They reached 100 losses.

It might technically be an arbitrary benchmark because 95, 90, or even 85 losses will keep a team out of the playoffs. But hitting triple digits in the L column adds salt in the wound of embarrassment the Sox have dealt with all season.

That’s one of the adjectives manager Pedro Grifol used to sum up what this year has been like for him as a first-year manager.

“Frustrating. Educational. Somewhat embarrassed. But hungry and committed to get it right,” he said.

The Sox have now lost 100 games in a season just five times in franchise history and only three times since Major League Baseball expanded the schedule in 1961. The most recent 100-loss season was in 2018 at the start of their rebuild. Before that, you would have to go back to 1970, 1948, and 1932. This year’s team already had the sixth worst win-loss percentage (.377) in Sox franchise history; they moved past the 2018 team earlier this week. But even with another loss Sunday, they wouldn’t end up faring worse than the 1931 team that went 56-97 for a .366 winning percentage.

So yes, in a way the number of losses is relative. The Sox locked up a losing season a month ago. But if for nothing else than pride, avoiding 100 losses and not being among the worst teams in franchise history might feel like an accomplishment.

“I’ve never been too caught up in that number,” Grifol said. “I know people think it’s an ugly number, but 99 is not? I’ve never been too caught up in that. I want our guys to go out there and compete. Respect the game and finish the season strong. And wherever we end up, we end up.”

Saturday’s starter Mike Clevinger said the 100-loss marker was on his mind as he took the mound against San Diego. He didn’t want the team to get there at all and certainly didn’t want it happening on his watch.

But after giving up six runs in less than two innings, Clevinger’s night was done along with most any hope the Sox would avoid losing. Clevinger said his stuff was off Saturday and said he had a lot on his mind as he made the start. What that was, he didn’t specify, but Clevinger admitted that not wanting the 100th loss to come on his night was one of the things distracting him.

“It’s definitely an ugly number and not something you want to see,” Clevinger said. “I know there are a lot of guys in this room who don’t want to see a complete rebuild and 100 losses could result in something like that. A lot of these guys want to win now.”

Traditionally, yes, a team that loses 100 times is either about to start a rebuild or in the early stages of one. Stopping the bleeding at 99 might look better, but it would still signify a team badly in need of changes.

The significance of 100 losses has more to do with what it means for the White Sox in the near future. The new front office has said they intend to be competitive in 2024, not rebuilding. But moving forward from a season as bad as this year is a tall order.

Work toward next year started at the trade deadline when the previous front office aggressively shipped out a large chunk of the pitching staff. And when the offseason officially begins, new general manager Chris Getz and the rest of his new front office will have decisions to make about the players still in the clubhouse. The team has options on Liam Hendriks and Tim Anderson and a mutual option with Clevinger. The first two both seem likely to be retained, and Clevinger has said he hopes to stay in Chicago. Even with Saturday’s rough outing, Clevinger has had a solid season, so that might be worth considering, especially since the makeup of next season’s rotation is in question. He would cost the Sox $12 million if they do pick up his option, but the team will finish 2023 with a payroll of about $177 million. With next year’s luxury tax threshold kicking in at $237 million, there will be room to keep Clevinger, Hendriks, and Anderson and then go out and add on in free agency.

Improving will take more than a few new players, of course. Especially if they want to do it by next season. After 100 losses in 2018, they were able to post a winning record in the shortened 2020 season and won 93 games by 2021. But after they lost 106 games in 1970, it took until 1983 to reach the playoffs again. It took 11 years after the 1948 season, and when the Sox had their worst year in franchise history in 1932, they weren’t able to boast a winning record until five years later.

Times have changed, but dramatically improving and turning around a bad baseball team is still a process. One that rarely happens quickly. The Sox have never been known to be especially active in free agency during the offseason, so that puts more of the onus on the current roster and coaching staff to take significant steps forward.

“We all gotta work. You’ve got to work to be better. We’ve got to work to put together a better season than this year and be competitive,” Gavin Sheets said. “You’ve got to look in the mirror and be hard on yourself and be critical.”

On Sunday, as just over 37,000 of them watched the Cubs sweep the Rockies to close out the last of their 81 regular season games at home, the excitement over their postseason chances was palpable. At the same time, the question of whether there would be another game at Wrigley in 2023 hung over Sunday’s 4-3 win.

As things stand now, the Cubs will have to play the wild card series on the road, likely in Milwaukee, and possibly in Philadelphia. They have the third wild card spot and are one game ahead of the Marlins. The Cubs would have to win the three-game wild card to get to host any division series games in Chicago. There are six regular season games left to decide – assuming they stay ahead of Miami – which wild card spot they’ll have. Moving ahead of the Diamondbacks would mean they play the Phillies. Staying as is would mean the Brewers.

“We’ve got six games in the regular season left, and we’re going to take it game by game,” Patrick Wisdom said. “But momentum is crucial. I don’t think we ever lost sight of that confidence, especially during the little uneasy patch. But I think getting back on the horse, if you will, and having a sweep here at home just builds that momentum.”

The Cubs swept Colorado after dropping four straight series; a four-game set to Arizona at Wrigley, and then two on the road to the Rockies and Diamondbacks and one at home to the Pirates.

Wisdom gave the Wrigley crowd reason to cheer Sunday. Trailing 3-1 in the sixth inning, Seiya Suzuki led off with a double and then scored on Yan Gomes’ sacrifice fly to get the Cubs within a run. And then Wisdom hit a 432-foot blast to left center to put the Cubs ahead.

He and the rest of the team and coaches stuck around on the field to sing “Go Cubs Go” with the fans after the final out. That’s been a custom for the team for some time, but the chorus of fans and players together sounds different when the Cubs are in a playoff race.

Wrigley attendance totaled 2,775,149 this year, the highest number since before the pandemic. Fans were allowed back in the stands in 2021 in increments, and there were no restrictions on attendance last season, but this year’s total outpaced 2022 by about 100,000 fans.

“It’s awesome. It gives me goosebumps when we’re saying thanks to the fans out there after the game,” Wisdom said. “Just to see the pure joy on their faces and the smiles. I mean, it’s electric, and you can’t beat it, really.”

The Cubs have won 82 games so far this season, and that’s been driven by the right mixture of veteran presence and players stepping up to fill roles as needed. Jordan Wicks was called up to fill out the rotation on August 26, and he delivered his third quality start Sunday. Wicks tossed six innings and held Colorado to three runs before handing the ball off to the bullpen. The relievers have been without Adbert Alzolay, who has emerged as the stabilizing force at the back end, since he went on the 15-day injured list on September 10 with forearm tightness. Since then, a rotating group has had to pick up the high-leverage innings at the end of games.

On Saturday, Jose Cuas earned the save in the ninth after Julian Merryweather took the eighth inning, and on Sunday, the two of them flipped places. Cuas pitched a scoreless eighth inning and then Merryweather produced the last three outs in the ninth.

“We’ve seen everyone in every role at this point in the year,” Merryweather said. “And that kind of gives everyone confidence that we can do any role we get put into. I think that’s been our calling card as a bullpen, that we’re ready at any time for anything.”

Wisdom, in some sense too, is playing in a different role than he had been. After serving as a de facto starter for many of the final games of 2021 and most of the 2022 season, Wisdom has been relegated to part time duties. The Cubs’ roster construction has changed a lot since last season and even more since this year began, so Wisdom’s name shows up in the lineup less often.

But, like Merryweather and the rest of the bullpen arms, Wisdom has leaned into his new role.

“I had to go all in, I couldn’t be questioning it,” he said. “Just accept it and keep going and trust in my abilities, knowing that when my name is called, I’m ready.”

No two playoff team formulas look quite the same, but assuming the Cubs are at least able to hang on to the third wild card spot, their 2023 formula was featured in a microcosm over the last regular season weekend at Wrigley Field. The usual veterans delivered when needed, and role players stepped in and made their impact. The bullpen who – despite not having stable roles for much of the season – has stayed in the top half of the league in ERA, gave three scoreless innings Sunday to protect the lead Wisdom gave the team.

There might be another chance for Cubs fans to sing over a victory at Wrigley this fall. Whatever happens, Sunday’s win had a little more meaning because it might be the last time Steve Goodman’s song is heard in Lakeview this year.

“That’s what it’s all about, right? It’s nice to win, it’s nice to hear ‘Go Cubs Go’ in the background when you’re thanking them and they’re singing and cheering,” David Ross said. “Almost 40,000 people in the stands and you get to try to give back some of the love. I know our play is supposed to do that, but to take the last game of the regular season at home, it’s just nice to make sure they know we appreciate their support.”

And this late in the season, different players have to step up to get those much-needed wins. In Saturday’s 6-3 victory over the Rockies, Javier Assad and Miles Mastrobuoni were the story.

Marcus Stroman returning to the rotation was the big news going into the game. He went on the injured list in early August because of a balky hip, and then his stay was extended thanks to a rib injury. Stroman came off of the IL on September 15, but he had only appeared as a reliever until Saturday.

David Ross said the decision to start Stroman Saturday was made earlier in the week, after Stroman got up in the bullpen during Wednesday night’s loss but didn’t get into the game. Stroman had petitioned to get back in the rotation, and timing-wise, Saturday lined up well.

“We used [Wednesday] as his bullpen, gave him a day off, figured he could start and we’d use him for as many leverage innings as we could get out of him,” Ross said before Saturday’s game.

The Cubs got three innings from Stroman, who started off with a perfect first frame but gave up three runs in the second and put two runners on base in the third. With Stroman at 64 pitches going into the fourth, Ross went to Assad.

Like he has all season, Assad stepped up when called upon, whatever his role might be. He tossed four scoreless innings, holding the Rockies in place while the offense chipped away at the three-run deficit and eventually took the lead in the seventh.

“He’s so valuable to this team and the versatility he gives you,” Ross said. “Being able to bring Javi behind him, he’s done a really good job of that pretty consistently this year. Having him in the bullpen is just such a weapon.”

Assad struck out six and gave up just two hits. His biggest strikeout came in the seventh, when he faced Kris Bryant with two outs, two runners on base and the game tied 3-3. Assad got Bryant looking at a 2-2 sinker to end the inning.

“That was huge,” Assad said of the Bryant strikeout. “That was a great pitch, just to be able to help the team and get out of a jam and keep the score down. That was great, a great pitch.”

Offensively, the Cubs got production from all parts of the lineup, but only Nico Hoerner and Mastrobuoni had more than one hit. Mastrobuoni, who went 2-for-3 with a walk and two runs scored, factored into important scoring opportunities in the fifth and eighth innings.

In the fifth, he singled, advanced on a wild pitch, and ended up scoring on Hoerner’s sacrifice fly to bring the Cubs within a run. And in the eighth, Mastrobuoni helped add an insurance run by drawing a walk, stealing second, and then scoring on a Hoerner single.

Mastrobuoni has been optioned four different times this season, and during his stretches in the majors, playing time has often been hard to come by. In late June, his batting average dipped as low as .133, and he was relegated to occasional duties. But since grabbing regular playing time over the last week, Mastrobuoni is hitting .471 with eight hits, six runs scored, and two stolen bases.

“I’m so proud of Miles and the adversity he went through early on. Being a role player, getting some opportunity, not getting off to the start he wanted,” Ross said. “Came back, played great, really well for us. Good defense, positive energy, worked his tail off and then got sent down when Nick came back. And then this last time coming up and not getting any opportunity, but he worked and kept a positive attitude.

“He’s a good baseball player. Hard-nosed, gritty guy that you love having on your team. He’s been really patient and worked his tail off and deserves all that’s coming to him.”

Mastrobuoni will likely have to keep factoring into more Cubs wins with seven games left and the team still in possession of the third wild card spot. Jeimer Candelario is eligible to return from the IL – he’s been shelved since September 12 with low back strain – but as of Saturday he was still doing general baseball activities without a clear timetable for return. Nick Madrigal has been down since the 17th with a hamstring sprain, so Mastrobuoni may have to keep holding things down at third base.

His play of late would likely have earned him that role anyway, especially with the Cubs needing every win over these last seven games. He’s come a long way from where things stood for him in the first half of the season.

“Sometimes struggling is the best teacher. You’ve got to learn throughout those times,” Mastrobuoni said. “It’s easy to kind of fall into a hole, and sometimes you want to, to be honest with you, but bouncing ideas off guys, talking with people. Just running through things, and every day coming in and trying to get better. During those times, not getting too much playing time, but still trying to get better.

“Coming down the stretch, you can’t have any hiccups. Just trying to do what I can to help this team win.”

The same goes for Assad, who stepped up for Stroman in the rotation in August and early September and then picked him up in Saturday’s win. Ross said the expectation for the last week of the season is that Stroman will make his next start and Assad will stay in the bullpen.

He sees Assad as a valuable weapon there, and Ross thinks there’s a chance Assad pitches a little better when he comes in on the attack out of the ‘pen, knowing that his outing will be a little shorter than a start. At this point, there are no plans to reserve Assad as a piggyback option for Stroman’s next start.

“We’re going to go for wins when we’ve got ‘em and figure it out each and every day,” Ross said.

After losing the first three games to Arizona as the offense struggled against top-tier pitching in Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly, starter Kyle Hendricks and the combined effort of Jose Cuas, Mark Leiter, Jr., Hayden Wesneski, and Julian Merryweather out of the bullpen kept Arizona to two runs on Sunday.

Hendricks succeeded on his changeup that has kept hitters off balance for years, striking out four in the first two innings. He pitched into the sixth, scattering seven hits across 5 ⅔ innings and allowing both of Arizona’s runs. The bullpen combined for 3 ⅓ innings and never allowed a runner to reach scoring position until Pavin Smith got to second in the ninth inning on defensive indifference. 

“That’s what we can bring every single day,” David Ross said of his team’s performance on the mound and on defense. “These guys have done a really nice job of pitching for a while now. Our starters continue to go out and give us a really nice outing and a chance to win.”

The Cubs bullpen ERA (3.93) ranks 14th in baseball, but that’s a significant difference from where they were in May and early June, when the team was well below .500. Some roles are more clearly defined at this point in the season, and when needed, Ross can call on different guys to fill in and be flexible. Michael Fulmer has been out with a right forearm strain since August 26, so guys like Cuas and Leiter, Jr. have had to get outs in spots he would normally take. And on Sunday, Merryweather took the ninth inning and earned his first save of the season.

“Those guys have given me more than I ever could have asked for, to be honest,” Ross said of his bullpen. “They’ve held down the back end of our games and done a really nice job in that.

“There’s so many big, important pieces to our team, but those guys continue to post and give us all they got.”

Behind them, the Cubs defense helped in keeping the Diamondbacks’ nine hits from turning into big innings. As a group, they ranked sixth in the league in defensive runs saved (40) headed into Sunday. Notably, left fielder Ian Happ converted a fifth-inning double play that turned the tide on what could have been a game-shifting inning for Arizona. 

Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. lead the inning off with a double and then scored thanks to back-to-back singles by Emmanuel Rivera and Seby Zavala. With Rivera on second, Geraldo Perdomo hit a fly ball to left field, where Ian Happ made the catch for one out and then a very quick throw to second base to catch Rivera off the bag for a double play.

“They’re getting a little momentum there, getting a couple hits in a row, guys on base,” Hendricks said. “For him to come in and make the play and double the guy off second, it really just shut down the inning. That was huge.”

“You’re just trying to catch the ball, first thing,” Happ said. “And when you see he’s a little bit off there, getting rid of it quick. I played infield once upon a time, so that’s when it shows up.”

A quick glove to hand transfer is key to making that play. With the distance Happ had to make the throw to second, an extra moment getting the ball into his throwing hand makes the difference the other way. That transfer is a move familiar to middle infielders – Happ played a lot of second base early in his career and as recently as 2021 – and gathering the ball in the outfield and getting the ball released quickly helped him get Rivera out at second. 

Obviously, hitting three home runs is going to help win ballgames, too. The Cubs scored in the first on a Seiya Suzuki RBI double and then opened things up with three solo home runs in the third inning. Dansby Swanson drove in an insurance run in the fifth.

Dropping three games out of four to the Diamondbacks, who are right behind the Cubs in the wild card race, might eventually prove costly. But Ross has touted his ballclub’s unwavering consistency all season, and he credits that for helping them weather tough patches like a challenging four game series.

“When two teams line up with similar records, it’s going to be tough, and one little detail here or there is going to push it the other way,” he said. 

On the whole, the Cubs are entering into one of the final stretches of the season. After they go to Colorado and Arizona this week, they have one homestand left before finishing the season in Atlanta and Milwaukee at the end of the month. 

There are a lot of important games left; not only three more against the Diamondbacks, but the Cubs finish the year on the road against a team that has already clinched a playoff spot (the Braves) and one they’ve been chasing in their division all season (the Brewers). 

Their consistently good pitching and defense have helped them weather stretches when the lineup has struggled. Behind all of that, there’s a clubhouse with a significant veteran presence. And not just guys with a lot of years in the big leagues, but a group that has logged a lot of playoff games. Guys who have been through it, and who can help lead the group as a whole through an important final stretch.

“Playing a lot of baseball, and guys being around different teams that have had success,” is how Happ describes team leadership. 

“The way you get through 162 is by being as consistent as you can,” he said. “Consistent mindset and just going and playing every day. It’s one day at a time. It’s cliché, but it’s very true.”

And after a bump in the road – in the form of three straight losses at home against the Diamondbacks – the Cubs hold firm in their belief that that same consistency will keep these three games from turning into a late-season skid that dashes playoff dreams.

“We went through some struggles and challenges early in the year, but this is a resilient bunch,” Dansby Swanson said. “We’ve proven time and time again that we will bounce back.”

On Saturday, the Cubs lost 3-2 in extra innings, despite yet another brilliant performance from Justin Steele. The ERA league leader (at 2.49) spread six hits across seven innings and only gave up a run, posting his 20th quality start in 27 outings this season. He’s making his case for National League Cy Young hard to ignore. 

But on offense, the Cubs’ bats scuffled for the third day in a row. Facing Merrill Kelly, they put together plenty of quality at-bats, drawing five walks against a starter who normally doesn’t have issues with his command, but they lacked the timely hit. 

The only run the Cubs scored before the tenth inning was manufactured almost entirely by Nico Hoerner. With one out in the third, he bunted for a single to give the Cubs their first hit of the game. After Ian Happ struck out, Cody Bellinger hit a two-out pop-up to second baseman Ketel Marte that looked fairly routine for the third out. But as a play like that dictates, the runner should keep going around the bases, just in case. Marte lost the ball – cloudless skies and a good wind blowing in from the lake will do that – and Hoerner was able to score from first.

After that, the Cubs got a handful of baserunners, but only once created a real scoring threat. They loaded the bases in the sixth inning, but again were left wanting for the timely hit. Ultimately, Daniel Palencia’s wobbly tenth inning performance was the difference. He hit Jordan Lawlar, the second batter of the inning, which put Arizona runners on first and third with one out. After a couple of bounced pitches and a single from Tommy Pham, Gabriel Moreno and Lawlar both scored to put the Diamondbacks ahead, 3-1. The Cubs would bring home free runner Mike Tauchman in the bottom of the tenth, but Swanson popped up behind the plate to end the game.

“These games have been competitive, it’s not like it’s something where we’re just laying down,
Swanson said. “We’ve put a lot of effort in, it just hasn’t happened for us.”

At another time in the season, a stretch of three losses might not raise alarm, but so late in the year and facing a team that’s right behind them in the wild card standings, the margin for error suddenly feels very slim.

“I know it may feel a little bit hard with a team that’s chasing you coming in here for four games [and] beating you for three,” David Ross said. “I get all that, but we’re a really good team. I think just staying true to believing in that. This group hasn’t wavered all year. I doubt they will.”

Ross credits his club’s diligence with how they have gone about their business for where they are now in the standings. Especially after how bad things looked a few months ago. He has said all season that the guys in the locker room have never gotten overly rattled by bad losses, tough losses, or rocky stretches in the schedule. And he’s saying now, with less than 20 games left in the regular season, that hiccups are to be expected, so he and his group are not worried.

“As a whole, I don’t feel like we were just going to roll to the end of the season without any bumps in the road,” he said. “I don’t think we’re playing bad baseball, we’re just not getting the key hit when we need it, and that comes and goes sometimes.”

The Cubs have Sunday’s game at Wrigley to salvage a win to end this homestand before they head out west to Colorado and Arizona. They currently sit a game ahead of the Diamondbacks for the second wild card spot, but only two and three games in front of the Marlins and Reds for a chance at the postseason. 

“We’ve got to stay confident, we’ve got to trust in our plan and our process,” Ross said. “We’ve got a long way to go, still have a lot of games left.

“And I think a bump in the road was probably expected. We weren’t just going to roll all the way to the end.”

That has been the story of Lee’s tenure with the White Sox so far. He came over in a swap with the Astros for Kendall Graveman on July 28 and got the call to Chicago just over a week ago. Through six games in a White Sox uniform, Lee has one hit.

But what he has done at the plate is not the whole story, and it’s not even the most important part of the story, according to his manager.

“When I look at a catcher and a catcher’s development, I don’t even think about his hitting,” Pedro Grifol said. “I really don’t. Obviously there’s an offensive side where you have to do some things offensively. But there’s so much I ask catchers to do that he has to work on and develop. Hitting has become secondary for me.”

Lee played in only 12 games with the Astros in 2022, and he still has less than 50 career plate appearances. It’s early, and right now, Grifol’s focus for his young catcher is on how he handles himself when he’s not at the plate. His overall defense, of course, but even down to details like how he’s setting up behind the plate, managing a game, and working with his pitching staff.

On that front, Lee is succeeding plenty, according to Grifol and the pitchers he works with. Despite not hitting yet, Lee has made seven starts since being called up on August 24. He’s rested only twice, both times because a day game followed a night game. Traditionally, catchers won’t start the following day after catching nine innings the night before.

In other words, Lee is being treated like the starting catcher. He’s worked with every starter on the Sox staff, and Dylan Cease and Touki Toussaint twice. 

“You can tell he’s advanced. Good game-caller,” Toussaint told CHGO. “We sit there and talk between games, before the game, in the game. Kind of get to know each other. His game speaks for itself. He’s selfless, he’s all about us and what we want to do. I like that about him.”

Oftentimes, a rookie catcher will have to lean on a more experienced pitcher to handle the game calling and pitch selection. Eventually, those roles might reverse, but Toussaint said Lee already has a good balance in that respect. He might need an occasional reminder about Toussaint’s preferences in different situations, he said, but by and large, Lee is good at reading the nuance of a game and helping his pitchers in situational approaches. 

For example, during Friday’s game against Detroit, Toussaint said Lee came to the mound to remind him during an early at-bat against Spencer Torkelson that, with first base open, Toussaint could afford to be fine with his pitches.

“He gets it,” Toussaint said.

Lee doesn’t use the word selfless to his philosophy as a catcher, but given all the facets of the game involved in that position, the way he characterizes his first priority would qualify as selflessness.

“I’m there for them, that’s my job,” he told CHGO. “You kind of have to put yourself second as a catcher, and I think that’s what I prioritize. They come first, and then I worry about myself.”

Lee has sort of informally been assigned Yasmani Grandal as a mentor. The two spend a lot of time together doing pregame work and and during games reviewing in-game situations in the dugout. Grandal’s contract with the White Sox expires at the end of this season, and the 34-year-old will be an unrestricted free agent. His performance has declined since posting a .939 OPS in 93 games in 2021, and it is not clear whether Grandal plans to continue his playing career.

In the meantime, Grandal is embracing the role of taking the 25-year-old Lee under his wing. On Thursday, the team’s off day after returning from a road trip to Baltimore, Grandal and Lee were the only players at the ballpark, there at 9:45 in the morning, getting work in. 

Before Saturday’s game against the Tigers, Lee didn’t linger in the locker room, where many of his teammates were watching college football. He chatted for a few minutes, grabbed his catching gear and headed out. After taking batting practice, Lee had a few minutes to grab water in the dugout until Grandal was there to summon him back into the clubhouse for a pregame meeting.

The work is there, and he’s earning the respect of his manager and his pitching staff. Lee’s demeanor has earned him a healthy leash to remain in the lineup despite his .053/.182/.053 slash line. He’s produced some hard contact, and Grifol is confident the hits will start to follow and not worried about when. Lee was a first-round draft pick for the Astros in 2019, and he’s listed as the number 14 prospect in the White Sox system. Buried so deep in the standings, it doesn’t hurt to give him time to figure things out at the plate. Especially since Lee is making such a strong impression with the other aspects of his game.

“A young guy, sometimes [bad at-bats] can trickle into behind the plate, but he separates the two,” Toussaint said. “It’s neat to see that he’s able to do that and has the capacity to do that. You don’t really see that in young guys. Young guys just care about their hitting. He’s more worried about us and how we perform, and then he’s worried about his hitting.”

Grifol is unmistakably clear in his priorities for Lee. Because of Grandal’s contract status, it’s possible that Lee becomes the White Sox full-time catcher in the near future. That means Grifol is going to focus on developing Lee’s non-offensive skills first. That’s part of his general philosophy toward young catchers, so much so that Grifol hasn’t asked Lee about his hitting. 

Grifol’s patience with Lee’s offensive struggles may wane eventually. But he says Lee has checked every other box as a catcher, so Grifol can feel comfortable remaining unconcerned about the aforementioned stat line. There are other lessons. Lee was removed from Saturday’s 10-0 loss after he didn’t leave the box on a third inning pop-out that sliced over by the Tigers dugout.

Lee said he hadn’t followed the ball off of his bat, so remaining in the box wasn’t for lack of hustle. In Grifol’s mind, it still reflected a type of play that he doesn’t want to see, especially not in a young catcher who he seems to think highly of. Grifol said Lee would be back in the lineup Sunday.

These kinds of situations might make things tougher for a young catcher who is already struggling at the plate, but Lee is not all that concerned about his offense, either. Probably with some degree of good reason. We’re talking about a hitting sample size of 19 at-bats this season. That’s part of why he doesn’t sweat a frustrating lineout to right field. It’s also more important to him right now to get to know his pitching staff and make sure they’re succeeding.

“You gotta turn the page, you gotta get out there and prioritize catching,” Lee said. “I can go 0-5, but if we win the game, that’s a win in my book. That’s what you’ve got to carry, especially as a catcher.”

Getz steps into the role tasked with righting the ship, and the team hopes in short order. A lot went wrong to take the Sox from 93 wins in 2021 to where they are now, and the White Sox expect to head back in the right direction quickly with a more singular vision under Getz.

He spoke to assembled media on Thursday, and before Friday’s 4-2 loss to the Tigers, players in the clubhouse and manager Pedro Grifol talked about their hopes for the organization going forward under new leadership.

“I hope that with his arrival now, we can start from scratch and then have a better beginning and future,” Yoan Moncada said through team interpreter Billy Russo. “Hopefully that’s good for us and it’s going to play out next year.”

That’s going to be the big question for Getz. It’s hard right now to envision a 2024 season that is dramatically different results-wise than this year, but making next season at least a little better starts with spending the next month’s worth of games evaluating all parts of the organization and making a lot of personnel decisions.

Grifol has already been assured that his job is safe for at least 2024, but for guys like Gavin Sheets, September is going to be “prove it” time.

“When you bring in a new GM, you’re playing for your spot,” he said. “You want to show to him what you can do and why you need to be a part of this rebuild, so we all have a job to do.”

Sheets was drafted in the second round in 2017, the first year Getz was in charge of the Sox farm system. That means Getz oversaw almost all of his minor league development, and Sheets said in those years he gained a lot of respect for Getz. That respect came from Getz’s status as a former player and from his communication style.

Under Williams and Hahn, it could feel at times like the White Sox didn’t have a clear sense of who was in charge. It may have been clear internally, but to many outside of the organization, it felt a bit like season six of The Office when Jim Halpert and Michael Scott are named co-managers.

Getz comes from within the organization, a move that drew some criticism from those who felt the White Sox needed a more dramatic shift away from the old leadership duo. A fresh voice from the outside might have been better for communicating to fans that things going forward would actually change. But owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s opinion was different.

If Getz is able to carry out his vision for the ballclub, one of the immediate gains for the White Sox will be a degree of clarity that hasn’t always been there. In short, the guys in the clubhouse will know who’s in charge.

