Chicago Cubs: A number of players looking to get out of slumps

Chicago Cubs: After being incredibly clutch in April, Daniel Descalso has fallen very hard.

Hoo boy, this one is pretty rough. Let’s look back at the April of Daniel Descalso. The slash was at .263/.349/.408 with a wRC+ of 105. For a guy who is a platoon/bench player that is some good production. He came up with a number of clutch hits that lead to victories. He hit the ball hard; he got on base; it was great.

Then May flowers bloomed, and it went south. So far this month he is slashing .114/.149/.159 and a wRC+ of -23. Yes, you are reading that right, a wRC+ in the negatives. He has five hits total during this span and has struck out 14 times. His hard contact went from 41.8% in March/April to 18.8% in May, and his groundball/flyball ratio went from 1.0 to 1.7.

So what the heck happened? One could speculate the injury to his ankle has hurt his play. One could say it is just a prolonged slump. One could say Descalso was never as good as he was in April. This could all be true. Is Descalso as good as he was in April? Career numbers say no, but he is better than this, especially in recent years. If the ankle had bothered him for some time, it makes sense to see numbers go down. Hopefully, he can turn it around in June.