BASEBALL ZOMBIES

 

               For some baseball teams September is the month for edgy watching of scoreboards for the progress of the divisional races, or, at least, a lingering hope for same. For others, that hope has been abandoned and the remaining games exist only for the accumulation of gate receipts and individual stats.

               Unfortunately, my home-town Chicago Cubs and my new-home Arizona Diamondbacks are in the latter category, and have been for some time. Indeed, both have been zombies since early summer, plodding along from defeat to defeat with no hope of reward. Such is the downside of baseball’s long, long season. It would have been merciful to put both out of their misery long ago.

               An interesting argument could be made over which of the two teams is worse. The D’backs have an overall edge with a 44-90 won-lost mark as of Monday (9/1) to the Cubs’ 58-75, but the Arizonans have been less terrible in recent weeks. They started the season well enough, posting a 14-12 record in April, but then took a cannonball dive by going 8-48 in May and June, a scarcely believable fall when it’s remembered that baseball is a game in which the best teams win about six of 10 while the worst go about 4-6. Included in that May-June swoon was a 24-game road losing streak, the worst in the sport’s officially recorded history.

               The Cubs have had a weird year, begun with the off-season trade of their best starting pitcher, Yu Darvish, for a passel of pink-cheeked prospects. The message sent out by that deal was clear, but the team began well enough anyway, winning 38 of their 65 games at mid-June. Gravity then set in, leading to losing steaks of 11 and 12 games since, with a record 13-game home losing streak among them. They engineered an epic salary dump at the July 31 trade deadline, erasing just about all human reminders of their 2016 World Series triumph. Since late June they’ve been the worst team in baseball, with no end in sight.

               Nobody expected much of the 2021 D’Backs, so the Cubs’ collapse was the most notable. Pending free agency dictated that they let go some of their World Series core, but few expected that Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez and Kris Bryant all would be jettisoned, along with the ace relief pitcher Craig Kimbrel. That was in addition to the veteran outfielder Joc Petersen, who’d been moved earlier. The haul the Cubs received in return included only two bona fide Major Leaguers, second baseman Nick Madrigal and relief pitcher Codi Heuer, both from the Chicago White Sox, and Madrigal already was out for the season with a hamstring tear.

               It would be nice to report that the Cubs had a bunch of promising young minor leaguers ready to debut at Wrigley Field, but such was not the case. MLB.com’s ranking of minor-league systems had the Cubs 22^nd among the 30 teams before the July moves, and they moved up only four spots afterward. Some of the newly acquired players are pups, too young to be reflected in such rankings, but it can’t be said that that other help from below is near at hand.

Instead, the Cubs have filled their roster with journeyman players with little long-term upside. The prime example of that is outfielder Rafael Ortega, who has played well in Chicago but is 30 years old and with his seventh big-league organization. Frank Schwindel, Matt Duffy and Patrick Wisdom are similar in age and biography. Two of the team’s remaining vets, Ian Happ and Jason Heyward, have struggled all year to get their batting averages above .200, and can’t be counted as assets.  Trusty vet Kyle Hendricks is their sole proven pitcher.

To create any interest among the Cubs’ faithful owner Ricketts will have to open his purse big time in the offseason. A reputed billionaire, and with one of the game’s highest ticket-price structures, he should have ample resources for that, but he does strange things so who knows? If he falls short my friend Eddie Cohen, founder of Cubs Fans Anonymous, is threatening to revive that organization and have followers march on Wrigley with torches and pitchforks.

The D’backs’ prospects are at least as discouraging. This season has revealed several useful young players, including second baseman Josh Rojas, first-baseman-outfielder Pavin Smith and catcher Daulton Varsho, and MLB.com rates their farm system as ninth best. But their pitching is beyond woeful, last week ranking 29^th among the MLB’s 30, and it will take more than minor-league help to correct that.

 The team went the big-money route in 2020, luring the San Francisco Giants’ World Series hero Madison Bumgarner to the desert with an $85 million contract, but he’s been mediocre at best and has three more years and $60 million owing. It got a pick-me-up a few weeks ago, when lefty Tyler Gilbert threw a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres in his first big-league start, but he’s no kid at age 27 and got whacked for four runs on nine hits in five innings in his next start.

I can’t look into anyone’s pockets so I don’t know what resources the D’backs owners can command, but by rep they don’t match those of the Cubs. The team doesn’t draw well even when it wins so much help from that source is unlikely. The team stood pat last off-season, hoping for internal improvement. It’ll take a truckload of that to get it out of its present rut.