“It was a little different because there were two guys running it,” Sheets said of the previous regime. “I mainly had talks with Rick, not Kenny as much, so I think it’s good now that you know where it’s coming from with one guy in control, and with him being a good communicator it makes him a good fit for the role.”

Sheets lauded Getz’s communication style, saying that while he was in the minors, he appreciated the directness he would get about how he was performing and what he needed to improve to keep climbing the organizational ladder.

Grifol, who has known Getz since the his time as a player with the Royals, had similar things to say about Getz’s communication style. Both Sheets and Grifol seem to agree that having someone in charge who can take his experience as a former player and speak directly and candidly to the people under him is a plus.

“In my opinion, we’ve got a good guy leading us,” Grifol said. “It’s really, really hard to get to the big leagues as a player. It’s really hard. And it’s really hard to become a major-league general manager, he’s one of 30. So for him to have accomplished both of those, it speaks to his character, to his integrity, to his personality, just really who he is.

“He was a pretty damn good big-league player and I know he’s going to be a damn good general manager.”

But the next few months will be “prove it” time for Getz, too. He has the short-term task of assessing the current roster and then deciding from there how to approach the off-season. His knowledge of the White Sox organization is deep because of his history in the front office, but becoming the person in charge means Getz will be making decisions he hasn’t had to before.

He will have club options to decide on for Liam Hendriks and Tim Anderson. There will be arbitration negotiations with Andrew Vaughn, Dylan Cease, Michael Kopech, and Garrett Crochet. He will have to decide what holes in the roster – namely the starting rotation – to fill in free agency. As things stand now, the Getz will in theory have plenty of money to spend to improve. The White Sox will finish 2023 with a payroll of about $177 million. That’s around $60 million below the first tier of the luxury tax threshold. If Getz were to decline both Hendriks’ and Anderson’s club options, that would create close to $30 million more wiggle room.

That extra cash sits in the hands of Reinsdorf, however, so Getz may find himself hamstrung when making his pitch to free agents. Which makes the next month even more important. The games in isolation may not matter, but the time to evaluate does. Getz has his 2024 manager in place, and the goal for him is more than simply becoming a winning team again, or even competing for a division title.

“I’ve been a part of a World Series championship. I’ve been a part of a seventh game where we lost, and I can tell you this: I’m not thinking about winning a Wild Card or winning a division. That’s not on my mind,” Grifol said. “I’m thinking about preparing to win a World Championship. I don’t think I’m wired in a way to just think about putting a team together to go to the playoffs. I’m wired in a way to having a team that prepares to win a world championship.

“I didn’t like that seventh game feeling. I never want to feel that again. You can say, ‘Well you were part of a seventh game’ and I get it. But we lost it. I didn’t like that feeling. I like the other feeling when we were celebrating on the field and raising the trophy. That’s what it’s about for me.”

It’s easy to see why. In a lot of ways, Steele has been the only consistent and reliable starter in Ross’s rotation. He earned his 14th win of the season Saturday, beating the Royals 6-4, and notched his 17th quality start in the process.

“If we’re going to make the playoffs, he’s going to be a big part of that,” Ross said. “So he’s going to take the ball. He wants the ball. We want him to take the ball.”

But it’s Steele’s reliability that has made things somewhat less simple for Ross. With the Cubs in the hunt for a postseason spot, Steele is increasingly important even as he has surpassed his previous career high in innings pitched. After Saturday’s start, Steele has logged 132 innings this season, already 13 more than last year. Especially with a young pitcher, there is a natural tendency to worry a little over how he will handle his first full season as a starter.

Particularly in Steele’s case, because back issues ended his 2022 season a month early. A problem that he says arose because of late-season fatigue.

“Just running a little bit out of gas. Back ends up tightening up,” Steele said.

But he was able to throw bullpen sessions last September and spend the offseason preparing to pitch for a full year in 2023. Other than a short stint of forearm tightness in June, Steele has delivered on that offseason work. But it was around this time last year that he ran into trouble, so the next few starts could show how well his offseason work paid off.

And unlike in 2022, the Cubs are in the hunt for a playoff spot. They dug a standings hole in May and then spent June, July, and into August climbing out of it. Thanks to a 38-28 record since June 1, Steele is in a position where he needs to be the guy in the rotation. 

Marcus Stroman going down on August 1 with a right hip injury and then potentially for the rest of the season with a broken rib cartilage that emerged earlier in the week makes Steele’s job all the more important. And all the more challenging.

“He’s one of our best pitchers. You gotta put trust in him,” Ross said. “[We’re] going to ride him, give him the ball when in doubt.”

In Saturday’s start, Steele used 99 pitches to get through six innings and held Kansas City to two runs. Ross has said many times that he does not necessarily monitor pitch counts as much as high-stress innings when deciding the right time to pull a starter. Steele pitched his way out of jams in the second and sixth innings, finishing off the sixth with Salvador Perez in scoring position by getting Matt Duffy looking at a 1-2 fastball that nipped the outside of the zone.

As far as high-stress innings go, that was a mild case. Regardless, Steele’s ability to manage innings like the sixth in Saturday’s game has been a part of his maturation into the staff ace this season. With Stroman out and the other spots in the rotation still something of a question mark in terms of performance from start to start, Steele’s ability to stay on the mound for the next several weeks is magnified.

Young pitchers’ health can be monitored much more closely than in years past, and that additional information can be useful, but it risks becoming paralyzing to a manager trying to figure out how to guide a guy like Steele through a late-season playoff push, and then – hopefully – the postseason itself.

“You gotta get to pitching a full season at some point,” Ross said. “We measure everything so much now. You try to make a reason for everything. I don’t know what Roy Halladay’s first full season looked like. I’d like to go back and see what metrically his numbers would be and did that factor in.”

Halladay’s trajectory was a little different than Steele’s; he threw 149 innings in 1999, his second season in the majors. But it took until his fifth season, in 2002, for him to make as many starts as Steele has this year. For what it’s worth, that year Halladay went from 105.1 innings in 2001 to 239.1 and being an All-Star and 19-game winner the following year. 

It’s not a perfect comparison, but the point probably stands. Eventually, a guy like Steele has to just go out and get the job done for a full season. He put in the work during the winter to learn from his injury at the end of 2022, and mentally, Steele takes a day at a time approach to his job.

After Saturday’s win, he joked that he can’t compare how he feels now to how he felt back in April and May because he doesn’t remember the specifics of those starts and might not be able to tell you what day of the month it is now. When it’s time to take the ball and go to the mound, he puts his hat on and does the job. He is forward-focused.

Getting to the playoffs isn’t all on Steele, of course. Cody Bellinger has jump-started the offense since he returned from a leg injury in mid June. Not coincidentally, the Cubs’ best stretch of play has been since Bellinger came back to the lineup. On Saturday, he homered twice and hit a sacrifice fly in the fourth inning. 

And Jeimer Candelario, acquired in a trade with the Nationals on July 31, has batted .385 with a 1.044 OPS since joining the Cubs. His steady defense has helped the Cubs win games too. Against the Royals Saturday, he fielded back-to-back tough grounders to end the second inning.

“We gotta play clean baseball. If you’re going to be a playoff team, you gotta play clean defensive games,” Candelario said. “You’re waking up knowing you’ve got a really good chance to win a ballgame. And we’re fighting for the playoffs. For us to be there we’ve got to do the right things.”

Five games from now, Steele will make his next start. The Cubs will have to keep trying to win without him between now and then, and as August ends and the calendar turns to September, Ross will continue to blend the surplus of information he has access to about how Steele is feeling with the old-fashioned instincts of a guy who has been around the game for a long time.

“We can’t panic if something does pop up,” he said. “We continue to make the best guess we can as far as health-wise, but if he’s healthy and we feel like he’s able to pitch efficiently, we’re going to put him out there. And that’s the only way we’re going to get to the postseason in my mind.”

In his mind, that’s a good and necessary thing. He wants to pitch at some point next season rather than treat all of 2024 as rehab, both because he wants to compete and also because his contract situation a year from now might make it useful.

“Depending on what happens contract wise, who knows if I’m going to need that little showcase at the end of the season to be able to get a job,” Hendriks said. “We’ll take that as it comes. That’s all I got. The plan is to pitch and we’ll see how it goes. It’s a wide range with one side being back in August and one side not being back at all.”

The White Sox have a $15 million club option for Hendriks next year, and if they pick it up, he won’t be an unrestricted free agent until 2025. Hendriks said he hopes to remain in Chicago and has made that desire known to the front office.

“The ball is in their court, obviously. I have an option for at the end of the year,” he said. “I have put it in their ears that I’d like to stay. I think I have unfinished business here and I feel I can, that’s why I wanted to rehab here. I petitioned to rehab with the team.”

A speedy recovery puts Hendriks back in a major league game as early as September 2 of next year. Assuming things do work out that way, Hendriks would have about a month to earn his next contract. Whether that is with the White Sox or another team is a different question, but he said he has no doubts that he will be able to return to the mound.

The 34-year-old has been pitching with some pain in his elbow for years, he said. He was sidelined last June for over two weeks with a forearm strain. Initially, this year’s injury was described as being the same as last season’s, but Hendriks said when he threw his last live bullpen session and felt pain while topping out at 92 miles per hour, he knew things were different this time.

“I realized my velocity was trending in the wrong direction and at that point there was nothing I could do to prevent what was going on,” Hendriks said.

Though it was the same tear that put him in the injured list last year, this time around the tear worsened and the surrounding muscles weren’t fully recovered from recuperating in 2022 from the injury. Hendriks said he was used to pitching with some pain in his elbow and had been doing it for most of his career, but this season it felt like it was beyond what he had grown used to.

If there’s a silver lining, what Hendriks has been able to do in his career with a bad elbow is remarkable. Assuming that he is able to recover and go through the rehab process successfully and return to the mound — in 2024 or later — having a brand new elbow could give new life to his career.

“At this point I’ll be pitching with a less than stellar elbow for 15 years, so having a new one out there hopefully I can add an extra couple of years on the back end,” Hendriks said. “I’ve always said I wanted to pitch until I was 40 and this means after this one I should be able to hopefully go longer than that.”

Hendriks has been kept away from the team for long stretches of this season because of his battle with cancer and his elbow injury. His absence has been felt on the field as Kendall Graveman and others had to step up to close games. Not having him at the back end of the bullpen changed the way many of the White Sox relievers were used.

Along with that, it could be the case that the Sox needed his presence as a team leader. On Sunday, former Sox reliever Keynan Middleton told Jesse Rogers of ESPN that there was a clubhouse culture problem in Chicago, and then Lance Lynn seemed to corroborate Middleton’s story.

Sox general manager Rick Hahn addressed the comments earlier this week, and manager Pedro Grifol admitted that some of the leaders he thought he had in the clubhouse didn’t live up to the role. None of that seems to apply to Hendriks, but if things were as bad as Middleton described and Lynn implied, having him around might have helped.

A cancer battle, elbow injury, surgery, and now rehab have kept Hendriks physically apart from the team for significant stretches of this season. But he’s back with the team now, and even though he can’t be the team’s closer, Hendriks is leading with an eye on the Sox future.

“He’s out there with (Gregory) Santos and all these young kids that are out there,” Grifol said. “I know he’s not just sitting there, I know he’s talking to those guys about the game, about preparation. He’s doing that right now.”

The disappointments of the last two seasons give Hendriks added fuel to get back on the mound in 2024. His contract situation is one thing, but as he said when he made his case to rehab with the team, he feels like he has more to accomplish in Chicago.

The latter was Swanson’s contribution. By the time he was playing on travel teams, he had watched it so much that he worried the tape reels were going to wear out. 

“Superstar Shortstops” was released a few months after Swanson’s fifth birthday. He’s not sure how it came to be in his house; it’s possible it belonged to his older brother, Chase. Narrated by 13-time Gold Glove Award winner Ozzie Smith, it is a detailed look at baseball history. Specifically, the history of the shortstop position. Swanson loved watching Nomar Garciaparra and Derek Jeter growing up, and both are featured on that tape, along with past greats like Ernie Banks and Honus Wagner.

You could argue that old VHS tape changed Swanson’s life.

“I watched that video like every day,” he told CHGO. “It just had highlights of all the greatest shortstops who have ever played. I watched it every day, all the time, and that is what really made me want to be like them.”

This begs the chicken-or-the-egg question, but Swanson had already declared himself a shortstop before he watched the tape for the first time.

He gravitated toward that position early, around the same time the tape was released, because he liked knowing that the shortstop was, in many ways, the captain of the defense. Throughout his amateur career, Swanson didn’t stray from that position often. He played second base for most of his sophomore season at Vanderbilt because Vicente Conde was entrenched at short, but otherwise, Swanson was almost always a shortstop during his college and minor league careers. Since debuting with the Braves in 2016, he has played no other position.

When Swanson hit free agency last winter, he was among a crop of sought-after shortstops. The Cubs inked him to a seven-year, $177 million deal a week before Christmas, giving them their shortstop of the long-term future. 

But, of course, the Cubs already had an emerging building block at shortstop.

When Swanson signed, Nico Hoerner was fresh off of a 106 wRC+, 4 fWAR season in 2022. In order for things in the infield to work, Hoerner would have to move to second base full time, a shift that is not as simple as it might look. But the outcome, the Cubs hoped, would be having one of the best middle-infield tandems in baseball.

Now more than two-thirds of the way through their first season together, it looks like the gamble is paying off. 

“It’s huge. It’s hard to put into words, honestly, but I truly think they’re the best in the league,” Marcus Stroman told CHGO. “With their range, their ability to convert ground balls, turn double plays. You don’t see that much, you know?

“It gives me more confidence to attack the zone aggressively myself, because I feel like if it’s hit on the ground, they’re going to convert that out.”

Hoerner has played plenty of second base, but it has not been his primary position until this year.

Like Swanson, he always thought of himself as a shortstop. He grew up watching shortstops like Troy Tulowitzki and Miguel Tejada. In his years at Stanford, in the minors, and since his 2019 callup to the Cubs, Hoerner has played almost 1,000 more innings at shortstop than second. The last time Hoerner was a full-time second baseman for a whole season was his freshman year at Stanford (excluding the pandemic shortened 2020 season). He does not lack experience at second, but switching between the two positions is not as simple a transition as Hoerner has made it appear.

Despite being two positions very close to each other on the field, playing one or the other can feel a lot different and require skill sets that don’t necessarily overlap. One of the primary issues for a second baseman is his angle towards first base. A shortstop can charge a ground ball on the run and keep moving toward first to make the throw. Many times, a second baseman is making a play almost with his back to first base. 

“You assume it’s as easy as just catch it and throw it, but it’s just not,” Swanson said. “The best analogy I can give is, if you’re a guy who plays out on the wing for a basketball team, it’s like, ‘Hey, I want you to go play on the block with your back to the basket. I want you to be the guy who plays with your back to the basket.’ And it’s like, ‘What do you mean you can’t just have that feel for playing with your back to the basket? What do you mean you can’t see that guy coming to double team?’ It’s the same kind of thought process for me.”

There are other differences. The biggest is the direction a player moves, but even fielding a grounder won’t always feel the same. At shortstop, a ground ball will often head to the back hand side, but for a second baseman, it’s the opposite. 

Again, it’s not as though Hoerner hadn’t played plenty of second base in his career. That is part of why the Cubs signing Swanson made sense in the first place. Hoerner is not truly learning a new position so much as adjusting to dealing with its quirks on a daily basis.

“I feel like I am at a level where I can play it well,” Hoerner told CHGO. “But there are a lot of outs I feel like I’ve left on the field, just plays here and there. Whether it’s tags or double plays.”

Hoerner said he can still feel like the ball is playing him at times, and like the shorter throw from second base can make him feel a little flat-footed. But he said taking the aggressiveness and athleticism from shortstop has helped him grow more comfortable at second. One of his biggest strengths is playing the game on the run, Hoerner said, so having a shortstop mentality at second base is working.

And Hoerner might be a little too hard on himself. He ranks behind only Swanson on the team in total defensive runs saved, and he is tied for third in the National League among second basemen with six.

Hoerner and Swanson have been a boon to the whole team. The Cubs rank fourth in baseball with 28 defensive runs saved (last year, they were 21st in the league with just four). This season, Swanson and Hoerner account for 20 of the 28 DRS the Cubs have as a team. 

Stroman joked about how much more effective his sinker would be this season during spring training, in anticipation of how many ground balls Swanson and Hoerner would gobble up. The Cubs’ starting staff pitches to a lot of contact, and having those two up the middle allows them to pitch to their strengths more easily and with more confidence. 

“There’s times when I look back, and I’m like, ‘These guys are sick,’ and I’m just like, ‘Here’s a sinker. If you put it into play, there’s a high probability that’s going to be converted to an out,’” Stroman said.

Kyle Hendricks has built a sterling career on pitching to soft contact. Having Swanson and Hoerner behind him has allowed Hendricks to do that even more. His groundball rate is up to 46 percent this season, the highest it has been since 2020, and Hendricks is getting more soft and medium contact than he has in a few years.

Some of the difference in Hendricks this season is because his shoulder is healthy again, but even he will credit the difference Swanson and Hoerner have made. Knowing those two are behind him reiterates that pitching to get weak contact is the only bullet he needs to have. 

“You just keep it simple and create the soft contact,” Hendricks told CHGO. “When you’re doing that, and balls are getting through or finding holes, it makes you want to get off of that gameplan, but it kind of feeds into itself. The more soft contact we get, the more plays get made. It makes us just want to keep doing what we’re doing. 

“It keeps us in our gameplan as opposed to feeling like we have to do more or do all these other things that might get us out, and now we’re not pitching as well as we should be because we’re not being ourselves.”

There are the intangibles, too. The Cubs’ season has turned a corner since early June. They have climbed their way back into the NL Central and NL Wild Card races, and Ross has often given credit to the professional, veteran attitudes in his clubhouse. There is a lot of collective experience in that locker room, and Swanson (eight season) and Hoerner (fifth season) make up a decent share of it. 

When Swanson was out with a left heel injury last month, Ross and the players all said he acted like an extra coach. Ross said Swanson’s ability to see and read an infield would make him a good third-base coach some day.

And Ross has said that he wishes he could have been teammates with Hoerner in order to have more opportunities to talk baseball with him. Hoerner will frequently find Ross in the dugout during games to talk strategy, he said.

Defensively and at the plate, there aren’t many up-the-middle duos better than these two. Signing a veteran shortstop to a long-term contract when there was already a good one on the roster asked a lot of both players, especially Hoerner. But the results are there.

Swanson never did end up wearing out his VHS copy of “Superstar Shortstops” like he feared. At some point — he doesn’t remember when — his mother copied it onto a USB drive just in case.

As these things go, both the tape and USB drive are gone, lost in the shuffle of life. But for about $40, you can buy a VHS copy online. It’s also been uploaded in full on YouTube. 

Swanson watches the YouTube version these days. Earlier this season, he shared the link with assistant hitting coach Johnny Washington to show to his son. Swanson is passionate about his position and the chance to share its legacy.

“I always took a lot of pride in it, even when I was real little, like 5 or 6, just because the leader of the team is always going to be play shortstop,” he said. “The captain of the team is the shortstop, and for whatever reason, I just always loved that part of the position.”

From there, the onus fell to the team. They had played well enough to merit a vote of confidence from the front office leading up to the deadline, so with the Reds and Braves in town for the week, the question then became whether the Cubs could keep winning.

The team responded by going 5-2 on this homestand, climbing to a second-place tie in the National League and a tie for the last NL Wild Card spot. The weekend series against the Braves started on a down note, with the Cubs getting blanked by Max Fried on Friday, but they punched back with an 8-6 win on Saturday and a 6-4 win on Sunday to earn the series victory.

All wins count the same in the standings, but there is something to be said for taking two of three from Atlanta. The Braves have the NL’s best record and the second-highest run differential in baseball.

“It’s no secret that the thought across the league is that the National League is running through the Braves right now,” Mike Tauchman said. “That’s a really good team over there, so for us to be able to get a series win against them, it’s evidence that if we execute the way that we can, if we play baseball the way that we can, we can compete with anybody.”

The series win over Atlanta put the Cubs in a tie with Cincinnati for second place in their division. Thanks to Reds and Brewers losses on Sunday, the Cubs moved to 1 1/2 games out of the NL Central lead. In the Wild Card, a Marlins loss helped push the Cubs into a tie for third spot with Cincinnati. If the season ended today, they would be in the playoffs.

Considering that the Cubs had the worst record in the NL as recently as May 28, this is a remarkable position for the team to be in.

“The entire year we’ve felt like we’ve had the ballclub and the pieces in place to compete at a high level with whoever the team may be. We as a group have felt that way the entire time,” Justin Steele said.

Still, they had to prove that in June and July. Otherwise, the team would almost certainly have traded away a few key pieces, and the rebuild would have stretched for another season. The team did its part, going 29-22 in those two months to end July at .500.

For that effort, the front office decided to buy at the deadline.

“It feels good for the guys up top to make the decision to add pieces rather than trade away,” Steele said. “It’s definitely helped. I feel like it’s kind of boosted the locker room a little bit. We’re just fired up to show up each and every day.”

“Momentum is a powerful thing, and I think when you play well, and then you get the backing of the front office, I think that helps the momentum. That helps the confidence. That helps the belief,” Cubs manager David Ross said.

This weekend’s series was a good litmus test for whether the Cubs really could hang with the best team in the NL.

The bullpen and a resilient offense were the keys to getting the two wins after Friday’s shutout. On Saturday, Javier Assad spot-started in place of Stroman and delivered. He pitched into the fourth inning and held the Braves to two runs. From there, relievers Michael Fulmer, Daniel Palencia, Mark Leiter, Jr., Julian Merryweather and Adbert Alzolay held Atlanta at bay for 5 1/3 innings.

In Sunday’s finale, Steele notched his league-leading 13th win, but he was not as sharp as usual, giving up eight hits and handing out four free passes. He allowed four runs but pitched into the sixth inning, and again, the bullpen stepped up. Fulmer and Leiter picked up high-leverage outs for the second day in a row, with Cuas taking the seventh inning and Alzolay earning his 10th consecutive save (and 14th of the season).

On the other side of the ledger, the offense gave Assad some cushion with a five-run first inning Saturday, and they wiped away two Braves leads Sunday. They trailed 2-0 in the top of the third inning, knotted the score in the bottom of third, and after the Braves took a 3-2 lead in the fifth, the Cubs scored three runs in the bottom of the inning. They never trailed again.

“They’re continuing to go out and play baseball for nine innings,” Ross said. “They’re not taking anything for granted. I think that’s a strength of a good team. That’s a product of winning, believing in yourself, confidence. Proving to yourself that you’re a good team.”

There are fifty games left in the season, and the Cubs still have ground to cover in order to secure a spot in the playoffs, whether it’s as division champions or with a Wild Card berth. Either way, there is a prevailing sense in the clubhouse of having something to prove — even after taking it to the Braves.

“Going on a run, getting backed by the front office. All these little dominos that fall just continue to reiterate the confidence that everybody has around here, and you see it play out against a really good team,” Ross said.

Wrigley Field is always a special atmosphere, but the magnitude of the last few weeks has given the Friendly Confines an October feeling.

“The crowd getting on their feet, all the way from the first inning through the ninth inning in big spots,” Fulmer said, “it really gives us a big boost of adrenaline and kind of gives us the will to want to do it even more and get the job done.”

Their 12 combined home runs between Tuesday and Wednesday are also a franchise record dating back to at least 1901. On Wednesday, Christopher Morel, Dansby Swanson, Ian Happ (twice) and Seiya Suzuki all went yard.

This year’s Cubs team was built to win on pitching and good defense, but when they score like they have in the last 48 hours of baseball, that can change expectations about what the group is capable of as a whole. Their offensive production has been a part of why the team has gone on a run good enough to get above .500 for the first time since early May.

“[When] we’re able to put up these types of numbers offensively, yeah, you do feel like the ceiling goes way up,” Cubs manager David Ross said.

Obviously, scoring like they have the last two nights is not going to happen all the time, but the results of these last couple games are a product of the quality of the at-bats the offense is having. Even when those at-bats aren’t yielding runs or even hits, they are tough outs that run up opposing pitchers’ pitch counts. And that will score runs and help win games most nights.

“In the first, we made [Reds starter Brandon Williamson] throw 24 pitches,” Ross said. “It was not going down 1-2-3. It’s hard to get everybody out. Nobody’s chasing, nobody’s going outside of what they’re trying to do and sticking to their plan, so [opponents] have to work.”

The Cubs got just one baserunner through the first two innings, but Williamson needed 41 pitches to get those six outs. After that, Jeimer Candelario led off the third inning with a double and then scored on Morel’s homer. The Cubs had at least one hit and scored in every inning from then on.

“Guys do a really good job of learning from the first [at-bat],” Happ said. “Even if we go through the order one time and don’t have a ton of success, learning from that and the second time through being really productive.

“The feeling of being just one swing away or a couple good at-bats away from getting something started is really nice for a lineup, and we’re pretty deep right now.”

It’s easy to dream about what is possible when the Cubs play like this. It’s easy to overlook that Drew Smyly struggled through yet another outing. Or that Marcus Stroman is on the injured list with right hip inflammation and will miss at least one start. The Cubs are 12-3 in their last 15 games, going back to July 18. They have the third-best record in baseball since June 9, going 29-17 in that stretch. The Cubs have climbed their way out of a deep hole in the standings to three games behind the Reds in the National League Central and only 2 1/2 out of an NL Wild Card spot. All of that was enough to keep them from being sellers at the trade deadline.

If they are going to keep going at a pace like this, scoring dozens of runs will help, for sure, but anyone who has watched at least a week’s worth of baseball knows that it never happens that way. When the 1897 Chicago Colts scored 43 runs in two days, 36 of those came in the June 29 game. The 2023 Chicago Cubs will need the aforementioned quality at-bats to continue winning at the clip they have had since early June.

Wednesday night was a good example of those kinds of at-bats. The Cubs hit five home runs, but they had 16 hits in all. In their five-run sixth inning, they scored via walks and base hits only. And all of this happened after they trailed 3-0 early in the game.

“I think the more impressive part is getting down early and fighting back,” Happ said. “It’s not just the homers. It’s guys going out there, getting on base. The singles that lead to getting pitchers deep into pitch counts and then being able to take advantage. That part of it is the more impressive part.”

And Candelario, for his part, was the catalyst for the scoring. He had the Cubs’ first hit of the game Wednesday, and he has gone 8-for-9 with three doubles and a walk since joining the team after they acquired him from the Nationals on Monday. Candelario lengthens the lineup and also adds another switch-hitter, something that makes an opposing manager’s job even harder. Ross said having the ability to impact which pitcher comes in out of the bullpen because of Happ and Candelario’s presence “bring[s] a lot of trouble” for those decisions.

Candelario scored four times Wednesday, thanks to getting on base every time he went to the plate.

“That was on my mind,” he said. “The first day that I’m in the lineup, put myself in a good position to help my team win, be on base for them, and always find a way to win ballgames.”

After Wednesday’s win, the Cubs have a plus-77 run differential. That’s good for the third-highest in the NL, behind only the Dodgers and Braves. However many runs they score each night, getting quality at-bats like they had on Tuesday and Wednesday is a part of their recipe for continuing to play meaningful games in August and September.

Couple that with a quality start from Kyle Hendricks and effective innings from the bullpen, and throw in a dazzling, grand slam-robbing catch by Seiya Suzuki, and all the pieces are in place for a team that can be tough to beat, no matter who the opponent is.

The trouble is, the Cubs have not done enough of that, or at least have not done it consistently enough, to get results better than a 49-51 record a week from the Aug. 1 trade deadline.

“We haven’t really synced up all parts of our game at once,” Nico Hoerner said. “We’ve shown flashes of each. We haven’t even gone through a stretch where we’ve swept teams and rattled off consecutive wins and things like that. We’re doing all the right things to make that possible.”

With six more games to play before the deadline, there isn’t an opportunity to show that they can sync up and sustain it over the long haul. But if the Cubs are starting to do that even a little bit now, it’s coming at an opportune moment.

The course a team takes at the trade deadline can sometimes come down to timing. If the deadline had come in the middle of the London series, the Cubs probably wouldn’t be sellers. A week later, maybe they would have been. A week from now? That might depend on how they do Wednesday against the White Sox, for four games in St. Louis and maybe even next Monday back at Wrigley Field against the Reds.

