Cubs manager David Ross noticed his players were “grinding” by the end of their series last week in Colorado.
“Felt that way, for sure,” he said. “We didn’t play our best brand of baseball there on that road trip at all, to be honest.”
All month, Ross has leaned on the proven players who helped drag the team into playoff contention. Injuries forced a lineup shake-up Tuesday in a 14-1 victory against the Pirates, giving Alexander Canario his first major-league start at designated hitter and sliding Christopher Morel over to third base.
“The offense is just kind of not going right now,” Ross said. “Putting the ball on the ground a lot, which has been uncharacteristic of us, not being able to get that big hit. Just trying to find something that sparks these guys a little bit, mixing things up.”
That doesn’t mean Ross has changed his stance.
“No more off days for guys,” he said, pointing to their built-in off day next week. “We’re going to lean on the guys who got us here.”
The one time Ross may have wished he’d prioritized getting some regulars a break was the Colorado series. But it’s a delicate balance. This time of year, players across MLB are playing through bumps and bruises. And the climb from 10 games below .500 in early June to 12 games over earlier this month was quite the physical feat.
As the Cubs have fallen into a rut over the last 1½ weeks, some of their best players haven’t been at their best. Cody Bellinger hit just .174 over the last three series. Dansby Swanson made some nice plays over the weekend but also wasn’t as crisp as usual on a couple of others.
How much of that is the normal ebb and flow of a season, and how much has to do with the physical toll?
“Talking to guys, what their body’s like, what their mentality’s like,” Ross said of his process. “What I see — am I seeing a slower bat, a less conditioned at-bat, a less focused at-bat, any kind of slower steps in the outfield? Analytically, we can measure that stuff.”
Ross put Bellinger in the DH spot for two consecutive games two weeks ago after Bellinger hurt himself on a slide in Cincinnati. But his last time out of the starting lineup was late June.
Swanson, who played 160 regular-season games before a 2021 World Series run with the Braves, hasn’t sat out a game since returning from the injured list (bruised heel) on July 22.
Bellinger, Swanson and Canario all homered Tuesday, as did Seiya Suzuki.
“We have guys that want to play every day; that’s the way they view themselves as players, is doing that,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said. “And that’s hard.”
Going into the Colorado series, Jeimer Candelario’s back injury also left Bellinger and third baseman Patrick Wisdom as the only options at first base.
The Cubs called up top prospect Pete Crow-Armstrong to roam Coors Field’s spacious center field for two starts, which gave Mike Tauchman some rest. But for the most part, Ross stuck with regulars. And the Cubs lost two of three games in Colorado.
Now, imagine if Ross had given a couple of them the day off for the Wednesday day game and they had still lost.
“Those are all almost impossible questions to answer,” Hoyer said of things like adding a fresh bat to the lineup or changing the batting order. “Because, ultimately, you can only make one decision in that moment. And if it works, people think it’s smart. And if it doesn’t, then people say you should have done the other. And you never know what thing actually led to what happened.”
After the Cubs got through the Colorado series, the end of a stretch of 14 games in 13 days, Ross wasn’t going to sit any regular starters against the Diamondbacks, a wild-card opponent, with off days on either side of the three-game series.
The Cubs were swept in Arizona and entered their series against the Pirates in the third wild-card spot, with 12 games to go.
“That’s where you’d like to thrive, when your backs are against the wall and things are a little bit challenging,” Swanson said Tuesday. “That’s when you step up. That’s what you trained all offseason for. You’ve put the pennies in the piggy bank the whole year to be at this point. And you’ve just got to find a way to get through it.”
