This series represents the calm in the middle of the storm for the Cubs, who follow a week of games against the Pirates and Nationals with three night games at Wrigley against the lowly Padres, after which they’ll host the Pirates for three games, then head out on the first road trip of the season that qualifies as grueling. In a perfect world, the team would continue to bank wins, but San Diego isn’t a walkover club on the level of the Brewers, Reds, or Braves:
Worst Third-Order Winning Percentages, National League
| Team | Third-Order Win % |
| Philadelphia Phillies | .429 |
| San Diego Padres | .375 |
| Atlanta Braves | .318 |
| Cincinnati Reds | .317 |
| Milwaukee Brewers | .272 |
The Cubs have averaged nearly 38,000 fans per home game thus far this season. A weeknight series against the third-most anonymous team in the league (likely second, by now, and the most anonymous outside the division) is likely to dampen that, as is the rainy, chilly weather forecast Monday and Tuesday nights. There’s some danger not only of the quietly competent (though not competitive) Padres coming in and playing well, but of the Cubs suffering some letdown. It will be important for Joe Maddon’s charges to maintain focus and keep the pedal to the floor. With a true day off on Thursday in advance of Pittsburgh’s weekend visit, they’ll have plenty of time to rest.
Probables
San Diego’s current big-name starters (Andrew Cashner and James Shields) won’t pitch during this series. Nor will their ace, Tyson Ross, who’s been on the disabled list since early April. Instead, the Cubs will see three young starters off to promising starts—three interesting arms, as much for the stories attached to them as for their abilities.
On Monday night, Jon Lester will try to avoid loading the bases with nobody out, and he should have a fair chance to do so. The Padres are a below-average offensive team against left-handed pitchers, including striking out in 26 percent of their collective plate appearances against them. Lester’s 18th batter faced Monday night will be his 1,000th as a Cub, and if he strikes out five batters, he’ll reach 250 in a Cubs uniform, too. He’s been almost exactly the same guy in the early going that he was all last season, but for the fact that he’s thrown a few more sinkers and a few fewer curveballs. His velocity has been encouragingly constant. He’s a metronome, known for his intensity and the ferocious competitive demeanor he carries, but special, in reality, for a very different reason: he keeps himself under control, keeps his heart rate low.
To counter Lester, the Padres will offer Cesar Vargas, by far the most interesting pitcher who will take the ball for either team during the series. Vargas, 24, is a sturdy, strong right-handed hurler, though not a hard thrower. Born and raised in Mexico, Vargas signed with the Yankees as a 17-year-old, but never got past Double-A with them, and attained minor-league free agency after last season. When he did, he was two full seasons (plus a fall stint in the Mexican League) removed from his last turn as a starter. The Padres saw something they really, really liked, though, pouncing on him with an offer of a guaranteed spot on their 40-man roster in November. He made two starts at Double-A San Antonio in April, and has now made three starts for the Padres’ parent club. This career minor-league reliever has a 1.10 ERA as an MLB starter so far, and if you rank all 309 of the pitchers who have pitched at least 10 innings this season by hard-hit rate on balls in play, you’ll find that Vargas’s figure is the eighth-lowest.
That all means very little, in all likelihood. Vargas has only fanned 12 (and has walked nine) of the 67 batters he’s faced. He throws a cutter as his primary fastball, and the pitch sits around 90 miles per hour. He complements that with a slider (slower and bigger than the cutter, definitely a distinct pitch, around 80 miles per hour), a curveball, and (to left-handers exclusively, so far) a changeup, but he’s principally a cutter-slider guy. When right-handed batters get ahead in the count, they can sit on the cutter. Perhaps because his track record is so obscure and unusable, the league has yet to solve him. It’s a pretty good bet that the Cubs will be the first team to crack the code. He’s also slow to the plate with runners on base, so if the wind is blowing in, Joe Maddon can fire up his running game.
Tuesday night will bring a tougher test. As the Cubs downshift from Lester to Kyle Hendricks, the Padres will send Colin Rea. Hendricks remains the freshest full member of any team’s rotation, throwing on at least five days’ rest about half the time and averaging about 85 pitches per start. Unfortunately, despite the Cubs’ efforts to keep him well rested and untaxed, Hendricks’s velocity is down significantly this season—from averaging 90 miles per hour on his four-seamer and 89 on his sinker at this time last year, to 88 and 87, respectively, so far this year. He’s been able to maintain his velocity separation between those fastballs and his excellent changeup, which he’s still commanding with his usual precision, and he’s getting as many ground balls as ever. Still, the velocity dip bears watching. He wore down and lost velocity over the course of last season, and if the pattern repeats this season, he could be sitting around 86 MPH soon.
Rea, on the other hand, has a fastball that can reach the mid-90s. Two of them, in fact, although his sinker tends to sit more consistently in the low 90s. Rea, 25, stands six-foot-five and is broad enough to use that length. He’ll be making his first start since flirting with a no-hitter against the Mets on Thursday night in San Diego, and while the numbers don’t suggest he’s a constant no-hit threat, his stuff is no joke. Consider an early sequence from that Mets game. Rea froze David Wright on a 3-2 cutter (his runs in the mid-80s, velocity-wise) in Wright’s second at-bat, one that looked inside all the way but nipped the inside corner, after Rea had worked Wright away throughout the battle. Then, to end the inning, he got Yoenis Cespedes to ground out lazily to shortstop, when he threw a 2-1 cutter that started on the outer part of the plate but moved off it, catching the end of Cespedes’s bat.
Nor is that all hitters have about which to worry. Rea is a true four-pitch pitcher, though he slows down his delivery out of the windup when he delivers his curveball, so it isn’t as effective as it could be, given its movement. Rea seems particularly adept at using his four-seamer, sinker, and the slower cutter to fool hitters who think they know what to expect. In the eighth inning of that Mets game, the no-hitter gone but still going strong, Rea cruelly froze Neil Walker on a sinker that started inside but ran arm-side, to the inside corner. (That particular pitch, a sort of backing through the front door, seems to be Rea’s favorite way to neutralize lefties. It makes a nice complement for the cutter that can crash through the front door to righties, as Wright found out.) Then, with Asdrubal Cabrera set up for the same treatment, Rea snapped off his best curveball of the night, one that started high enough to be another sinker, but dove to Cabrera’s ankles for a swinging strike three.
The smart thing for Cubs hitters to do might be to look for the four-seamer early in the count (Rea works up in the zone with it, which Kris Bryant and Javier Baez, especially, ought to be pleased to see) and try to bash it. Though Rea has quality stuff, there’s not tremendous risk in falling behind in the count against him, because he lacks a swing-and-miss pitch that can consistently put hitters away. As long as he’s attacking the zone, Cubs hitters should look to attack Rea. If and when they do fall behind, the best counsel is not to get frozen. Twenty-six of Rea’s 53 career strikeouts have been called, not swinging, punchouts, which is more than twice the number an average pitcher would have. He has eight three-pitch strikeouts already this season. Once they get to two strikes, the Cubs should be ready to fight some pitches off.
The series finale will pit Drew Pomeranz against John Lackey. For Lackey, it’s a chance to continue striking batters out at a rate he’s never approached before—over a quarter of all those he’s faced so far. He has just eight career games with at least 11 strikeouts, and two of them have come in his first six Cubs starts. He’s not doing very much differently: just throwing his changeup a bit more and a bit harder. The whiffs are coming fast and furious, though, a remarkable development (if perhaps an unsustainable one) for a pitcher in his late 30s.
Lackey is 12th of 101 qualified hurlers in percentage of pitches resulting in swinging strikes this season, but Pomeranz is 10th. The former Indians first-round pick might be finding a home, at last, with the Padres, his fourth organization. A tall lefty, he employs a delivery focused on using that height as an advantage. It’s a bit stiff, but it permits his blend of a low-90s fastball and a curveball to change hitters’ eye levels in a painful way. Pomeranz has actually thrown his curveball more often than any other pitch this season. It’s his primary offering against right-handed batters, to whom he throws the kitchen sink. His changeup, cutter, and sinker aren’t particularly good, but they keep righties guessing, and when he gets ahead in the count, Pomeranz uses the hook to put them away. Against lefties, he’s much more strictly fastball-curveball, and it breaks down cleanly: fastballs when he’s behind, curves when he’s ahead. Pomeranz is striking out roughly 30 percent of opposing hitters this season, and while he’s prone to walks at times, the results he’s getting from his newfound reliance upon the curve are wildly encouraging. Look for a very righty-heavy lineup against Pomeranz, who has dominated lefties with that simple approach throughout his career.
What to Watch For
Miguel Montero’s back has kept him on the DL for a fully 15 days, as of Tuesday. It wouldn’t be a surprise, given the way both the team and the player spoke at the time when he went on the shelf, if Montero was back before the end of this series. Nor would it be a surprise, though, if the team tried to steal a few extra days by keeping Montero shelved through the series and the subsequent off day, in hopes of getting their aging starting catcher as fresh a start on the rest of the season as possible.
The Padres’ biggest strengths are three right-handed hitters, Derek Norris, Wil Myers, and Matt Kemp. Despite ugly early numbers for Norris, these three are capable of breaking a game open. Norris has become an excellent, quiet pitch receiver and framer behind the plate, in addition to providing pop at the plate. Myers still has the strange swing that was his trademark even through his prospect days, having had enough success last season and early this year to feel confident in it again. It’s mostly geared toward driving pitches low and over the plate; Myers is the guy to whom mistakes might be most costly. Kemp looks to go the other way often, as was his wont even in his prime, but some of the electricity in his swing has faded.
Defensively, the Padres are a better team than they were last season, though perhaps that’s damnation with faint praise. Brett Wallace (yes, the old first-base prospect) has been the cleanup hitter and starting third baseman for the Padres for about a week. Jon Jay isn’t the athlete most teams want in center field, but he remains excellent at tracking the ball in flight, often getting to balls with sheer efficiency and a good jump. Melvin Upton, Jr. has become a fixture in the lineup, not by any means a superstar but something very like his former self, and he’s been a stellar defensive left fielder. Still, the team defense can be pressured into making mistakes, and they lack range on the infield. Contact and aggressive baserunning will be rewarded.
Another thing that will be rewarded: grinding at-bats that allow the Cubs to reach the Padres’ bullpen early. There’s a dearth of talent there, and a lack of depth, but one of the major problems the team’s relief corps has faced this season is the sheer volume of work that has been asked of them. If the Cubs chase the starters early, they will be able to feast on some mediocre, overworked arms in the later innings.
Broadcast Information
Monday and Wednesday nights both find the Cubs on Comcast SportsNet. On Tuesday, they’ll play on WPWR, my50 Chicago. All three games start at 7:05, weather permitting. (Be sure to note, in the cases of Monday and Tuesday, that’s not a given. There could well be another rainout in the offing.)
Lead photo courtesy Jake Roth—USA Today Sports.