TORONTO — The fissures of frustration kept cracking during another disappointing night for the Chicago Cubs offense.
The normally stoic Kyle Tucker, hitting .200 in his last 18 games with just one home run since June 29, whipped his helmet down the dugout steps after grounding out with two on in the seventh inning against the Toronto Blue Jays.
Two batters later, Pete Crow-Armstrong, facing lefty Brendon Little, struck out to leave the bases loaded in a three-run game. Crow-Armstrong slammed his bat and helmet to the ground in what would be the Cubs’ final scoring chance.
Seiya Suzuki punctuated an 0-for-5 night by striking out to end the game, returning to the dugout to toss his batting gear toward his cubby as the Blue Jays celebrated their 5-1 victory Tuesday at the Rogers Centre.
The Cubs (67-51) managed just four hits, though they walked seven times against starter José Berríos and the Blue Jays bullpen. They again couldn’t convert in prime opportunities, however, going 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position and leaving 10 on base.
“To score, either you’ve got to be sequential and get a bunch of guys in a row on, or you’ve got to have the extra-base hit that pushes guys in from first base or score yourself,” manager Craig Counsell said. “We obviously created the walks and created some rallies and traffic and pressure through that. The next hit was missing.”
Too often timely hitting has been absent from a Cubs lineup that, through the first three-plus months of the season, was the best in the majors. After the Milwaukee Brewers’ 11th consecutive win Tuesday, the Cubs sit 7½ games behind first place and are tied with the San Diego Padres at the top of the National League wild-card standings.
“Human instinct is everyone cares so much about this team and wants to come through in all those moments that naturally that can cause a little bit of … stress or whatever, and it’s all coming from a good place,” shortstop Dansby Swanson said. “And sometimes you’ve just got to find a way to relax and allow your natural, God-given ability to take over.
“We’ve got so many guys in here that are proven and … have had a lot of success in this league, and sometimes you’ve just got to take a step back and trust in yourself.”
In his season debut, right-hander Javier Assad
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allowed four runs and eight hits in four innings. Ben Brown’s relief effort — one run in four innings — gave the Cubs a chance to chip away at the Blue Jays lead.But the innings kept playing out similarly. An infield single by Swanson represented the Cubs’ lone hit through five innings. Michael Busch’s RBI single in the seventh prevented a shutout.
Assad and Brown each worked around a Swanson fielding error in the fourth and fifth. Entering Tuesday, Swanson had committed two errors in a game only four times in his big-league career, spanning 10,978 2/3 innings. It marked his first two-error game as a Cub.
The Cubs’ best chance for a comeback was thwarted in the seventh when they trailed by three. Crow-Armstrong, who has only one multi-RBI game since July 11, faced a tough bases-loaded, lefty-lefty matchup against Little.
Little threw six consecutive knuckle-curves to Crow-Armstrong, none within the strike zone. The last one, right below the zone, had Crow-Armstrong flailing to end the inning.
Crow-Armstrong didn’t feel he was putting too much pressure on himself in that moment amid his struggles.
“Those situations are the ones you want to be in regardless,” he said.
The Cubs know they are a better team than what they have shown during a stretch that has been largely buoyed by the rotation. They point to how collectively the group keeps swinging at the right pitches. That’s the starting point for getting out of a funk.
“The optimism is we’ve got good hitters and we’ve scored a lot of runs this year and they’ve done a lot of damage,” Counsell said. “There’s no ‘woe is me’ here and ‘oh, no.’ This is baseball, and you’ve got to have a good at-bat … with whatever the situation is and keep grinding through them.”
For as much as the Cubs said the right things over the last four weeks as their division lead vanished and their hold on a playoff spot now becomes tenuous, the steadiness the team has preached hasn’t resulted in a spark to get them going again. As the on-field frustrations continue to bubble over, the Cubs know what’s at stake.
Figuring out how to turn things around might require shaking things up.
“There’s a lot of different buttons to press,” Swanson said. “We’ve all had plenty of conversations, and whether it’s in the hitters meetings or just throughout the day while we’re in here, guys love being at the field and putting in the work to get better.
“So maybe there’s got to be a different button that gets pressed. But guys are coming in here with the right intentions and doing the right things in order for us to get to where we want to get to. It’s just a matter of time when that happens.”