It’s Beginning To Feel Alot Like October

Okay folks. Make your plans. While those of us at Hire Jim Essian have been quietly confident in this Cubs team the entire season–often needing to beat back a lot of the shrieking pantywaists who oddly feel entitled to that ever-rare totally stress-free 162-game season– I feel I can now boldly proclaim, without any superstitious retribution– that this team is going to the postseason in back-to-back years for the first time in 100 years.

After breaking open last night’s game against the Reds and winning five-love, the Cubs now:

Have the best record in all of baseball for the first time since June 27th.

Have opened up a 6 game lead in The NL Central, their largest of the season and their largest since 2001.

Have won 77 games. In the last 30 seasons, the Cubs finished the season with 77 or fewer wins seventeen times, and it’s only August 20th. Granted, this says more about the relentlessly awful cluster of bad baseball that we have been exposed to over the years, but 77 wins this early is pretty damn sweet.

Have reached a new-high water mark of twenty-nine games over .500. The last time the Cubs soared this high, record-wise, was in 1984, when they finished the season 31 games over.

There’s still work to do, of course. The worst thing that can happen would be for the Cubs to get complacent, and slide sideways into the playoffs. However, thanks to the presence of Uncle Lou in the dugout, that’s not likely going to happen. No, while the Cubs are going to make the playoffs regardless, what they need to do right now is step on the necks of their closest pursuers these final 12 days of August, and render September one long tuneup for a title run while they entertain their fans by flirting with 100 wins.

This is the Cubs’ (77-48) schedule for the rest of the month:

vs. Cincinnati for 2
vs. Washington for 3
at Pittsburgh for 3
vs. Philadelphia for 4

I will combine those first three series and call the Cubs going 6-2. They’re welcome to win more, but I’ll settle for two 2-1 series and one sweep. The Philadelphia series will be significant. No more fucking around. It’s about time the Cubs made other contending teams feel like how other teams have made the Cubs feel when they were contending in ‘07, ‘03, ‘98 and ‘89. If this team wants to win a division going away for the first time since 1984, they’re going to need to take 3 of 4 from this collection of power-hitting freaks and rag-armed sallies.

Going 9-3 the rest of the month will have the Cubs sitting on 86 wins (to 51 losses) as they open September. This will give the team some opportunities to prepare for the playoffs which would come in the following forms:

The opportunity for Lou to pitch the really-freakin’-awesome-but-still-potentially-fragile Rich Harden every six days (or more) until the division is clinched. Hell, Lou could throw in an extra day rest for the other three non-Marquis pitchers at least once if he wanted to.

The opportunity to give Daryle Ward some starts and, therefore, at-bats, so that the awesome shit he pulled on Friday won’t come as such a surprise.

The opportunity to give Koyie Hill, or watever schlub catcher gets called up in September, some starts and begin to rest the ever-loving shit out of Geo Soto (who’s baserunning derring-do last night once again reminded me that he truly is the anti-Barrett)

The opportunity to prepare a really elaborate plan to ditch Jason Marquis by month’s end.

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All of the DOOM-sayers have been pointing to the Cubs’ September as proof that the Cubs could be in trouble down the stretch. Bah! I look at the September schedule and see, in the first three weeks of the month, 6 games against Houston (already peaked), 3 against Cincinnati (umm, yeah), 6 against St. Louis (how fun will it be to kick the last table leg out from under the Tards’ playoff hopes?) and 3 at home against Milwaukee (the only legitimate team…sorry, I know it’s late August and they currently have the third-best record in the NL, but I refuse to admit that St. Louis doesn’t suck).

So long as the Cubs enter September with 86 wins, merely going 9-9 against that monument to mediocrity gives the Cubs 95 wins with 7 games to go. Even if they haven’t clinched the division by then, their magic number should be somewhere between 2 and 4. The beautiful part is that Lou will then be ready to have these guys kick up the intensity the final week as they head into the playoffs, and finishing with the Mets and Brewers–which was the closing two series that made the likes of Gordon Wittenmeyer soil their shorts– will, instead of being an obstacle, prove to be good preparation for the postseason. Also, playing spoiler for those two teams while getting ready themselves for October should be good times.

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