“No one performs an experiment once and considers the work done. They repeat it with different variables, correcting what they thought they knew, adding what they’ve learned.”
— from “The School of Life” by Amy Maclin as it appeared in O Daily Magazine
At some point this season — maybe it was during their first 10-game winning streak in late April, maybe it was during their second, maybe at some point during the 10-game losing streak that followed in late May, maybe they’re in the midst of it right now during their 8-2 run since the Dodgers series in which they’ve been playing some of their best and most meaningful baseball all season — the Cubs fell into a sense of belief in themselves.
As if they had found, to some unexpected degree, a deeper purpose.
We’ll never know. They’ll never outwardly say. At least not until they win it all or once it ends. That’s the way it should be.
Belief can be a thing of beauty or betrayal. Last season, the Cubs believed. Maybe not hard enough, maybe not real enough, but either one of two things happened: Their belief in self betrayed them or the truth did what the truth does.
This season, at the 75%-of-the-season-done threshold, their belief, we can all believe, is different. Rooted in something more real. Rooted in a greater sense of self-truth.
One through nine, no matter where manager Craig Counsell wants to put them in the lineup, these Cubs can put up numbers and men on base as fast as any team — if not faster than any team — in all of baseball. Against just about anyone any team puts on the mound. Sweeping the Dodgers in that three-game series is so not the same as being locked into seeing the Dodgers over seven games in September or October. But it’s the consistency of showing out after that series that speaks the loudest. Carries the most lasting meaning.
Damn the latest Dansby Swanson slump (7-for-38 since the Cardinals series in July before a breakout game against the Nationals on Wednesday, which included a 436-foot “see ya” in the seventh inning, somewhat confirming the “He’s made the adjustments” stamp by hitting coach Dustin Kelly). Damn Alex Bregman’s first-half low-show. Now he’s playing like he’s jealous of Pete Crow-Armstrong’s National League MVP position and conversations. He switched to using Swanson’s bat July 27 and is hitting .388 with six home runs since.
This is where they are. Most feared offensively, most respected defensively. Pitching — starting, middle relief, closers — still far from defined. But more important than what we’re supposed to make of them, where are the Cubs with themselves?
It feels good to the outside world of Cubdom to watch them put up 20 runs in the first two games of a series against the Nationals, but what should that same world do with the one-hit shutout the Nats put on them to end that series?
Those 10-game extremes of April and May, of clustered and stacked losses and wins, won’t disappear. They remain the difference in a team being “streaky” and a team that carries that tag of being “volatile” in performance.
Still, this is what Joe, Tom, Todd, Laura and Pete (Ricketts) wanted from an ownership perspective. A team that was in search of self while winning at the same time. A team finding a path greater than just wining the NL Central. A team that makes an $845 million purchase 17 years ago, now valued at north of $5 billion, seem worth twice as much. The MLB version of the Lakers in a certain context. Hot. The “it” franchise regardless of championships. The best of all baseball worlds.
But this team internally seems to be beyond all of that. So the Cubs sit. One of four teams (Arizona, San Diego, Philadelphia) battling for top position in the NL wild-card race, with a 6½-game lead over the closest wannabe, with seven games left against the Brewers to close the three-game gap Milwaukee has on them for the division crown.
Pressing neither the panic nor patience button.
Psychology Today tells us beliefs are not absolute truths. They are tools that exist on a spectrum between fact and faith. Facts are objective realities that remain true whether we believe in them or not. Faith is absolute conviction without evidence, a leap beyond what the senses or science can verify.
Maybe the Cubs’ belief, to get past their own past coming back to haunt them, is (with all due respect to last postseason, hitting .200 as a team in the NL Division Series): All nine bats can’t go cold at the same time. Not this time. But just what are they to do during the last quarter of the season while fighting the demons unsubstantiated belief can have on a team?
For the experiment that has been the Cubs’ season, belief is the only habit that breeds confidence. So if they lead by faith, the bats will follow.