There is a real possibility that the Cubs will be at or even above .500 by the time July ends. As things stand now, they are six games back in the division but only 4 1/2 games out of a National League Wild Card spot. 

It’s going to be tough to change those numbers much in six games, so assuming the Cubs are in more or less the same position — except with a winning record again for the first time since May 2 — there are just a few options for the front office. Stand pat, sell or buy. The first option can be ruled out, and a full selloff for the third summer in a row is unlikely. More apt to happen is a little bit of both.

Here’s why: Marcus Storman accepted a qualifying offer from the Mets in November 2020, so the Cubs don’t have that option. If he leaves as a free agent in the winter, they get no compensatory picks for him. The 32-year-old is having one of the stronger seasons of his career, and solid starting pitching is always on the market at the trade deadline. If the Cubs trade him by next Tuesday, they will at least get some prospects in return. 

Beyond that, there are a few bullpen arms that would be appealing to other teams, but it would make sense for the Cubs to trade Stroman and add to their roster otherwise. A rotation of Justin Steele, Kyle Hendricks, an improving Jameson Taillon, perhaps Hayden Wesneski, and then Drew Smyly or a young arm in the minors should win plenty of games. It’s not ideal, but it is a doable option.

Cody Bellinger is the other most logical trade piece. He has a .903 OPS, 14 home runs, and more importantly, will almost certainly be a free agent this winter. There is a mutual option for 2024, but it’s safe to assume that, given how he has played this season, Bellinger is going to want to test free agency. The Cubs have the qualifying offer option with Bellinger where they do not with Stroman, so there is less long-term risk involved in riding things out with him this season.

And the Cubs might want to. It will take a herculean effort to get to the top of their division in the last two months of the season, but a Wild Card spot is much more attainable. Last year, the Phillies were a Wild Card team and reached the World Series. In 2019, the Nationals were a Wild Card team and won the World Series. 

Two years ago, Dansby Swanson’s Atlanta Braves were 49-51 at the same point in the season as the Cubs are now. They went 36-19 to finish the season at the top of their division, and they won the World Series.

Is there any reason to think the 2023 Cubs possess similar qualities to that Braves team?

“No doubt. Belief is such a powerful thing, and being able to fight through so much adversity like in 2021 that we did, and kind of what we’re doing now,” Swanson said. “We’ve fought through so much this year and been through a lot as a group that it really does make you stronger, and I think everyone’s starting to realize and tap into the potential of this group.”

The guys in the locker room cannot decide for the front office what to do in the next week. But as Swanson joked after hitting two home runs in Tuesday’s win, “It’s fun for us to make their job challenging.”

The Cubs have won six of their last seven games with a plus-26 run differential during those games. They have the fourth-best run differential in the National League. It might not be too hard to envision this group going on a Braves-esque run in the next two months.

“We’re continuing to work towards championship baseball, and it’s not only the playoffs, it’s position to win the World Series,” David Ross said. “And what that big picture looks like is the ultimate goal, and how fast can you get there. If it means trading the entire team to win a World Series sooner, that’s the job that’s at hand. 

“I want to win a World Series. I want to be the manager of a World Series team, the guys out there want to win a World Series, and that’s what we’re all pushing for.”

“He’s tried to be manager and hitting coach and infield coach,” Ross joked Saturday. “He just can’t turn it off. It’s been fun watching him interact around the dugout and in the clubhouse.”

Swanson was activated from the 10-day injured list before Saturday’s game against the Cardinals, so he will have to put his budding coaching career on hold for now. 

“My wife tells me I’m for sure coaching. I do enjoy helping other people. That’s just kind of my personality,” Swanson said.

Obviously, Swanson would prefer to play every day; he has missed just two games in his last three seasons. But there were some advantages to the time off of the field. He said observing from the dugout gave him a chance to take a zoomed out view of the team. Swanson has brought with him an attention to detail that Ross and his teammates noticed quickly. 

For example, Swanson has pointed out ways the infielders can better position themselves for cutoff throws and relays. Ross said he has an eye for the little things like that and is always eager to talk about what he’s seeing and thinking. 

“He sees a lot. He’s very aware of the surroundings, how the game is moving,” Ross said. “It’s just really important to value the small details and notice those in-game. Even when you have a game that you win, and notice things that need to improve.”

During Swanson’s absence, the Cubs went 5-5. Three of those wins were come-from-behind victories. Swanson said one of the things that stood out to him during his IL layoff was the way his team responded when opponents took leads. 

In his first game back on Saturday, that trend continued. The Cubs won 8-6 despite trailing the Cardinals four different times. The first three times they fell behind, the Cubs tied the game in response. They eventually took the lead for good after a three-run sixth inning.

Swanson was a catalyst for some of that scoring; he doubled in the second inning and scored a game-tying run on a Christopher Morel single, and then he hit an RBI single that tied things up again in the third. 

“I feel like we’ve responded well to when other teams have scored, too, being able to add a few more runs on our own,” Swanson said. “Our biggest thing is to stay on the attack, be aggressive whenever we’re playing offense.”

That kind of fight is always good to see, but the Cubs are in a precarious position thanks to inconsistent play and some bad stretches earlier in the season. They did well in June, going 14-11, but that wasn’t enough to make up for a 10-18 May and playing right around .500 otherwise. There is just over a week until the Aug. 1 trade deadline, and it is likely that Swanson will be saying goodbye to at least a couple of teammates. Cody Bellinger is an increasingly intriguing trade piece by the day, and Marcus Stroman is having one of his career-best seasons. 

There’s a chance that, if they can inch up the standings in the National League Central and in the NL Wild Card race enough in the next week or so, the Cubs won’t be sellers at the trade deadline. Their remaining games before Aug. 1 — five more against the Cardinals, two against the White Sox and one against the Reds — might be an opportunity to make a case to be buyers. The Cubs would have to get closer to the top of the NL Central and play well enough to demonstrate that they can compete down the stretch, and it’s possible that fighting back from being behind in games lately has helped do that. 

But the Cubs went after Swanson in part because of the way he approaches the game, especially behind the scenes, and because of his experiences on successful teams with the Braves. Every player on every team knows the balance of weathering the ups and downs of a long season and of working to win each game. True, some stretches of the season seem more important than others and require a different sense of urgency, but seemingly every one has pointed to the way Swanson carries himself daily.

“Each game is each game, and that’s one thing that the good teams I’ve been on have really taken that seriously,” Swanson said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s the first or ninth inning. Each game, each moment, it’s obviously important to be able to look at them the same way. 

“Whether it’s the first game, or the 73rd game, or the 90th game, each day our job is to go out and perform at a high level.”

It’s clear that the Cubs as a group are galvanized by Swanson’s presence. Even when he was not playing, he continued to display the kind of leadership that made him an attractive free agent last winter. Jokes about being an assistant coach aside, that’s part of the reason he was signed to a long-term contract that signifies the organization’s turn from rebuilding toward contention.

They might — and probably will — still trade away some players at the deadline in a week, but Swanson has established himself as a cornerstone of the team’s future.

“Dansby is really important to our success, and his play has been missed,” Ross said. “Having him in the lineup, his leadership on the field, obviously defensively his hardware speaks for itself. It’s nice having him back.”

That’s the big question lingering over the Cubs these days. The Aug. 1 deadline is less than two weeks away, and the direction the front office will take is not always easy to predict.

What they do leading up to that day does not hinge on any one game or series, but the reality is that this homestand is the last opportunity for the current Cubs roster to make its case to the people running the team to bring them reinforcements.

Tuesday night’s 17-3 win over the Nationals was a microcosm of just how hard deciphering this season has been. It could become the catalyst for a decisive stretch of games going forward. Or it could be a goofy blip in the big picture of a Cubs year that has not met the mild expectations of the preseason.

The concern is consistency. Can this team play well enough over a sustained period to both close the gap in the division and demonstrate to the front office that getting help at the deadline is the path to take?

On that front, the Cubs have been frustrating, even to themselves.

“It seems like that’s been the question all year. We’ve kind of been hot and then cold,” Jameson Taillon said. “Just a little too streaky, which is weird because there’s a lot of veteran, super professional guys in there. So I think the streakiness is a little bit weird.”

Taillon knows he has played a role in that streakiness. He has not been the starting pitcher the Cubs expected when they signed him for four years, $68 million last winter. He has been open all season about his struggles and what he has done to try and improve. And until maybe his last two starts, the results have not been there.

Following up on a stellar outing in New York before the All-Star break, Taillon missed tossing a quality start on Tuesday by one out. Perhaps affected by the eleven-day layoff between starts, he took seven or eight batters to shake off the rust. In the first inning, Lane Thomas sent a fastball left too high in the zone into the bleachers, and then after giving up three consecutive hits and two more runs in the second, Taillon settled in and pitched into the sixth. 

His performance in the middle innings was ultimately part of what allowed the Cubs to stage their comeback. They narrowed the 3-0 deficit by one run in the fourth inning and then tied the game in the sixth on a home run by Seiya Suzuki and back to back singles by Ian Happ and Cody Bellinger. The Cubs went on to score 17 unanswered runs — 14 of them in the seventh and eighth innings. Patrick Wisdom hit the go-ahead homer to lead off the seventh, the hardest hit ball of his career at 114.4 mph off the bat.

That homer marked Wisdom’s third in his last four games. He was activated from a wrist injury on July 4, and he is showing signs of heating up. After posting a .083 slugging percentage in June, Wisdom is slugging .833 in his last seven contests.

“Just kind of reaffirming the things that we as a group have been working on down in the cage and in my work,” Wisdom said of his recent performance. “Being able to do that and do it more consistently in the game, that’s the goal.”

Consistency is really the goal for the team as a whole. All teams go through hot and cold stretches, but the Cubs have not been able to get hot and sustain it for significant periods of time. That’s part of why they might see players like Marcus Stroman and Cody Bellinger headed to other teams.

The question coming out of Tuesday’s big win is whether they can build off of it. Any time a baseball team scores that many runs, it’s a fluke to some degree, but there are elements of a 17-3 win that can carry forward.

“That is the key, maintaining the consistency. Not putting up 20 hits and a bunch of runs in a game, but I think coming through and doing the little things right,” Wisdom said. “Moving the guy over, getting them in. I think those are important things to just note, and I think we did a really good job of that tonight. And it shows when you’re putting up runs, those little things do happen.”

Starting Wednesday, the Cubs play 12 more games before the trade deadline — one more against the Nationals, eight against the Cardinals and two against the White Sox. The schedule has lined up for them to pile up some wins in that stretch, but the bigger question will be if the Cubs can play at a level that shows the front office they can win against the tougher teams in August and September to justify buying at the deadline.

That will be a hard case to make, given the reality of both Stroman and Bellinger’s contract situations, not to mention a few others on the roster who would be appealing trade pieces as well. The National League Central is one of the weakest divisions in baseball this year, but zooming out, president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer and general manager Carter Hawkins also have to consider that the way they handle this trade deadline will impact the franchise in 2024 and beyond. 

But in the short term, the players still in the locker room have 12 games before the deadline, and all they can control is what happens on the field during those games.

“It comes down to the results,” Taillon said. “You have to put the wins up.”

Instead, he made it a point to be in the dugout for the ninth inning. With the Cubs down two runs and Milwaukee closer Devin Williams taking the mound, Steele wanted to be in the dugout because he felt like a comeback was in the works.

“It just kind of seemed like we weren’t done,” Steele said.

Williams ranks eighth in baseball with 18 saves this season. Before Wednesday, he had only blown a save once. He’s an All-Star. His changeup is called the “Airbender” because of the massive amount of break it gets across the plate (so much so that when it breaks less than 17 inches, that’s worth writing about).

But Steele remained in the dugout.

Some of the desire was because he felt like his teammates were still going to come through, even down to the last three outs. And some of it was because of how they had won the previous game: A wild 11-inning, 7-6 victory Tuesday that Steele said “was drunk there for a minute.” The Cubs came out on top of that one, putting behind them the maddening 8-6 loss that started this series in Milwaukee on Monday. That was part of why Steele felt like he needed to see the last round of at-bats from his teammates.

“The whole entire season, it seemed like at some point it’s going to fall in our favor,” Steele said. “That might have been the reason why I felt like we were going to do it tonight. I just had a good feeling about it.”

In the ninth, Cody Bellinger and Jared Young both reached with singles. Bellinger’s had an exit velocity of 69.2 mph, Young’s just 58.4. Then, with two outs and both runners in scoring position, Mike Tauchman fouled off four straight pitches from Williams before lacing a double down the left-field line and sending both runners across the plate.

Tauchman said he knew to stay away from William’s changeup. He swung through the first one, laid off the next, and then fouled off two others before getting a four-seam fastball. He went on to score on the next-at bat, as Nico Hoerner hit a weak grounder that put enough pressure on the defense to force a throwing error and then rounded first and kept the play away from Tauchman as he headed home. And in the bottom frame, Adbert Alzolay — who had allowed extra-inning runs in Sunday’s loss to the Guardians and blew a save in Tuesday’s eventual extra-inning win — shut down the Brewers to close out a much-need ‘W’.

Before the last inning, the Cubs had managed just one run and had stranded seven runners. Things were lining up for what has become a frustratingly common Cubs loss: They get the runners on, but can’t bring them home. Going into Wednesday night, they had the third-highest strand rate in baseball.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that the Cubs probably don’t get the chance to cause Williams’ second blown save if not for Michael Rucker. He took the ball in the seventh and eighth innings and kept the Brewers from adding insurance runs. Key to doing that was inducing ground balls that could be converted into double plays. Four of Rucker’s six outs came that way.

All-Star shortstop Dansby Swanson had to leave the game with a left heel contusion brought on by stepping on first base, according to Cubs manager David Ross, but even without him, Rucker pitched with the assurance that the soft contact he got would end up in gloves.

“The more confidence we have out there on the field, whether it’s confidence in ourself, confidence in our team to be able to make plays, that’s all helpful,” Rucker said. “That’s one thing I can count on when I go out there, just how solid the guys have been behind us.”

All season, the Cubs have felt like they should be performing better than their record. With Wednesday’s win, they are still five games below .500 and seven games out of first place. But they are the only team in the NL Central with a positive run differential, and their starters’ collective ERA is among the lowest in baseball — though so far, that has not translated into enough wins.

“It comes down to competing in moments. The game is not measured on paper. You gotta come through in moments,” Ross said. “I still stick by we do have a good team. I think some of that is on paper, and some of that still hasn’t transpired.”

The hope in the Cubs’ locker room is that the style of Tuesday’s win and the complete team effort involved in Wednesday’s win means that their number in the ‘W’ column will keep climbing. Baseball players are careful to avoid riding the highs and lows of the season too much, but there is something to putting together back-to-back hard-fought, grinding victories.

Like Steele, others in the dugout could feel the result of the ninth inning coming. Rucker said he felt it because the offense has been competitive against Williams before. And Alzolay said watching the hitters rally was a spark.

“Those are the moments that take your mentality to another level,” Alzolay said. “When you see your teammates out there giving everything they have to put the game back, that was electric. That took my adrenaline from zero to 200 right there.”

Steele might be on to something, not heading into the locker room an inning or two early. Most of the results of this season have been disappointing so far, but this isn’t a group to be rattled. They have had some very good stretches, one in April and more recently when they won 11 of 13 games in a stretch that ran from their series in San Francisco to the first game against the Cardinals in London. But they have also had really bad stretches (they just finished a 1-5 homestand against the Phillies and Guardians).

Still, the fight the Cubs have shown the last two games could be a launching pad to another one of those long good stretches. With the trade deadline less than a month away, they sure need it.

“They don’t waver. It’s very impressive to me,” Ross said. “The fight never goes away in their intensity and preparation, and I think that’s all you can ask for as a manager. If you don’t have good character in there, then you quit. And we don’t have quitters.”

When the Sox sent Colás down on May 2, they sent him with a specific set of things they wanted him to work on. Chiefly, they wanted to see that Colás could improve his pregame preparation and better handle on-field setbacks. Now, two months later, the powers that be are happy enough with the growth they have seen on those fronts to bring him back to Chicago.

“He was sent out with a pretty clear explanation about some of the things we wanted him to do in terms of his game prep, in terms of knowing the opposing pitcher, in terms of his attack plan on a given night,” general manager Rick Hahn said. “And our player-development people — [Justin Jirschele], Cam Seitzer, Chris Getz — were involved in helping him develop that plan and a pretty regimented schedule on a daily basis. He absolutely ramped up the amount of work he was doing. It was purposeful work and focused work and is bearing fruit, especially over the last couple weeks.”

The results of late would seem to back up Hahn’s assertion. Colás has hit safely in each of the last eight games he’s played for Triple-A Charlotte, a stretch in which he’s batted .394 and clubbed six home runs. On the whole, Colás is hitting .293/.358/.508 with 14 doubles, nine home runs, 29 RBI, and an .866 OPS in 48 games in Triple-A this year.

Hahn made a point to say that the timing of Colás being called up had more to do with how much his behind-the-scenes work had improved. But it’s hard to ignore how much a hot bat like his could help the Sox offense on what will likely be their last chance to right the ship and avoid a major selloff at the trade deadline.

This is not to suggest that that Colás by himself can make that much of a difference, but he can provide pop in a lineup that still sits around the middle of the pack in power – the Sox are 13th in baseball in home runs and 21st in slugging percentage – and Colás can also improve upon the production the Sox have gotten from their right fielders. Their corps at that position ranks dead last in baseball with -1 fWAR so far this season.

On that front, both Hahn and manager Pedro Grifol said the plan is for Colás to be treated more or less like the everyday right fielder, or at least the primary one.

“He’s going to play on a daily basis. I’ll give him a break every once in a while,” Grifol said. “Some guys will take a little bit of a hit on playing time, but I would never hesitate to give him a break and throw somebody else out there.”

Though Colás struggled to produce during his first stint in the majors earlier this season, the team is looking first for how he can handle when things go wrong or when he makes mistakes. Colás said he felt rookie anxiousness back in April and even felt overwhelmed at times by the speed of the game. And as mistakes, both mental and physical, added up, he struggled with not letting them affect his play as a whole.

“Control the emotions and the anxiety,” he said via team interpreter Billy Russo. “As a rookie, I think I was trying to do too much. I was battling with my anxieties. I think now, I’m in a better position.”

Colás owned just a .541 OPS in 25 games with the Sox during the first month of the season. He said he saw quickly the difference between minor and major league pitchers.

“Pitchers here, they don’t make mistakes,” he said. “They can make one mistake per game, one mistake per at-bat, and you have to capitalize on those mistakes. If not, you’re going to be in trouble.”

Not being able to hit major league pitching impacted other parts of his game, according to Grifol. Colás wanted to produce, and as he struggled more and more to do that at the plate, he tried harder to come through defensively and ended up making miscues. Not always major ones that show up in a box score, but things like throwing to the wrong base from the outfield. It likely didn’t help that as Colás was going through all of this, the Sox were putting together an 8-21 start. 

“The overwhelming part of it came with struggles at the plate. It affected everything, his defense, his base running, his focus in applying instruction. It affected everything, right?” Grifol said. “Sometimes this game up here is hard and some guys can handle it right away and some guys need it to continue to develop. He needed it to continue to develop.”

Whether or not Colás has improved enough upon the things that caused him to struggle in April will have to be seen. He at least is returning to the big leagues having seen and experienced it once before, and the best test for whether or not he has grown enough will be to see how Colás responds when struggles inevitably come.

In Tuesday’s 4-3 loss to the Blue Jays, Colás was 1-4 with a bunt single.

Colás is confident in himself – he emphasized that fact before Tuesday’s game: “I’m 100 percent convinced that the results are going to be better this time,” he said – but the major leagues are a crucible that can melt even the most talented players. Perhaps appropriately, Clint Frazier was optioned on Tuesday to make room for Colás. Frazier was the fifth overall pick in 2013 but has never been able to fully realize the talent that got him selected that high. 

Frazier’s story is different from Colás, but it helps illustrate the way that one or two bumps in even the most talented player’s road can throw everything off course. In Colás’ case, the Sox want to see growth in how he responds to those bumps in the road.

“You’re in the major leagues, you’re playing with the best in the world and you gotta control your emotions,” Grifol said. “He’s a guy that plays with a lot of flair and a lot of emotion, and we’re asking him to tone that down a little bit. I don’t want him to stop playing with fire or emotion. I just want, when mistakes are made, to stay calm and just understand that we’re going to learn from this and we’re going to move on, but we’re certainly not going to add to it.”

In order to trust whether Colás has matured enough, Sox fans will have to watch for what happens when the familiar tests start coming. Colás says he has learned how to better manage his emotional response in those situations.

“In the past I was just felt overwhelmed and I just put my head down,” he said. “Now, I’m able to just sit down and think about it and analyze what happened or the situation. That helped me to get better.”

From the media room adjacent to the Cubs locker room, three different waves of cheering were heard. One for each of the players who will be representing the Cubs in Seattle this year: Marcus Stroman, Justin Steele and Dansby Swanson.

This is Swanson’s second All-Star appearance and second in a row, and Stroman is returning to the Midsummer Classic for the second time as well. He last played in the 2019 game in Cleveland.

But for Steele, this recognition is a little different because it’s his first time as an All-Star.

“You grow up wanting to play major league baseball your whole life, and playing an All-Star game has obviously always been a goal, something to look forward to. It’s quite the honor,” he said.

Steele has emerged as one of the best starting pitchers in baseball, especially this season. After his last start against the Guardians on Friday, Steele’s ERA dropped to 2.43, the lowest in baseball. He may not tally the strikeouts at the rate of pitchers like Spencer Strider of the Braves, but Steele is stingy when it comes to letting runners get on base. Along with his league-leading ERA, he has the lowest WHIP among qualified National League starters.

After turning a corner last June, Steele has put together a full calendar year of strong pitching. He had a 0.98 ERA in his last seven starts of 2022 and committed over the offseason to continuing to improve, picking up his family and moving from their home in Mississippi to the Cubs’ spring training facilities during the winter. 

“This guy made a real dedication this offseason, moving to Arizona, putting the work in to be able to be this type of pitcher for us all season long,” Ross said. “His first half has been phenomenal. He’s a guy we lean on.”

All of that is part of why Steele has become one part of the one-two punch at the front of the starting rotation.

“I think everybody knows when he goes out on the mound, we feel like we’re going to get a win,” Stroman said. “And that’s pretty amazing to have as far as a feeling from a team, to know when a guy steps out on the mound, he’s going to give you a great chance to get a win.”

As a group, the starters have grown into a tightknit bunch, spending time watching each other throw bullpen sessions – something they didn’t do until this season – and the Steele/Stroman combo have taken to boosting each other on social media as well. Those kinds of things have played a role in Steele’s progress, Ross said.

“The maturity level has gone up so much this season,” Ross said of Steele. “It feels like he’s gotten to be that dude who you expect to dominate every time out because of how he’s grown.”

Stroman is have a Cy Young-caliber season in his own right. His 2.76 ERA ranks fourth in the National League, and he has held opposing hitters to a .205 batting average. Only Blake Snell’s is lower (.199) in the National League. And he has done all of this while throwing the second highest number of innings in the NL.

When Stroman was last named to the All Star roster, he was putting up similar numbers for the Blue Jays as he has been this season. In 21 starts before being traded to the Mets that year, Stroman posted a 2.96 ERA. But set some of his other numbers from that season against what he has done in 2023, and Stroman is outperforming anything he has done before. 

Stroman listed off the Cubs coaching and clubhouse staff when thanking the people involved in helping him put up personal best numbers at this stage in his career and so many seasons after last being named and All Star.

“Four years later, to still consider myself at the top of my game,” he said. “I truly feel like I’m in my prime, and I feel like I’m going to stay here for a long time.

“That’s always pretty special, just to be named amongst your stars at the highest level. It just puts all the work and everything that you do for this game, it just kind of puts it into perspective.”

Like his counterpart in Steele, Stroman is the kind of player his team trusts to put them in a position to win when he takes the mound. He leads both leagues with 14 quality starts.

“The moments this season where we’ve struggled to put up Ws, and his turn comes around and he finds a way to carry us across that finish line. He’s put us on his back multiple times,” Ross said.

Both of these pitchers owe some degree of their success to the defense behind them, especially up the middle. Among NL shortstops, Swanson has the highest fWAR, and he is tied with Francisco Lindor for the highest OPS. Expand to both leagues, and Swanson’s 2.9 wins above replacement ranks just third behind Wander Franco (3.7) and Bo Bichette (3.0).

Swanson came to Chicago from the Braves on a seven-year, $177 million contract over the offseason. Many players who have come to the Cubs with a large contract looming above everything they do have struggled in their first season at Wrigley. Swanson has only picked up where he left off in Atlanta.

“Never has he shied away from any moment. All he wants to do is play. He wants to grind. He wants to be in there for the boys,” Ross said. “He has the work ethic, the championship pedigree and the mindset to be that guy. The staple that we needed here in the middle of our diamond.”

Being named an All-Star is a recognition players don’t take lightly, because they know in some cases it’s because they have been chosen by the fans, and in others, by their peers.

“The guys you play against, and to be able to have that kind of respect of other guys around the league and coaches, I think that’s something to not overlook as well because there’s some weight that goes into it, and for them to have that respect, whether it’s your teammates or guys you play against, it’s really, really neat,” Swanson said.

One of the unique things about the All-Star game is that, for at least a day or two, players get to be teammates with guys they otherwise wouldn’t. Steele said he is looking forward to talking to Clayton Kershaw and gleaning some things from him. And Swanson, who missed that time with his NL teammates in 2022 because he got permission to go watch his wife play in the CONCACAF championships in Mexico, is excited to make up for some lost time with the NL’s best.

“It’s so cool to pick the brains of anybody and everybody that’s there,” Swanson said. “Obviously, they’re successful for a reason, and to be able to learn from what makes guys the best at what they do and to be able to take something from each person you’re there with is neat.”

The Cubs went into this season with Eric Hosmer and Trey Mancini set to platoon until Matt Mervis was ready to come up from Triple-A Iowa and take over. Or something along those lines. Hosmer was released on May 25, a few weeks after Mervis was called up, while Mervis put up a 47 wRC+ in just under 100 plate appearances and was optioned to Iowa on June 15.

On Tuesday, the Cubs called up Jared Young — already part of that group of 10 thanks to a brief stint in the majors last September — to be the next first baseman du jour.

“We’ve been watching him for a while,” Cubs manager David Ross said. “He’s been swinging the bat really well.”

Young is hitting .326 with 13 homers for the I-Cubs this season. This after he was outrighted and cleared waivers back in November. Young had to be added back to the 40-man roster on Tuesday in order to be called back to the majors.

“When stuff like that happens, you go back to work,” Young said. “I kind of looked at it as I want another opportunity to get back here.”

The question in the short term for Young is how well he can carry over what he’s done with his bat in Iowa to the big leagues. In his first go-round with the Cubs, he had a .732 OPS in 19 plate appearances. But his performance at the plate in Triple-A this season attracted enough attention for another shot. It’s tough to ignore a guy who has a 1.031 OPS and a .395 batting average in June. 

And it’s tough to ignore the general lack of production from the group of first baseman Ross has had to write into his lineups in 2023. The aforementioned Hosmer was worth -0.4 fWAR, and Mancini -0.5 going into this week. The latter could typically be relied on to at least be a steady hand on defense, but he made costly errors in the second inning in London on Sunday that helped the Cardinals come back from a 4-0 deficit. 

For what it’s worth, Mancini took the blame for that loss, and before Tuesday’s game, he was in the infield doing drills at first base — and doing so in air quality conditions bad enough to merit conversations between the league and the players association about whether or not to postpone the game against the Phillies. 

“He’s out there working. That’s who he is. He’s a worker,” Ross said. “He owned his mistake and he’s going to try to be better for it. 

“What more do you want out of your players than to take ownership of the mistakes or areas where they may have not had things go the way they want them to and then identify that and go out there and get better?”

While it is nice to see a veteran player do what Mancini did, the reality remains that the Cubs are still in contention, so they need more reliable and consistent production at first base. Especially with the stretch of 13 straight games against the Phillies, Guardians, Brewers and Yankees going into the All-Star break.

Unless he somehow hits in the majors like he has in Triple-A, Young is not going to fix this problem on his own. Cody Bellinger has stepped in as of late, but that is a move as much about easing him back into playing center field after his knee injury as it is about getting quality at-bats from the first baseman in the lineup. Where Young can provide value will probably be in specific scenarios for now.

