Should we be worried about Kyle Tucker?

It was shaping up to be a completely frustrating weekend at Wrigley Field. Little Jed Hoyer botched the trade deadline, and imperiled the Cubs chances at winning the division while likely dooming them to the Wild Card round and, because they are the Cubs, an early postseason exit. They won 1-0 on Friday against the resurgent (but still mostly hapless) Orioles and then blew Saturday's game in spectacular fashion and were on their way to do it again on Sunday.

Because Baltimore had lefty Keegan Akin in to pitch in the ninth and Michael Busch was due up, Craig Counsell sprinted to the bat rack to try to tackle Busch so that 41 year old Justin Turner could finish applying Ben Gay to his entire torso and take a few hacks before popping out to the catcher.

But, shockingly that's not what happened. Thumbo Cohen was on the call on TV, so screw him, here's the Hall of Famer Pat Hughes with the call that includes Dansby Swanson reaching before Turner's pinch hit at bat. And Turner was smart enough to hit the first pitch to drown out the groaning from all of us who were pissed that he was batting at all.

The Cubs play the Reds next and they have lefties going on Monday (Nick Lodolo) and Wednesday (Andrew Abbott) so if you feel like you missed a chance to boo Turner before he could play the hero, you'll have plenty of chances early this week.

If it feels like Kyle Tucker hasn't been an impactful hitter for a while now, that's because he hasn't been. Coming into yesterday's game, Tucker was slashing just .227/.395/.318 with a homer and nine RBI in his last 28 games. It's probably not that he's not seeing the ball well, because he has 19 walks to just nine strikeouts during that time.

So you wonder if it's something physical.

On June 1, Tucker had to leave early in a game against the Reds when he slud awkwardly (slidded? slided?) into second base and jammed a finger.

At that point he was slashing at an MVP level, .284/.394/.524/.918.

Since? Not so much. .260/.382/.432. But that's still good. It's a 104 OPS points less than what he was before the injury, but an .814 OPS for the entire season, is OK. I mean, it's 104 points more than Ian Happ, and 112 more than Dansby Swanson.

On July 22 against the Royals, Tucker smashed a foul ball off his shin just below his knee (and just above his shin protector). He stayed in the game, and later stole home on a double steal, but he got the next day off. Since, he's slashing .240/.472/.320. Again, lots of walks, but no real damage.

But hey, that's only 10 games. That won't tell you anything. The only way we would start to get concerned would be if your star right fielder gave you some concrete evidence that he knew something was wrong with him and he felt he couldn't contribute at anything close to his regular level.

But we're not going to get any of...wait, what? Oh, no.

Tucker came up in the bottom of the first yesterday with Michael Busch on second base after Orioles right fielder Jeremiah Jackson clanked a fly ball off his glove. Nobody out, runner on second. Here's a chance to get rolling early.

And, this is what he did...

Oh, that's very bad. Jim Deshaies opined that Tucker was trying to drag bunt for a hit. Either way, this is bad. This is Nomar sac bunting in the 12th inning of the Cubs last chance to salvage the 2004 season against the Reds and bunting Jose Macias (!) to second with TWO OUTS down 2-1, bad.

But hey, cut Nomar some slack. Juan Padilla was a lights out reliever for the 2004 Reds. Let me look up his ERA because if I remember right it was incredible. Yes, here it is. It's incredible. It was 10.67! He'd allowed 23 hits in 14 innings in his previous 11 appearances.

Orioles starter Brandon Young came into yesterday's game with a scintillating 6.63 ERA in eight starts, he'd allowed 46 hits in 36 innings. Lefties have hit him to the tune of .313/.394/.594 with 13 homers in 96 at bats.

And the Cubs best player was bunting.

Nothing alarming about that. Sure.

Tucker got two hits in the game, both were singles. So...he's heating up?

Tucker had given a bad pitcher an out to help him settle into the game. And then with the Cubs up 1-0, three batters later Quintin Berry gave the Orioles another out. Ian Happ doubled which scored Seiya Suzuki, but for some unknown reason, Quintin sent the lead footed Carson Kelly, who was out by...a lot.

The only interesting thing about this play is that it took three guys named Jackson to pull it off. Jeremiah Jackson was the right fielder who hit cutoff man Jackson Holliday, who threw to catcher Alex Jackson for the tag.

Neat? I guess?

Stop giving the other team outs!

You can't accuse Happ of that. No sir. He wasn't giving the Orioles outs, he was giving out doubles?

How is that a double? Happ got there, even started to slow down, then did his little half-assed hop and dropped it. Put that on his Gold Glove four-peat highlight reel, I guess.

Speaking of Alex Cohen, good ol' Thumbo (I was asked again why I call him that--he's dumb and he looks like a thumb, it's a very nuanced nickname), nobody should accuse him of not doing incredible research.

I can tell you gang, that I think I am on top of a lot of things. But until he told us, I had no idea that Nico's "the best defensive centerfielder in baseball." I completely missed that. I thought it was Petecrow Armstrong.

The Cubs honored Ryne Sandberg on Friday and Saturday, and it mostly was very nice. They had a great video tribute for him, and it was a nice touch when Rick Sutcliffe and Jody Davis took the second base bag out before the first pitch and stuck it into the ground with a big 23 on it.

Near the beginning of the video theres' a quote from what sounds an awful lot like Lee Smith saying, "You were the player to be named later, it means they didn't even want you." First, that's not what that means, and Sandberg wasn't a player to be named later in the trade from the Phillies.

And the Cubs announced that for the Saturday game, every Cubs player would wear Sandberg's retired 23 in the game and wear the "iconic" blue jersey.

It was a very cool idea. I was genuinely impressed and excited to see this. And current second baseman Nico Hoerner even wore flip down sunglasses for the game like Ryne did.

But then the Cubs completely half-assed it. They wore blue jerseys, yes. But all they wore were their regular, lame alternate blues with the crawling Cubbie bear logo on the front. At least the precious Motorola jersey sponsor patch was on it, though!

Did Sandberg even ever wear a version of this abomination? Apparently, he did. The Cubs had a similar blue jersey for the first time in his final season in 1997 and they were it on occasion. But this is what we wanted.

Maybe without the dress shirt under it.

But it's not what we got.

Why didn't the Cubs just wear the home pinstripes with 23 on them? He wore a version of that uniform in every home game of his entire career.

It seems like a dumb thing to get fired up about. But the whole idea was that they were doing this very cool, very Ryne specific thing to honor him, and then they botched the execution.

Just like Jed at the trade deadline.

If it was that hard to do it right, what was the hurry? Do all of the other nice, thoughtful things you did to honor him, and announce that at a future home game you're going to have the correct blue jerseys and wear them to honor him.

Or, like I said before, take the really nice pinstripe ones you currently wear and use those.

There was a very nice moment before the game when third base coach Quintin Berry's grandfather threw out the first pitch, to celebrate his 100th birthday. What a nice thing.

Which was better than when Quintin sent grandpa home on a sac fly to shallow left in the third and he was thrown out by 70 feet.

This would make a cool shirt, right?

And you know what? There might even be others.

Buy some crap