As extraordinary as it might have seemed in this offseason that was so pregnant with expectation for a competitive National League Central race, the Cubs enter this three-game, mid-June set with the Cardinals at Wrigley a stunning 12.5 games ahead of the Redbirds in the Central, and with an even-more-imposing 15 game lead on the reeling Pirates, who’ve now lost five straight. This is not, one presumes, how Neal Huntington and John Mozeliak drew up their plans for the season last December. While there’s still a chance that the division’s incumbent first- and second-place finishers will rally and make this a race to remember yet, nothing about how the season has progressed so far suggests that the division is or is likely to become anything close to competitive. The 2016 Chicago Cubs aren’t just the best team in their division: they’re one of the best teams in the history of baseball, through this point in the season.
Probable Pitchers
John Lackey vs. Jaime Garcia
Last year was meant to be the aberration for John Lackey. His velocity climbed throughout the year, he wasn’t really walking people, and he started to rely far more heavily on his curveball than he had in the past, mostly at the expense of his four-seam fastball. The results showed: he ended his age-36 year with the Cardinals with a 2.77 ERA over 218 mostly-brilliant innings. Turns out it wasn’t an aberration. Through 88 innings pitched this year, Lackey has allowed just 21 walks, striking out 91 in the process and posting a 2.66 ERA—stunningly, one of the lower marks on staff. He’s kept up the increased usage of his curveball, and has continued to find ways to vary his arm slot and delivery to keep hitters off-balance. It’s been extraordinarily effective, and there’s no particularly compelling reason to think he won’t keep that up in this, his third start of the season against his former team. The first, on April 23rd, went exceptionally well: seven innings, no runs, one walk, and 11 strikeouts. The second, exactly a month later, was somewhat less impressive by results—seven innings, three runs—but not especially different in terms of the inputs: again, Lackey walked just one and struck out nine. Anything in that range today will work just fine.
Jaime Garcia, for his part, is having sort of a weird season: he isn’t doing anything all that differently than he did last year, in terms of pitch mix or velocity, but he’s having far more pedestrian results: a 3.93 ERA year-to-date against a 2.43 mark last year. A large part of that is probably his increased walk rate: he’s given 25 free passes already, compared to 30 in the entirety of last season, but some measure of the change is probably just the normalization of Garcia’s luck, as his DRA gap between the two years (4.71, 2016; 4.40, 2015) is far smaller than that of his ERA. He’s faced the Cubs once this year, and it wasn’t a particularly shining moment: on April 19th, he went just five innings, walked four, and allowed two runs in a game St. Louis would go on to lose 2-1. His last six starts, meanwhile, have seen him give up 3, 5, 2, 2, 5, and 4 runs respectively. If you’re looking for a moment in this series for the North Side offense to erupt, Game One might be it.
Jason Hammel vs. Adam Wainwright
Will he or won’t he? That’s the question with the oft-injured, oft-fading Jason Hammel, who’s so far this year managed to stay on the sunny side of the thin line that separates bad pitchers from good. Part of that, one assumes, can be chalked up to the much-ballyhooed training program that Hammel went through this offseason, working to develop his lower-half strength; part, too, is probably the result of some small tweaks to his delivery. The rest is probably good fortune. Whatever it is, it’s working: Hammel has a 2.26 ERA on the year, and—conditional on health—shows no particular signs of slowing down. It’s boring to write this again and again of the Cubs’ rotation, but these guys are really, really, really good this year. Anyway. Hammel hasn’t had a particularly dominant start since May 24th, against St. Louis, but his last outing—against the Nationals in DC—was a good step in the right direction: he threw seven innings, walked none, struck out four, and allowed just one earned run. That, again, will be perfectly suitable for the Cubs’ purposes.
