The Cubs’ bullpen is an obvious weak spot

Gentle reader, my hope was that the Cubs would win a nail-biter in Game 2, outlasting the Dodgers. Not because of my partisan alliances, but because I already had my morning feature idea. The headline was going to read, “Yes, the Cubs won, but their bullpen is still a problem.” It was going to veer left when you were expecting a turn to the right. Ha. You wouldn’t have seen it coming.

Instead, no, the Cubs did not win. And the bullpen is still a problem. You’ll hear a lot about this today.

Before we get into John Lackey coming into the ninth inning with the winning run on base to face one of the game’s best hitters while the danged closer wasted away in the bullpen ...

[deep breath]

... let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. The Cubs have done a fine job acquiring the pitchers to start the games; they’ve had mixed results acquiring or developing the relievers needed to finish them. The relievers they faced in Game 2 went like this:

There’s a little bit of everything, there. It’s part garage sale-ing, part big-market bullying, and part internal wizardry. Compare it to what the Cubs featured:

It’s so close. Duensing most certainly is an example of the Cubs polishing an underappreciated reliever. Strop and Edwards, Jr. were acquired in two of the more lopsided trades in the last few years, and both of them certainly helped the team win a championship last year. It’s not like the Cubs are screwing up. There are a lot of teams that would be right to be jealous of this bullpen.

It’s just a bullpen without an unending procession of those guys. They can polish someone like Duensing, but they haven’t quite turned him into one of those guys. They stole the power arms of Strop and Edwards, but they haven’t turned them into those guys. Even when they tried to trade for one of those guys, Wade Davis, he was just one pitcher. One lonely pitcher.

This is how the Cubs ended up with Lackey pitching with the winning run on second in the ninth inning, a sentence that’s as ridiculous to read as it is to type. Lackey had a fine second half for a starter, but he is still, empirically, verifiably John Lackey. He still led the National League in home runs allowed, and his 36 home runs were tied for the second-most in Chicago Cubs history. Whereas the Astros and Yankees are currently slapping each other with a procession of pitchers striking out 12 batters per nine innings, the Cubs had to use their fifth starter in the ninth inning with the winning run on base.

I don’t know exactly why the Cubs haven’t been able to find a bullpen filled with those guys, like the Royals of yore, or the three remaining teams in this postseason. They’ve tried. Justin Wilson came over in a win-now trade that was comparable to the Watson deal, but he took 37 steps back after the Cubs got him. Hector Rondon wasn’t that far removed from Jansen a couple of years ago, but now he’s someone who gets buried in favor of Lackey on no rest. Justin Grimm tumbled off the face of the Earth, and Koji Uehara couldn’t outrace time. And so on, and so on.

(It is a little odd that the Cubs don’t have a single homegrown pitcher on the postseason roster. A spigot of 100-mph arms would be a useful thing to have right now.)

With all this mind, the only possible strategy the Cubs should have would be to ride Davis as hard as sensibly possible. That’s what makes the decision to save him for a save situation on the road so baffling. If there’s any team that can’t afford that old-timey mentality, it’s these Cubs. If you want an explanation of why closers should pitch tie games on the road, the long version is here, and it goes like this:

In a tie game on the road, the closer isn’t trying to save a win. He’s trying to save a chance that the other team will screw up in the later innings.

Jansen was out of the game. The Dodgers were mostly out of those guys. The Cubs needed to see if any fastballs were left over the plate in the 10th. They needed to see if the Dodgers could bumble their way into three errors and a four-run inning that even Randy Wells could save comfortably. Instead, they kept their best chance to keep the game alive in the bullpen (where he warmed up before the ninth, by the way).

You don’t notice these quirks with a functioning, dominant bullpen. You wouldn’t notice much if the Indians kept Cody Allen out in the ninth inning of a tie game on the road. He’s one of several those guys, and the Indians can sprinkle them around however they damn well please.

The Cubs have just one, and even if he’s taken the tiniest steps back this year, he has to pitch in that situation.

What we have, then, is a war on two fronts. The Cubs haven’t built that Davis-Holland-Herrera or Miller-Shaw-Allen or Chapman-Green-Kahnle-Robertson monster that the other teams have. And the pitcher they do trust is still being used according to 2004 orthodoxy. It’s a brutal combination in contrast to the rest of the postseason.

And it led to Lackey turning around and watching a ball sail over the fence for the 37th time this year.

The talk of the early part of last postseason was Buck Showalter letting his season end with Ubaldo Jimenez on the mound instead of Zach Britton, and that led to this headline:

Buck Showalter cost the Orioles their season, but at least the conventional wisdom will change

Nice thought. But apparently the conventional wisdom still has a long way to go. There are two options in the modern postseason:

Joe Maddon rode Davis hard in Game 5 of the NLDS, so he’s not allergic to the idea. But he doesn’t have the depth to feel comfortable doing it in every game, and it shows.

We might be here next year, lauding the praises of Anthony Shume and Perez Borabol, the Cubs’ late-inning tandem of death, who combined for 225 strikeouts in 150 relief innings in the regular season. Bullpens are fickle things, and the Cubs are a smart organization that is fully capable of developing late-inning behemoths or finding and repairing their own Brandon Morrow.

They don’t have one now, though, and it’s a problem. The Cubs aren’t dead yet, but if they win, they’ll have to score a bunch of runs or get their starting pitchers to prevent them. They can’t play the shorten-the-game game like the other teams. And it doesn’t help that their manager can be far more traditional with his bullpen than his reputation suggests.