For one night at least, the Milwaukee Brewers reminded a packed Wrigley Field that the reigning division champs still have plenty of talent to continue being a menace.
Even as the Cubs faithful among the 37,647 tried to get the energy flowing during the fifth inning with a “Green Bay sucks!” chant following Dansby Swanson’s two-run home run, left-hander Shota Imanaga put them in a massive hole that was too much to overcome.
Imanaga, so reliable this season, didn’t have his best stuff. The Brewers scored eight runs against Imanaga in 4 1/3 innings, and the Cubs couldn’t get much going against right-hander Brandon Sproat in a 9-3 loss. It snapped their 15-game home winning streak and moved the Brewers a half-game back of the first-place Cubs in the National League Central.
“Shota just didn’t have a good night and mostly he just didn’t have real good command, the command that he usually has,” manager Craig Counsell said. “There were just too many balls towards the middle of the plate. I think the three walks tell you he didn’t have great command tonight. That’s just not something he normally does, so it’s just frankly not being able to put the ball where he wanted to put it, and they swung the bats good and took advantage of making a lot of contact.”
The command issues affected his splitter in particular. Imanaga wasn’t getting much chase with the pitch — just two whiffs — or generating the weak contact he needed. It forced Imanaga away from one of his key pitches, ultimately accounting for just 19% of his pitches thrown, well below his season average (36%). When Imanaga did get ahead of Milwaukee’s hitters, he couldn’t put them away.
“If you look at their hitters, they know what they need to do at times,” Imanaga said through interpreter Edwin Stanberry. “They’re aggressive, and they try to make that hard contact, and at times they understand they’ll hit the ball the other way, and I think one through nine everybody understands what they need to do individually, and I think it’s why they have a good offense.
“Overall, I think their game plan overcame my skills.”
The Cubs (29-19) came into Monday’s series opener in the bottom third of the majors with runners in scoring position. Their .238 average in those situations ranked 22nd, while their 99 wRC+ put them 19th. The Brewers, conversely, have been among the best RISP teams with their .282 average (fourth) and 128 wRC+ (third). Both trends played out in Monday’s game. With runners in scoring position, Milwaukee went 6-for-9 while the Cubs finished 0-for-9 and left seven on base.
Seven weeks into a 162-game season still creates a small sample size for those opportunities, but the Cubs haven’t been able to come through with multiple big hits in those spots over this 3-7 stretch. Ian Happ struck out twice looking to strand three baserunners in the first and fifth innings, and Dansby Swanson and Seiya Suzuki each failed to drive in a runner with two outs.
“There’s a skill to being able to advance the baseball and make things happen with runners in scoring position, just like hitting in general. There’s ups and downs of it throughout the season,” Happ said before the loss. “Sometimes you feel like every time you’re in a position to be up with runners in scoring position you get a good pitch to hit and you handle it and you move forward and good things happen. There’s also times where you hit a bunch of balls hard in scoring position, or you get pitched really, really well, and that’s part of the season. It’s kind of why you wait until the end of the season to kind of look back at that stuff.
“But, yeah, I think it’s definitely a different situation. You’re usually seeing the guy’s best stuff from pitch one.”
Swanson got the Cubs on the board with a two-run home run that cleared the left-field bleachers. On a night the wind was blowing out, Sproat got the Cubs to hit the ball on the ground often. Six of the 14 outs Sproat recorded were groundouts to shortstop Joey Ortiz. When Sproat did have stretches of shaky command (three walks and a hit batter), he limited the damage. Nico Hoerner, walking after Swanson’s home run in the fifth, scored on Michael Busch’s double.
The Cubs, though, didn’t manage to put another run across after their three-run fifth.
“Any time you play a division opponent, and especially a team like them who has proven to be at the top of the division every year, there’s always a little bit of extra something,” Swanson said. “At the end of the day, I feel like this group’s so good about showing up and being prepared for the day and trying to win the day, and that’s why tomorrow’s going to be important for us to come out here and compete.”