Wainwright is an interesting case because he—more, even, than Yadier Molina—represents to me the whole of the Cardinals’ recent attitude and dreams of who they believe themselves to be. In that sense, his 2016-to-date continues to be highly representative. Which is to say: a little disappointing. Wainwright’s 4.78 ERA on the year, high as it is, still masks the degree to which the former ace has been gutting his way through his starts, scattering hits and stranding runners. Consider: in his first 11 starts of the season, Wainwright allowed fewer than 6 hits just once—and that against the Phillies—and has only recently put forth his first three games in which he cleared the 6 2/3 innings-mark. I’m not by any means trying to suggest he’s a bad pitcher now—nobody with his talent and experience could be considered that—but merely that he is, manifestly, in the decline phase of his career. He’s a competitor, though, in the old-school sense, and you’ve got to imagine he’ll bring his A-game (whatever that is, these days) to this start against the Cubs.
Jake Arrieta vs. Michael Wacha
Jake Arrieta is good. That is your preview for this start. Here’s how good he is: Jake Arrieta has been bad—as bad as we’ve seen him, since early 2014—so far in 2016. And yet, look up at the leaderboards, and there he is atop nearly every one of them. His 1.74 ERA is lower than it was in his Cy Young-winning season last year, and way lower than it was in the first half last year, when he posted a 2.66 ERA through the All-Star break. This, again, despite a lowered strikeout-to-walk ratio, and outings that have bordered on the human. All of which speaks to a simple fact: Jake Arrieta has worked out how to make his pedestrian better than almost anyone else’s inhuman. Carve some time out of your day on Wednesday to watch him pitch. You’ll want to tell your kids that you saw him when he was at his peak.
Michael Wacha was supposed to be the ace who would carry the kiddie Cardinals on past the era of Wainwright and Molina. This season suggests he won’t quite be that—a 4.56 ERA over 81 innings isn’t terrible, but isn’t pretty—but at age 24, he still has more than enough time to turn things around and become the kind of brilliant pitcher St. Louis is so good at producing. It’s hard to pin down exactly why Wacha has struggled so far in 2016, though it is perhaps worth noting that he’s lost a tick on just about every one of his pitches, save the curveball. Might be something to that, or might not be, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he turned out to be hurt or at least severely fatigued. Watch for Wacha’s changeup usage in this start—over the last few weeks, he’s increasingly gone to that pitch over and above his fastball, and in situations where you might expect a fastball to be thrown. If he can command it, that might prove to be an effective strategy against this Cubs’ lineup. If he can’t, watch out.
What to Watch For
What to watch for? You should watch for a very good and patient team—the 2016 Chicago Cubs—to turn the screws a little tighter on the aging champions, the St. Louis Cardinals. There’s no reason to think this year’s Cardinals can’t still be a good team—they certainly have the talent—but not much has gone right for them so far, and the Cubs have run out to such an extreme division lead, so early in the season, that it’s going to be tough for the Redbirds to turn things around. If they do, they probably have to sweep this series, or at the very least take two out of three. The Cubs, for their part, can pad their commanding lead with a mere series win, and won’t even be too harmed by dropping the series two games to one.
Another thing to watch for: with Dexter Fowler nursing a hamstring injury—those can linger—and New Kids on the Block Albert Almora, Jr. and Willson Contreras now hanging around the home clubhouse at Wrigley, this might be a series in which you see some rather novel lineups and defensive alignments from Joe Maddon. That’s not a bad thing—the reinforcements, especially in the person of Contreras, were definitely needed—but it will mean you’ll probably see some playing time situations you haven’t seen so far this season. For example, Maddon has already announced that Contreras will start today, fresh off his first-pitch bomb. Just another use for the Cubs’ extraordinary depth and flexibility.
Lastly: watch how the teams carry themselves on the field. This might finally be the series which marks the transition of power in this division.
Broadcast Info, Game Times, Etc.
Games One and Two are both week-day night games—7:05 pm ct starts, the pair of them—while the series finale on Wednesday will kick off at the more traditional time of 1:20 pm ct. Game One will be broadcast in-market on Comcast SportsNet, while Games Two and Three will be found on ABC 7. Game Two, meanwhile, will also be broadcast nationally on MLB Network, though that broadcast will only be available to out-of-market viewers. Such is the delight of big-league ball’s labyrinthine blackout restrictions. All three games will be broadcast over the radio by AM 670 The Score.
Lead photo courtesy Jeff Curry—USA Today Sports.