It was a good weekend overall for the Cubbies. Reed Johnson's pinch-hit, two-run homer in the eighth yesterday gave the Cubs the lead for good and secured a series victory over the Pirates. Things seem to be clicking again, but that has been the trend at Wrigley.
The Cubs now have a 5-game lead over Milwaukee and are 7-3 in their last 10. The Cubs league's best ERA for starting pitchers and have scored more runs then any other team in the NL. It's a good combination. Soriano looks healthy and ramped up. The combo deal of the year in the outfield, Johnson/Edmonds, has batted .306 combined with 23 doubles, 16 HRs and 67 RBIs. Not bad. Kerry is about ready to come back, but his absence has led to some good innings from Samardzija.
Couldn't be better, huh? Well, I'm a tad concerned about the 15-17 record in one-run games (9-7 at home and 6-10 away). Is this a major concern? Probably not, but it's worth looking at. Of those 17 losses, only six of them came when the Cubs scored 4 or more runs (5 away and 1 at home). You can look at these facts any way you want. I'm going to say that when the Cubs suffer a blip in the offense, they are losing close games. However, this doesn't happen terribly frequently (at 5.3 runs per game) and when it does, the pitchers are keeping them in those games. Those one-run games still amount to approximately 29% of the games thus far and we know what the playoffs are like.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment