe it took, today, another three ground outs to the right side and a pop-up to short left field to go, ‘Oh, it’s time to reset him.” It was obvious weeks ago!
“The leadership, the roboticness, if that’s a word, of this organization…Every year, they all slump at the same time…I’ve been really disappointed in the leadership…They’ve taken the personality of their leader and Kyle Tucker needs help, man. He needs somebody to help him out of this.”
David Kaplan affixed his target on Counsell in his recent rant on The Rekap podcast.
“That team is lifeless,” Kaplan pointed out. “You see no enthusiasm and they feed off the personality of their manager. I’m not telling you Craig Counsell is an incompetent baseball guy, because he’s not, he’s a smart baseball man. But there’s absolutely no fire with that guy and there’s no fire with that team.”
“They are not managing humans over there anymore”
Marc ‘Silvy’ Silverman of the Waddle & Silvy show on ESPN 1000 was even more aggressive in his targeting of the Cubs’ cold, analytical ways.
“Why did we know before them? Why did we say he needs a couple of mental [health] days off? Why is Craig Counsell last on this? Why does Craig Counsell need this 0-for-4 to finally say this? Where’s he been? We’ve all known this,” Silvy raged.
“They are too analytically driven on the North Side of Chicago…They don’t coach human stuff. They don’t scout, ever, with their eyes. They never make a decision based on their eye…They go with their matchups, they say, ‘Kyle Tucker can’t be this bad for this long. He’s gotta rise back to the top…His expected this, his expected that.’ They are not managing humans over there anymore…You gave a manager 32 million [Actually, 40 million] to be asleep at the wheel!”
Unless there’s some sort of amazing and sudden turnaround, don’t expect the heat to be dialed down anytime soon. Frustration has boiled over.
Under normal circumstances, one would say that heads will roll for this extended awfulness. But with Counsell owed the rest of his $40 million contract over the coming three seasons and president Jed Hoyer recently signed to a multi-year extension, it looks like nothing will be changing up on the North Side.
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