MILWAUKEE — The New York Mets released reliever Jorge López on June 5 shortly after he threw his glove into the stands and reportedly called them the “worst team in probably the whole ‘f−−−−−−’ major leagues.”
The Chicago Cubs might not be the worst team in the bleeping majors, but they certainly have looked the part over the last two months, going 21-35 after a 4-2 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers on Friday in the opener of a three-game series at American Family Field.
Looking to fix a bullpen that has been dysfunctional since the start of the season, the Cubs selected the 31-year-old López from Triple-A Iowa after he pitched in only three games.
The Cubs are in last place in the National League Central with an 11½-game gap between them and Craig Counsell’s former team. The Brewers could finish the Cubs off this weekend, leaving them to hope for a wild-card berth.
Cubs President Jed Hoyer admitted before the game that the slump has “dragged on a lot longer than we thought” and that the coming month will lead to “hard decisions” about the team’s future as the July 30 trade deadline nears.
That could mean the Cubs become sellers instead of buyers. Only a winning stretch before the 2023 deadline changed Hoyer’s thinking and made him add for the stretch run, which ended in a September collapse.
“The idea that this isn’t a topic of discussion all day? Of course it is,” he said, adding that the team’s playoff odds changed last year with the winning.
“We’re still in June, I don’t want it to go there,” Hoyer said of full-scale discussions about selling. “There is a point at which we have to do that. … I don’t think it’s time yet for that whole conversation. But it’s just the reality that we have to play better in July. We’ve backed ourselves into a little corner.”
The Cubs’ unique brand of bad baseball — baserunning gaffes, unforced errors, strikeouts and a lack of clutch hitting — was on display again. The Cubs led 2-0 in the fourth with a man on and two outs when the Brewers rallied on a catcher’s interference call on Miguel Amaya, a dribbler off the glove of pitcher Jameson Taillon and a grand slam by 20-year-old Jackson Chourio.
“Stupid mistake,” Taillon said. “Just trying to make a pitch nastier than it needed to be.”
Cody Bellinger added to the misery, falling asleep on a routine fly to center in the sixth and getting doubled off first to end the inning.
“Uh, he just made a mistake,” Counsell said of the mental gaffe.
It was a perfect example of this season’s downfall.
“This started out as a funk,” Taillon said. “And then now it’s turned into something morte than a funk. It needs to change, or things are going to change.”
The Cubs might be in a funk-fest, but Counsell didn’t look at this weekend as a must-win series.
“I don’t know if I look at it like that,” he said. “Of course the spot we’re in, we have less room for error, no question about it. I don’t think at this point in the season you can look at a series like that. There’s (77) games after the series. We’ve not made things easy for ourselves, that’s for sure.”
Counsell laughed at the media asking if this is an important juncture in the season, with the trade deadline one month away and the Cubs floundering.
“I know you guys want to put like ‘This is it’ (in stories), but I think in this game you must turn the page and there is always opportunity ahead of you, and that’s the way you have to see it,” he said.
For now, the Cubs are counting on the hitters playing up to their career numbers and the remodeled bullpen pitching above expectations.
López was 1-2 with two saves and a 3.76 ERA in 28 games for the Mets before being designated for assignment and eventually released. He said he took time to work on his mental health after the incident and vowed to be a “professional.”
“It’s something I’m never going to do again in my life,” López said Friday of his infamous exit. “Ask me what I did? It was emotions. I’ve been working on my mental health for a long time, and that’s my priority — to not show that any more and give the best energy that I can to the game.”
López said after the incident that his remarks about the Mets were misinterpreted.
“Yeah, I got quite bad emotions from that moment,” he said, adding he should’ve gone home and talked the next day. “Just a bad moment and a bad opportunity to say something. It was a misunderstanding. I was never talking about the team. I was blaming myself and saying how bad I was looking in those moments.
“For me, body language is the best thing you can show out there. I’m a competitive guy, and I’m going to bring the best energy I can. That’s me. I really worked these three weeks around that and I’ll be ready.”
López has a 5.42 career ERA in 258 games and pitched for Counsell in Milwaukee in 2015 and 2017-18.
“He’s a guy that’s had success in the league,” Counsell said. “We’ve got to get him going and get him in the right spots here, and hopefully we’ll find something.”
The Cubs also recalled reliever Ethan Roberts, who had Tommy John surgery in spring 2022 after making the team out of spring training and missed all of 2023. He was nontendered by the Cubs and re-signed in hopes of a comeback.
“Going into the offseason, whenever I was nontendered, that was one thing I looked at,” Roberts said. “I knew I was going to be taken care of here. I wanted to make sure that was a priority, signing back.”
Keegan Thompson was placed on the 15-day injured list with a right rib fracture, retroactive to Thursday. An MRI taken Friday revealed the injury, Counsell said, after Thompson felt pain while throwing Thursday in San Francisco. Reliever Vinny Nittoli, who had just been signed Thursday, was designated for assignment.
Of the Cubs’ opening-day bullpen, only Héctor Neris has made it through 83 games without being either injured, demoted or released. Neris, Drew Smyly and Luke Little are the only three in the current bullpen who made the opening roster. The Cubs bullpen had a 4.42 ERA on Friday with 17 blown saves in 36 opportunities.
Hoyer said their own projected win total going into this season was higher than last year, and obviously that hasn’t come to fruition after 83 games.
“Is that frustrating to me? Absolutely,” he said. “And if it’s frustrating to me I have to imagine it’s frustrating to fans.”
On that point, Hoyer is 100% correct.
