“Obviously, I’ve been terrible this year.’’
Clearly, Alex Bregman will get no dissenting votes from the folks who’ve taken to booing him with some regularity at Wrigley Field, as they did again Sunday night, when he popped out for the last out of the Cubs’ 2-1, 10-inning loss to the Giants.
In losing the rubber game of this three-game set, the Cubs have lost or tied their last nine series.
They’ve lost eight and split one with the Pirates and have gone a full month without winning a series.
That’s the formula to follow if you want to go from a 3œ-game lead in your division to the 7œ games they trail the Brewers by while sharing third place with the Pirates in the National League Central.
There were other losses for the Cubs on Sunday, too. Starting pitcher Jameson Taillon left one batter into the second inning with a strained left hamstring. He will have an MRI exam Monday; the Cubs can only hope the injury will not be as severe as the one that sidelined Shota Imanaga for seven weeks last season.
Energetic rookie Kevin Alcantara lost a bit of innocence when he was doubled off third on a broken-bat line drive by Bregman to Giants first baseman Rafael Devers in the eighth inning. Alcantara represented the go-ahead run in a game kept tight by the spectacular relief pitching of Javier Assad, who replaced Taillon and held the Giants to one hit in 6„ scoreless innings.
Assad left to a standing ovation from the crowd of 36,317, unaccustomed to watching baseball at such a late hour on a Sunday night, thanks to NBC and its ‘‘Sunday Night Baseball’’ broadcast.
Surely, Alcantara was anticipating big cheers when he broke for the plate on Bregman’s liner, but he committed a cardinal baseball sin: make sure the ball has gotten through the infield before you think about advancing.
Alcantara was easily doubled up; the Cubs went from first-and-third with no outs in a 1-1 game to an empty hand when Ian Happ struck out to end the inning.
“No excuse to not be able to do what I’m supposed to do there,’’ Alcantara said.
Matt Chapman’s ground-ball single through an undefended right side easily scored ghost runner Jonah Cox in the 10th, and with ghost runner Pete Crow-Armstrong only 90 feet away after stealing third with one out, Michael Busch and Bregman popped to short to end the game.
Afterward, Bregman patiently sat in front of his locker, waiting for his inquisitors. He is 2-for-24 after an 11-game hitting streak had raised hopes that he was breaking out of what has been a seasonlong slide. He has a .669 OPS and five homers and has driven in only 19 runs in 65 games.
“I started to feel like today was the best I’ve felt mechanically,” he said, “but obviously I’ve been terrible this year, honestly, offensively.
“So there’s only one way to get out of it, and that’s head-on. I’ve been in this spot many times in my career where you go through spells where you’re not hitting, and I’ve learned that from the first 30 at-bats in my career, when I went 1-for-32, that there’s only one way to go, and that’s straight through it.
“But I’ve just been bad, and I need to correct a lot mechanically. I thought some of the things we looked at pregame were very, very insightful, and we kind of diagnosed everything that has been going on. Now it’s execution time, and I haven’t executed at all this year. I’ve been terrible with runners in scoring position.
‘‘There have been passive at-bats; there have been overly aggressive at-bats. There needs to be some consistency, and I need to be better, and I will be better, and I’m gonna get after it.”