“[He’s] mashing right-handed pitching,” Ross said. “That’s an area we’ve had some trouble in a little bit with when we have some heavy matchups, so he’ll be a guy who can pinch-hit off the bench, play some first, some outfield where it matches up.”

Obviously, if Young hits anything close to how he was in the minors, then he might force his way into more regular at-bats. Young believes he can do that.

“I think you take the confidence of everything that’s happened the last few weeks and the last couple months and bring it here,” he said. “I don’t think things are going to change.”

It’s more than simple confidence, though. Young said the hitting instructors in the Cubs’ system have done a lot to help mold him into the hitter we’re seeing this season, and he credited John Mallee in particular. Mallee is back in the Cubs system as the Triple-A hitting instructor, but when he was last with the team, Mallee was the major league hitting coach from 2014 through 2016.

“As you get older in baseball, you always look to learn more,” Young said. “With that knowledge, you put it into the things you’re good at. When things match up, that’s when you start to get some real production.”

Young wasn’t in the lineup against Phillies southpaw Ranger Suárez in Tuesday’s 5-1 loss, but the Cubs face righty Aaron Nola on Wednesday, so Young might get his first look then. But again, even if he does, it is not realistic to expect him to stop the revolving door of first basemen of the past two years. 

One, because that doesn’t seem to be in Ross’s plans, unless Young keeps hitting close to .400. Two, because he can play other spots on defense too (Young has played first, third, right and left field for Iowa this season). And three, because there are still other options.

Mervis shouldn’t be ruled out just yet. He didn’t get the results the Cubs hoped for when he was called up and struck out close to a third of the time, but Mervis would hardly be the first hitter to flounder a little in his first look at major league pitching. When Rizzo debuted with the Padres in 2011, he batted .141 with a 51 wRC+ in 49 games. 

The Cubs could fill a lineup card, and then some, with the guys who have played first base since Rizzo was traded. To name just a few: Alfonso Rivas, Frank Schwindel, P.J. Higgins, Hosmer, Mancini. Now enters Young, and maybe Mervis re-enters the picture the again in the near future. 

In the meantime, the Cubs have clawed their way back into contention after being 10 games under .500 a few weeks ago, and they have a crucial stretch of games to win coming up. With or without a consistent first baseman.

But after that game, Hendriks began to feel discomfort in his right elbow close to his forearm. Then following examination on Saturday, the decision was made to put him in the injured list, retroactive to June 10. According to general manager Rick Hahn, this injury is not unlike the right flexor strain that sidelined Hendriks for close to a month in 2022. At least based on the initial examination.

“Symptomatically it’s presenting similar to what we dealt with last year,” Hahn said.

Hendriks went on the injured list with that injury on June 14 and was able to return by July 4. But at this stage, it is too early to tell if following something close to last year’s recovery protocol is going to be possible.

“At this point we do not know if that’s going to be a similar path for this year. He’s undergoing additional examinations at this point,” Hahn said.

According to Hahn, the next update on Hendriks likely won’t come until Tuesday when the team is in Los Angeles.

Hendriks returned from the injured list on May 29 after winning his fight against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He has made five appearances and earned his first save of the season on June 6 against the Yankees. Given what he went through in his cancer treatment and then the atypical nature of his ramp-up to return to play, it might be fair to wonder if Hendriks’ elbow inflammation is a byproduct of the last six months. 

But Hahn does not believe that is the case. The team was especially cautious about Hendriks’ return to the mound.

“Based upon the fact that the number of medical professionals involved ranging from our orthopedic people to his oncologist, to rehabilitation specialist, to the number of check-ins with where he was at physically along the way, this is perhaps the most thoroughly vetted return to play of any player in certainly my recent memory,” he said. 

There’s never a good time for an injury, but the Sox have been playing their best baseball lately, so the timing of this injury will probably present another hurdle for the team to jump on their way back from an incredibly bad start in April. They are 21-17 since May 1 and 6-3 so far in June. Even after Sunday’s 6-5 loss, the Sox are in third place and only 4.5 games back in the AL Central.

“Obviously he’s a big part of our team, big part of our bullpen,” manager Pedro Grifol said. “It’s unfortunate, especially how he got through what he got through. It impacts us as a club emotionally, it impacts our roster. We gotta continue to move forward and hopefully he can recover from this. That’s all we can do at this point.”

Losing Hendriks now means that bullpen arms like Kendall Graveman, Joe Kelly, Keynan Middleton and Reynaldo López will have to resume picking up innings that might have been spots slated for Hendriks otherwise. That’s a job they have handled nicely; since May 1, the Sox bullpen has the fifth-lowest ERA (2.86) in the league. Graveman and López lead the team in saves with 6 and 4, respectively, and both will likely be called upon to pick up more in the weeks to come. They pitched for two months without Hendriks in the bullpen in the beginning of the season and had him back for two weeks. And even then, not as the officially designated closer yet. So for Grifol’s relievers, moving forward from this setback will be familiar territory.

“These guys are going to fall right back into where they were prior to Liam being here,” Grifol said. “They know what their roles are, we communicate them daily, and they’re going to continue to be great.”

Guys like Graveman and Kelly are openly flexible about their role out of the bullpen. Graveman said the job is simple: “Whenever your name is called, you go get three outs, and that’s kind of what we’ve told [Grifol] from the start of the season.”

And Kelly isn’t one to overcomplicate things either.

“It’s different every day, so nothing affects me,” he told CHGO on May 20. “I don’t give a shit. It’s one of those things, just get the ball and ‘alright.’”

The Sox lost to the Marlins Saturday when Kelly couldn’t hold a 1-0 lead in the ninth inning, and again in Sunday’s 6-5 loss when Graveman came in to secure a save with the Sox up two runs. After Lucas Giolito turned in a sparkling seven innings — allowing just one run via Jorge Soler’s solo shot in the fifth — Middleton took the eighth with the Sox up 5-1 and gave up solo homers to Solo and Garrett Cooper. Up 5-3 in the ninth, Graveman took ball and gave up the lead on Jean Segura’s home run, a walk to Soler, and Bryan De La Cruz’ double down the left field line.

“I thought I had the right pitch selection, Seby [Zavala] and I did, I just think I didn’t get to the right location,” Graveman said. “So, thought we had a good gameplan and I didn’t locate as well today. Got me behind in the counts. Didn’t finish guys when I was ahead in the counts.”

Before Sunday, Middleton had not given up a run since April 29 against the Rays. Graveman not since April 30, and he had given up a total of three hits since the start of May.

The bullpen has the added help of Garrett Crochet now as well, who returned from Tommy John surgery recovery on May 16. Crochet last pitched in 2021, and he has a 4.50 ERA in eight appearances since returning this season.

“He himself having gone through an extended rehabilitation, it does take a little bit to get those sea legs under you […] and get back to your previous level of performance,” Hahn said. “But I think you guys have all seen, we’ve all seen over the course of his early outings here, the stuff has returned back to the preexisting level and now it’s just a matter of getting him as consistent as he’s been in the past.”

The best-case scenario is that Hendriks’ injury is something akin to what happened last season. Because if it is, he could return around the time of the All-Star break. That is, assuming his path back to the mound is about the same as last year. 

But of course, any time a pitcher has elbow and/or forearm discomfort, the fear is that it is worse than something like a flexor strain. Needing Tommy John surgery could mean Hendriks isn’t back until late 2024, maybe not even until 2025. He will be under contract next year if the Sox decide to activate their club option and avoid a $15 million buyout that would be paid out in $1.5 million increments over the next ten years.

For now, the White Sox must wait and see how things look over the next few days.

“It’s just a matter of how does it present, how do you treat it and how do you get him back if we look at all the different treatment options and figure out what’s best,” Hahn said. “Again, the symptoms are very similar to what we had last year, but [we’re] not ready to say it’s a flexor strain until we can read a MRI.”

Since June started, the White Sox have won six of their seven games played. The latest thanks to a timely ninth-inning single by Luis Robert, Jr.

The Sox had stranded ten runners going into the ninth on Friday. Yasmani Grandal’s second inning solo homer provided the lone run; they had ten hits and one run to show for it. Normally, that’s a recipe for a maddening loss.

“I wasn’t frustrated that we weren’t scoring. And I know we were 0-for-10, 0-for-11 with runners in scoring position at the time. I wasn’t frustrated,” manager Pedro Grifol said. “You know why, because that’s good pitching over there. These guys are running out there really good arms. And we know the kind of baseball we have to play against these guys. And now they do too. It’s two good teams with really good pitching. These guys today, both teams, they made really good pitches when they needed to.”

But the Sox did get the one timely hit that made the difference. Despite leaving so many runners on base — including loading the bases with no one out in the third inning and then coming away empty-handed — Robert, Jr. found the right spot for a well-placed single. Elvis Andrus opened the ninth inning with a single against Marlins reliever Dylan Floro and then took second base on a wild pitch. Miami manager Skip Schumaker elected to intentionally walk left-handed batter Andrew Benintendi to try and set up a double play with Robert, Jr. coming up to bat.

“He’s a pitcher that throws a lot of sinkers, and I thought their plan was to face me trying to get a groundball, but at the same time, they were trying to not face a lefty,” Robert, Jr. said through team interpreter Billy Russo.

Though he understood the strategy of walking Benintendi to get to him, Robert, Jr. still took it as added motivation.

“I think every time that something like that happens, there’s a bigger desire for you to get a base hit, to (not) let your team down,” he said.

And instead of getting Robert, Jr. on a sinker, Floro went with an 0-1 slider that the Sox centerfielder dumped down the left field line so Andrus could score from second. Going into that at-bat, Robert, Jr. had struck out twice, flied out, and reached on a catcher’s interference.

“You can be 0-for-3 and get the game-winner right there. I’ve seen championships won on guys 0-for-3 and all of a sudden that last at-bat’s the one that counts and that’s the one you’re popping champagne,” Grifol said. “That’s why every at-bat is different and you’ve got to separate at-bats. You’ve got to flush the previous at-bat. Because you never know when you’re going to get that chance to win a game.”

“And you know what, he got a good pitch to hit that he can handle and he won the game for us.”

Grifol has called Robert, Jr. the best centerfielder in baseball right now, and not just for clutch hits like Friday’s. He regularly praises Robert’s defense. Blue Jays centerfielder Kevin Kiermaier is the only player with more defensive runs saved (10) than Robert (8) among major league centerfielders this season. Headed into Friday’s game, Robert’s 2.2 fWAR trailed only Aaron Judge and Corbin Carroll in that same group. And it put him ahead of Mike Trout.

The Sox will have to lean more on Robert, Jr. in the coming days. During Thursday’s doubleheader in New York, Eloy Jiménez felt discomfort just above his left calf. The Sox do not plan to put him on the injured list at this point, but Grifol made it a point to not call him day-to-day, either. Instead, Grifol said he expects Jiménez to be down anywhere between three and five days. He had a .764 OPS with two home runs and two doubles since returning from appendicitis on May 28.

Friday’s win put the Sox at 29-36, their best winning percentage since April 21. More notably, they are 3.5 games back in the division. They were 7.5 back when June started. That’s a steady climb, steady enough to get someone to prompt Grifol to check the standings. Something he hasn’t done much of this season.

“I actually did yesterday for the first time in a little bit,” Grifol said. “Somebody mentioned it on the plane and I saw we were 3 ½ back.”

There is a lot of season left, which presents plenty of opportunity for the Sox to keep climbing and capitalize on being in a weak division. They can more easily overcome a really bad start when the rest of the AL Central struggles to be above .500. For what it’s worth, Grifol’s bunch are doing their part. Since May 1, they are 21-15.

“Really, we’re just continuing to put in the work and following the process and staying even-keeled,” Friday starter Dylan Cease said. “When it wasn’t going our way, we were still putting in the work and the results weren’t going our way. Now we’re finally starting to see some more normal results.”

Andrus went on the injured list on May 13 with an oblique strain, and Gonzalez played like a starter in his absence. That’s the dream, though. Teams talk a lot about needing the next man up to step in and produce, and Gonzalez has done that. In his last seven games, Gonzales owns a 1.048 OPS and he’s hit three home runs. And his defense is drawing praise from teammates.

But Andrus was activated Friday, so Grifol has to determine the best spots to use his two second basemen. For now, he said, it will be matchup-based.

“We look at the pitching we’re facing, and we’re looking at who matches up better against that particular pitcher and that’s how we’re gonna play it,” Grifol said. “If somebody takes it and runs with it and he becomes the guy that takes on the majority of the [at-bats] then so be it. But we’re looking at matchups and who’s pitching and what kind of pitch shapes they have and swings that we’ve got and so on and so forth.”

On Friday, Gonzalez got the start against Reese Olson, who was making his major league debut for the Tigers, and he broke up a no-hitter in the sixth inning. The next day, Andrus was in the lineup. It was Gonzalez who factored into the 2-1 win on Saturday though; he pinch ran for Andrew Vaughn in the eighth inning and then in the tenth, his sacrifice bunt moved Yoán Moncada to third. Moncada scored the walk-off run on a wild pitch that struck home plate umpire Cory Blaser in the face mask. Saturday’s game was the first time in MLB history that teams combined to score three runs on wild pitches without scoring any runs by other means.

Two games are not enough of an indicator for how Grifol will use Andrus and Gonzalez, but working that out only succeeds when both players are on board with sharing playing time. In Gonzalez’s case, he’s the relatively unproven commodity. He has just over 200 career major league plate appearances across three seasons. Andrus is a 15-year veteran. Really, making this work is about convincing him to yield days in the lineup to Gonzalez.

Thankfully, Andrus is embracing the shared playing time.

“That’s good, that’s baseball,” Andrus said of the competition. “I told him, ‘Don’t feel bad, man. I did the same thing when I was younger.’ That’s just baseball. I want all my teammates, even if we play the same position, to do the best. At the end, it’s all about winning. Now me and him are gonna, I don’t say compete, but share playing time. If it’s for the best of the team, that’s what it’s all about.”

Philosophically, Grifol believes that healthy competition like this is good for his squad. Like a group of starting pitchers working to outdo each other when they get the ball, he believes that having playing time split like this between two guys can be a good thing.

“It raises your level of focus, it raises your game, it takes you to another level,” Grifol said. “Whether you’re competing against somebody else on your team or you’re competing against the other club. Competition is really, really healthy.”

Balancing playing time between players like this is also about finding other ways to get them days in the lineup. There’s opportunity to move them both around some defensively to do that. Gonzalez can play a little outfield – he has logged innings at all three outfield spots this season along with shortstop and third base – and Andrus can spell Tim Anderson at shortstop when needed.

“That versatility certainly allows them to continue to keep their bat in there if they’re hot,” Grifol said.

As a first-year manager, Grifol has not yet had to manage a player’s ego in a situation like this one. He said he has dealt with that kind of problem as a coach in the past, and he said he won’t shy away from the hard conversations when they inevitably come up in Chicago. In this case, there isn’t an issue, thanks largely to the veteran player embracing the big picture.

“He’s a team guy, and he understands what this is all about,” Grfiol said of Andrus. “He’s been on winning teams before, and he’s probably been the guy who has been on the other side. He comes in and takes some ABs from whoever was there. So he understands this.

“He’s got a really good mind for this, and he understands the game, he understands everything that is at stake, the expectations.”

Again, part of the reality here is that this has been a problem for two games. Gonzalez started one, Andrus the other. It is very possible that an injury elsewhere could force Grifol to lean on the defensive flexibility of either player. It is also very possible that one could emerge as the regular second baseman by performance. Andrus is batting .199 with a .526 OPS this season. Gonzalez has a much healthier slash line, but he rarely walks and has only recently started hitting all that well.

Playing time at second base is a competition between Andrus and Gonzalez for now, but unless either of them starts commanding the majority of at-bats, they could both yield the position to someone else. Jake Burger has sort of been in the conversation since April, and he made his first appearance at second this season during the series against the Angels, entering the May 31 game as a substitute in the eighth inning.

Ultimately, it will be up to one of those players to show that the job should be his on a full-time basis. But even if that doesn’t happen, Grifol has multiple good options to plug into his lineup. That’s a good problem to have.

“This is major league baseball. We’re here to do one thing. That’s win baseball games,” he said. “So there’s always competition. Even with guys that are every day players, there’s always competition. There comes a time when somebody’s coming up and you have to continue to perform.”

Before the series opener Friday night against the Tigers, the Sox reinstated Mike Clevinger from the injured list, who had missed a pair of starts with wrist inflammation. Earlier in the week, Liam Hendriks returned to the bullpen. In his lineup, Grifol wasn’t missing any of the core pieces.

“I am excited that we have a full roster. Now the challenge is going to be getting everybody in. But it’s a good challenge. It’s a good problem to have,” Grifol said. “One of the most important things for us is to continue to try to keep everyone healthy. Having a full roster like this and having some depth is going to allow us to rest some people more often than we have been able to.

“That’s important for us, to allow bodies to recover while we still have the depth in our lineup and the depth in our pitching.”

On Friday, the Sox beat the Tigers 3-0 with the right mix of good pitching, timely hitting, and sturdy defense. Along with health, each of those elements has been absent from the team at different points this season.

But against Detroit, all the pieces came together. Clevinger returned and pitched five innings, striking out six and allowing four baserunners. He was perfect through the first three innings. The bullpen of Keynan Middleton, Reynaldo Lopez, Joe Kelly, and Kendall Graveman kept the Tigers scoreless while the offense broke up Reese Olson’s no-hitter in the sixth, eventually scoring two runs that inning and tacking on a third in the seventh.

Good health might go a long way toward this group getting their season back on course. Injuries played a role in the team’s historically bad start in April, and as the Sox gradually got healthier in May, they won more games. The Sox posted a 15-14 record last month. But they will need a much better June to make up for a terrible first few weeks of the season.

Regardless, Grifol won’t entirely blame injuries for his team’s bad start, and he believes going through the struggles of the first month of the season may have done some good.

“We had some injuries in April that certainly affected us, but there’s no excuse for that,” he said. “We’ve still got to perform through injuries and you’ve got to battle through adversity. But we’ve learned from each other. We’ve made mistakes, that’s me included, but we were a better ballclub in May and we need to improve here in June and continue to improve in July and finish the year strong.”

Friday’s win could be a nice measuring stick for what the Sox are capable of. Obviously, when they check the boxes of good pitching, defense, and hitting, they are going to be hard to beat most nights. But when they add on to that by doing the little things well, that may do more for them to right the ship than simply getting healthy.

For example, getting three consecutive singles in the sixth inning scored the first two runs, but their insurance run in the seventh was partially the product of quality baserunning. Jake Burger pinch hit for Gavin Sheets after Yasmani Grandal drew a leadoff walk, and he hit a groundball that looked off of the bat like a sure double play. Instead, Burger beat the throw, making it a fielder’s choice and giving the Sox another out to keep the inning going.

Two batters later, Tim Anderson hit a two-out double, and Burger was able to score from first base and give the Sox the desired insurance run.

“Going first to home? He’s pretty good once he gets going, pretty damn good,” Grifol said. “His numbers once he gets going are pretty good percentile in baseball. First to home doesn’t surprise me, but out of the box caught my attention a little bit because that’s normally a routine double play. We needed him to stay out of that double play and he did.”

Along with Burger’s baserunning, Romy Gonzalez broke up the no-hitter in the sixth and made multiple impressive plays at second base, and Luis Robert showed off his range in center field. Both earned Clevinger’s praise.

“He made probably three plays that helped define the game tonight, let alone breaking up the no-hitter and getting the momentum started on the offensive side. He did it all tonight,” Clevinger said of Gonzalez.

And of Robert:

“Oh my goodness. I want to play wherever that man is playing. He’s unbelievable. Especially his first step. You should watch his first step and look at all the ground he covers. It’s like he’s standing at shortstop reading the ball off the bat. It’s crazy to see.”

The pieces for a winning team have always been there. One of the problems has been getting them all on the field at the same time. Another has been syncing up good performances. On Friday, the Sox had all of that, and the result was a textbook win.

They will have to keep doing that, day after day, series after series, for a long time in order to recover the lost ground in the division standings. As things stand after Friday’s win, the Sox are still eleven games under .500 and 7.5 out of first in the American League Central.

But it’s only June 2. The Sox have a healthy roster that performed well against Detroit. And they have over a hundred games left. Time is still on their side.

“We know it’s a long season. We have a lot of professionals who have done it for a very long time,” Middleton said. “It’s just the beginning. It’s a long season. We have a lot of making up to do but we are going to put in the work and make it happen.”

In the Cubs’ case, they look from the outside like a team that is perilously close to skidding out of control. They’re well below .500 and at the bottom of the division and the National League. They just got swept at home by the Reds and have the Rays – the best team in baseball – in town before going on a long road trip. Memorial Day could have been the death knell for hopes of a winning summer of Cubs baseball.

Instead, Marcus Stroman took the mound and delivered a complete game shutout.

“Throwing a [complete game] at Wrigley, that’s one of the top moments in my career,” he said.

A 1-0 win against Tampa Bay doesn’t necessarily mean the tides are going to turn back in the Cubs’ direction. They started off well in April, but May has been horrendous. The first month of the season showed how good they could be, but this last one has shown the opposite end of that spectrum. They are 9-17 in May, and it is going to take a lot of games like Monday’s for the Cubs to climb their way out of the hole they dug themselves into.

But getting on a roll has to start somewhere. Stroman limited the Rays – who lead baseball in batting average (.273) and runs scored (335) going into Monday’s game – to one hit, one walk, and one hit batsman. The Cubs had lost four in a row going into the Rays series, but the sweep against Cincinnati looked especially like a low point for the team. Saturday night’s loss, for example, took the Cubs from third in the National League Central to last. They also took on the lowest winning percentage in the NL that night.

“We needed a stop and to get things rolling,” Stroman said. “I think we’ve been on a little skid, not necessarily anything I’m worried about, baseball’s a game of trends and ups and downs, but I think it should hopefully give us a little momentum.”

Getting that momentum going in this series was important for Stroman on a granular level, too. He has struggled a lot against the Rays in his career; he was 5-8 with a 5.04 ERA against them headed into the Memorial Day start. But on Monday, he got a career-high 20 swings and misses and notched eight strikeouts. Wander Franco had the lone hit of the game, a well-placed single that left his bat under 70 mph leading off the seventh inning.

Leaning heavily on his sinker through the first two innings, Stroman got five of the first six outs via groundballs. He ended with 11 groundball outs and incorporated his cutter, slider and four-seam fastball as the game progressed, eventually racking up the eight strikeouts and getting a few outs on fly balls. Stroman said he and catcher Tucker Barnhart were so in sync that he never had to shake him off.

“It was like playing a video game. He made it super easy,” Barnhart said of his starter.

Stroman was so dominant that, other than Seiya Suzuki making a catch in the seventh inning and holding Franco on second base with his throw and then Dansby Swanson turning a double play to end that frame, there was little pressure on the defense. Typically, a strong outing on the mound is at least somewhat supported by the gloves behind him, but Stroman made sure they didn’t have to do a whole lot.

“It didn’t really feel like there was a ball that was going to kind of put us in a precarious situation,” Barnhart said. “There wasn’t really enough that I would say ‘That was a tough play’ or anything like that. Stro was just dominant today.”

Stroman took a no-hitter into the seventh inning and didn’t allow any baserunners to that point other than hitting Luke Fraley in the foot in the third. He took a couple of moments to acknowledge the Wrigley crowd, especially as the game went on, but he said he has to stay very present in the moment and the job of pitching. Otherwise, he can get out of a groove pretty easily.

“I’m truly just focusing on my body and my mind each and every pitch, and when I do that, I’m usually pretty good,” Stroman said. “I try to stay out of getting too excited or letting myself get kind of out of my zone, because when I do I feel like my mechanics and my pitches are off.”

There was no indication from Ross or Stroman that this was a deliberate performance, given the potential weight of the moment. Not that a player can ever simply decide to dominate one of the best teams in baseball on any given day, but it is hard to ignore the fact that Stroman stepped up in this spot in particular.

Again, it’s the Rays in town after a tough series against Cincinnati. After this, the Cubs leave for a very long west coast road trip against the Padres, Angels, and Giants. Getting out of the rut of May can look like a daunting task, and the start of June not much more hopeful.

Given what the Cubs have done recently and how much worse things could get going forward, Monday’s win might have been an important step in the right direction for the team.

“The circumstances, how we’ve been going as of late,” Ross said. “The pressure that you gotta feel coming in. It’s a lot piling up there to look forward if you want to and try to have a lot of negative thoughts. What big time players do is what he did today.”

Stroman’s performance was even more valuable because it kept the Cubs bullpen out of the game. They have struggled lately, losing a lead on Saturday most recently, and on the season as a whole: Their 4.65 ERA ranks 26th in baseball.

The Cubs had positive expectations for this season, and until May started, it looked like they could exceed those. The next few weeks will have to tell whether they end up in another July selloff, or whether they are giving the Wrigley faithful meaningful games in the summer and fall.

“We all want that. There’s nothing more that every single person wants more than that,” Stroman said. “Everyone in this clubhouse is doing everything in their power to go out there and perform, so hopefully things start going our way.”

But through eight starts with the Cubs, Taillon has struggled to meet those expectations. Where the rest of the rotation is doing pretty well – their collective 4.03 ERA ranks in the top third in the league – Taillon has not picked up his share of the slack. Again, being a veteran, the expectation is that he would be contributing to the success of the starting corps.

It’s hard to call his Saturday outing against the Reds – 4 ⅔ innings pitched, four runs on six hits, five strikeouts and one walk in an 8-5 loss – anything but more of the same. If it was a step in the right direction, it’s a baby step. His season ERA went from 8.10 to 8.04. 

Not what the Cubs are looking for from the guy they signed last winter for four years, $68 million. In terms of total dollar value, he has the fourth-largest contract on the team. But despite the results he’s getting so far, Taillon retains some confidence that he has a clear sense for what he needs to do going forward in order for things to improve.

“I throw a lot of pitches, and that can be a good thing, but it can also kind of cloudy up who I am and who I need to be,” he said. “I want to be able to throw a lot of pitches when I need to, but at the same time, let’s remember what my strengths are: four seam fastballs, curveballs, sliders. And then on top of that I can add a cutter, add a two-seam, but I felt like I got away from who I was at my core.”

There are some mechanical things going on as well he said, but Taillon said his main focus is on simplifying his pitch mix. He is not looking to abandon certain pitches, but instead start going to them more selectively.

Taillon and manager David Ross both characterized Saturday’s start as at least a modest step in the right direction. Ross was somewhat pleased with the way Taillon was attacking hitters and more aggressive in the strike zone, and Taillon said he felt like he was “a closer version to myself and where I need to be and where I should expect to be going forward.”

The results still aren’t there, but if there is cause to be at all optimistic about Taillon, maybe it’s that he seems at least outwardly confident that he has his finger on the problem. And pitching coach Tommy Hottovy is on the same page.

“He’s a guy who can do a lot of things,” he said. “It’s easy to get caught up in like, ‘Oh, I think I have this open right now’ or ‘I might be able to backdoor the cutter and then go to a chase slider’ and all those different things. 

“I think the key for us is let’s get his foundation of what makes him the best pitcher first, and then we can work off of that.”

The fact that Taillon is even in this position at the end of May is surprising. He was the Cubs’ biggest acquisition on the pitching side this offseason, and with good reason. Taillon was coming off of two strong seasons with the Yankees, particularly 2022 when he threw 177 ⅓ innings and posted a 3.91 ERA in 32 starts.

But his first two starts went poorly, his third on April 15 against the Dodgers went slightly better, and then he was sidelined by a groin strain for almost three weeks. Those two things have kept Taillon from being able to get on the kind of roll he needs, Ross believes. The Cubs skipper said he thinks the best remedy for Taillon will be to get the chance to string together a handful of good starts.

Doing that will renew a sense of confidence, Ross said, because veteran or not, he knows Taillon came to Chicago knowing the new uniform and sizable contract meant he would have to prove himself to a new fanbase.

“You feel like you’re trying to prove your worth to that group, whether it’s your teammates, the front office, the people that gave you the money and the trust to be good at your job,” Ross said. “I think that’s definitely something every guy to some extent internalizes and wants to do good for the organization and do good for their family and the fans and help win ballgames.”

