The Cubs went into this Wild Card Series with, by the numbers, the best offense in the sport. They left it having scored one run in a potential series-clinching game and getting handled easily across both. Michael King flirted with a no-hitter, and Fernando Tatis Jr. took the Cubs deep leading off Game 1 in an 8-0 laugher. Two days later, Gavin Sheets came off the bench and hit a pinch-hit homer that buried Chicago for good in a 4-1 finish. Michael Busch got the Cubs their lone bright spot, a first postseason homer, and it changed nothing. San Diego swept it.
This lineup, built to be the engine of a deep October run, got shut down by two pitching performances with no answer in reserve, because the team never built one. The Cubs spent a regular season making a case that they could slug with anybody in baseball. Then they ran into October, where a short series turns on starting pitching depth and bullpen length, and Chicago had neither. You can out-hit a bad team for six months. You can't out-hit a dominant strikeout arm and a bullpen that knows how to put out a flame unless you've got a staff of your own that can hang.
Busch and Dansby Swanson aren't the problem. The people who built this roster are, for deciding a historically potent offense was enough of a plan. This franchise built a lineup that could carry a 162-game season and a pitching staff that couldn't carry two elimination games. That's the front office's problem. If you keep building a team this way and keep getting the same result in October, a new hitting coach won't fix it.
This was still a fun season to watch. A team with this kind of offense, scoring the way it did for stretches of the summer, is worth the ride even when the ending stings. Nobody should pretend six months of good baseball evaporates because of two bad nights in San Diego. But a good regular season was supposed to be the floor for this group, and treating it like the ceiling is how you talk yourself into running it back with the same flaws next year.
The Cubs lost because they went into October with a roster built for May. That's on whoever decided offense alone was enough to win in October. Fix the pitching or watch this happen again.
