MILWAUKEE – “Tell them you got in a Lyft and the driver said the Mets suck!”
That’s what greeted me when I touched down in New York last Monday.
Over the course of the next four days, it turned out my hilarious, all-around stereotypical New Yorker of a Lyft driver – shoutout to Larry – was right.
The Cubs dealt the Mets a four-game sweep that sparked team brass in New York to fire the manager.
Even as an avalanche of pitching injuries threatened to bury them – and still could – the Cubs looked all sorts of back in Queens, scoring 33 runs in three days.
That offensive funk? No more. Instead, the offense was grooving. It was just plain funky.
And then? The Brewers.
“The Brewers are the cream of the crop,” starting pitcher Matthew Boyd said Sunday. “They’ve won the division three years in a row and multiple years before that.
“The Central runs through them, we all know that.”
The Cubs pulled a rabbit-sized 4-3 win out of their hats Sunday, scoring three runs in the top of the 10th inning and narrowly avoiding disaster in the bottom half, all despite getting only four hits off Brewers pitching on the afternoon.
It sent the Cubs, who took the series, winning two out of three, back down I-94 feeling a lot better than they did after last October’s NLDS.
But if the Brewers showed one thing, even in a series loss, it’s that they’re no Mets.
The supposed soft spot in the Cubs’ schedule is over, with 21 straight games against teams that started June below .500 now in the rearview mirror. They didn’t start that stretch so hot, but they emerged from an offensive malaise by the end.
Just in time for their pitching staff to go on the fritz.
It’s not so much poor performance as bad injury luck. Terrible injury luck. There’s an entire rotation and late-inning group on the IL at the same time.
So while from the outside this looked like a key series against the division leaders as the Cubs try to get back toward the top of the Central – they’re now within 5 1/2 games – it ended up being a test in survival for a team patching its pitching together.
Fittingly for being in Wisconsin, the Cubs have bigger fish to fry than the Brewers at the moment.
“Really, I’m thinking about our team right now,” manager Craig Counsell said after Saturday’s game. “We’ve just gone through this period of pitcher loss, right? We’ve got to get through this phase, that’s No. 1. That’s really the focus of everything for me right now is let’s get our team through this phase and come out the other side with some semblance of order in how we’re going to run it the rest of the year.
“We need health, and we’ve got new guys, we’ve got new guys doing new things. That’s what my focus is on right now is getting that to a good place.”
The Cubs are facing big challenges that have nothing to do with the Brewers. But somehow, amid all the injuries and rainouts and everything else, the Cubs went 6-1 on the road trip.
They woke up Sunday in the second NL wild-card spot, but with Cade Horton, Justin Steele, Ben Brown, Jameson Taillon, Edward Cabrera, Daniel Palencia, Phil Maton and Hoby Milner all sidelined for now – and in some cases deep into the summer and beyond – the task is staying afloat enough to give Jed Hoyer’s front office something to do at the trade deadline.
The bats coming to life and contributions up and down the roster, the themes of this successful trip – and of successful baseball, in general – will help with that.
But even if the Cubs escape death-by-pitching-injuries and find themselves a contender in September, that Brewers problem doesn’t figure to go away.
The Central, as they know, goes through Milwaukee.