That’s a common human experience. Heading into a new environment means there will be unfamiliarity, and with that, uncertainty. Ross likened it to a conversation he had with a couple of his children earlier this week about finishing a school year and moving up a grade level. In one of his kids’ case, that means changing schools. All the confidence and self-assuredness of being one of the oldest students in middle school goes away when you first walk into the halls of your high school. Taillon might be a veteran, and one who has changed teams and pitched for a big-market team before, but there was always going to be the pressure to feel like he had to prove himself. His situation here isn’t exactly the same, but the analogy works. 

“I think there’s probably a level of him trying so hard to impress. He wants to live up to his contract, he wants to impress the fans, and I think that’s a challenge,” team president Jed Hoyer said. “But I mean, we’ve seen it so many times with different guys. [Craig] Kimbrel struggled when he first got here; was awesome after that. [Yu] Darvish struggled when I first got here; almost won a Cy Young. So, I’m not the least bit worried.”

What now then? Taillon may be feeling optimistic that he is making progress even if the results aren’t showing up in the box score yet, but there is a growing sense of urgency about how the Cubs season is unfolding. At the 51-game mark, they are 22-29 and slipped from third in their division to last. By winning percentage, they have the worst record in the National League. Being in the weak NL Central means they are only 4.5 games out of first place, but the Cubs are on a bad trajectory.

Saturday’s loss wasn’t all about Taillon – Michael Fulmer took over for him and gave up the go-ahead homer in the fifth inning, and then Jeremiah Estrada surrendered two more runs – but how well he pitches going forward can help make a difference.

“When it’s my name called on that start dates, it’s time to put my head down and just start knocking those good starts out,” Taillon said.

After an abysmal April, they are showing some signs of life.

“It was tough at the beginning of the season, but now everybody’s better and performing at the level we’re supposed to perform,” Yoán Moncada said through team interpreter Billy Russo.

The Sox went 8-21 in the first month of the season, so even with a solid few weeks of games, they still sit 11 games below a winning record. They know they are performing well of late, but there are also realists in the clubhouse.

“We’re still well under .500. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Lucas Giolito said. “In this division, I think that [if] we keep playing the way we’re playing we’ll be in a good spot. That’s about it.”

Right on both counts. At 18-29 on the season, you’re not scaring anyone just yet. But in the American League Central, it is not outlandish to imagine that if the Sox keep piling up series wins, they can threaten the top of the division standings. Their division boasts just one team – the Twins – above .500, and if not for the Oakland A’s terrible play, the Royals would be getting a lot more attention for how bad they are.

The recipe for doing that – winning a series at a time and doing it consistently – has a lot of ingredients, but good pitching is one of the primary ones. Things are looking up on that front. Their starting rotation still has one of the higher ERAs in the league, but they seem to be collectively turning a corner.

Giolito went six innings against the Royals Saturday and allowed only one run on a solo homer to Salvador Pérez in the first inning. With that quality start, the Sox have had five quality starts in a row, with each member of the staff earning one, including Michael Kopech’s near-perfect dazzler on Friday night.

“I’m a believer in these guys,” manager Pedro Grifol said. “They have the ability to pitch deep in games, but they also have the ability to pitch and at times dominate. And even when they don’t have their stuff, they have the ability to go out there and give us 95, 100, 105 pitches and give us what we need that day.”

The bullpen is coming together, too. Liam Hendriks is still progressing toward his return from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the latest update from Grifol was that he will throw another sim game in Cleveland next week, and then the team will assess from there. Reading between the tea leaves, it would seem that Hendriks might be physically ready to pitch, but his return will probably happen once he feels like he is ready to perform to the standard he’s accustomed to, and once he has amassed enough work to try and replicate as close to the equivalent of a spring training workload as possible.

In the meantime, other bullpen arms have stepped up in his absence. Joe Kelly came into Saturday’s game with 16 strikeouts, seven hits allowed, and one walk in 11 ⅓ innings pitched to that point. In other words, for every baserunner allowed, he has struck out two. Kelly added a 17th strikeout Saturday, tilting that ratio in his favor a little further.

Kendall Graveman has a 3.26 ERA while keeping opposing hitters to a .162 batting average, and he has three saves and six holds so far, including finishing Kopech’s brilliant performance Friday. With Hendriks out, Kelly, Graveman, and the rest of the bullpen have had to be flexible about their roles.

“We had a meeting, and we said, ‘Look, there’s no ego in this room. We don’t care if we get a save or a hold. Whenever we pitch we’re just going to go out and compete until you tell us that we’re done’,” Graveman told CHGO.

“Our job is simple. Whenever your name is called, you go get three outs, and that’s kind of what we’ve told [Grifol] from the start of the season.”

It helps to have veteran arms like Kelly and Graveman in the bullpen to spearhead this kind of mentality. Experience taking on a lot of different roles helps – Kelly has been a starter, a long reliever, and a high-leverage bullpen arm in his career – but getting guys to take on the role that’s best for the team over the one they might want for themselves requires having the right personnel.

“You gotta sign the guys with the personality like that. You gotta find the right people who don’t really care about that,” Kelly told CHGO. “That goes into doing your research and understanding what type of people you have in your clubhouse and who you have in your pen.

“It’s different every day, so nothing affects me. I don’t give a shit. It’s one of those things, just get the ball and ‘alright.’”

This has worked of late, but like the team as a whole, they are recovering from a very poor start to the season. Even with the sturdy performances lately, Sox relievers still have the second-highest bullpen ERA in baseball (5.52).

But that’s on par with where this team is as a whole in the third week of May: They have played pretty well lately, but they were very, very bad for the first 30ish games of the season. It will take a lot to turn the Titanic around. The good news is that putting the last few weeks of Sox baseball under the microscope would seem to show that all the right pieces are in place for them to – potentially – accomplish an epic turnaround.

In the series opener against the Royals Friday, he showed off how dominant he can be when he can challenge aggressive hitters with his fastball and effectively mix it with his breaking and offspeed pitches.

Piloting a 2-0 win, Kopech went eight scoreless innings with ten strikeouts and just one hit allowed – a broken bat single by Michael Massey in the sixth that broke up Kopech’s perfect game bid. Kopech still ended up facing the minimum number of hitters because Jackie Bradley, Jr. grounded into a double play after Massey’s hit.

“This is what I’ve learned over these past few years in the big leagues,” Kopech said, “that if you’re not synched up and you’re just trying to throw hard you’re gonna put yourself more at risk than anything or it’s just gonna be really painful.”

That fastball can still cook, though. Kopech got over 99 miles per hour twice, one of those on the last pitch he threw that ended the eighth inning. Kopech said he restrained his fastball a little in the early innings before letting it fly some as the game went on. 

First pitch strikes were a cornerstone of the game plan, and on that front, Kopech succeeded. After nearly taking Bobby Witt, Jr.’s head off with the very first pitch of the game, Kopech got a strike on the first pitch to 18 of the 24 batters he faced.

“The biggest thing we talked about is strike one,” pitching coach Ethan Katz said. “Get strike one and control our counts. When you do that, it’s a little bit better outcomes for him.”

White Sox manager Pedro Grifol has had many chances to see Kopech from the other side of the diamond, so he’s familiar with how powerful Kopech’s fastball can be. But now that he has seen it up close in bullpen sessions and as Kopech’s manager, there’s a different appreciation for that pitch.

“His fastball, it’s got another gear to it. Today it might have had two,” he said. “He threw some fastballs in fastball counts that he was able to get by good hitters. These guys have some good hitters, they’re young, they’re aggressive, they’ve got some bat speed.”

Kopech said the game plan catcher Seby Zavala helped develop was also about his pitch mix to go with the fastball. Zavala suggested going to his curveball and shorter slider – instead of the sweeper – more often, which made things easier for Kopech to have the kind of control he showed Friday. Historically, his walk rate has been high, something he knows hitters try to work to his disadvantage by extending at-bats. So getting ahead of batters more often in this start kept Kopech in control of each at-bat. 

Between starts, Kopech has been working on his mechanics so that he can get better at throwing each of his pitches from the same arm slot, he said. Along with that, he has been focusing on staying mentally in control during his starts as well. Kopech said he felt both his mechanics and his mental focus click during Friday’s start.

If there is going to be a turnaround for the season as a whole, one of the things that will need to change is how well the starting pitchers have performed, and there are positive signs in that regard. Headed into Friday’s game, the White Sox starting staff ranked 24th in the league with a 5.09 ERA. But consider the rotation’s most recent cycle: Dylan Cease threw a quality start against the Guardians on Thursday, Mike Clevinger did the same the day before, Lance Lynn did it on Tuesday, and Lucas Giolito missed a quality start by one run last Sunday. 

Consistency will be the question, both for whether this run from the rotation and whether Kopech’s start was a blip or the beginning of a new norm. For the team as a whole, that’s the biggest desire Grifol has.

“The pitching, the bullpen, base running, the defense, the quality of at-bats, we’re capable of doing that consistently,” he said. “Obviously, this is a game that is played every day. You’re not going to do it every single day, but I’d like to ramp up our percentage of quality games as a group.”

Stabilizing the bullpen will help too. The White Sox relievers rank second to last in ERA in the majors, but there could be good news coming soon. Liam Hendriks threw a live bullpen session Friday, but the Sox have been mostly mum about what’s next. His session looked good and reports were that he felt good too, but the team has kept the details of his timetable close to the vest.

Katz did say that the team and Hendriks were both happy with how Friday’s work went, but there was no plan yet for what would happen next with the closer.

“Everything was a step in the right direction from the stuff that we had looked at and where he’s going,” he said. “So it’s just…it just takes time, and we’re just trying to make sure we’re getting all the right information and being able to evaluate it properly.”

After a disastrous April, the best path forward for the White Sox is to win a series at a time and hope to capitalize on a weak division. Since the start of May, they have won three of the five series they have played this month, and they have not been swept.

Getting more nights like the one Kopech had Friday will do a lot for his team’s hopes of getting up to .500 and then maybe more.

“I certainly feel like I was able to find something that clicked tonight, both physically and mentally,” he said. “Mechanical things are always going to be daily tweaks that I can work on. That’s the beauty of having four days in between, so I can get to work on this stuff everyday. But the mentality has to be something that I work on away from the park, no matter where I’m at. 

“I’m certainly hoping that I can take this one with me the rest of the season.”

The story on that front is the same each time, it’s just the names that change. The same day Yoán Moncada returns from a back injury, Elvis Andrus strains his oblique. The former was reinstated from the injured list on Friday, and the latter took his place on the IL Saturday.

Adding on, Eloy Jiménez is recovering from an appendectomy, Tim Anderson has not been back long from a left knee sprain, Jake Burger is working his way back from an oblique strain of his own, Yasmani Grandal has been out for two games since leaving in the fourth inning of Thursday’s game with a balky hamstring, and the Sox have been without their star closer, Liam Hendriks, all season. Hendriks looks like he is near a return, but the Sox injury-related transactions log has been busy.

A lot of things have to go wrong for a team to start 13-27 through their first 40 games, but count this among them. 

“That’s part of it. I think the whole league is going through something like that,” manager Pedro Grifol said. “We just gotta adjust and move on and continue to work. Just give an opportunity to somebody else to come in and do the job.”

It’s true that every team deals with injuries. The White Sox are definitely not uniquely troubled here. But the difference might be coming from who gets injured, how frequently, and how well they are able to do what Grifol described and have someone come in and do the job.

Take the core of Moncada, Anderson, Jiménez, Luis Robert, Jr., and Yasmani Grandal. Since the start of the 2021 season, they have all been in the lineup together for just 20 games. Twenty. Last year, then manager Tony LaRussa was able to put all five of those names in a lineup only two times all season. When this group does play together – surprise, surprise – the Sox have a winning record. In the 46 total games they have spent on the field at the same time since 2020, the Sox are 31-15.

Every team does indeed deal with injuries, but it’s one thing to have to rely on backup players here and there, but it’s another for that to be your modus operandi.

“I think it’s not a secret that we haven’t been playing at the level that we all know we can do, for many reasons,” Moncada said Friday via team translator Billy Russo. “One of those factors is injuries, but it’s not an excuse.”

Speaking from the other side of the diamond for the first time in his career, former Sox first baseman José Abreu offered the same assessment for what went south for the team in 2022 in particular.

“I think the health was the biggest thing last year,” he said through Astros translator Jenloy Herrera. “We just weren’t healthy enough last year and I think for a team like this, it’s very hard to win games when you’re not healthy.”

It’s all enough to overshadow the times when the Sox look like a proper baseball team. The potential is always there, usually tamped down by the revolving door to the IL, but a handful of times this season, they have shown the possibility that they could be real American League contenders.

Like Saturday night against the Astros. On all fronts, the Sox performed, and they got a 3-1 win to show for it. Dylan Cease threw his first scoreless start since September 25 of last year, going six innings and spreading out four hits and two walks. The bullpen of Reynaldo Lopez, Joe Kelly, and Kendall Graveman followed with three (mostly) shutdown innings. The lone run allowed was on a tough-read chopper single by Jake Meyers in the seventh inning. The lineup had 13 hits, including Robert’s second home run in as many games, and they came through with go-ahead and insurance runs in the eighth after the Astros tied the game the previous inning.

Truly, on all fronts, this was a pretty aesthetically pleasing Sox win. There were flaws – the aforementioned tricky defensive play in the seventh and nine stranded runners – but overall, Saturday was the kind of game that should be possible for the Sox every time out.

“If we play like that consistently we’re going to be pretty deadly,” Cease said. “We’re showing what we’re capable of, now it’s just consistency with it.”

That last part has been the challenge last season and this one. Injuries are certainly one factor getting in the way, and arguably one of the biggest. And though his OPS with the Astros is well below .500 so far this year, not having Abreu around changes the mentality in the clubhouse.

“He taught us to never put your head down,” Moncada said of his former teammate. “No matter what, the good moments, the bad moments, just keep working hard. Try to go out and do your best. That’s how he did it, right?”

With Abreu gone, the guys in the Sox clubhouse will have to look to other examples. Anderson, who was reinstated from the IL less than two weeks ago, collected three hits on Saturday, but at times he looked like he was still running gingerly. He spent three weeks on the shelf with a knee sprain. 

“Timmy’s giving us the best he’s got right now,” Grifol said. “Obviously he had that injury, and he came back quickly. He heals quickly, but again, it takes time with an injury like that. It takes time to feel 100 percent. He’s just grinding through it, he’s giving us everything he’s got.”

The Sox will need a lot more games like Saturday’s to climb out of the hole they dug themselves in April, and they’ll have to hope they can get and stay healthy enough to give themselves a chance to do it.

At that time, he was summoned to the majors because his defensive versatility would help Cubs manager David Ross plug some holes opened by injuries to Nico Hoerner, Jason Heyward and Nick Madrigal over the previous week. To some extent, he is back in Chicago because of the same ability. The Cubs don’t have the same injury woes this May, but Morel can get himself consistent at-bats by virtue of his ability to play in several spots on the field.

That’s a big part of the reason why he was called up while Nelson Velázquez was optioned down to Triple-A Iowa on Monday. The latter only plays the outfield, and those spots are currently locked down by Ian Happ, Cody Bellinger and Seiya Suzuki.

“We’ve got limited spots for at-bats right now, so we’re trying to mix and match that,” Ross said.

It helps, too, that Morel has been hitting the bejesus out of the ball in Iowa. In 134 Triple-A plate appearances, he batted .330 with a 1.156 OPS. He hit 11 home runs already, and he routinely posted exit velocities well over 100 mph. In other words, if you keep hitting screamers, you quickly make a push for a call to the show.

“He’s proven that Triple-A, he’s better than that league and deserves a shot here,” Ross said.

It’s true that Morel’s defensive versatility is a part of the reason he is in Chicago and Velázquez is not. But the same issue of how to get the youngster consistent at-bats will hover over Morel as it did for Velázquez. That was one of the benefits of sending Morel to Iowa for the first month of the season. Having everyday playing time in Triple-A helped him to grow more comfortable in his plate approach, and the results spoke for themselves.

Morel took advantage of his opportunity with the big league club last year, but it was evident that as major league pitchers adjusted to him, he struggled to adjust back. That’s one of the integral skills to sticking around in the majors for any prolonged period of time.

Matt Mervis has been in the majors for less than a week after getting his call-up Friday, but he said he was prepped for what to expect in that regard before getting here.

“It’s going to be an up and down process all year. People describe it as a yo-yo,” Mervis said. “Teams attack you a certain way, and you adjust, and they start attacking you differently, then you adjust to that.”

Last season, Morel just couldn’t do that. He hit .283 in both of his first two months after being called up, but then it was a steady decline: .224 in July, .183 in August and .182 in September/October.

Ross chalked up Morel’s demotion to Iowa at the start of the year to roster construction, but that kind of drop off offensively might call for a reset in the minors. The Cubs have done it before with other top prospects: Happ started the 2019 season in Iowa, and Kyle Schwarber was sent down for a short stretch in 2017 amid struggles that year.

One of the reasons for Morel’s issues in 2022 and the need for him to start the season in the minors was the need for better quality in his at-bats. His strikeout rate last year finished at 32.2 percent in 425 plate appearances; it sat at 40.3 percent in August and 36.3 precent in September/October.

“Everybody knows I have a problem with my strikeouts,” Morel said. “So that’s where I made an adjustment. I’m trying to get good at-bats, make more contact, put the ball more in play.”

Morel has only cut the strikeout rate down slightly while in Iowa this season. But despite still striking out at a rate over 30 percent, Morel’s walks are up significantly (12.7 percent in Iowa this year compared to 8.9 percent with the Cubs in 2022).

He seems to have proven he can make those kinds of adjustments in Triple-A, so defensive flexibility aside, there’s the reality that, at some point, he needs to show that he can do it at the major league level, too.

“He’s deserving of the opportunity to prove that the first half of when he was up here last year is who he is,” Ross said, “and I think we have a lot of confidence in that.”

The question will be how Ross gets Morel in the lineup consistently enough to justify this call-up from a development standpoint.

It does Morel no good to return to the majors and then play sporadically. This move was as much about him needing a chance to show he can produce at this level as it was about not wanting Velázquez wasting much more time with inconsistent at-bats. But that means Morel can’t be saddled with limited playing time, either.

Getting Morel enough chances to justify this move will be a tough job for Ross, who has a much more veteran-heavy roster this year than last. Players like Bellinger and Dansby Swanson aren’t going to surrender starts too often for the sake of a player like Morel getting his at-bats. For that reason, he may have to embrace a mixed bag of duties.

“He’s going to be ready when I put his name in the lineup, he’s going to be ready when I call his name off the bench,” Ross said. “That’s where he should be. There’s a lot of guys that have long resumes that have earned playing time and earned contracts and earned a lot of things that are there. I think as a young player you understand that, but you also gotta stay ready for your opportunity.”

These opportunities sometimes have a way of popping up when you least expect it.

In the fifth inning of Monday night’s 3-1 loss against the Cardinals, Hoerner pulled up while running from first to third on a Swanson double that could’ve scored him. He exited the game with left hamstring tightness, per the Cubs, and Madrigal took his place. Considering Morel appeared in over 30 games for the Cubs at second base last year, if Hoerner is forced to miss any time, this might be the opening to get Morel those at-bats.

In the meantime, Morel picked up right where he left things last season: He was all smiles in the Cubs locker room, spent several minutes greeting ballpark staff before the game and bear-hugged former teammate Willson Contreras (another familiar face back in town Monday night).

Morel wasn’t bitter after starting the season in Triple-A. He worked hard to prove he could make the improvements the Cubs wanted to see. He was one the best hitters in the minors over the last month, but now, he’ll work to make sure the Cubs can’t send him down again.

He emerged from that session with an increased sense of confidence about where he is in the rehab process and in the timetable for his full-time return to Wrigley.

“It’s going to happen really quick,” he said.

The plan is for Hendricks to fly back to Des Moines after this weekend’s series against the Marlins and then make another start on Tuesday against the Toledo Mud Hens. He hopes to get up to around 75 pitches on Tuesday, Hendricks said, and then he and the team will assess from there. The Iowa Cubs are at home all week, so there is a good chance he will make another rehab start on Sunday for them.

After that, it could be time for Hendricks to rejoin the Cubs rotation for the first time since last July. A rotation that, going into Saturday, had the lowest ERA (3.20) in the National League. Their success has made it easier to go through his rehab a step at a time, Hendricks said.

“Every single guy, it’s just one guy to the next dominating, so that creates a little more patience for me,” Hendricks said. “I just want to be sharp and be right. Whenever my name is called, I want to get the ball and be able to dominate along with the rest of them.”

Getting fully healthy was the first stage of his rehab process, so being able to get on the mound in game action has been important for Hendricks to see that his shoulder is truly recovered from the capsular tear that required surgery last year.

“When I got into that first game, there was still a little bit of a governor on there, a little brake, so just getting through my first outing and my first game, bouncing back and still not feeling anything,” Hendricks said, “that really showed me that I was in the clear. To be in competition, to be full go, no holding back, and respond and bounce back from that, I feel like I’ve cleared all those hurdles.”

A long time away from the team can be as mentally taxing as it is physical, so getting back to Wrigley for a weekend was important for Hendricks for more reasons than just his bullpen session.

“Everybody was excited to see Kyle this weekend. I think he needed that,” Drew Smyly said. “He’s been locked in on rehab for so long, I think it’s good to take yourself out of that element and be around the guys for a weekend.”

Cubs manager David Ross said he felt an energy boost personally, just from seeing Hendricks around the ballpark again. He joked that he wasn’t going to let Hendricks leave, even for a rehab start. It likely helped Hendricks mentally too that he was in town for the debuts of Matt Mervis and Miguel Amaya, both of whom collected their first major league hits and runs batted in on Friday and Saturday, in a 4-1 win in the series opener against the Marlins and a come-from-behind 4-2 win on Saturday.

His shoulder appears to be in good shape, so the last step before returning to the mound for the Cubs is getting his mechanics right. Hendricks said he has struggled with consistency on that front – probably a product of rust brought on by a long layoff – and getting in-person feedback on his delivery was one of the reasons he came to Chicago to throw a bullpen session.

Even just a couple of days with Cubs pitching coach Tommy Hottovy and the rest of the staff have helped him make some important adjustments, Hendricks said. He had been getting feedback from them on video of his minor league rehab outings, but being able to pitch in front of Hottovy in person Saturday was important for Hendricks to start getting better results on the mound.

He has felt physically healthy after two outings with Triple-A Iowa, but the stat line hasn’t been pretty: a 20.77 ERA in 4.1 innings where he has averaged putting almost three runners on base per inning. The most important thing at this point is that he is physically fine, but if Hendricks is going to add to the success of the rotation, he has to sort out what is going on with his mechanics.

Some of what he has done, Hendricks said, has been to cut down on the amount of yoga he had been doing and to shift instead to trying to tighten up his body. The flexibility and looseness had started to work against him.

“Things were just getting so loose, and I was losing my arm behind me,” Hendricks said. “I was getting so stuck behind the rubber because my body was moving quick. I just didn’t have my foundational point of getting over the rubber and moving quick from there. My shoulder level, everything was kind of exaggerated, I was behind the ball, I was underneath it.”

Hendricks said the life on his pitches has felt good. They are coming out of his hand just fine, but wobbly mechanics are keeping them from going where he wants them to. His usual velocity is there too – he joked about touching 90 mph with his fastball – so provided that he gets his delivery sorted out, there is reason to expect Hendricks can come back and help make the Cubs pitching situation even better.

His return will force tough decisions about the rotation. The top three spots of Marcus Stroman, Justin Steele, and Smyly have been sharp all season, and Jameson Taillon returned from a groin injury on May 4. The only pitcher in the rotation who could realistically be optioned to the minors is Hayden Wesneski, but he is showing signs of improvement of late. In his last two starts, Wesneski has allowed two earned runs, and he tossed a seven-inning quality start on April 17 against Oakland.

Figuring out how to get Hendricks into the rotation falls into the category of problems managers hope to have, and it is one that Ross will likely have on his hands soon. In the meantime, his teammates are ready to see him back.

“There’s always a spot for Kyle Hendricks. If he’s healthy and he’s right, he’s going to fit in just fine,” Smyly said. “Kyle’s been an absolute stud for the Cubs for a really, really long time, and I know he’s really close, and I know he’s chomping at the bit to get back and help this team.”

This is a much-needed sliver of good news as the White Sox stretched their losing streak to nine games. The latest dropped game, Friday night’s 3-2 loss to the Rays, exhibited many of the ways the Sox have been a bewilderingly frustrating team this season.

Before the game and on the heels of a 14-5 loss the night before, manager Pedro Grifol talked about the importance of his team not making mental mistakes on defense. 

“That can’t happen,” he said. “That’s not a part of who we are. That’s been addressed and we’ll move forward today.”

But those lack of focus errors didn’t take long to impact Friday’s game. In the first inning, a miscommunication on a Brandon Lowe fly ball in the first inning allowed Yandy Diaz to score from third. No one was covering second base as Lenyn Sosa made the catch, and when Sosa got the ball, he chose to throw to second anyway instead of making the play to keep Diaz at third.

“Again, mental mistakes against championship caliber teams,” Grifol said after Friday’s loss. “You don’t win like that.”

And there were issues besides defensive gaffes. Kendall Graveman gets the loss in the box score because of the home run he surrendered to Isaac Paredes in the ninth inning, but the offense had sputtered badly before that. 

A solo home run by Andrew Vaughn in the first inning tied the game, and Jake Burger’s team-leading seventh homer of the season gave the Sox the lead in the second inning. But that was ultimately all the Sox had to show for themselves offensively. Otherwise, they went 0-10 with runners in scoring position and stranded at least one runner in each of the third through seventh innings, and then two more in the bottom of the ninth.

Graveman, who was pitching for the second night in a row, was visibly upset in the Sox clubhouse following the loss.

“It’s just tough. The boys fought and we had a chance at the end and kept fighting,” he said. “I’m solely responsible. Two nights in a row giving up solo homers doesn’t sit well with me.”

There was promise that the losing streak would stop at eight games. Grifol opened the postgame interview with praise for starter Lucas Giolito, who tossed his third quality start of the year, going into the seventh inning while allowing just two runs on eight hits. Headed into Friday’s start, Giolito’s walk rate was all the way down to 5%, by far the lowest of his career. Against the Rays, he walked none.

And this was in spite of a warning given to both benches in the first inning, after Luis Robert, Jr. was hit by Rays starter Zach Eflin. Grifol argued the warning, saying after the game that he does not agree with the rule that calls for mutual bench warnings in that kind of situation. Grifol was eventually ejected, and for the second night in a row.

“I don’t agree with that rule. I don’t agree with they hit our guy and we get warnings,” he said. “I don’t agree with it. Never have, never will. As long as I’m in this game and beyond when I’m in this game, I don’t agree with that. That’s just not the way I was brought up in this game.”

Getting Crochet – and eventually Liam Hendriks – back in the bullpen is almost certainly going to be a good thing for the Sox. A nine-game losing streak means a lot more is going wrong than just one part of the team, but having those two as late-inning options should help to start steering this ship in the right direction, especially in situations like Friday’s, where Graveman is called upon to take the ninth inning.

Crochet will head to Double-A Birmingham and make his first appearance on Sunday, and then eventually move up to Triple-A Charlotte before rejoining the major league team. Crochet was a 2020 first round draft pick and debuted late that September, so this will be his first taste of minor league life. Hendriks threw off of the mound in an extended spring training game in Arizona on Friday, but there is no timetable for him going forward yet.

In Crochet’s case, he said the plan is for him to assess how best to move forward a day at a time, but one of the main things will be how he recovers from each appearance and feels the next day.

“Just feeling good, recovering good. Just being confident, and that’s pretty much it,” he said. “Got some checkmarks I gotta hit along the way as far as two out of three, multiple innings as well throughout the rehab assignment.”

In the meantime, there’s the reality that the Sox have not technically or mathematically reached a point where this season is unsalvageable, but it is hard to look past the historically bad start the team is having. So bad that national pundits are already putting out trade deadline hypotheticals and general manager Rick Hahn is worried about his job security. 7-20 is their worst start to a season since Harry Truman was president, and even without the nine-game losing streak, they would still be well below .500.

“It sucks. There aren’t too many words to describe it. Shitty,” Giolito said. “I have faith in these guys, faith in myself. We’ve just got to try and put it together.

