Cubs hitters a mental mess

There's baseball and only looking at what your team is doing well.  Trends don't stay hot and being cold doesn't last.

Mets had excellent days at the office and they won.  The Cubs have a talented young organization that will be back next year.

I'm a Rockies fan...

It was a learning experience for both teams all the way around, but especially for the Cubs. It's a very young roster that will be competitive for several years. Very few other MLB organizations have done what the Cubs are doing to prepare and develop their young players. With all the hype and talk, this post season appearance was two years earlier than predicted and with this experience under their belts, they can only get better (assuming everybody stays healthy).

Good luck to the Mets in the post season. I hope they have as much success against their AL opponent as they did against the Cubs.

Signed,

Life Long Cubs Fan

the Mets rotation has the chance to be scary good for the next few years.

Signed life long Mets hater...

& Zach Wheeler (from here in Ga) is recovering from TJ, and anticipated to join the rotation next June.  Scary good ++

I grew up outside NY, but my son is a native Atlantan and is with ya old school - he hates the Mets too!

Let's Go Mets!

I've been to all the home playoff games, will be at the home WS games...this was the most unexpected season of all. Unbelievable. 

Murphy > Babe Ruth obviously!!!

I am with you on this. I heard someone saying how badly the Cubs did, WHAT? Do you realize that they were the wild card winners? Did that person realize they beat out the CARDINALS?

They are very young, they are going to grow up, the NL central division should fear the Cubs.  They also looked very very tired.

Mets did an awesome job, cant take that away from them. 

This also has been a great post season even if you are not a fan of one of those teams!

The Mets were the better team in the series.  I agree that the Cubs hit the wall.  Arrieta was around 90 some innings more than he ever threw before.  Lester has been pressing all season cause he knows he is going to get minimal run support. That hurts location trying to be too precise.  The rest of the rotation is suspect (although I think Hendricks can turn out to be pretty good - he pretty much dominated the Cardinals in the NLDS except for 3 pitches).  The hitters aren't experienced enough to make adjustments to great pitching.

All that said......OMG HOW GREAT ARE THE CUBS GOING TO BE IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!  That bandwagon is going to get pretty full next season.  Sadly there are no guarantees and injuries could derail the whole thing or they don't progress the way it looks like they should.  But it's a time to be excited.

I like to get on the Cubs Facebook page and read comments.  It's truly amazing how stupid some "fans" are.  I saw a post today Rizzo should be traded because he had a bad postseason.  They've been riding Lester all season because of his W/L record although the rest of his stats are pretty good.

Been a Cubs fan since I was 12 years old.

Cubs brass where talking about reducing strike outs and situational hitting as things to improve today.  They were just too long ball centric and when it didn't come, they struggled. 

It certainly seemed to come back to Mets pitching versus Cubs strikeouts. Unbelievable the number of 2-strike hits Mets had. Cubs could not put away batters nor get leadoff man on.

Ha!  That's exactly where the Nationals were last year after almost beating St Louis in the playoffs.  Expected to not only appear in the WS, but win it all this year (according to SI).  Sadly, the injury bug bit them bad along with an August slump.

Yes, the Cub's are young, but they have an excellent manager.  They should be back next year, but no guarantees.

The Nationals have the curse of shutting down Strasburg on them now, it will be 100 years because they took it all for granted, was it was '12 or '13 they shut him down in September...they thought they were going to dominate for years to come!! Never take anything for granted! Plus they have Scott Boras as the shadow GM and he doesn't give a damn about the organization, add in Bryce Harper and POS he is...good times!

Theo also mentioned about their defensive focus on baserunners.

Couple steals of 3rd in this series will do that.

As a Cardinals fan, I've heard about the supposed Cards-Cubs rivalry all my life, but I've never seen it except for some low-level, mostly good humored rowdiness in the the bleachers.

The two teams have hardly ever been good at the same time.

I think it would be great if the Cubs and Cardinals could sustain simultaneous stretches of excellence.

But let's wait until it happens. 

All this talk about being ahead of schedule seems to assume that the hot second half of a season the Cubs just enjoyed is firmly established as the new baseline from which further improvement will naturally proceed.  

Maybe. They're doing a lot of things right in that organization. But it's just not that easy.

As the NL Central has transformed over the past decade from the weakest division in MLB to  one of the strongest, each team has risen up for a year or two to challenge the Cardinals, then dropped back to the pack.

There's also the matter of the Pirates, who have their own reasons for optimism, and the Cardinals, who should feel pretty good about what they accomplished with so many of their stars hurt.

Fans of all three teams should realize the most probable outcome for next year is for all three teams to have lower win totals than they posted this year. Baseball is still a hard game, and sustaining excellence is even harder than achieving it the first time.

One thing for sure.

Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing in sports.

Let alone against good pitching like the Mets

Tell that to Daniel Murphy. 

Ha ha - Except for him.

Being a life long and kind of fanatical Cardinal's fan, I guess I will have to hope that they can come in third or fourth in the NLC. 

Before the Cubs are given the NLC championship next year, I might suggest that so much can happen in a season,  Waino went down for us.  What happens if it is Arrieta for the Cubs?  The Cardinals lost so many players throughout the year.  Still, they contended.  The Pirates are not a push over and I think that they feel they are the best in the NLC.  What about free agency and trades?  These three teams will all have different personnel next year. 

... and to the point of the OP, good pitching often messes with a hitter's head.  I thought that the Met's pitching was outstanding but the OP is correct in that Cub's hitters often expanded the zone. They will learn discipline as they mature or at least Cubs fans had better hope that they learn discipline.  Unfortunately, my Cardinal's offense lacked discipline for much of the year. 

CoachB,

I am reading that the plan will be for yadi and peralta as well as Matt to get more time off. 

Lots of these young guys from all of the teams went over their pitch limit  so should be interesting year in 2016.

I think that the one area that I tend to agree with some of the criticism of MM is that some players tended to be pitched a little too much.  Then again, when he tried to give them a break, they spoke out against it.  I look for the bench of the Cardinals to be drastically different next year.  There will be 4 OFs and one other that can play both corners.  So rest for them shouldn't be a problem.  Yadi has to get more rest.  He doesn't want it.  He live about 3 miles from me and so, I speak from 1st hand comments.  Carpenter is also one who wants to be in the lineup.  However, his "chronic fatigue" is proof that he has to have more rest. 

TPM, I know you know 1st hand the dealings with the pitching staff.  It has to become aware that some things have to change.  JMHO!