Steele Dominates, Power Bats, Gomes, Hoerner, Iowa, and Other Cubs Bullets

If the season ended in the present day, the Cubs could be the highest Wild Card within the NL. Don’t you dare take a look at the calendar. Simply smile.

• How locked in did Justin Steele look final evening? Like he might execute something he needed at any time. The Dodgers bought him on two of these pitches, however Steele was doing it his method. He’s not all the time a strikeout man, however he had that sort of stuff final evening along with his 8 Ks over 7.0 innings and 17(!) whiffs. He touched 94 mph on his fastball (that’s fairly scorching for him), and his 32.0% CSW is admittedly stable. The contact high quality towards him, aside from the 2 homers, was crummy. Tip your cap on these two, however in any other case it was Steele’s evening.

• The best way he can form is slider is simply so spectacular:

• Bonus particular enjoyable on what Steele did:

• Justin Steele has that critical Dad Energy:

• Everybody was very joyful about Seiya Suzuki’s return to the Cubs lineup, which pushes others down a spot and provides the lineup extra size. The house run in his first recreation again was simply gravy. Suzuki went back-to-back with Ian Happ, saying after the sport: “Watching Happ hit that homer, it’s clearly good on him, however I needed to do the identical factor” (by means of interpreter Toy Matsushita, through the Solar-Occasions). So principally the Cubs simply want Ian Happ to maintain hitting homers forward of Suzuki, and he’ll match it.

• The Cubs’ 5 homers final evening gave them 15 on the season, leaping them from twenty seventh within the league to seventeenth.

• Yan Gomes has now had a recreation the place he hit two infield singles, and in addition a recreation the place he hit two dwelling runs. Which was extra unlikely? Trick query. It was neither. It was the stolen base he had final evening. That was the eighth stolen base of his total profession.

• Talking of stolen bases, Nico Hoerner had two extra, tying him with Cedric Mullens and Jorge Mateo for essentially the most in baseball to this point this 12 months. I’m not saying he’ll sustain THIS tempo, however is 40 or 50 steals fully doable? Yup. And that’s enjoyable.

• On the one hand, I really like this and I really like that the primary time I’m listening to it’s from Justin Steele. However, I’m so mad I didn’t consider it first:

• Unsure what it was about these changeups final evening, however Dansby Swanson simply seemed horrible on the plate. I’m not nervous about something associated to his earlier recreation (he was 4-4 earlier than taking himself out), but it surely was arguably the worst plate efficiency of his professional profession:

• From the Tribune: “Requested about his walk-up tune choice, Clevinger replied: ‘Are you a music producer? No? OK. Properly when you’ve got a baseball query, I’m right here for you.’” I selected that tune and needed everybody to listen to it, however you may’t ask me about it. Okay.

• No different participant’s dwelling runs constantly make me snort out loud:

• Unsure what the harm is but, however Adrian Sampson was positioned on the 7-day IL at Iowa. His first two begins of the 12 months had been horrible (and we all know how his spring coaching went), plus his velocity was down in accordance with Statcast. Surprise if one thing hasn’t been proper. Javier Assad took his spot within the rotation, and his first begin of the 12 months was combined: 2.2 IP, 2 ER, 2 H, 1 BB, 2 Okay, 47 pitches.

• In that recreation, every of Nick Burdi and Manny Rodriguez had their first actually dangerous outings of the 12 months.

• OMG the rapid strut out of the field:

• Immediately is Jackie Robinson Day in MLB: