ST. LOUIS — It was a loaded question that Craig Counsell brushed off like a fly on his coffee cup.
Pete Crow-Armstrong was back in the leadoff spot Friday night in St. Louis. Could he see Crow-Armstrong hanging there for the rest of the year?
“I think he’ll be there tonight,” Counsell said before the Chicago Cubs opened their three-game series against the Cardinals. “Yeah.”
So you can’t see …
“We don’t have to make out a lineup for September 1st,” he interrupted.
Let’s rephrase that. Could you see him adapting to …
“I think he’s done a nice job since he’s been there,” Counsell interrupted again. “Is there a level of production you’re going to need from the top spot in the lineup? I think that’s to be expected. That’s the guy you’re basically saying is going to get the most at-bats, so there’s certainly production we’re going to need. And I think he’s done a nice job in the six games he’s been there.”
The subject quickly changed, and Counsell moved on to other pressing issues before a third interruption was necessary.
Crow-Armstrong was hitting only .190 (4-for-21) in those six games, albeit with a .357 on-base percentage thanks to five walks. Counsell made the move last week to shake things up with a slumping team and stuck with it Friday after the Cubs won the final two games of the Pittsburgh series following a brutal 10-game losing streak.
Counsell’s lineups have been dissected over and over by Cubs fans the last couple of weeks as he has tried to correct a team that went from a 20-3 stretch to a 2-14 stretch in the blink of an eye. How they fare against the Cardinals will be magnified, with the final two games slated for national TV on Saturday (Fox) and Sunday (NBC).
It has been a crazy first two months for the Cubs manager, whose emotional state has been under constant surveillance, unlike the last two Cubs managers, Joe Maddon and David Ross. Not every fan base is filled with tens of thousands of armchair psychoanalysts, ready and willing to diagnose the manager’s body language without expecting compensation.
All was well after the final two games in Pittsburgh, in which the team made the plays and came up with clutch hitting, particularly Ian Happ.
“We can talk ourselves in circles about all the other stuff, about our emotions and how we’re feeling,” Counsell said. “But we’ve got to make plays, and (the last two days) we made plays.”
There was a pause.
“So how ya feelin’?” I asked. “We’ve got time.”
Counsell has been getting more criticism than most of his players during the losing stretch, which is something a manager has to accept. Has it been hard for him to deal with the hot takes about his managing on talk radio and social media?
“We have to look at it like you have to find the good things that come out of struggles and challenges,” he said. “As a coach, that’s your job. And it’s not always good things necessarily, but you find opportunities from it. That’s what you always have to search for and keep on and maybe not let on, ‘Oh, I’m upset or I’m mad.’
“You have to go into something and (have it) serve as some kind of positive impact. But when you’ve lost 10 in a row, everybody is a little more vulnerable, right? And you should be.”
Counsell doesn’t have to worry about job security. President Jed Hoyer has his back and understands it’s the players losing games, not the manager. The players also have his back, not that that helped Ross when Hoyer decided to fire him in 2023.
When the Cubs played Milwaukee last week, Brewers manager Pat Murphy, Counsell’s mentor and former bench coach, told me he’s not managing against the opposing manager.
“I’m really managing against myself, to try to keep myself sane so I don’t crush myself after the game, thinking of what I could’ve done, should’ve done,” Murphy said. ” I’m a great second-guesser of myself. One of the best.”
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Does Counsell follow Murphy’s law and second-guess himself after games?
“Yeah, in the game you’re doing that absolutely,” he said. “That’s the job. It’s the same thing a hitter does, the same thing a pitcher does when things don’t go right.”
Counsell, to his credit, doesn’t try to pretend he’s someone he’s not. If some fans don’t think he’s showing enough emotion, he won’t start getting thrown out of games to prove them wrong — though he did get ejected in Pittsburgh.
What could Counsell have done differently to stop the 10-game skid? It’s hard to say because the entire lineup was slumping at the same time, and the rotation is without Cade Horton, Edward Cabrera and Matthew Boyd.
Cabrera will test his blister with an extended bullpen session Sunday, the same day Boyd will begin his rehab stint with Triple-A Iowa.
“We’re missing Starter 1, Starter 2, Starter 4 to start the season,” Counsell said. “That’s significant. You want the guys that you counted on at the start of the year making as many starts as you can make. But things are going to happen. That’s just where we’re at.”
This is an important series for the Cubs to get back on the right foot and prove the 20-3 stretch was closer to their true identity than the 2-14 stretch.
So how ya feelin’?