In the season's past two weeks, two National League teams have thrown it in fifth gear and headed in opposite directions. The Philadelphia Phillies, dismissed early in the year by some as an NL East also-ran who would battle for the scraps behind the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, have surged, winning 13 of their last 15 games. Heading into May 16's action, the Phillies were just a game and a half behind front-running New York.
The Chicago Cubs, on the other hand, have descended into the abyss at meteoric velocity since an injury to first baseman Derrek Lee transformed their lineup from MLB-average to a weak-hitting version of the Iowa Cubs. Not only can the Cubs not hit the ball, but their starting pitchers continue their season-long refusal to get anybody out, fueling a 7-17 spiral since April 20, the day Lee left the game holding his wrist after a collision at first base. The Cubbies are six games under .500 and seven and a half games out of first place in the NL Central.
The question, of course, is whether these teams will continue trending in their present directions or whether these streaks will be mere blips on the radar by the time August arrives. Obviously, it's unlikely that either team will keep up its current remarkably good or remarkably bad pace for the entire year (although it turns out the Cubs could be a pretty bad team), so we'll instead ask one question for each team as a proxy measurement for their future play.
In the case of the Phillies: is this the team (not the Braves, after all) that will do the most to challenge the Mets' bid for supremacy in the division?
For the Cubs: can players and coaches start making reservations for October vacations already — are they essentially out of the playoff race in May?
For those of you who aren't into reading low-quality prose (and I can promise that the rest will be fairly painful), here's a quick guide to the rest of the column. Read on if you dare.
Phillies: Yes.
Cubs: Yes.
Philadelphia Phillies
I (along with the population outside downtown Philadelphia, I believe) was pretty pessimistic about the Phillies' chances to field a pitching staff that could perform in the bandbox that is Citizens Bank Ballpark. And not much has changed. Of the team's five regular starters, one guy (Brett Myers) has an ERA under 5.12. This isn't a recipe for long-term success, and the Phillies will most certainly sink like a stone if it continues. Fortunately, there's almost no chance that it will.
Jon Lieber, for instance, isn't going to wrap up the year with an ERA of 5.50. It will be much closer to the 4.21 he posted a season ago, and possibly lower since he's actually giving up fewer home runs in the early going than he did in 2005. In a fun side note, Lieber is one of the few guys, along with possibly David Wells, that makes an annual bid to give up more home runs than walks (he did it in 2002 and 2004). The count so far in 2006 is even, 5-5. Stay tuned.
Ditto, Cory Lidle. He won't be amazing, that's for sure, but he's striking out 8.85 hitters per nine innings, which puts him in Curt Schilling/Scott Kazmir territory. To be clear, Cory Lidle is not Curt Schilling or Scott Kazmir, but guys who strike out that many hitters almost always (unless, of course, they're Daniel Cabrera) have ERAs in the low 4 range at worst.
The Phillies' rotation isn't going to be confused for the mid-1990s Braves any time soon, but it's a group that almost certainly better than it's showed so far, and so far, the Phightins are six games over .500.
The other reason for optimism, and the reason that the pitching staff doesn't have to take home any hardware at the end of the season for the team to be successful, is the offense. When this lineup gets going 1-9, the Phillies will mash opponents into submission.
Philadelphia is currently just 20th in the majors in runs scored, but they have yet to receive even modest contributions from two of their biggest producers. While they have to be happy with the fact that Ryan Howard is batting .302 in addition to his 12 home runs and with Aaron Rowand's .310 average (before he got up close and personal with the center field wall in one of the most ridiculous displays of heart in quite some time), Jimmy Rollins will not continue to hit .248 and reach base at a .313 clip.
When Rollins finds a way to get to first base, his speed and base-stealing ability will give the offense a dimension that it has been missing. Another guy who won't be stuck on the status quo for very long: Bobby Abreu and his .257 batting average. Bobby is still walking quite a bit, so his .437 average isn't killing his run production, but there are a lot of hits between .257 and his lifetime mark of .302. When Abreu starts closing the gap, he'll carry the club on his back for a week or two, at least.
The loss of Mike Lieberthal definitely smarts, because he was hitting well in the early going, but the Phillies look like they could be built for the long run, something we haven't been able to say very often in the last few years.
