As the temperatures start to heat up, the question around the Chicago Cubs is: when will the bats heat up as well?
In a 5-0 shutout of the Milwaukee Brewers on Sunday, the Cubs didn’t register their first hit until the third inning when left fielder Ian Happ singled on a line drive to center. Starting Cubs pitcher Javier Assad threw 94 pitches over six innings with four hits, four walks, four strikeouts and no runs.
Leading up to Sunday’s game against the division rival, the Cubs were slashing .236/.315/.390 as a team, where they rank 19th, 13th, and 14th, respectively, in the majors.
With Cody Bellinger and Seiya Suzuki out of the lineup, the offense has been a lingering question for a couple of weeks and their absences show in the slim margins — except for that 17-run shutout by the Red Sox on April 27 — by which the team has won and lost. Suzuki and Bellinger have been ramping up for their returns and were running and hitting over the weekend. They’re expected to be back in the lineup within the coming days to help stabilize the offense.
Through the last five games, shortstop Dansby Swanson has an average of .067 and didn’t register a hit Friday or Saturday.
“I think with Dansby he has such a track record that we can kind of go back to. And we’re always trying to just kind of maintain a lot of his movements and some of the things that he’s working on approach-wise,” hitting coach Dustin Kelly said Sunday. “With some of the guys that have that track record, we try not to get too far away from what they’re really good at and what they’ve done really good in the past. There’s always little tweaks, little mechanical things that we are always kind of monitoring, but it’s usually not that far away. And I think that’s kind of where we feel with him right now.”
Kelly shared that despite Swanson’s recent numbers, he has encouraged the All-Star to remain confident and know that “each day is a new day and he has some way to impact the team.” Swanson, who has recorded a career high in ground balls and whiffs, broke through Sunday hitting a home run to center field in the sixth inning, bringing his season total to four and likely lifting his confidence a little.
“We’re all still human, right? And nobody wants to perform better than us. And at times, you just get so lost in results and numbers and you forget that the main job is to just show up as yourself and be yourself and be committed to who God made you to be,” Swanson said postgame.
“The biggest thing is just being connected. When you’re connected good things happen and this year has been a lot of disconnected moments in my swing and we’ve been working hard day and night almost to figure it out. I think today was a good step in the right direction,” Swanson said.
With late-game pitching an issue over the current 16-game stretch, the Cubs are desperately in need of some clutch hitting. So what exactly are they doing to try to get out of their collective hitting slump entering the third month of the season?
In their assessments of players’ hitting mechanics, some key markers Kelly and his staff look at are stride length, stride height and hand placement.
“There’s a ton of technology, there’s a ton of information for all these guys on their own to go look at and then we have a time in-house as well. (What) we talk about as hitting coaches a lot is we’re going to take the complex as coaches and try to make it really simple for the players,” Kelly said. “And a lot of times it’s just ‘hey you gotta be on the fastball in the middle of the zone and make sure you’re on time for that and use the big part of the field.’ Easier said than done but a lot of times that’s the approach you have to take to make it really simple for guys.”
Thanks to some promising starting pitching, the Cubs’ offensive slump hasn’t impacted their place in the standings, where they’re tied with the Brewers for the National League Central lead. But with upcoming games against the San Diego Padres and Atlanta Braves and the remaining division opponents, the Cubs need to improve their hitting — whether it be mechanics, how they see the ball or confidence — or their win total could look as questionable as their swings.