“I hate losing. I’m going out there trying to win these games. I know we’re all trying but we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to turn this thing around.”

It is also hard to ignore the fact that current Cubs first basemen have not produced much at the plate. Through their first 22 games, they combined for a .233 average, which ranked 26th in the league, and they combined for just three home runs. That group’s -0.6 fWAR is the second lowest in baseball.

Meanwhile, Mervis slashed .309/.379/.606 with 36 home runs and 119 RBI across three levels of the Cubs farm system last year, and through his first 19 games in Iowa this season, he has only continued to rake, adding on 5 home runs to his minor league total.

As he has done this, the Cubs have been mostly successful, sitting at 13-10 after a 5-3 loss to the Padres Wednesday night. They still hold the highest run differential (+43) in the National League and the third-best team OPS in baseball. They have mostly had production from all spots in the lineup, but again, with Mervis crushing balls in Triple-A right now and the first basemen in the majors seemingly not producing all that well, this would seem like the time to bring Mervis up to the big leagues.

But Trey Mancini would like a word.

His first two weeks of the season were bad, there’s no question. After a week of games, he was batting .182, and it took until April 11 for him to get an extra-base hit of any kind. He connected for a home run in that game, but then went on a seven-game stretch without any other extra-base hits that also dropped his batting average from .275 to .196. Cubs manager David Ross gave him a few days off to clear his head at that point, and that may have done the trick.

Since taking a break for a couple of games, Mancini is batting .333 with a .625 slugging percentage. When the Cubs trailed 2-0 in the bottom of the fourth Wednesday, he launched a two-run shot to left field that went 400 feet and left his bat at over 109 miles per hour.

“Give him a couple of days off, give him a little bit of a breather down at the bottom of the lineup, then put him right back where he belongs. Looks really good and has for a couple games now,” Ross said.

Mancini has experienced slow starts before and knows enough not to be rattled by them, but there is the reality of added pressure that comes from being on a new team.

“You’re at a new place, new fans, and you want everybody to know what you can do and like you. There’s a little bit of that,” he said.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve started like this a lot of times in my career. It was tough, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time you realize you’re only 20 games in.”

One of the things Mancini said he has been working on is how he gauges the success of his at-bats. The desire to produce can cause any hitter to start chasing pitches out of the zone and to stray from their plan at the plate. For Mancini, he said he zeroed in on that and has worked to stay focused on measuring himself by the quality of his plate appearances rather than just by the outcomes.

“Judging the success of the at-bat on how well I committed to the plan and stayed with it rather than just the end result,” he said.

Through the admittedly small sample size of about a week’s worth of games, it would appear that Mancini is trending in the right direction. And that complicates things for Cubs fans clamoring to see Mervis entrenched in the lineup and at first base. It’s tempting to think that he will single handedly provide the necessary firepower to keep the Cubs from losing games like Wednesday’s.

This is not to ignore that if a change were to be made, it is Eric Hosmer, not Trey Mancini, who would have to move out of the way. Hosmer is batting .230 with one home run and his strikeout rate (21.2%) is higher than it’s been since 2019.

The Cubs brass has not given any official word on their plans for Mervis, but them signing multiple free agents who are primarily first basemen or who can handle first if needed (Mancini, Hosmer, Edwin Rios, and even Cody Bellinger), should be a signal that they are not going to be in a rush to bring Mervis to Wrigley. He also does not have a significant amount of minor league experience – less than two seasons’ worth of games – and if the Cubs were merely looking to preserve his service time, Mervis would be in Chicago already.

Mancini has been a benefit to the Cubs, even when he wasn’t hitting all that well. He roved around defensively while Seiya Suzuki was recovering from injury, and now that Mancini has been playing at first base more consistently, it appears that he might be getting it together at the plate. There might be enough offensive production coming from Mancini to keep things as is for now.

Because of that, there’s no reason to bring Mervis into the first base equation just yet.

“I like where Trey’s at, he worked really hard. He looks like he’s in a really good space,” Ross said.

Among those are at least one or two surprises, like the Cubs’ offense ranking near the top of the league in several categories. Going into Sunday’s game against the Dodgers, the Cubs had the best run differential in the National League and the third-highest in baseball. Their team OPS (.805) ranked only behind the Rays.

The key to this group’s earlysuccess has been the offseason gamble the front office made. Team president Jed Hoyer and general manager Carter Hawkins chose to bolster their lineup with several veteran bats, but many of them were projects. The only sure thing was Dansby Swanson’s seven-year, $177 million deal, but otherwise they took on guys like Cody Bellinger, Trey Mancini, and Eric Hosmer to fill out the order. The idea for those three was that banking on them to have turnaround seasons would be fruitful one way or another.

Of that group, Bellinger had the highest ceiling and the lowest floor; he played like a future Hall of Famer his first three seasons but fell off of an offensive cliff for the next three. But with about 90 plate appearances in the 2023 season, Bellinger is looking a lot closer to the version of himself that won the 2017 Rookie of the Year and 2019 National League MVP. He has a .927 OPS and five home runs and is hitting well over .400 in his last seven games.

“I definitely thought this would be an all-year process, and I’m happy he’s gotten off to a good start,” Ross said. “But I think we’re all going to go through peaks and valleys throughout this journey. And the more you’re able to get off to a good start I think it just helps the mental side a lot of the time.”

In other words, Bellinger’s great start is good for him and good for the rest of the offense.

And along with Bellinger, don’t miss the fact that another reason for the offense’s success has been Patrick Wisdom’s monster start to the season. He had a 1.002 OPS headed into Sunday and is behind only Max Muncy and Pete Alonso for the most home runs thus far this season.

“I don’t know that I’m surprised by it,” Ross said of the performance of his group. “There’s a lot of potential, and these guys are proven big-leaguers.”

The result has been a lineup that on its best days creates trouble for opposing pitchers from top to bottom. In Friday’s 13-0 win over the Dodgers, for example, every batter in Ross’ starting lineup had at least one hit, and five of them had multiple. Through the first 21 games of the season, the Cubs have scored 10 or more runs six times. Last year, they scored in the double digits six times all season. Currently. they rank fourth in baseball in total runs scored (121). In 2022, they were 22nd. 

The offense has done so well that even on their worst days, they are still scoring. In Saturday’s loss to the Dodgers, they still plated four despite not firing on all cylinders.

“It wasn’t our best offensive day up and down the lineup and all of the things we’ve done up to this point, and we still scored four runs,” manager David Ross said.

Take Sunday’s 7-3 loss to the Dodgers as another example. Other than Yan Gomes’ fifth-inning home run, the fifth through ninth hitters collectively reached base only once, and in a tough matchup against Clayton Kershaw, the Cubs offense still put up three runs. 

The overall success of the offense thus far has a lot to do with how well the top of the order guys have performed. On Sunday, two of the Cubs’ three runs were scored in the first inning on hits by Bellinger and Seiya Suzuki after Nico Hoerner helped set the table.

As a result, key members of the team brim with confidence. Despite dropping the overall series against Los Angeles four games to three over the past two weekends, the guys in the Cubs locker room still see themselves as able to go toe-to-toe with the best of the National League.

“We see where we stack up against them,” Marcus Stroman said of their two weekend slates with the Dodgers. “We know that we can compete with them each and every day. We don’t feel like we’re way behind them. 

“We truly think we can compete with anybody in the league. There’s nobody that we’re looking up to thinking ‘That’s where we need to get.’”

This is all good, and it’s safe to expect that reinforcements will come before too long in the form of Matt Mervis, Christopher Morel, and even others waiting on the 40-man roster. But the reality is that a very productive offense and mostly good starting pitching has yielded a 12-9 record thus far. That’s not bad, but it’s tough to get enthused at this point when the Pirates and Brewers are both off to very hot starts. The Cubs have not faced Pittsburgh yet, and they lost the opening series of the season to Milwaukee two games to one.

So take it all with a grain of salt. It’s about a month into the season, and that is enough to start taking some of the trends that have emerged seriously. But it’s still only April. The Cubs have shown so far that they have an offense capable of scoring a lot, and even on their bad days. It’s likely that they will get even better when promotions from the minor leagues start to come. But at the same time, they’re still looking up at the Pirates and Brewers in their division. Tempering expectations might be in order. 

Or just listen to Stroman:

“There’s no one that we’re scared of. There are no things we feel like we need to do to be more of a team to compete with anybody else.”

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Instead, familiar pitching problems continued to fester. 

Cease’s pitch count went up so high in part because he gave up five walks (one was intentional), and that was part of the larger problem that buried the Sox in this weekend series. The pitching staff as a whole issued 26 free passes to Baltimore the past three games. Even in Saturday’s extra-inning win, they walked 10 Oriole batters. That game should have been an easier win for the White Sox, but those extra baserunners helped create the situation where they had to come from behind four times and win in extras.

Before Sunday’s game, they had the second highest rate of walks per nine innings (5.08). For comparison, the Twins’ BB/9 rate is less than half that, at 2.28, and the Sox are one of only two teams over five walks per nine innings.

“It’s concerning for this series,” manager Pedro Grifol said.

Sox pitching coaches Ethan Katz and Curt Hasler spent all winter with the staff working on getting two out of the first three pitches thrown in the strike zone, Grifol said. 

“And that’s what I think our, the most important thing to our success is, we win the two out of three battle for the day we probably have a good chance to win a baseball game. If we lose that battle, we’re going to be in trouble.”

And though all members of the pitching corps have contributed to the walks problem, the bullpen’s overall struggles have been a major part of why the Sox have yet to win a series or even two games in a row this season.

When Cease reached the sixth inning Sunday, he was holding on to a 4-3 lead. He walked Gunnar Henderson with one out, which set Henderson up to eventually score the game-tying run on a wild pitch. Three of Cease’s five walks (including the intentional pass) came in the sixth inning, and given that his pitch count was so high, this would have been a logical place for manager Pedro Grifol to go to his bullpen.

Instead, Grifol left Cease out there, and though he got out of the inning after Henderson scored, the Sox’ 4-0 lead from the first inning was gone. Arguably, Grifol’s hands were somewhat tied. His bullpen had been taxed in Saturday’s game; he had to use six different relievers to get through the last five innings. 

And taxed or not, Grifol’s bullpen has been bad, so Cease’s high pitch count was at least partially a product of unreliable relief pitching. That group has a 7.32 ERA and is responsible for a large part of the high walk rate for the pitching staff as a whole.

Still, it was somewhat evident that Cease was not his best self all afternoon Sunday, and it was clear that he could have used some help in the sixth inning in particular. But Grifol, perhaps thinking at least a little about the trustworthiness of his bullpen, stuck with his ace anyway.

“Dylan is one of the best pitchers in baseball,” he said. “He had enough pitches to go into that sixth and finish the sixth. I’d do it again tomorrow.”

Cease’s overall velocity was down all game, and he gave up an uncharacteristically high number of hits, but he still kept a disciplined Orioles lineup to four runs in six innings.

“I can only speak for me,” Cease said of his struggles Sunday. “I think I need to adjust a little bit quicker and just see where my misses are. Which I don’t feel I did a great job of that today. Just in general, walks will really kill you.”

The work initiated by Katz and Hasler in the offseason clearly isn’t done. This is only just over two weeks into the season, but the Sox have yet to fire on all cylinders as a team, continuing from where they left off in 2022. Most recently, it’s been the pitching staff putting too much traffic on the bases.

“Obviously we need to do a better job staying in the strike zone and attacking guys,” Yasmani Grandal said. “The good thing is it’s happening now and not later in the year. We are going to address that early instead of late.

“Making them swing the bat more than anything. We’ve seen the number and when we’ve done that, we’ve had success. We just have to attack them a little bit more in the strike zone.”

Sox fans can be forgiven for thinking that this all feels too familiar. The woes of last season have not ended. Different people are in key roles with the team, but the problems still look the same. Against the Orioles, they lost two games because of poor pitching centered on too many walks, and the Sox made Saturday’s win a challenge because of the same thing.

Going into Saturday’s 10-3 win over the Rangers, the Cubs were tied for last in the league in home runs with only four. Patrick Wisdom was responsible for two of those himself. Conversely, the undefeated Rays had 18 home runs before Saturday’s action. 

Even with homers from Wisdom and Yan Gomes Saturday, the Cubs still sit near the bottom of the league in power. They have six team homers, and fifteen other teams have at least 10. But despite not hitting many home runs yet, their 40 runs scored so far are in the top third.

“I just like the way we’re approaching at-bats,” manager David Ross said. “There are a lot of balls hit up the middle, right-center, left-center, so that’s a really good approach early on.

“Early on, it’s nice to have the gap-to-gap, base hit type guys, here especially. When it warms up, they’ll get rewarded for some of those fly balls.”

Against the Rangers, the Cubs offense scored in the double-digits for the second time in just the seventh game of the season. Two of the ten runs scored on Saturday were from the Wisdom and Gomes homers, but the Cubs put up 12 against the Reds last Tuesday without hitting a home run.

“The longball will be there, but to be able to do it without it is really good,” Ian Happ said.

In the meantime, that means the Cubs offense has to find different ways to be productive. They don’t necessarily change their plate approach, but in the colder weather, baserunners have to think through decisions to take an extra base differently than on warmer days, Happ said, and in some cases, it means they have to be more comfortable with taking some risks on the basepaths in order to help manufacture more runs. 

This was probably best typified on Saturday by Dansby Swanson’s choice to score from first base in the eighth inning on a two-out, bases-loaded single from Happ. Arguably, the extra run was not needed at that point, with the Cubs up 9-3 thanks to Nick Madrigal and Nico Hoerner scooting across the plate from second and third. No one would have batted an eye at Swanson headed for third and staying here.

“That’s the player that he is, and we talk a lot about this group and the baseball player IQ,” Ross said. “Keeping his head up and finishing the play. Making those guys [think about] the small details, securing the baseball. Those little things go a long way and you continue to put pressure on the defense.”

The Rangers committed five errors on defense, and the Cubs successfully capitalized on those mistakes. There wasn’t an error on the Swanson score in the eighth, but he was still alert to the chance to take another base and score a run.

“If you can get that extra 90 feet, it puts us as a group in good positions,” Wisdom said. “We’re just going to feast on that, and we kind of base the baton, and it creates momentum. If we can run the bases like we’ve been doing, we’ll be in a really good spot.”

What’s even more impressive about Swanson’s play is that he did it despite understandable distraction. His wife Mallory, who was playing for the United States women’s soccer team in an international friendly against Ireland, suffered a significant knee injury shortly before the Cubs game started.

Swanson and some of his teammates were watching his wife’s game in the clubhouse and then had to take the field.

“Pretty impressive to come out and do what he did,” Happ said. “We were all watching the game in here, and [it was] pretty somber. And then to be able to do that and show that kind of emotion.”

Happ said he was high-fiving with first base coach Mike Napoli after what he thought was just a two-run single, only to see Swanson had scored and see him celebrating. Again, it was arguably an unnecessary run at that point in the game, with the Cubs then up by six runs in the eighth inning, but going from first to home speaks to how Swanson approaches baseball.

“Just a really heads up play from him, and good of him all around,” Happ said. “That’s who he is, and that’s why he’s played on so many winning teams.

“He loves this stuff. He loves being out here. He loves competing.”

Yes, fly balls that land in outfielders’ gloves in April often end up in the outfield seats in July. That’s one of the realities of playing home games at Wrigley Field. But in the meantime, the Cubs can benefit significantly from having an offense that can string together hits and be smart and effective on the basepaths. 

And then a few months from now, coupling that with a few more deep shots to the Wrigley bleachers will equal a very potent offense.

Before Sunday’s 9-5 loss to the Brewers, Dansby Swanson and Ian Happ had combined for nine hits through the first two games. The rest of the lineup had just two. That’s a .643 batting average from Swanson and Happ, and .043 from everyone else.

Three games in, it’s evident that the pitching and defense will be sturdy and reliable most of the time. Cubs pitchers started the season with 16 straight scoreless innings, and they were mostly solid throughout the series against the Brewers except for the sixth-inning walks and bloop singles that made the difference in Sunday’s game. Three of the Brewers’ four singles had exit velocities under 70 miles per hour, and one of those was just 58. Soft hits that just found grass while the bases were already packed with runners put on by walks.

The Cubs probably have a floor this year of 78-81 wins, and it will be the offense that decides whether they reach beyond that.

It’s way too early to diagnose anything officially, but to some degree Occam’s Razor might apply best here: The simplest explanation is always best, and in this case, the simplest explanation might be that there are several new faces in the lineup, and the opening series creates some added desire to do well. Especially at home.

“I know the new guys probably want to put a lot of pressure on themselves to perform,” manager David Ross said. “You just want to show everybody what you’re made of and produce. I’ve seen some guys probably a little more jumpy than we saw in spring training. Amped up. Adrenaline. Wrigley Field’s a special place.

“You can just see in some of the rhythm of their at-bats, they’re just a little bit more amped up than they were in spring.”

The most notable new batters outside of Swanson are Cody Bellinger, Trey Mancini, and Eric Hosmer. Bellinger has 4 strikeouts and no hits in 11 at-bats so far, Mancini is 2-for-10 with four strikeouts, and Hosmer has 2 strikeouts and no hits in 7 at-bats.

“I’m not going to lie, I haven’t felt great at the plate necessarily,” Mancini told CHGO. “But you also don’t want to freak out and let that spiral.”

It’s worth noting that these are all veterans, and two of those are veterans who have made moves to new teams before. With that comes the experience that can guide them through a rocky opening series. Still, consciously or not, they want to get the season started on the right foot.

“We all have that thought,” Mancini said. “You want to get your first hit out of the way, you want to have a good start to the year, but we play so many damn games. Especially those of us who have been playing a long time, [we] know how long the season is.”

But regardless, where Swanson is off to a 7-for-12 start and Happ has a homerun under his belt, many of the other hitters are still looking for something to jumpstart their offensive numbers. And veteran or not, a cold start can be hard to shake, especially when they came into the season with high standards for themselves.

“Probably the toughest expectation to manage is obviously going into a season you want to get off to a good start, and if you don’t, how you respond to that,” Swanson told CHGO.

Parallels exist in other sports. Swanson said that watching Saturday’s NCAA Final Four games reminded him of the weight of preseason expectations. There’s a similarity in what teams and individual players believe is possible, but the reality always exists that some disappointment is inevitable.

“The couple days leading up to it and the game, everyone’s belief strongly is that they’re going to win the national championship,” Swanson said. “And after the 40 minutes of the game, someone’s going to be heartbroken, right? And it’s really about managing if you don’t get what you’re wanting the first couple of games, how to maintain that level headedness.”

Happ, who is 3-for-8 with four walks and a homer, said that it often takes around a month into the season before hitters start to put stock into what their personal numbers are showing. And even then, playing most of your games at Wrigley Field means taking certain results with a grain of salt.

“You might get 100 at-bats in April and play in 60-plus degree weather a handful of times. You could hit five homers that come backwards,” he told CHGO. “You have to have enough time and have a really good barometer of where you’re at, and you can’t base that off of April because you’re going to smoke some balls that don’t go out. There’s all kinds of factors.”

Sunday’s results were a bit more encouraging, at least for the offense. Patrick Wisdom homered in the second and seventh innings, and the Cubs got hits from all but two guys in the lineup, and one of those was Happ, who walked twice.

There is a lot of potential in the Cubs batting order. Bellinger was on a Hall of Fame trajectory early in his career. Mancini has a .265 average and 125 home runs in his seven-year career thus far. Hosmer has been an All-Star and has a World Series ring. The pressure and adrenaline of the first series of the season may have played a part in slow starts at the plate, but it’s a safe bet that one – maybe even all three – of them might start to click and make the difference between a team that fights to finish .500 and one that’s fighting for the division title.

Using a two-pitch mix of four-seam fastballs and sliders against the Brewers on Saturday, Steele kept Milwaukee batters almost completely off balance. Typically best when attacking with his fastball, Steele leaned more heavily on his breaking pitch – of his 84 pitches, he threw 45 sliders, 36 fastballs, and just three other pitches that weren’t one of those two.

That pitch mix was effective. Steele kept the Brewers scoreless for six innings, striking out 8 while allowing just four baserunners. He walked Mike Brosseau on four pitches to start the game, something Steele chalked up to first game jitters, but limited Milwaukee to three hits otherwise. 

“It’s a hell of a start to build on,” catcher Tucker Barnhart said.

Steele struggled to locate his fastball early on; it took until the tenth batter of the game for him to get a called strike on his four-seamer. That’s where the slider helped. He had a 38% whiff rate with his breaking pitch.

Take a look at a couple of examples:

Both to left-handed batter Rowdy Tellez, but once tailing away from him, and once on the inner side of the strike zone. Adbert Alzolay joked with Steele in the locker room after Saturday’s game that Tellez would be having nightmares that night about facing Steele’s slider.

“As far as lefties, I used to hit as well, and I know how being a left-handed hitter how hard it is to hit a left-handed pitcher,” Steele said. “So if you can throw some good breaking balls towards a lefty, I know it’s really hard to stay in there and go with it the other way.”

This is a positive sign of growth for Steele, who took a step forward with his fastball in 2022, benefiting from advice he got from Jon Lester. Steele is often likened to the former Cubs pitcher, and it was early last year when Lester texted a tip to manager David Ross after watching Steele pitch on TV. His advice was to attack on the inside against righties with his four-seam fastball, and Steele used that to help him step into a front-end rotation spot in 2022.

A start like Saturday’s is important because it shows Steele growing even further. When that bread-and-butter pitch wasn’t working early on, he used the slider – manipulating its shape at times that made it look almost like a curveball – so effectively that Brewers hitters weren’t able to sit on it. Typically, when a pitcher struggles with his primary pitch, that’s a recipe for a bad (and short) outing. Not so for Steele.

“His ability to throw for strikes and throw for chase, and throw enough backup sliders to catch the edges is awesome,” Barnhart said. “It makes him extremely difficult on a hitter. It’s a unique mix because you wouldn’t typically throw a bunch of down and in sliders to right-handed hitters or down and in fastballs to right handed hitters without having some damage every once in a while, but that’s where his stuff works so well.”

Steele was aided some by dazzling defense at shortstop by Dansby Swanson, who added three more hits Saturday, giving him six hits in his first two games after going 5-for-41 in spring training.

But Miles Mastrobuoni, who came in as a defensive replacement in right field for Trey Mancini, couldn’t make a needed defensive play in the eighth inning that contributed to the Brewers’ three runs in that frame. Cubs reliever Javier Assad tossed a brilliant seventh inning, but he gave up a hit and a walk to start the eighth, and that ended a 16-inning scoreless streak against the Brewers through the first two games. The Cubs went on to lose, 3-1, scoring only on Ian Happ’s sixth-inning home run.

That doesn’t negate how well Steele pitched, and through the course of a full season, there will be games like Saturday’s, where one or two misplays can prove very costly. The important thing for the Cubs going forward is the outing Steele had.

He was masterful because of how well he used his fastball and breaking pitch, especially the latter when his four-seam wasn’t hitting the zone early. Steele said he has always felt comfortable going fastball/breaking pitch heavy, going back to his days in the minors. And as a burgeoning top-tier starter in the majors, it’s the way he throws those two pitches that’s making him so successful.

“There’s some deception in there, stuff we can’t measure, and then the late movement with the cut on his fastball that rides in,” Ross said. “Guys see it and it just gets off the barrel, whether it’s in and they cheat in and pull it foul.”

Building his confidence in those two pitches will be important for Steele as he goes forward this season. And even more so, being able to adjust from his usual mix when one pitch isn’t finding the right spot.

“The key to success is to continue to know your strengths and hone in on your strengths and value those really highly,” Ross said. “But the more you have other weapons or different sides of the plate that you can execute, things he did really well at times last year – where that backdoor cutter or the two-seamer away, or breaking out the changeup in situations where it calls for it.”

Three years later, when the Cubs failed to make the playoffs for the first time in four seasons, the DRS output had dropped down to 29, which ranked 11th in baseball. And last season, the Cubs recorded just four DRS as a team, which was down to 21st in baseball. Clearly, there’s a correlation between that defensive statistic and the team’s success.

“I think so much of what we think of as good pitching is run prevention,” Cubs team president Jed Hoyer said at Cubs Convention earlier this month. “All that matters is runs allowed.”

Reliable defense, and the run prevention that goes with it, is becoming increasingly important. The good news is that Hoyer and his front office have prioritized that part of the game this offseason.

Through free agency, they added four Gold Glove Award winners (Eric Hosmer, Cody Bellinger, Tucker Barnhart and Dansby Swanson) to go with reigning Gold Glover Ian Happ, who won the award for his defense in left field last year. There are likely future Gold Glove winners on the roster too; Nico Hoerner accounted for 10 DRS on his own in 2022 and was a Gold Glove finalist at second base in 2020, and Seiya Suzuki won multiple Gold Gloves in Japan before joining the Cubs.

“It makes our run prevention and pitching numbers better,” Hoyer said of the bevy of defensive talent he’s added this winter. “That’s been a focus of the offseason, for sure.”

Again, quality defense is becoming more and more of a priority for teams, so on paper at least, the Cubs are effectively working to get back to the head of the pack. And a focus on defense becomes even more important with new rule changes set to go into effect at the start of the 2023 season — most notably, the end of the defensive shift.

It hasn’t been that long since the shift began; many active players can recall what it was like before left-handed hitters were tormented by the sight of shortstops standing right behind second base or a third baseman in shallow right field. But in a small number of years, the defensive shift altered the aesthetics of baseball so significantly that, as quickly as it came, the shift is gone.

This will impact the Cubs on both sides of the ball. At the plate, left-handed hitters who have struggled over the last half dozen years might start finding a few more hits. That includes players like Bellinger and Hosmer, for instance. Both players have been top-tier hitters in the past, and restricting the shift could theoretically help them rediscover at least some of that.

“I think a lot of lefties are really looking forward to that,” Hosmer said at Cubs Convention. “It just kind of seems like there are going to be more hits out there for guys. There’s no worse feeling than hitting the ball hard up the middle and seeing a shortstop standing right there.

“If there’s anything that promotes offense, this is definitely it, and I’m all about promoting offense.”

The Cubs scored 657 runs in 2022, which put them in the bottom third of the league. That’s over 100 fewer than they scored in 2016. Coupling more run scoring with improved defense is an easy recipe for more winning.

One of the players most impacted on defense by this change is Hoerner. He will move to second base with Swanson taking over at short, and not being able to shift on defense will place greater demand on Hoerner. 

“The game is emphasizing athleticism as much as we’ve had for a long time,” he said, “and getting to play second base without three people on that side of the field, it’s going to make for some harder plays, and there’s going to be a lot of value at that position.”

Hoerner and Swanson combined for 19 DRS in 2022, so they should give the Cubs an elite up-the-middle defensive duo. Hosmer can help provide a defensive upgrade at first base. The need for athleticism is something that is top of mind for everyone in baseball going into the season, and that came up regularly during Cubs Convention, both from players and the front office.

“You have to have real athleticism, and I think we have that in the middle,” Hoyer said. “We’ll turn a lot of double plays, we’ll make a lot of plays, and certainly I think there will be teams out there that are disadvantaged with that.”

Losing the shift will also yield a product on the field that is more appealing to watch. The shift changed the way a lot of hitters approached their at-bats and changed the results many hitters got, whether they adjusted their approach or not. The players recognize that a game centered on the three true outcomes (home runs, strikeouts and walk) is boring to watch. Even for them. 

“What I’m most excited for, as a baseball guy, it just brings athleticism back into the game,” Bellinger said. “I think it’s good for the game.”

“I think it’s going to be an exciting brand of baseball,” Happ said. “There’s going to be hiccups, and it’s not going to be pretty for the first spring training games and maybe not for the first month of the season, but I think we’re going to look back and say, ‘This is a better baseball experience.’”

Better aesthetics will be nice, but the real test of the success of this offseason will be whether or not the Cubs win. They have a pitching staff that will put a lot of balls in play. They ranked in the top half of the league in ground ball rate last year, and now they should have the defense behind them to fully take advantage.

Defense held a prominent place in the formula that made the 2016 team so successful, and the current Cubs all know that.

“It’s something that those teams in ‘15, ‘16 and ‘17, they were built on that,” Happ said. “The guys banged, there were some weapons there, but playing great defense was so much fun with that group, and I think you’re going to see a lot of that this year.”

