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With NL Central in hand, Cubs preparing for October

Chicago Cubs
The Chicago Cubs are just counting down the days until October. (AP)

In 2010, when Joe Maddon won the second of his two division titles as a manager, his Tampa Bay Rays won the AL East by a game over the New York Yankees. They awoke on the final regular-season Sunday tied for the division lead. They beat the Royals that day in 12 innings, while the Yankees were drubbed in Boston. Two years before, the Rays won the AL East by two games over the Red Sox, their lead in September never more than three games.

Win a division and they don’t often ask by how many. You win it or you don’t. And, yet, here stand Maddon’s Chicago Cubs, 14 games in front of the rest of the NL Central and likely to have played their last critical game before October. That’s … different.

Wednesdays with Brownie
Wednesdays with Brownie

In the short term, Maddon puts them all in onesies and parades them through Los Angeles. Long term?

“Not learning,” Maddon said, “but reinforcing that you don’t change a thing.”

Watch their games, Maddon said, “You can’t tell where we’re at. The game looks the same.”

It’s true. The Cubs hardly lose, the two losses in three games to the Dodgers over the weekend notwithstanding. Before that, they’d primarily pitched their way to 23 wins in 28 games, a run that more than doubled their lead in the Central, and since then they’ve beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates twice.

The real benefit, Maddon said, is rest. The man who is happy to call off batting practice and encourages the 5 o’clock stragglers to keep straggling has sat Jason Heyward, Anthony Rizzo and Addison Russell, and intends to do the same for Kris Bryant, so that the dog days aren’t quite so challenging.

His only request otherwise? Be ready at 7:05.

“They’re big boys,” he said.

And the big games are coming.

A WEEK BEHIND:

If there were an odder occurrence in baseball than whatever happened in Milwaukee to the Pirates over 12 years, then it’s probably best not to look at it square in the eye. There’s some deep, dark Pfister Hotel, “redrum” stuff going on, and you don’t want to know.

Granted, the Pirates were plain pathetic for a lot of those years, and the Brewers were at least presentable, but this is baseball. Even the worst teams win almost 40 percent of their games. The difference between a 90-loss team and a 90-win team is, like, two or three games a month over half-a-year.

So how to explain the Brewers winning 64 of 81 home games against the Pirates?

Pittsburgh Pirates
The Pirates did the unthinkable: Swept a four-game series in Milwaukee. (AP)

Going with voodoo here, along with that brownish-yellow secret stuff they put on their pork-ish products.

Largely forgotten in a race that hasn’t been a race for months, and losers of five of six games going into a four-game series against the Brewers, the Pirates won four in a row at Miller Park, which is in Milwaukee, which is where they hardly ever won, and as a result the world looks a little brighter for Clint Hurdle and the boys.

Pirates pitchers allowed 12 runs in four games. The bullpen – no Mark Melancon, remember – allowed two runs over 16⅓ innings. And, looky here, Andrew McCutchen just hit .292 with a .400 on-base percentage for a month.

The Pirates have been all over the place for five months, and now Gerrit Cole has a sore elbow, which almost certainly explains some uneven starts lately, and so they start again.

As Hurdle told reporters this week, “It hasn’t been linear, by any means. It’s kind of been an Etch-A-Sketch type of season.”

A WEEK AHEAD:

Go back far enough, and it’s really not that far, and Tigers manager Brad Ausmus was about to get canned and the Kansas City Royals were deader than that crooked thing on your uncle Lou’s head.

Now, maybe we’ll get there and maybe not, but September dawns and you know who’s still working – Brad Ausmus, whose club is a game back in the wild-card race. And you know who’s still relevant – the Kansas City Royals, who are three back.

As Ausmus said then, back when neither the Detroit Tigers nor the Royals would ever catch the Chicago White Sox, and it pretty much goes for all of us, “You keep doing your job.”

Because you never know about today. Since mid-May the Tigers are 56-40 and the Royals are 52-44 (and the Cleveland Indians are 58-40) and, well, just about everybody has outplayed the White Sox (even the Minnesota Twins), which doesn’t solve everything but doesn’t hurt, either. The point being, the Tigers reach the final month with a shot at catching the Indians, with a shot at the wild card, and with series remaining against the Royals (two), Baltimore Orioles and Indians (two). The Royals have six games against the Tigers and six against the Indians ahead, all critical series, the first this weekend against the Tigers.

The probables:

Friday: Anibal Sanchez vs. Danny Duffy

Saturday: Michael Fulmer vs. Yordano Ventura

Sunday: Matt Boyd vs. Dillon Gee

SAW IT COMING:

Yeah, sorta did.

This Baltimore Orioles starting rotation problem isn’t going away, in spite of an ERA in August that was slightly better than those in June and July. They managed it in June by scoring 6.6 runs per game, but have scored slightly more than four runs per game since, so sustaining a division-title level of play has become a challenge. Complicating things was the 6.56 bullpen ERA in August, possibly the result of carrying all those additional innings. Only Cincinnati Reds starters have pitched fewer innings than Orioles starters, which leaves lots for the fellas in the bullpen.

The latest has Kevin Gausman pitching to a 3.04 ERA over six weeks, which is good, and Chris Tillman on the disabled list with a sore shoulder, which is not. Yovani Gallardo just gave up eight runs in 1⅓ innings in New York, which is not good, and Ubaldo Jimenez went six tidy innings the day before in Washington D.C., which was exceptional, other than the loss. (Jimenez also went 6⅔ sturdy innings Tuesday night to help beat the Toronto Blue Jays.) Dylan Bundy, mentioned in this space not long ago as a reason for optimism, has pitched to a 7.53 ERA in his past three starts, so not good. And Wade Miley’s ERA as an Oriole is more than 7.

At some point, it is what it is. At that point, there’s only one solution: more runs.

DIDN’T SEE IT COMING:

Albert Pujols has driven in 103 runs, a big number derived from big opportunity, and that is hitting immediately behind Mike Trout.

That said, Pujols has batted .324 with runners in scoring position, his best average in those situations since batting .343 in 2010, when he was still rolling in MVP votes.

Also, consider the depth of the opportunity: Pujols hit cleanup most of the season and the men who hit behind him, primarily in the five-hole, have slugged .379 and OPSed .673. In all of baseball, only the Astros and Dodgers rate worse from the No. 5 spot.

So Pujols, who granted is not vintage Pujols at 36, has been without a net for another season in Anaheim, and sometimes you only have so much to work with, and a lot of times it’s been Pujols or nobody.