Their worst stretch of play in months couldn’t have come at a a lot worse time for the Chicago Cubs.
The veteran group wanted to regroup on Monday’s time off after a dreadful 1-5 journey in opposition to the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks. Five consecutive losses culminated with Sunday’s 6-2 defeat because the Cubs had been swept for the primary time in nearly three months and returned to Chicago for his or her closing homestand desperately making an attempt to regain their playoff place.
The Cubs (78-72) entered Monday tied with the Miami Marlins for the ultimate National League wild-card spot, although the Marlins maintain the tiebreaker.
“They were better than we were in all aspects of the game,” supervisor David Ross mentioned of the Diamondbacks. “They played better defense, they pitched better, they had timely hitting, they ran the bases better. We got beat all the way around. A bad road trip. Try to wash it on the off day tomorrow.”
The Cubs wasted their greatest alternative to erase Arizona’s lead and produce a giant inning after they loaded the bases with nobody out within the third. They drove in only one run on Cody Bellinger’s double-play grounder. The Cubs are 0-for-8 with one RBI in bases-loaded conditions since sweeping the San Francisco Giants on Sept. 6.
“It’s been frustrating,” Bellinger mentioned. “Overall the past week there’s been a lot of unfortunate bounces and as a whole pretty disappointing, but looking in the future, we’re still in a good spot. A good amount of games left to play and just trust the group in here and myself to continue to roll and hopefully get on a hot little stretch.”
Their points with scoring runs Sunday performed into a bigger drawback the final 10 days, with the offensive struggles significantly pronounced in high-leverage moments. During the three-game collection at Chase Field, spanning 31 innings, the Cubs left 27 runners on base. They did not put a runner in scoring place in Friday’s 6-4 loss.
All the little issues have added up.
“We get to those moments and we have to lock in, grind a little bit harder in those moments and not get too anxious,” Ross mentioned. “We had a lot of traffic. The at-bats are not bad. We just get in those moments and take the pressure off the pitcher pretty quickly. We’ve got to keep the pressure on and have quality at-bats.”
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Source: www.bostonherald.com