Nearly all of the guys who played on those teams are gone, but among the new faces, there are a few World Series rings to go around. Hosmer won with the Royals in 2015, Bellinger with the Dodgers in 2020 and Swanson with the Braves in 2021. They understand what it takes to win titles at this level, and they know that defense plays as big a part as anything else.

“You just know when you play those meaningful games, late in the season and in October, you can’t give away free outs and you can’t give away 90 feet,” Hosmer said. “And when you see the guys we have on the defensive side, it’s just not going to happen here.”

The last time Tom took the stage, in January 2020, fans booed when he mentioned the Marquee Sports Network. During this year’s opening ceremony Friday night, he got a mixed reaction during — a far cry from the receptions the Ricketts family was getting before it took a few years off.

“The last couple of years have been rough,” Tom told fans Saturday.

When he and his family members last sat in front of fans, the Cubs were coming off of three consecutive seasons of deep playoff runs, including the 2016 World Series. At the time, the expectation was that the Cubs were building a sustainable dynasty. But by the summer of 2021, the Cubs had become sellers. Anthony Rizzo, Javy Báez and Kris Bryant were all traded away in a matter of days.

Laura said the she was in tears when the Cubs traded Rizzo to the Yankees, but she “knew it was the right decision.”

The position the team has been in over the past two years is one the Ricketts family didn’t envision. Tom told fans that it was never the strategy to have to tear things down and then build them back up. So, what’s brought them here? One thing he pointed to was the need to trade much of their minor league talent during those successful seasons.

Of the last fifteen World Series champions, most of them have had top-ten farm systems, he said. At one time, the Cubs were in that position. Tom said that is why one emphasis for the organization has become building up the farm system again.

The good news is that he believes things are trending up. The expectations for the Cubs in 2023 are higher than they have been in several years, and the farm system is getting stronger, thanks in part to some of those painful trades.

“It’s kind of an inflection point for us,” he said.

In August, MLB.com’s team of minor league writers ranked the Cubs’ farm system No. 10 in baseball. Last week, Jonathan Mayo polled baseball executives for their opinions on minor league systems around the league. The Cubs’ system got votes for being among the best, and interestingly, 11 percent of executives said they had one of the most underrated systems in baseball. Only the Cardinals got a higher percentage of votes.

Add to that some of the additions the Cubs have made via free agency this winter, and the sense of optimism coming from the Ricketts family makes sense. It also might shed some light on why they were up for doing a Convention panel again.

The fans seem to see the vision, too, but that’s not to say they are all satisfied. There were the aforementioned smattering of boos when Tom took the stage Friday night, and during Saturday’s panel, a few of them had tough questions for Tom and Laura.

Namely, the DraftKings Sportsbook being built just outside Wrigley Field, which is set to open its doors for Opening Day this spring. One fan called it “an out-of-place addition” to the iconic and historic nature of the ballpark. Another asked if money from the sportsbook would truly be funneled toward the team’s payroll. To that, Tom suggested that yes, such revenue would be a part of the money put toward new players.

And when asked about things like the family’s attempt to buy the Chelsea Football Club last spring, he said the family has “lots of different investments” and something like that wouldn’t have anything to do with how they spend on the Cubs. The Ricketts family withdrew their offer for Chelsea last April, but Tom told fans on Saturday that he had long been a Chelsea fan and once had an office near their stadium in London.

The fans also had questions about Sammy Sosa’s status with the team. The Cubs do a nice job of honoring their past, which includes bringing back a large number of alumni for the Convention’s activities, but the player with the fifth-highest career fWAR (60.7) for the franchise is conspicuously absent. That’s a two-way street, of course, but it didn’t stop fans from chanting his name during Friday night’s introductions or from asking about him at Saturday’s panel.

Tom gave the usual responses, saying that he wants to be “thoughtful” about how they handle Sosa’s legacy with the team. It’s not a perfect one, but he is undeniably a major part of the team’s history and a reason many in attendance at the Convention are Cubs fans in the first place.

Easier legacies to embrace are Mark Grace and Shawon Dunston, who were added to the Cubs Hall of Fame on Friday, and Ryne Sandberg; Tom announced during Saturday’s panel that Sandberg will be the next Cubs great immortalized with a statue outside of Wrigley Field.

“To be part of a structure and be part of Wrigley Field, that means so much to me, because Wrigley Field was always my friend and so friendly to me,” Sandberg said. “I loved the atmosphere and the fans […] and the day games. The whole thing about it. I liked everything about that.”

There is no set date for when Sandberg’s statue will be unveiled, but he said the process sounds like one that will put that date sometime in 2024. He will join Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins on “Statue Row” at Gallagher Way.

“I was able to be around all those guys a lot, so to join them, kind of join a team of statues, that’s pretty awesome,” Sandberg said.

The Convention is an opportunity for fans to engage with the people in the Cubs organization in a way that they might not get in any other context. Saturday morning, the Ricketts family held a panel again. Maybe it’s because it’s been three years since the last convention, or maybe because things are finally trending upward. 

Either way, Tom is right. This is an inflection point. And one that fans hope will leave the losing seasons behind.

There are a handful of notes to himself around the margins, but mostly it is his meticulous documentation of the most important game the Cubs have ever played. The most important game he has ever called and most likely will ever call. 

I have talked with Hughes a handful of times in the Wrigley Field press box, mostly exchanging pleasantries. I’m not one to get starstruck, but I’ll admit he’s an exception. In person, he conveys the same understated ebullience and steadiness we hear on the radio. He talks with the smile you feel like you can hear in his voice. 

On Wednesday, Hughes was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as the 2023 Ford C. Frick Award winner.

He has been a finalist twice before, in 2016 and 2020, and with his induction this year, Hughes joins former Cubs broadcasters Jack Brickhouse, elected in 1983, and Harry Caray, elected in 1989. The award is given based on what Cooperstown calls “major contributions” to baseball. Considering we often have trouble agreeing which players have done enough to merit being in the Hall even though we have access to detailed statistics of their careers, the mostly intangible contributions of a broadcaster must be even harder to work with. But Hughes is an easy case.

“No one is more deserving of this award than Pat,” Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts said in a press release. “Outside of his impressive resume, Pat is a truly wonderful person who cares deeply about Cubs fans and the game of baseball. We’re so incredibly lucky to have had him as a member of the Cubs family.”

Hughes joined the Cubs in 1996. That’s 27 straight seasons as the voice of Chicago’s North Side baseball team. In that time, he has called eight no-hitters, nine postseasons, and in his third season in the booth, Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game against the Astros. He called Sammy Sosa’s home run race with Mark McGwire in 1998, Carlos Zambrano’s no-hitter in Milwaukee in 2008 and the final out of the World Series in 2016.

Huge moments, each. As he calls them, Hughes is logging a part of baseball history.

“I don’t stop and think about it too much,” Hughes said of those moments. “I’m aware of them, I’m aware of the moments that I’ve been fortunate enough to cover. … I always tell people, you’re a radio announcer. First and foremost, be true to your radio audience. Make the final call accurately and clearly.”

“I’ve gone back and been able to listen and watch some of that,” manager David Ross said of his own best moments in a Cubs uniform, all voiced by Hughes, “and to hear those calls and hear his voice, that’s how I identify those moments. That’s the voice I hear now rather than the thoughts I used to have in the box. I’ve watched those from time to time, and I hear his voice and his call and his excitement. He’s been here for so long and seen so many ups and downs. That’s the longevity of all that and going through the good and the bad. That’s why he’s just such a special person.”

Close to three decades of holding the same job are usually enough to invite a little cynicism into anyone’s outlook. It’s really tough to look at the same thing, day after day, for that long and not become a little jaded, especially when that thing has been the source of a lot of disappointment and heartbreak.

No Cubs fan needs to be reminded of the many down moments that Hughes witnessed and had to describe between 1996 and the final game of the 2016 World Series. Dropped balls, 100-loss seasons, a foul ball into the seats in 2003 that felt almost paradigm-shifting, and even after the World Series, the decline of the core that won it and their one-by-one departure from the franchise.

But a part of Hughes’ gift throughout his time with the Cubs has been his unceasing freshness. He is 67 years old but seems both much older and much younger at the same time. Hughes has a lightness of being that is as rarified in current culture as his status among baseball broadcasters. 

“I’m big on having a few laughs every single day, ” Hughes said. “If the Cubs win, we laugh more, but even when they don’t win, we still find some humor in some things.

“To me, being at the ballpark has always been a fun thing.”

Hughes is quick to credit his audience for some of the joy he has in his work.

“I feel a great closeness to our listeners. It’s one of the best audiences you could possibly have as a performer,” he said. “They really do appreciate the effort that I give.”

Reading over his Game 7 scorecard again, it is clear that he was weighing both the magnitude of the night and the reality that in many ways it would be a baseball game just like all of the others. Hits to record, runs scored, outs made, innings pitched, lineup changes.

It is also clear that he was enjoying the heck out of that game like he does at any other point in a season, whether the Cubs are in the playoffs, are competing for the division or are in the midst of a double-digit losing streak. Every time you see Hughes, he is at least smiling with his eyes. Always earnest and genuine without being sappy. He takes simple pleasure in each game, no matter its significance, and he reminds the rest of us to do the same.

That is his great contribution to the game of baseball.

CHGO’s Ryan Herrera contributed to this story.

Happ is in the roasting room at Connect Roasters in Bourbonnais, Illinois, doing a blind taste test of three of Connect’s coffees. He is working on his ability to identify the coffees just by their taste.

Caleb Benoit, Connect’s founder, demonstrates the proper way to cup the coffee, describing it as an “aggressive slurp” and suggesting that doing it properly means letting go of inhibitions just a little. 

As Happ tastes the coffees, a photographer is capturing the process on video for a Connect social media promotion. Happ later films a quick video encouraging Cubs fans to come to the convention in January and visit the Connect booth that will be there. Later, Happ signs a stack of baseball cards and other memorabilia for giveaways.

Happ’s relationship with Connect Roasters is well known to Cubs fans by now. For many of them, he put Connect on their radar. In most cases, this kind of relationship between a company and an athlete or celebrity endorser would entail little more than the rights to that person’s likeness. Happ could easily snap a few pictures for Connect to use on their product, post to social media on occasion, and leave it at that.

Instead, on an early November day while he is in Chicago from his offseason home in Texas, Happ has driven an hour from the city to Bourbonnais to spend time working on filming promotions, testing product and visiting a potential site for a Connect Roasters cafe near their roasting facility. Even during the baseball season, Happ has at least once taken part of an off day in the schedule to make the drive south. 

“I care about this business,” Happ told CHGO. “I care about these guys, and I enjoy it.”

The business that is Connect Roasters is a small group, led by Benoit and husband and wife Greg and Jessica Rattin. Happ has become a de facto staff member, so much so that customers have shown up at Connect expecting him to be there working.

One day last summer, Greg, who is the primary roaster, had the industrial sliding door to the roasting room open and a woman drove up looking for Happ.

“It was a warm day, so we kept the door open,” Greg told CHGO. “She drove up and rolled down her window and asked ‘Is Ian working today?’”

Greg and Jessica laugh as they retell the story, and though it speaks partially to the naivete of the hopeful visitor, it also says a lot for how involved Happ is in the operations at Connect. During spring training 2022, Happ finished a game and got on a sales call with Jewel-Osco still in full uniform. He regularly talks and texts with Benoit about new product releases and marketing. 

“My job here is not to roast coffee or decide what the best coffee is. That’s what these guys do so well,” Happ said. “It’s to get it in people’s hands because once they’ve tasted it, once they’ve had it, the rest takes care of itself.

“The biggest thing is I enjoy the marketing side, I enjoy thinking through these opportunities and getting some of this stuff to the finish line.”

That’s not to say that Happ doesn’t know his coffee. After filming the taste test and Cubs Convention promos for Connect, he carefully prepares a batch of pour-over with a Chemex. He checks in with Benoit and the Rattins about the right water-to-coffee ratio, the grind setting, and the correct timing of pouring the water over the beans. 

“You would be surprised how involved he is,” Benoit told CHGO. “We don’t launch anything without him putting eyes on it. It’s not just this brand ambassador relationship. He’s an equity partner in the business.”

Happ was a finance major in college at the University of Cincinnati, but he always found marketing interesting. Once he reached the majors in 2017, seeing the behind-the-scenes work that players, teams and the league did piqued his interest further. Now, working with Connect gives Happ a chance to flex his marketing prowess.

Happ initially got involved with Connect thanks to a tweet from an account Greg runs that covers two of his passions: baseball and coffee. He posted his tweet on March 30, 2020, and tagged Ian in it.

Greg joined Connect in late 2019, about three years after Benoit started the company. For the first three years, Benoit had his coffee roasted in a partnership with a roaster in Geneva, Illinois, in Chicago’s far western suburbs. Greg started roasting his own coffee with a popcorn popper at his house around 2013, and when Benoit was ready to move into his own roasting facility in November 2019, he invited Greg to come roast for him. 

Of course, a few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic brought a lot of things to a halt. When Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker issued the shelter-in-place order in March 2020, Benoit had close to three tons — 6,000 pounds — of coffee waiting for Greg to roast.

“It was a ‘What are we going to do?’ moment,” Benoit said. 

During that time, Greg posted the tweet that caught Happ’s eye.

“I reached out, we were in Arizona at the time with the guys at the Compound, and it was like ‘Hey, let’s see if they’ll send us some coffee,’ and they sent coffee,” Happ said. “I tried it and was blown away.”

He went to a Target in Arizona that day and bought a whole pourover kit, so he could get the best of Connect’s flavor. Happ was already a coffee guy; he credits his older brother Chris for that. Their parents, Happ said, were “dark roast, sludge drinkers,” but he and Chris took up trying craft coffee as a hobby when they moved in together after Happ got drafted by the Cubs in 2015. 

It didn’t take long after trying Connect’s Nicaragua blend for Happ to start thinking about ways to work with them. He liked the taste of their coffee, but he was also drawn to Connect’s giveback model. Benoit was inspired to start the company after trips to the Dominican Republic and Haiti in 2013 and 2014 and wanted to find a way to do work that could be a tangible solution to the problem of poverty that he saw there. Charity being at the center of Connect’s business made Happ want to be more than just a customer.

He credits playing for the Cubs as one of the reasons he feels such a strong desire to give back. Happ said he didn’t fully understand the power of the Cubs fanbase before getting drafted. It really hit him, he said, when he reached the majors in 2017, the year after the Cubs won the World Series. Six years into his career, it still hits him in moments when he sees the fans at Wrigley on their feet for a full count late in a game, even when his team is buried deep in the standings.

“I wouldn’t be doing half of the stuff I’m doing now without a community that cares as much as they do,” Happ said.

Within a few days of trying Connect’s coffee for the first time, Happ reached out to Benoit with some ideas. One of those became Quarantine Coffee, a blend that gave $3 a bag to Chicago charities, like local food banks. At a time when Connect was still trying to figure out how to navigate the early stages of the pandemic, they were giving away a sizable chunk of their potential profit. But giving back had been a part of Benoit’s business from the beginning, so he took to Happ’s idea quickly.

“It definitely fit in with what we were already doing,” he said. “I founded the company with the idea that coffee could be a vehicle to give back and improve people’s lives.”

From there, the partnership with Happ quickly reached its current form. They started the Home Run Club, a coffee subscription service that has reached over 500 subscribers in about a year. That group has become a bit of a community. Some of them aren’t even coffee drinkers — they get their monthly bag of coffee and give it away as a gift, or they buy coffee in bulk to give away. They had a member buy gift cards for Benoit and the Rattins to give to other customers. One member had bleacher tickets to a late-season series against the Reds he wanted to give away, and he turned to Connect to help find a recipient.

“It’s just, like, unusual gratitude,” Benoit said. “I would never expect to see something like that.”

But that strong sense of community is a part of the vision for Connect going forward. They successfully weathered the pandemic and have formed a strong relationship with the Cubs and coffee drinkers in Chicago. Connect Roasters coffee is what’s served in the clubhouse at Wrigley Field, and they have their cold brew on tap in all of Foxtrot Market’s Chicago locations, including Gallagher Way in Wrigleyville. 

The next step for Connect is to open cafes. They plan to start at a spot in Bourbonnais and hope to be all over Chicagoland eventually. And Happ is getting on Zoom calls with Jewel in uniform because they want to be on the shelf at grocery stores, too. Benoit and his team believe they have something at Connect that can differentiate them from other local coffee companies: a quality mission and quality coffee to go with it.

“You might have the best mission in the world, but if the coffee sucks, you might buy it once, but you’re not buying it again,” Benoit said. “The key to what we’re doing is quality product, quality mission, and then, obviously, Ian helping with the marketing and some of the branding.”

After Happ finished his work at Connect’s home base, he climbed into his rental car with Benoit and a few other Connect staff members. The group was headed to see the potential cafe site in Bourbonnais, which they hope will be the first of many that will eventually cover the Chicago area. Part of the reality of Happ’s day job is that he might one day — perhaps even soon — be playing his home games in a different city. That might bring expanded opportunities for him and for Connect, but at present, that’s not their focus.

“With where we’re at right now, we want to dominate Chicago,” Happ said. “We want when people think of drinking coffee in Chicago, we want Connect to be that presence here.”

In Marcus Stroman’s case, he has effectively used his first year with the Cubs to make a positive impression on the younger members of the pitching staff. Not always with what he tells them, but more often because they watch and learn from what he is modeling.

“You don’t even have to ask questions, you just go out there and watch him throw,” Keegan Thompson told CHGO. “Just pay attention to how he goes about his business and you learn a lot about how to set your routine [and] make sure you’re getting all your work in every single day.”

That’s one of the most important parts of what a baseball player does. The performance on the field, the stats, the win-loss record is all a byproduct of the work that gets done in the hours and days before and after each game.

“I’m someone who never gives up regardless of if I’ve had ten bad starts or ten great ones,” Stroman said. “I’m truly adapting and changing and working in between each and every start.”

In the early going this season, Stroman nearly had ten bad starts. He had a 5.32 ERA after giving up nine runs in four innings against the Cardinals on June 3, his ninth start of the year. At that point in the season, the Cubs were 22-30 and 10 games behind first place. Stroman went on the injured list a few days later with right shoulder inflammation.

Stroman returned on July 9, and in his 15 starts since then, he posted a 2.56 ERA. In his last three starts at Wrigley, culminating with six scoreless innings in a 8-1 win over the Reds on Sunday, Stroman had a 0.90 ERA. In roughly the same stretch — since the All-Star break — the Cubs have gone 38-29. They are on a seven-game winning streak going into the final series of the season and have lost just two games in their last four series dating back to September 19. It might be too little, too late in the grand scheme of things, but the Cubs have been one of the hottest teams in baseball since the break and even more so in the last month.

Not all of it is Stroman’s doing, of course, but he has helped the starting staff put together a 2.95 ERA since the All-Star break. That’s the third-lowest ERA in the majors in the second half, and a big part of why the Cubs have done so well. In that starting group is Hayden Wesneski, who has slotted into the rotation behind Stroman since making his first big league start on Sept. 17. Wesneski has a 2.33 ERA through five appearances, including his three starts.

“[Stroman is] what you shoot for in the starting-pitcher role,” Wesneski told CHGO. “I watch him go through his routine, he’s always moving and doing stuff. You don’t ever see him just sitting at his locker. He knows what he has to do to get ready for the game, and that’s an art in itself.”

Wesneski watches Stroman’s starts very closely because they have similar repertoires and because he’s been taking the bump the day after. Wesneski said he uses Stroman’s approach to teams to help him build his game plan, sometimes confirming how he would approach certain hitters based on what Stroman does.

After Stroman threw seven one-run innings against the Phillies on Tuesday, Wesneski said he rewatched the whole outing before his start to study how Stroman had attacked Philadelphia. He tossed five one-run innings against the Phillies the next day. 

Similarly, Thompson said he has learned from Stroman’s pitch sequencing and approach to hitters. For example, things like holding off on showing a slider or curveball in certain counts early in a start. 

“Learning when to stay away from certain pitches and when to use certain pitches and how to go about those type of sequences has been big,” Thompson said.

Those are the granular details that help young pitchers grow. But both Thompson and Wesneski spoke most to the way Stroman’s work ethic has influenced how they prepare themselves for each start. 

“When he was on rehab, he was in the weight room all day trying to get back to perform,” Thompson said. “Seeing those kinds of things, I think that’s something all the younger guys can take advantage of and learn from.”

“That rubs off, and it’s a great example,” manager David Ross said of Stroman’s influence. “When you have guys like that, it makes my life and our coaches’ lives so much easier, because you have the guy who’s got the contract, making the money, setting the right example for championship baseball and what you need to do every day.”

Ross said Stroman’s easygoing demeanor can bely his intensity.

“He’s in here working, and he’s very casual and very laid back, and his presence seems very chill,” he said. “[But] there’s not a person that throws a more intense bullpen than Marcus Stroman. There’s not a guy that’s more intentional about his weight room routine than Marcus Stroman.”

There are not many long-tenured Cubs in the locker room these days, and especially not on the pitching staff. With Kyle Hendricks away from the team since early July, the veteran leaders among the pitchers have by default become guys like Stroman.

“It’s awesome that I’ve naturally, organically grown into that role, because I’m someone who works extremely hard,” Stroman said. “I’m not someone who this has ever come easy for.”

Clarity that they would not be making the playoffs. Losing all three games against the Guardians did that. Though the Sox are not mathematically eliminated yet, dropping Friday night’s series opener to Detroit means the Guardians could clinch by Sunday. According to FanGraphs, the Sox have a 0.3% chance of making the postseason.

And Saturday provided clarity on Tony La Russa’s status. The team announced in a press release that La Russa would not make a return to manage the team through the final week and a half of the season. He has been away since August 30 because of heart issues that required repairs to a pacemaker he had installed before the season started. 

Per Saturday’s release: “After undergoing additional testing and medical procedures over the past week, doctors for Tony La Russa have directed him to not return as manager of the Chicago White Sox for the remainder of the 2022 season.”

What the Sox – and their fans – won’t get is clarity about how things will look next year. General manager Rick Hahn is still focused on finishing this season, despite the reality of what losing the last four games has done to his team’s postseason hopes.

“I don’t want to do a post-mortem until the body is fully cold,” he said. “So we’ll wait until the end of the season and then we’ll talk about all the different emotions we’ve had and what the plan is going forward to put ourselves in a better spot.”

Since La Russa’s forced departure from the team in late August, whether he would return this season has been uncertain. That question has been answered, but what happens going forward won’t be for a while.

“As for the inevitable question, ‘Well what does that mean for next season?’ We are going to finish up this season first and then address everything when it’s appropriate to turn the page at the end of this year,” Hahn said.

In La Russa’s absence, bench coach turned acting manager Miguel Cairo had presided over a 13-6 stretch going into this week’s games. Before getting swept by the Guardians, the Sox were five games above .500 and only four back from Cleveland. Headed into the three-game series at home, they had a legitimate chance to make a division title very reachable. 

“We’ve seen at various stretches, unfortunately not over the last four days or so, but for extended stretches over the last few weeks, this team showing flashes of playing at the level we thought was capable over the course of the entire season,” Hahn said. “It’s a little too little too late over the course of the year. But I think those guys deserve a lot of credit for what was thrust upon them on the fly and the way they responded.”

This week’s collapse notwithstanding, Cairo had at least given reason to wonder if he shouldn’t be given the managing job in 2023. There’s still a year left on La Russa’s contract, but he will turn 78 on October 4, and even if his health keeps improving, it might not be enough to make it safe to put him back at the helm next spring.

The reality is also that La Russa’s second tenure with the White Sox has not gone well. At least, not to expectations. La Russa’s past success had already earned him a place in the Hall of Fame, and that carries a lot of weight in the locker room. Player support never wavered, at least not publicly.

“We all love him,” José Abreu said just days before La Russa left the team. “His sense of unity and his sense of family is something that is around us, is around this team. It doesn’t matter what the people from the outside say, the fans can say whatever they want to. It doesn’t mean that what they say is true.

“We support Tony. We appreciate Tony and the effort he put to put us in the best position to succeed.”

Dylan Cease, who has had his most successful season in 2022, said having La Russa in the dugout has meant a lot to him.

“The fact that I get to play for a hall of fame manager, it’s a unique experience not a lot of guys get to have. Just getting to be around him has been really special,” he said.

But La Russa’s plaque in Cooperstown did not translate into a winning season in 2022. Some of that has been thanks to his team’s health. The Sox did not necessarily have more total games lost to injury than most other teams in the league, but the timing of injuries to key players like Lance Lynn, Michael Kopech, Tim Anderson, Luis Robert, and Eloy Jiménez have meant that La Russa has rarely been able to be in command of a team that is at full strength. 

Even now, injury woes hang over the team. Robert was shut down for the remainder of the season on Saturday because of lingering issues with his left wrist. Hahn said there is still a chance Anderson and/or Kopech makes a return before season’s end, but what is more likely is that the Sox will finish the year the same way they have played all season. Banged up and short-handed.

While there is now a clearer picture of how things will look for the Sox for the last 11 games of the season, the questions about 2023 and the future of the team will remain. 

Does La Russa want to keep managing?

Hahn: “Right now the focus is fully on his health.”

Would you consider making Cairo the manager if La Russa can’t return?

Hahn: “We’ll talk more about it come the end of the year.”

When will you offer your thoughts on how this season has turned out?

Hahn: “You are not going to hear me do some season retrospective today. That will be a later date once the regular season comes to a close.”

For the next 11 games, the Sox will play without La Russa. They will play without a realistic chance of getting into the playoffs. For clarity on what happens beyond that, fans will have to wait.

Though the Cubs lost 3-1 to the Rockies on Saturday, Hayden Wesneski showcased the potential that might put him in the rotation discussion for 2023. In his first start in the major leagues, Wesneski went seven innings and allowed just one run. He struck out seven, walked none, and gave up three hits. In a stretch that lasted from the first to the sixth innings, Wesneski retired 16 straight Rockies batters.

All told, in Wesneski’s first three appearances for the Cubs since his debut on September 7, he has a 2.30 ERA, 18 strikeouts, 9 hits, and 2 walks in 15.2 innings pitched. Against Colorado, he showed off his swing-and-miss slider and his ability to stay in the zone.

“I think that’s just the best chance you have of staying here longest, is just filling [the strike zone],” Wesneski said. “That’s just part of my M.O. and who I’ve been. They’re going to keep running me out there if I keep throwing strikes.”

Wesneski induced 12 swings and misses – good for a 28 percent whiff rate – in his start; five of those came via the slider. Wesneski said he felt like he was able to hit his spots with all of his pitches, especially that slider, better than he had in previous outings.

“That slider’s got just real sweep and depth to it,” manager David Ross said. “What I liked about it [was] he had confidence to repeat it, he had confidence to move it off the plate, throw it for a strike and then walking some guys off, changing some eye level.”

Wesneski said when he got to the ballpark Saturday morning, he wasn’t convinced his start was going to go well. Why? A bad night’s sleep brought on by worries over whether or not some of his struggles from his previous outing would carry over. Wesneski gave up three runs on two homers against the Giants on Sunday. 

But once he got to work on getting ready, Wesneski was able to get locked in. He said his prep work with catcher P.J. Higgins, pregame stretches and breathing exercises all went well.

“I kind of just fought through it,” Wesneski said, “and eventually got to the point where I got to where I needed to be.”

Rockies outfielder Yonathan Daza roped a double in the second at-bat of the game. Perhaps a product of those early nerves for Wesneski. But from there, Wesneski sat down the aforementioned sixteen straight Rockies hitters. He said during that stretch he was so hyperfocused on his plan for the next batter that he lost track of what inning it was.

“The thing I just kept in mind the whole time was, ‘We need to win the first pitch,’ and that’s all I had in my mind,” he said.

Ross said it is not certain at this point whether Wesneski will get another start this season. Keegan Thompson made another rehab start for Triple-A Iowa on Friday, striking out four in 2 1/3 innings. Thompson, shelved by back issues, hasn’t pitched since Aug. 19. Wesneski’s status will also depend on how quickly Justin Steele is able to return, Ross said. Steele has been on the injured list since Sept. 2.

These are questions for the short term, but the Cubs face similar questions about their rotation after this season. Wesneski said he has not thought about what his performance these last few weeks of the year might mean for next spring.

“I’m just trying to stay here day by day, to be honest with you,” he said.

And for now, Wesneski is not concerned with whether or not he is a starter.

