Feels good, huh? Extra-inning games—like the one the Cubs won last night—are fun to return to, in heady delight, the morning after, and certainly a thrill in the moment of their denouements, but they can be a bit of an emotional drain as they’re experienced. At a certain point, you just want to get to bed. Which is why a game like tonight—where the result never seemed particularly in question, and the Cubs played clean, professional baseball from the first to the last—was such a delight to watch, and the perfect complement to last night’s heroics. This is a very good team playing very well. Enjoy it.
Top Play (WPA): Hey, remember that guy who finished second in the MVP voting? No? Didn’t think so. Not many do. But don’t sleep on the season Anthony Rizzo is having for Chicago just because Kris Bryant is having a better one. With about 100 plate appearances to go—assuming health—Rizzo’s slashing .295/.392/.552, with 26 home runs and a .338 TAv. That’s really good. I know you know that, and so you didn’t think about it too hard, so let me repeat: that’s really good. Among players with 500 plate appearances, it’s seventh-best overall, and not by much: fourth-best, Joey Votto, is at .342. There’s a reasonable case to be made that, in Bryant (first, .366) and Rizzo, the Cubs have two of the three best hitters in the league. They both play defense too.
Anyway, this is a long way of leading up to this: Rizzo did his thang (is that what the kids are saying?) early in this one, crushing a first-inning line drive off the video board in right (+0.177), and is also a very good player. The home run gave the Cubs a two-run lead (Matt Szczur was on base, probably looking for his scruff—has he shaved recently?) which they never relinquished.
Bottom Play (WPA): Kyle Hendricks never really gave the Pirates a chance in that one. We’ll talk about that more later. But here, let’s just note that Gregory Polanco—who, one imagines, still dreams feverish dreams about Wrigley’s seagulls—led off the fifth inning with a single to center field (-0.039), and that same single increased the Pirates’ chances of winning the game by 3.9 percent. It didn’t matter. They lost anyway.
Key Moment: Things got a little hairy in the eighth. Carl Edwards, Jr. came in to relieve Hendricks in that inning—a good sign, all things considered, as Joe Maddon hasn’t seemed particularly confident in the young man in recent weeks—and promptly retired David Freese and Francisco Cervelli in order. That’s good—they both got out!—but Edwards didn’t look particularly sharp in doing so, running the count to two balls in both cases.
All of which made what happened next—a double allowed to Jordy Mercer—rather more disconcerting than it might otherwise have been. Up next was Matt Joyce, who always seems to get in the middle of these things somehow. He worked a solid at-bat, to begin with: Strike, Ball, Ball, Foul, Ball, Foul. And then he hit a high, deep drive to center. That’s the sort of phrase that’s usually followed by Ron Coomer saying something impolite. In this case, though, it didn’t: Szczur made the catch in center, and we headed to the ninth. Edwards has seen better days before, and he’ll see better again.
Trend to Watch: Well, Hendricks now has a 2.09 ERA. That’s sort of ludicrous: people who look and throw like Hendricks aren’t meant to have ERAs under seven, much less under 2.50. And yet, here we are, and Hendricks has the best ERA in all of major league baseball. This is, more to the point, sort of his thing: at every level he’s pitched at, people have insisted—often vehemently—that this is the level at which his pedestrian stuff simply won’t cut it anymore, and he’ll get schlonged hard by some Double-A batter who knows how to hit a curveball and get sent back to coastal California from whence he came.
That never happened. It hasn’t happened in the big leagues, either, and I’m starting to get the sense that it won’t for a while. First of all, Hendricks’s stuff doesn’t suck. It’s just not very fast, and he looks like what a drive-through worker at Denny’s would look like if Denny’s had drive-through workers. Fact: his changeup is, in reality, once of the best of its kind in the game. Second thing: Hendricks gets better the more he knows about the hitter he’s facing.
He and I talked about this a little last year: he feels like he’s a better pitcher now than he was in the minors not only because he’s matured in his understanding of sequencing and conditioning, but also because he now has reams and reams more data to work through before each and every start. There’ll be a point where the information becomes too much. He hasn’t reached that point yet. And although he isn’t the best pitcher in baseball, either, it’s long past the point where you can write him off as just a guy overperforming. This is, for the most part, who he is. Good.
Coming Next: The Cubs will face the Pirates. They’ll play at Wrigley. The game will start at 7:05 central time. The game will be broadcast on in-market television by CSN Chicago, and on ESPN nationally. The radio broadcast, as usual, will be on 670 AM.
Lead photo courtesy David Banks—USA Today Sports.