The Brewers are hot. Who gives a shit?
Boog says Busch is the Cubs best hitter? And let's take the Chicago sports media survey!
The Cubs didn't exactly sprint to the tape to end the first half of the season, but winning two of three in the Bronx was a big deal, especially for a franchise that is now 3-15 ever at any iteration of Yankee Stadium.
They tripled their franchise total for wins in the Bronx in one weekend. Impressive? Sad? Both.
The pants wetters are very concerned about the Brewers who have closed to within a game of first and who won seven in a row to finish the first half.
Nobody gives a shit about a seven game winning streak in July, especially when three of them were against the Nationals at home.
The Brewers are 9-4 in their last 13. The Cubs are 8-5 in theirs. Ooh, how scary.
The Cubs have played more teams with winning records than any team other than the D'bags, have the easiest schedule in baseball in the second half and they play the Brewers eight more times, including five games in four days at Wrigley in August. The Cubs will have plenty of opportunities to smack around red-faced Mat Purphy's scrappy group of dipshits to settle things.
What we need to focus on are the important things. You know, like Boog Sciambi's current take that Michael Busch is "the best hitter on the Cubs," one that he keeps repeating over and over again.
So, is Boog right?
No.
Not even close.
Busch is having a very nice year. And it's great to see his continued improvement over last year. Hell, he led off yesterday and homered, so that was fun.
Busch leads the Cubs in batting average (.290), slugging (.550) and OPS (.925), and he's second in on base at .375.
That sure seems like best hitter on the team kind of numbers doesn't it?
It would. Except for one pretty important thing.
He's spent most of the season hidden from left handed pitching.
Busch has been excellent against right handers, and that's great because on average they are 75% of pitchers in the league. But even with his lefty at bats hand picked by Craig Counsell, Busch is hitting just .208/.288/.358 against them in 53 tries.
Kyle Tucker's overall numbers are .280/.384/.499/.883. Only he pays the penalty of facing same sided pitching. And unlike, Busch, he's good at it. In 119 at bats he's slashed .269/.360/.479 against them.
Petecrow Armstrong plays against everybody and he doesn't do shit against lefties (.188/.220/.393) which brings his overall numbers down, but he tunes up righties even more than Busch does with a .613 slug.
Busch is a good hitter. But it's batshit insane to say he's the best on the Cubs, and even worse to say it over and over again like Boog has been.
Our good friend Jon Greenberg did his somewhat annual "Who Do You Love?" Chicago sports media survey and I didn't feel comfortable telling you who to vote for (because you can vote for Pointless Exercise!), so instead, I made a video where you can watch me take the survey with comments and then you can just do the same thing.
Vote now at The Athletic (no subscription required...maybe?)
When the All-Star teams were first announced on July 6, the assumption was that Seiya Suzuki would eventually make the team once the injury replacements started to be made, and that there was a decent chance that Carson Kelly or Busch might also make it.
But while the AL was shuffling the shit out of their roster, no position player on the NL team begged off. So Seiya, Kelly and Busch are all home, and not in Atlanta for the game.
One injury replacement that did happen, and that made players from all over the league bitch and moan, was when the NL pitching staff added Brewers rookie Jacob Misiorowski. He's got as many wins as NL starting pitcher Paul Skenes (four), so what's the problem?
Well, the problem is that he's only pitched in five games in his big league career. He's dominated in four of the five starts and has 33 strikeouts in 25.2 innings, but his inclusion on the team is, to put it in a classy way, fucking bullshit.
Kerry Wood was 8-3 with a 3.38 ERA, and had 139 strikeouts in 93.1 innings in 1998 and he didn't make the NL team. And he had nearly as many strikeouts in one of his starts as Misiorowski has in five. Just ask Pat Hughes about it, he'll talk unabated for three hours.
The issue here is as much the All-Star replacement process as anything else. Misiorowski was not the first starting pitcher the league offered the spot to. They offered it to the Phillies Christian Sanchez, but he pitched yesterday and since you can't make a pitcher who works on the Sunday before the game pitch in the All-Star Game they moved on, and offered it to his teammate Ranger Suarez, but Ranger said he wouldn't be able to pitch in the game, and according to MLB stooge Bob Nightengale, they reached out to "a dozen" starting pitchers before finally offering the spot to Misiorowski.
That number is likely super exaggerated. But when would Bob have ever been wrong?
The problem here is the makeup of All-Star pitching staffs. There are currently 19 pitchers on the NL staff, though three of them (Chris Sale, Matthew Boyd and Zack Wheeler) are not going to pitch, so they won't be active, plus there's an extra pitcher because MLB shoehorned Clayton Kershaw onto the staff as a "legends pick." But they still have ten starters and six relievers. Why wouldn't they have awarded another reliever with a spot instead of a starting pitcher with five career starts?
Why not Drew Pomeranz? He's pitched 29 times and allowed two earned runs. If you want somebody to pump in 102 MPH heaters, why not Daniel Palencia? Half of the six relievers on the NL squad are from the same team (the Padres). How about, the Giants' Trevor Rogers (1.55 ERA in 45 games). Somebody. Anybody.
Starting pitchers are pitching fewer and fewer innings year over year. Relievers are shouldering more of the load, so why don't the All-Star rosters reflect that?
