Cubs keep sabotaging themselves and it's getting worse

The 2025 Chicago Cubs are a good team, probably good enough to play post-season ball.

However, they are not yet a great team, and Thursday afternoon’s 4-3 loss to the Giants in San Francisco contained several illustrations of their shortcomings.

Good teams can pile up wins, and that’s obviously a big deal. Even with this third straight loss, the Cubs remain 18 games above .500 and seemingly secure in their postseason position. But great teams can prevail in games where the outcome is in doubt, as was the case on Thursday. They prevail by the simplest of formulas; not beating themselves.   

We can look at five moments in Thursday’s loss to the Giants for an explanation…five times Cub players failed to do the small but important things. Those failures cost them at a minimum one run, and probably more.

One brutal habit keeps costing the Cubs winnable games

First inning. Shota Imanaga walks Rafael Devers on a 3-2 count. Imanaga usually has excellent command of the strike zone, and Thursday was no exception. His 92 pitches included 63 strikes and walked only one batter, Devers.

But that one walk brought up the giants’ three-hole hitter, Willy Adames. Granted, Adames was to that point hitless in the series. But Adames is a high fastball hitter, and Imanaga throws high fastballs. The first pitch was a belt-high fastball, and Adames sent it careening into the left field bleachers for a two-run home run.

Fourth inning, part one. If you are a Cubs fan, the fourth inning was a disaster for smart play.

The problems began when Pete Crow-Armstrong stood in against Giants starter Logan Webb, working the count full. Webb then threw a sweeper that broke down and in toward Crow-Armstrong’s feet. It should have been ball four, giving the Cubs a leadoff runner.

But if we know one thing about PCA, it’s that he’s aggressive, sometimes to his own detriment.  His 42.5 percent chase rate – indicating that he swings at nearly half the pitches thrown outside the strike zone – establishes that.

In this instance, it meant trading a baserunner – the pitch being ball four – for a strikeout. Plate discipline: it’s a beautiful thing.

Fourth inning, part two. Nico Hoerner followed Crow-Armstrong into the batter’s box and lined Webb’s first pitch into right field for a base hit. But then Hoerner tried to cheat on Webb, got caught, and was cleanly picked off first base. Combine that was PCA’s failure to accept his walk, and instead of Owen Caissie batting with two on and none out, he’s batting with nobody on and two out.

Fourth inning, part three. Reprieved by the Cubs’ over-anxiousness, Webb fanned Caissie on four pitches. But here’s the problem. Both of the first two strikes were low changeups, and Caissie whiffed at both of them. It’s also true that the third strike came on a pitch off the edge of the plate that David Rackley mistakenly called strike three.

Granted, Caissie is a rookie with little major league experience who is still learning what a changeup looks like. But in a pressurized late-season setting, performance is what counts. Caissie put himself in a two-strike hole.

Eighth inning. The game was tied 3-3 when Matt Shaw lined a sharp one-out double into left field. In these situations, the drumbeat caution is universal: Freeze on the line drive.    

So what happened? Michael Busch absolutely smoked a line drive, and Shaw instinctively broke for third, seeing a chance to score the winning run. One problem: Giant second baseman Casey Schmitt happened to be standing right in the line drive’s arc; he caught it and flipped to second, easily doubling Shaw and killing the Cubs’ last, best rally with Kyle Tucker on deck.

One of the least discussed but most important axioms of baseball is that games are often lost, not won. The Giants may have gotten credit for winning Thursday’s 4-3 game, but the reality is that the Cubs lost it by their often sloppy play.

Good teams can get by with that stuff because they have superior talent. But great teams win by eliminating mistakes. That’s often the task ahead of the Cubs.

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