MILWAUKEE — A day after pitcher Justin Steele fired up Cubs fans — and maybe his team — by yelling, “Wake the [bleep] up!” in the dugout, the Cubs got back to their losing ways in a 7-1 clunker against the Brewers.
They weren’t sleeping, but they played like it. Do the Cubs need more of what Steele stirred and served up in their only win of the series?
“I think fans want us to do that every day,” manager Craig Counsell said. “I mean, really, they do. That’s what they want every day. And I understand that, because they’re not living it. I mean, they are living it, but in a different way.”
That was part of an indirect way of saying no. The Cubs don’t have a problem in the fieriness department, according to Counsell. They have a problem — a huge, ongoing one — in the hitting department, and teams that don’t hit often are labeled as low-energy by critics.
“It’s a common [refrain] in the history of baseball,” Counsell said. "We’re going to hear that every time a team doesn’t hit. It’s logical. When they don’t score runs, it just feels like a lot of guys coming back to the dugout. That’s what it feels like, right?”
No argument here.
Drew Smyly hit the 100-games-pitched mark in the major leagues as a starter. He crossed the 200-game mark as a starter, too. The 35-year-old lefty came out of the bullpen Sunday for career appearance No. 300 — 121 of which have come in relief, a little more than half of them way back in 2013 with the Tigers. This season is the first one since then in which Smyly hasn’t started at all, a reality he hasn’t exactly loved.
“There’s definitely a part of me that would like to be a starter again,” he said. “I look around the league at some teams and think: I could start for that team.”
Smyly reached 1,000 innings and 1,000 strikeouts — milestones that meant a lot to him — last year with the Cubs, for whom he has played since 2022. He has a guaranteed $2.5 million buyout coming if the Cubs cut him loose for 2025.
“You start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, kind of,” he said. “But I think I still have a lot I can play for in this game and am plenty good enough to continue on playing. I don’t plan on stopping. I hope one day I can make that decision myself and not have the game make it for me, but not all of us are that lucky.”
Reliever Ethan Roberts pitched the eighth inning Sunday, escaping a bases-loaded jam with no damage done in his first big-league appearance since April of 2022. Roberts missed all of 2023 and the first couple of months of this season after Tommy John surgery.
How many major league switch hitters would you guess there have been who had at least 11 home runs in each of their first eight seasons? Twenty-five? Fifty?
Try six — and the Cubs’ Ian Happ is one of them. His game-winning homer Saturday was No. 11 on the season and put him on a double-take-inducing list with Mickey Mantle, Eddie Murray, Ruben Sierra, Jose Cruz and Mark Teixeira.
