CHICAGO – One of the traits of this Cubs team early in the season, when the offense was rolling and the ballclub enjoyed a stay atop the division for most of the first four months, was a resiliency within each game. Comeback wins were a part of the script early on, but that dynamic has been absent for weeks.
On Saturday afternoon at Wrigley Field, the Cubs continued to search for a spark in the batter’s box, but a late rally delivered a 3-1 win over the Pirates and snapped a peculiar franchise-record drought. The North Siders had not pulled off a comeback win since July 2, marking the longest such streak (35 games) since the team’s founding in 1876, per team historian Ed Hartig.
“These games are a great opportunity to create momentum,” Cubs outfielder Seiya Suzuki said via interpreter Edwin Stanberry. “The hope is to keep it going.”
The extended run without a comeback victory had a few factors at play. Chicago’s rotation has been enjoying a strong stretch -- continued with Shota Imanaga’s seven stellar frames on Saturday -- while the offense has gone quiet. That created a situation in which Chicago was not allowing much on the front-end of games, while in turn laboring to mount many rallies in the batter’s box.
At the same time, the Brewers have gotten red hot, soaring to the National League Central’s perch and knocking the Cubs into the Wild Card field. It made each whiff with runners in scoring position, each high-leverage mistake by the bullpen and every loss seemingly carry more weight, even as Chicago remains very much in the October picture.
“We’re still a really good team regardless of how the last couple weeks or whatever has gone,” Cubs right fielder Kyle Tucker said. “We’re still in a playoff hunt right now and in the playoffs currently, so we don’t change our course just because you might lose a few games or whatever here and there.
“Our goal is to grind out the season and get to the playoffs and try to win from there. That’s what we’re going to try to do.”
To do so, the Cubs need more games like Saturday’s win.
“We had a lot of fun today,” said Tucker, who had two hits and scored twice in the win. “[We need to] try to just get back to playing good ol’ Cubbie baseball.”
Imanaga turned in a quality start, limiting the Pirates to a fourth-inning solo homer from Tommy Pham in seven innings of work. The Cubs lefty struck out six and walked two, seeing his walk-free streak end at 117 consecutive batters faced. Imanaga’s outing also lowered Chicago’s rotation ERA to a Major League-low 3.04 since the All-Star break.
The decisive push arrived in the eighth, when Tucker -- batting .140 in a dozen games this month, entering Saturday -- led off with a single to right off Pirates lefty Evan Sisk. With the game knotted, 1-1, Tucker then successfully stole second base, giving him 25 thefts on the season.
Tucker’s steal came one game after both Ian Happ (eighth inning) and Pete Crow-Armstrong (ninth) were thrown out on steal attempts late in Chicago’s 3-2 loss on Friday.
“A gutsy stolen base,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “It’s the same play as yesterday that we got thrown out on. And we took a risk. Kyle took a risk and thought he had something, and picked the right pitch to go on.”
That set the stage for Suzuki, who drove a pitch from Sisk to center to bring Tucker in to put the Cubs up, 2-1. Nico Hoerner later added an RBI double for some insurance, which reliever Brad Keller used to collect his first save of the year.
Combined with Carson Kelly’s run-scoring single in the fourth, that late rally helped the Cubs find the win column in comeback fashion for the first time since early July against Cleveland. At that point in the season, the Cubs had 23 comeback wins. That was part of the team’s brand before the offense’s recent outage.
“In the close games,” Counsell said, “one run can be a little more important. And we did some little things well to kind of get that extra run. We executed some things to get that extra run. And we’ve talked about that -- that you have to win in different ways.”
The Cubs did just enough on Saturday.
“Hopefully, today is the start of a long stretch of [winning],” Tucker said.