MILWAUKEE — As the Cubs grabbed their bats in the eighth inning against the Brewers, hoping to add on to their four-run lead, the Marlins sealed their fate from Pittsburgh.
Miami’s 7-3 victory against the Pirates eliminated the Cubs from the playoff chase before they finished their 10-6 victory over the Brewers on Saturday.
“You’ve got to be great consistently in this game if you want to get to the postseason and the World Series,” Cubs manager David Ross said. “We know that. We fell short of that.”
It was a swift fall out of playoff contention for his team.
When the Cubs completed a three-game sweep of the Giants, who at the time were also in the wild-card race, on Sept. 6, FanGraphs put the Cubs’ chances of making the postseason at 92.4%.
They lost 14 of their next 20 games. Then the Marlins’ latest victory shrunk those odds all the way to 0%.
As players digested the finality of their elimination, they were asked to label the season — success or failure?
“This comes back to what the standard of this organization should be,” second baseman Nico Hoerner said, “in that, we know that we’re in an incredibly special place with a fan base and resources to compete at the highest level year in and year out. And I think that should be the standard.
“And we felt that we had a group of players this year, too, that was not just able to play meaningful baseball in September but to go to the postseason and push it as far as we can. And so, yeah, we did fail in that way. And it does sting right now. I think that there will be positives taken away, for sure. But I think, especially as we talk in the midst of it, yeah, we came up short down the stretch.”
At least from the outside, the Cubs’ fate seemed inevitable after their 4-3 loss to the Brewers in 10 innings Friday. The team’s losing streak reached four games, and the Cubs had lost all four by two runs or fewer. Half of them went into extra innings.
“It’s never one thing,” left fielder Ian Happ said Friday night. “There’s so many plays and so many little things that change the course of the game, and it all adds up.”
The same could be said about the Cubs’ season.
If their bullpen had been healthier in September and their offense had come through more in the clutch in the last week, maybe they’d be playoff-bound.
But the offense was a major part of the Cubs’ season-saving surge through the trade deadline.
What if they’d added more back-end bullpen depth via acquisitions or player development? What if they hadn’t slumped quite so hard in May? What if they’d won more close games earlier in the year?
It’s not just one thing.
“It hurts probably more that we made that run,” right-hander Jameson Taillon said of the Cubs’ mad dash from 10 games under .500 to 12 games over that made them surprise playoff contenders. “But I honestly feel like we were closer to the team that made that run than we were to the team that we showed we were in the last few weeks.”
Now the Cubs have to figure out how they can be that nifty team over the course of a full season. And, ultimately, the front office will have to answer that question in the offseason.
“The last few weeks were more on the frustrating side than any of us wanted it to be,” said Cody Bellinger, who is headed into free agency. “But, overall, throughout the 162 [games], we played good baseball. It wasn’t good enough. But we fought to the very end.”