“I just want to be given the opportunity,” he said.

Ross was impressed with how well Wesneski managed the tempo of the game, and one of his early observations is that Wesneski can read batters’ swings well and adjust as he goes.

“I think in his outings he’s really slowed down the opposing offense with his secondary stuff,” Ross said. “He’s got enough in the tank with his fastball to blow it by guys, but he uses it really smart, which is kind of mature for his experience.”

Saturday was Higgins’ first look from behind the plate at Wesneski, acquired from the Yankees for Scott Effross on Aug. 1. He, too, was impressed by the pitcher’s mature approach, also noting that Wesneski wanted to talk so much about the game plan in the dugout between innings that Higgins would have to remind him that he needed to get his batting gloves on and be ready to hit.

“A lot of times they just want to be told what to do,” Higgins said. “So with him having a game plan and knowing what he wanted to do, [it] makes it more confident with how he wants to pitch — and it makes my job easier, too.”

It is to be expected that the Cubs will be in discussions with at least one of these players, looking to upgrade their middle infield.

Never mind the fact that the Cubs already have a well above average shortstop. Nico Hoerner has tallied four wins above replacement, per FanGraphs, with about three and a half weeks left to play in this season.

“I think it’s like when you want to buy a new car, but you don’t have to,” manager David Ross said. “You can be picky.”

In many ways, 2022 has been a breakout season for Hoerner. His 4 fWAR is higher than Correa (3.6) and not far behind Bogaerts, Turner, and Swanson. Still, the Cubs are probably going to be in pursuit of one of those free agent shortstops. Despite already having one who is showing that he could be of the same caliber.

But that’s alright with Hoerner. He has different priorities.

“I don’t want to be at the trade deadline doing the selling thing again or being in September and seeing Wrigley partly empty,” he told CHGO.

For Sunday night’s 4-2 loss to the Giants, a game given primetime television billing, the announced attendance was 30,004, but the number of empty seats at Wrigley Field would really beg to differ. At first pitch, there were a total of six people in the upper section of the bleachers in center field. Since his callup in September 2019, Hoerner has only been around one playoff team, and that was in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. And thanks to a .571 OPS in 48 games that year, Hoerner did not appear in the wild card series against the Marlins that postseason. 

So rather than concerning himself with what position he plays on defense, Hoerner would prefer to be a part of a team that is winning.

“If they’re spending money to give us the best chance to be in the postseason and be not just a competitive team but a dominant team, which is what you want to go towards, obviously that’s the biggest priority,” he told CHGO.

But it would be fair for Hoerner to feel at least a little like he has earned the right to be the Cubs’ everyday shortstop beyond this season. Again, he has been worth four wins above replacement this year, and his .751 OPS going into Sunday’s game matches a career high. He posted the same number last year, but in only 44 games. One of the biggest changes for Hoerner this season has been his consistency. Other than a short stint on the injured list with a right ankle sprain in May, he has been a regular presence in Ross’s lineups. Hoerner left Sunday’s game after the fifth inning with right triceps soreness, but the initial prognosis from Ross and Hoerner himself was that this was a day-to-day injury rather than another IL stint. He has otherwise played in 125 games this season, by far the most of his career.

That consistency has also helped Hoerner put together one of his best defensive seasons. He has been worth 12 defensive runs saved at shortstop so far in 2022, well above any number Hoerner has posted on defense, at any position. 

“The opportunity of it has been the biggest thing. I’ve been able to go out there from the beginning of the year through now being in the same spot,” he said. “That kind of consistency goes a long way. It’s the position I’ve played my whole life, so there wasn’t a lot of changes or big adjustments, but I do think playing every day at this level the game slows down some.”

But regardless of how well Hoerner has played this year, his team is still going to look for ways to improve, even if that means asking him to move from shortstop. 

The Cubs have looked somewhat better in the second half of this season. They’re just two games below .500 in the since the All Star break with Sunday’s loss, and their 15-15 record in August was the first time the Cubs have gone at least .500 for a month since they went 19-8 in May of 2021.

But winning a handful more games in these last two months of the season is one thing, becoming a truly competitive team again is another. Throughout the 2022 season, some of the pieces that will probably help comprise that next Cubs winner have emerged, and that list includes Hoerner. 

But it is clear that team president Jed Hoyer and general manager Carter Hawkins will still have to be active this winter. They made a push for Correa last offseason, and they should be players in the shortstop market again this time around. It’s a smart approach; the Cubs have more than enough space under the 2023 luxury tax threshold, and Hoerner’s early exit Sunday was a reminder that depth is essential for a winning team.

“We’ve got a really good shortstop here,” Ross said. “If something works out where they identify a middle infielder that is a value that they feel like fits really well, everybody’s on board with that, including myself and Nico. Those are good problems to have. We’ll let the front office pick and choose on that.”

This will mean that Hoerner has to move somewhere else on the field defensively. He has logged almost 500 innings in the majors at second base and even a smattering of time at third and in the outfield. Hoerner can handle moving around a little.

“The good thing about Nico is that he’s willing to do whatever we’ve asked,” Ross said. “We asked him to move to second base, he did a great job. He was asked to fill in early for a really good shortstop and a name here in Javy [Baez] and did a really good job.

“He’s a winner, he wants to win, and when you have a really good player, you want as many of those guys as you can get. The willingness for him to move around is real.”

For the past four days, the White Sox have looked more like the team that was expected going into the season. For the past two games, they have looked like a team that could still, despite all that has gone wrong this season, win their division.

Friday night, they beat the Twins in a 4-3 walkoff. Saturday, Dylan Cease missed throwing the 21st no-hitter in White Sox history by one out. Luiz Arraez lined a 1-1 slider for a single up the middle with two outs in the ninth; until then, Cease had fully stymied Minnesota batters. They managed two baserunners – Jake Cave walked in the third and Gilberto Celestino in the seventh – and only three times did they have an exit velocity on a ball in play over 100 miles per hour.

“It would have meant a lot,” Cease said. “It’s an incredibly difficult feat to achieve. It definitely would have meant a lot.”

Still, Cease threw his first complete game shutout, needing 103 pitches to get through all nine innings. He didn’t record a strikeout until the fifth inning but fanned seven Twins batters in the last four frames.

“I think after the fifth I kind of felt I didn’t have my sharpest stuff early,” Cease said. “And then once I got to the fifth, I started to have a better feel and then I really emptied the tank.”

Cease’s performance Saturday was another line on his Cy Young candidacy this year. He is 13-6 with a 2.13 ERA, and his 197 strikeouts are third-highest in baseball. Cease was a true All-Star snub, but he’s making it hard to keep ignoring what he is doing on the mound

“I was shocked first that he didn’t make the All-Star game, and he should be talked about,” interim manager Miguel Cairo said. “He’s been very consistent all year round. He goes out there and throws six, seven innings every time. He’s been outstanding.”

As if what Cease did wasn’t enough, the offense put up 13 runs. Six of those may have come against position player reliever Nick Gordon in the eighth, but the Sox had a comfortable 7-0 lead after four innings. They struck early; Elvis Andrus, Andrew Vaughn, and José Abreu connected for consecutive singles and the game’s first run, and then Eloy Jiménez hit a three-run homer.

In the fourth inning, Romy Gonzalez hit his first career home run, also a three-run shot, to put the Sox up by seven.

The last four days – the last two, especially – have felt in contrast with how the Sox have played most of this season. The team has been perpetually right around third place, but never more than a few games behind either the Twins or Guardians. For as low as things have gotten at different times in the season, the Sox have always managed to stay within striking distance. 

But now time is getting really short, and they are hoping the spark from a four-game winning streak is enough to ignite a team that has been playing .500 baseball all year.

“Everything runs on a timeline in this sport, and that timeline with the regular season ending is what we’re running up against,” Kendall Graveman told CHGO. “Not that these games mean more, but you’re closer to either playing in the playoffs or going home.”

Friday and Saturday night’s wins both felt like they contained moments that could be momentum-shifters. But the Sox have teased this kind of thing at other times this season. Most recently, when they won five games in a row, including sweeping the Tigers and winning the first two games of a four-game set against the Astros. At the end of that streak, the Sox were 61-56, the highest number of games above .500 they have been all season.

But instead of keeping the positive momentum going, they lost the next two games in Houston, including a 21-5 drubbing on August 18. They won only two games from August 17 to the 30th and got swept at home by the Diamondbacks along the way. Medical issues forced manager Tony La Russa to step away from the team indefinitely on August 31, meaning interim manager Cairo might be presiding over the season’s turning point if his team can keep up with the kind of fire they have shown for the past four games.

“Maybe they realize they’ve got to push the gas,” Cairo said of his team’s recent play. “And they’re pushing the gas right now.

“We’ve been through so much, injuries, all the stuff that’s happening, pitchers, position players and sometimes it’s like you kind of like overwhelm you. I think they just put that behind and they want to finish strong.”

The fight the team showed Friday night, in some instances almost literal fight, like when Lance Lynn lead the team in charging the mound after Twins closer Jorge López threw a 97-mile-per-hour pitch up and in that hit Andrew Vaughn in the shoulder. From the outside, the vibe has looked different these past four days. The elephant in the room – La Russa’s absence – can’t be ignored. The players have spoken highly of him throughout the season, but the tone in the Sox clubhouse has been different, especially after Friday’s win. 

“We’ve definitely turned the page for the better, and we know what we’ve got to do,” Yasmani Grandal said. 

Cease: “I think we know it’s crunch time right now. It’s time to bring out the focus and as much intensity as we can. We’ve definitely been locked in.”

Gonzalez: “It’s been a total shift in energy. We’re coming in here and we’re excited. We’re excited to get out there and play and compete.”

The Sox have a September schedule that can play into their favor if they capitalize on matchups against Cleveland and Minnesota. They play the Guardians four more times, and there are six more games against the Twins after this weekend’s series is over. Pushing the gas and wanting to finish strong might be the goal, but it will be most important in those games.

“You can get lulled to sleep a little bit in the middle of the season, everyone can,” Graveman told CHGO. “But these games matter just as much as the first game we played this season, as far as what they cost. That doesn’t change and that mindset definitely can’t change, but I think the energy in the building creates a little more urgency.”

Playing above .500 over the next four weeks will require more physically from players. Even the ones not on the injured list are banged up by this time of year, but the last stretch of the season can be unrelenting.

“There have been a lot of ups and downs, and we’re at the point where there’s something like 30 games left,” Andrew Vaughn told CHGO. “You make that final push. Everybody’s got that energy, you might have 80 percent, but you can give 180, 70 you give 170.”

The American League Central is not a particularly strong division, even at 66-66 the Sox are only three games out of first place. And once a team gets to the postseason, those wins and losses no longer count.

“This game is funny man, it’s a unique game. If you get in, everybody’s starting out with the same record. You still gotta win baseball games,” Graveman told CHGO. 

He recalls getting traded to the Athletics in November 2014, a few months after they were one of the best first-half teams in baseball, only to have to fight for a wild card spot and then eventually lose the AL wild card game to the Royals.

“It’s crazy what happens in this game. That’s why it’s such a unique sport,” Graveman said. “It’s 162 games. I love the length of it because it really challenges players mentally and physically, but it gives you opportunities to go through ups and downs through a season and then try and right the ship at the end.”

Ideally, the Sox would not have to be righting the ship in September. But if they are going to after months of struggles and frustration, the last four games might have been the start. After beating the Twins Saturday, and the Guardians losing to Seattle, the Sox are just two games out of first place.

“Hopefully we’ve been kicked in the mouth enough this year to realize there’s still some games to be played and some time to play them, and at the end, we’ll reflect,” Graveman told CHGO. “We’ll reflect at the end of the year, that true reflection of how the season went, and until then we’ll just keep playing baseball.”

To some extent, that’s all they can really control. Presumably, a team that has talent and that does the right things to prepare, execute, and stay healthy will win more often than not.

“The only way to compete in this league is to compete with urgency,” La Russa said. “The team you’re playing against, they’re trying to beat you. So it’s not the urgency thing. For us, it’s more look at where we can improve and improve.”

But if there’s a time when the White Sox might be forgiven for hitting the panic button, it could be now. There are 35 games left. Labor Day and the home stretch of the season looms. And the Sox are still, still mired right around .500 and a handful of games behind the division lead.

This begs the question: Are they ever going to go on a run?

It looked like the Sox might two weeks ago when they swept the Tigers and then started a four-game series against the Astros with two dramatic wins. Instead, the same issues that have plagued the Sox all season have continued. 

The past week alone has displayed several of them. Every team deals with injuries, but the Sox have played only a handful of games at even close to full strength this season. On Monday, they lost Michael Kopech to a knee injury, and Yoan Moncada was placed in the injured list with a left hamstring strain before Saturday’s game. The Sox are still starved for power; they rank 26th in the league with 105. After Thursday’s late-inning gut punch loss to the Orioles and Friday’s 7-2 embarrassment against the Diamondbacks, fans booed the team as they left the field.

“You’re going to face good things, bad things. You’re going to experience good and bad things, but you have to get over that and keep going,” José Abreu said. “Move forward. You have to face those challenges with love and with passion for yourself and for the game. That’s the only way that you can approach that and try to overcome that.”

Saturday’s 10-5 loss to the Diamondbacks dropped the Sox below .500 for the first time since July 29. And it was another showcase of so much of what has gone wrong for the Sox this year. Davis Martin had to take the start because of Kopech’s injury, Carlos Perez was behind the plate because Yasmani Grandal is still working his way back, AJ Pollock was in center field because Luis Robert is dealing with a wrist injury, and Abreu was the only guy in the infield not filling in for an injured player.

In the game, Martin tossed a scoreless first inning and Gavin Sheets put the Sox up to an early 3-0 lead with a three-run shot to the bullpen in right field, but the good times were short lived. Martin floundered in the second, eventually giving up five runs. The bullpen allowed two more through the eighth inning. Eloy Jimenez came within inches of tying the game in the bottom of the eighth, with a flyout that left his bat at nearly 104 miles per hour and traveled 374 feet only to land in Daulton Varsho’s glove.

“I don’t know how that ball didn’t get out. Doesn’t make any sense to me,” Sheets said. “I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know how that ball doesn’t get out. 104, 27 degrees is, that’s a home run. And that’s a game-changing home run.”

As La Russa said, his team’s task is to figure out where they can improve and then do it. But really putting a finger on what has gone wrong this season has been difficult. 

Until a recent team meeting, when a few of the players suggested that the deepest issue this year has been complacency. Namely, Jose Abreu, who called out how the team’s “confidence has turned into cockiness.”

“We just expected to come in and roll like we did last year,” closer Liam Hendriks said after that meeting.

Both the players who were here in 2021 and the ones who weren’t seem to be identifying a lack of urgency as the problem. New guy Johnny Cueto called out the team’s missing spark weeks ago. The question all season has been whether or not they can find it and keep it lit for more than a few games at a time. Their longest winning streak of the season was six games, but that was back in the beginning of May. And it was not long after an eight-game losing streak that stretched from April 17 to April 26. 

Fans have been frustrated since springtime, and as the season has progressed, “Fire Tony” chants have turned into a regular occurrence. There was a “Sell the Team” banner displayed rather prominently behind home plate during Saturday’s loss.

That negativity doesn’t seem to have bled into the clubhouse, at least not for the team’s de facto leader in the locker room.

“We all love him. His sense of unity and his sense of family is something that is around us, is around this team,” Abreu said. “It doesn’t matter what the people from the outside say, the fans can say whatever they want to. It doesn’t mean that what they say is true.

“We support Tony. We appreciate Tony and the effort he put to put us in the best position to succeed.”

The Sox may have come into the season cocky, but now at the end of August, they may have been knocked around enough that they have lost some of that swagger. Missing a sense of urgency dug the hole they are in, and perhaps losing a touch of their confidence has made it deeper.

“My point in that meeting was if we believe that we can do it, we can do it,” Abreu said. “The success is in the unity of a team. I truly believe that because that’s my goal in life and in my family. That’s how I strive as a family man. Being this is my second family, I just try to enforce that message here and try to have everybody understand and try to get everybody together, everybody to come together in that same goal. 

“If we believe it, we can make things happen.”

Like they have been all season, Minnesota and Cleveland are head of the Sox in the division. Of the 35 games that remain, the Sox have nine more against the Twins and four against the Guardians. Those 13 games will be the time to make it happen. 

“If you believe you got a shot, you got to start some place,” La Russa said. “Just don’t give in whenever you’re up.”

Harder and harder to do, especially after three tough losses in a row.

“Worst thing you can do is get frustrated and depressed, discouraged,” La Russa said. “Get angry. Do something about it tomorrow. That’s the message. Get some adrenaline pumping and get back to even.”

A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label was there to commemorate his 100th career home run. It joins a growing collection of gifts Happ has received for career milestones.

With his first-inning home run off of Brewers starter Brandon Woodruff, Happ became only the 26th player in Cubs franchise history to reach triple digits in his career home run total. Getting there took him just 637 career games.

“One hundred homers, that fast, is pretty impressive. Especially from a switch hitter,” manager David Ross said. “Guy’ has had a really nice year, and I think that’s just one of those icing on the cake for the year he’s having.”

Happ also has a bottle that he got from Wade Miley for making his first All-Star appearance this season. Going into Sunday’s game against the Brewers, Happ had a .801 OPS, making this his first season of at least 100 games played with an OPS above .800 since his rookie year in 2017.

It has taken Happ a lot of hard work and perseverance through struggles in 2018 and 2019 to get to this point in his career. After his impressive rookie season, Happ batted .233 with 15 home runs in 2018, and he started the 2019 season in Triple-A Iowa. Reaching the 100-homer milestone Sunday is one testament to what Happ has accomplished, not just in counting stats, but in working to mature as a player.

“It’s humbling and it’s something I take a lot of pride in,” he said.

There was a chance this moment would not have happened at Wrigley Field, Happ’s home ballpark for the entirety of his career. Not just because he reached 99 home runs a week ago while the team was still on a road trip, but because there were significant rumors that he might be traded at the Aug. 2 deadline.

“This was one of the things that as the deadline was going past, I wanted to get to 100 before my time here was done,” Happ said. “Being able to be here and get a chance to do it is really special.”

Happ had 97 career home runs going into the trade deadline, and he had not hit one since July 12 at that point. Had he been traded, as it was expected he could, Happ would have likely reached 100 home runs before too long. But he would not have been able to do it wearing the uniform he has donned for the entirety of his major league career.

“It’s really cool to have a milestone like that and achieve it in this ballpark,” Happ said. 

He reached 100 homers in a year when he has been hitting less of them than usual.

Happ’s overall home run rate is actually down some this season. His home run to fly ball ratio is 12.9% this year; that’s the lowest it has been in his career and about half what it was in 2021 when he hit 25 home runs. Some of the decrease in homers is probably due to a dip in his hard contact and fly balls rates this year, but Happ has still had one of his most productive seasons. He already has 31 doubles in 2022, far surpassing his previous season high of 20. Happ’s overall performance, especially at the plate, draws nothing but praise from Ross.

“We talk a lot about clubs in your bag, and he’s brought a lot of different clubs,” he said. “And it’s been from both sides of the plate. Just a very well-rounded, solid big-league player.”

Ross noted Happ’s improved defense in left field — he has been worth six Defensive Runs Saved in that spot so far this season, compared to two last year — and Happ has succeeded in doing a lot of the small things successfully as well. Most recently, in Saturday’s 6-5 win over the Brewers, Happ stole third base in the tenth inning. That set him up to score the tying run on Franmil Reyes’ sacrifice fly.

Along with the Blue Label he got on Sunday, Happ still has a bottle of Ace of Spades champagne from Jon Lester that he got for his first career home run. That one he hit in his major league debut on May 13, 2017 in St. Louis. It was a two-run shot in the 7th inning off of Cardinals starter Carlos Martinez.

Fittingly, Lester was in attendance Sunday for Happ’s 100th homer, this one a towering, 387-foot blast through the wind and into the seats in right field.

There isn’t a dedicated room in his home for all of the keepsakes he is gathering for his career accomplishments so far, Happ said, but he may need one before too long.

“You start to accumulate stuff like that,” he said, “and it’s pretty cool when you look around and have a bunch of those.”

Their latest win, an eleven-inning 6-5 victory over the Brewers, showcased all of what a winning ballclub needs to have: quality starting pitching, good defense, an effective bullpen, and timely hitting. 

“They’re all pulling the same end of the rope,” manager David Ross said. “It just seems like everybody has slotted in nicely. Nobody cares where they’re playing, they just want to be playing, they want to help support each other.”

On Saturday, starter Marcus Stroman set the tone, settling in after giving up a run in the first inning. After Willy Adames hit a single in the second at-bat of the game, Stroman went into the top of the eighth before he allowed another base hit. In all, Stroman was one out shy of going eight full innings, ultimately giving up just two runs while striking out five.

Some of Stroman’s success was thanks to the defense behind him. Shortstop Nico Hoerner, in particular. Going into Saturday’s game, Hoerner had 12 defensive runs saved, per Fangraphs, which put him in a tie with Houston’s Jeremy Pena for the second-most among shortstops in all of baseball.

Stroman said he believes Hoerner does not get appropriate credit around the league for his defense, and both Ross and left fielder Ian Happ praised Hoerner’s glovework on Saturday. Happ joked that there were several plays when he expected to be making a play on a base hit into the outfield, only to see Hoerner’s glove appear out of nowhere and grab the ball.

“Playing the in the middle of the field, I take a lot of pride in that every day,” Hoerner said.

Hoerner got Andrew McCutchen out on a 105 mile per hour liner in the sixth inning, and Luis Urias on two liners around 100 miles per hour in the seventh and ninth innings. All three batted balls in play had expected batting averages well over .800. But Hoerner and Stroman both said his play to get Christian Yelich in the sixth inning was the best of the afternoon because he had to range over and play the shift.

“I obviously believe in myself as a shortstop,” Hoerner said. “I’ve said that for a while, and I think people believe that now.”

Questions hover around the team, even in August, about how the Cubs will handle free agency in the offseason. Some of what they do might affect Hoerner. Carlos Correa was a heavy target last winter, and he could be again. Despite Hoerner’s success both at the plate and on the field, he could get pushed aside in the name of building a team that can contend in 2023.

Something like that might create some negative tension in a lot of clubhouses, but Hoerner said that is not the case in the Wrigley locker room.

“If they make moves that are going to help us win baseball games, that’s not going to be a huge issue around here,” he said. “If we have the issue of having too many good players, I’ll like that problem.”

Hoerner’s teammate up the middle, Nick Madrigal, supplied three hits Saturday, including a game-tying RBI in the ninth inning. Timely hitting like that made the quality performance from Stroman worthwhile. Willson Contreras hit a go-ahead homerun in the fifth inning, and then the Cubs battled in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh frames to eventually win in a walk-off. The final hit was another one from Contreras.

“There’s no one who wants to come through for the team more than Willy,” Stroman said.

Obviously the Cubs can do these things in the microcosm of one game or even a stretch of series. The difference through the final month and a half of this season and next year will be whether or not they figure out how to do it all together consistently. 

But right now, the Cubs are in the midst of an impressive stretch. One that could be showing the kind of baseball they are capable of at some point. The kind that could be even better with a few additions in the offseason. They have an 11-7 record in August, and they are winning a lot of the kinds of close games that weren’t going their way earlier in the season. Some of that is just goofy baseball luck – the ball bounces your way until it doesn’t – but some of it is the mentality in the clubhouse.

Stroman said he told a family member recently that he has been impressed by the demeanor of his teammates through the extreme ups and downs the season has brought.

“You couldn’t really tell the difference between a 10-game losing streak and a 10-game winning streak. It was very even. I think that’s extremely important,” he said.

Ross has spoken of the value and importance of having a winning culture all season. One of his goals has been for his younger and less experienced players to learn how to win and do it on a regular basis, and how to persist through difficult stretches and challenging games. They have done a lot of that over the last couple of weeks.

“The value here is the players are doing that and continue to support each other and come in here with a lot of high confidence and going about their business and still continue to work no matter what’s asked of them. I think that is a winning culture and a winning environment,” Ross said.

“Confidence is a strong thing in this game, and these guys got a lot of it right now.”

“Big thing is we got to win series. We got to get bunch of wins to really say we’re in contention,” he said.

Roughly two weeks later, the Sox are two games above .500 after beating the Tigers 2-0 on Friday and 6-4 on Saturday. If they complete the series sweep, the Sox will be three games above .500 for the first time since they had a 6-3 record on April 17. They sit two-and-a-half games behind Cleveland for the division lead. Not much has changed.

Ultimately, the Sox are still looking for galvanizing moments. During the series in Kansas City earlier this week, Johnny Cueto raised questions about whether or not the team had any fire. If they are going to get it, they need something to create a spark. 

In their win over the Tigers Saturday, there were two such moments, potentially. Starter Lucas Giolito gave up four runs in the first three innings, but after giving up an RBI double to Detroit catcher Eric Haase, Giolito retired 12 straight. He ended up pitching seven innings and only allowed one base hit after the third inning.

The moment for Giolito was a call he didn’t get in the second inning. He got two quick outs but walked designated hitter Kerry Carpenter. The pitch that did it for Giolito was ball four on a full count.

“I got a little pissed off after the second inning,” Giolito said. “It was a big pitch that inning on a 3-2 count that was as strike, I would have liked. Could have made the inning go a lot different.”

Four or five years ago, a moment like that would have lead to frustration, like it did Saturday. But the difference back then was how Giolito responded.

“I was scratching, clawing, struggling then. So those things would get to me and really ruin an outing,” Giolito said.

Now, he gets mad and makes adjustments. Giolito said he and Yasmani Grandal changed their approach after the first three innings, moving away from his changeup and shifting to using his fastball more. A wise move, it turned out. Only three members of the Tigers have batting averages above .300 against the four-seam fastball this season, and one of them (Miguel Cabrera) was not in the lineup. The other two – Javier Baez and Harold Castro – did not get the chance to do damage against Giolito’s four-seam after the third inning. In his fifth-inning strikeout, Baez only saw one fastball and swung and missed. Against Castro, Giolito stuck to a changeup and a slider.

All of that because of a call he didn’t like in the second inning. Giolito used the frustration as fuel to adjust and give his team seven innings.

“I made it a point to channel it into aggression toward executing pitches and starting finding a rhythm in the fourth, fifth inning and carried it through seven,” Giolito said. 

Jose Abreu provided another potential spark in the seventh inning. With the score tied 4-4, Abreu singled and then tagged up and took second on Grandal’s deep flyout to center field. The call at second base was close enough that it needed a review, but Abreu reached safely. Taking that extra base was a small thing, but it put him in scoring position with two outs. Enough for Andrew Vaughn’s single to send Abreu across the plate for the go-ahead run.

“That’s heads up, knowing the situation,” La Russa said. “He’s a very heady, plays defense the same way. Very smart about when to try something and when to make it routine.”

It’s a small thing, taking an extra base. But it can spark a team. 

“It’s huge. Pito’s not a very fast guy, but he knows baseball,” Vaughn said. “And he knew, ‘hey if I can get into scoring position right here,’ you don’t even have to ask him. That’s exactly what he did. It’s the little things sometimes.”

“He’s a leader by example,” Giolito said. “So when he’s out there playing his ass off, doing the little things right, giving the extra effort, just so we have a chance to scratch another run across, it’s uplifting. I think it’s motivation for every single guy watching it in the dugout, on-deck circle.”

More of that kind of motivation is going to be needed. Every team deals with injuries, but one of the things that seems to have held the Sox back this season has been their inability to field a healthy lineup. Not that many days after Tim Anderson needed surgery that has shelved him for a month and a half, Luis Robert exited Friday night’s game with a wrist sprain. La Russa said Saturday that Robert was still just day-to-day, but injuries like that can take a while to go away.

For most of the rest of the season, the Sox will not be able to play at full strength.

“You concentrate on what you have, not what you’re missing,” La Russa said. “You compete with what you got. This sport is big enough. You got 13 pitchers and 13 other players. You can deal with injuries if your mind is right, and our minds are right.”

Looking forward, the Sox have a challenging couple of weeks ahead. After they finish the weekend series against the Tigers, they have four games at home against the Astros, three in Cleveland, and then three in Baltimore. Winning games against Detroit is to be expected, but the weeks ahead will tell whether moments like the ones that came Saturday were truly galvanizing.