Chicago Cubs
The Cubs are done. Finished. They might not play quite this badly for the rest of the season, but they likely won't play a whole lot better, and that's a scary thought.
First, some numbers to illustrate the absolute inability of this team to score runs since Lee left the lineup. Those with weak constitutions or less than 4-feet-8-inches tall should skip down the page a bit.
Since April 20 (24 games), the following figures apply to the Chicago Cubs offense:
Batting average: .220
On-base percentage: .285
Slugging percentage: .324
Home runs: 12
Extra-base hits: 47
BA with runners in scoring position: .185
Sure, that's bad, but how bad is it really? Perhaps the following will provide a more concrete sense of the utter ineptitude with which the Cubs have swung the sticks over the past month. If one were to search for a player to match the numbers above, the result of the search would be ... drum roll, please ... Henry Blanco. As luck would have it, Blanco is actually a Cub, so Chicago fans get a chance (every fifth day or so, since a player who hits as poorly as Blanco doesn't usually get regular playing time, even at catcher) to see what a career .216/.286/.254 hitter looks like.
As it turns out, Blanco's shortcomings should be fairly inconspicuous these days, since the Cubs lineup as a whole has hit as if every player in the lineup is Henry Blanco. A lineup full of Henry Blancos — need I say more?
I'm tempted to write "QED" and just leave it at that, but let's continue, shall we? After all, the Cubs can't possibly be this bad at the plate for the rest of the year, right? Right, because eventually, in two or three months, Lee will come back. Until then, um, put on your seatbelts, Cubs fans, because it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Without Lee in the middle, the Cubs' lineup is absolutely toothless, and the fact that Aramis Ramirez's batting average is hovering above the Mendoza line isn't helping things. But the real problem starts at the top, where Juan Pierre is getting on base at a .269 clip — so bad that manager Dusty Baker actually took him out of the leadoff spot at one point. Dusty could literally put 90 percent of the everyday players in the league in the leadoff spot and do better than .269. Maybe not what the Cubs were expecting for their offseason investment, huh?
Frighteningly, shortstop Ronny Cedeno has been the lone bright spot on offense, but not nearly bright enough. Oh, did I mention that right fielder Jacque Jones is hitting .056 against lefties? Maybe that's why the Cubs have gone from frigid in general to absolute zero against southpaws, batting .163 as a team with two home runs against left-handers since Lee went down.
They do have Felix Pie waiting in the wings at Triple-A Iowa, but do they really want to bring him up at this point? Wrigleyville isn't exactly the happiest place on earth at the moment, and who wants to see the kid get heckled along with the rest of this squad?
Aside from getting Ramirez to hit better (which he will), the Cubs don't have a whole lot of options to improve their lineup. They've already got some of their young players at the major league level (Matt Murton, Cedeno), and the rest of the equation is a group of veterans (Todd Walker, Ramirez, Jones) who just aren't getting it done and don't look equipped to change things without Lee's ability to get them more fastballs and better hitting situations.
Of course, no collapse is possible without the cooperation of the pitching staff. Fortunately, the Cubs' starting rotation has been a more-than-willing accomplice. Besides Greg Maddux and Carlos Zambrano, who have held up their end of the bargain, the starters have been a disaster with Mark Prior and Kerry Wood on the shelf. Baker has had the pleasure of mixing and matching Sean Marshall, Angel Guzman, Jerome Williams, Rich Hill, Glendon Rusch, and David Aardsma to fill the final three spots in the rotation.
Wow, I can't imagine why they're not winning. Guzman (7.00 ERA) has been utterly overmatched, and he's also been the best of the group. Rusch couldn't throw strikes and was moved to the bullpen. Unfortunately for Cubs fans, he still sees plenty of mound time, because a Chicago starter gets out of the third inning about once a week.
Wood's almost back, but only time will tell what he can give them and for how long. Prior? Word is he kind of likes Iowa and might never leave after making his next rehab start.
Then again, even if Wood comes back in a week, the Cubs could already be more than 10 games out of first place. He only gets to play every fifth day, and there's still the matter of the lineup producing about two runs a game.
It's gonna be a long summer on the north side of Chicago. Hey, at least they get White Sox games on WGN, too.
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