PITTSBURGH — It doesn’t matter what Craig Counsell does. His team just can’t get back in the win column. On Monday afternoon, the Chicago Cubs’ offense was listless once again as they lost 2-1 to the Pittsburgh Pirates, with Michael Busch’s solo home run accounting for their lone tally.
“There wasn’t much today,” Counsell said. “We didn’t create scoring opportunities, and that’s first. We gotta create scoring opportunities.”
The Cubs had just six hits, with only Busch’s homer going for extra bases. They went 0-for-2 with runners in scoring position and didn’t really put up much of a threat as the game went along. The lone big moment was in the second inning when, with two outs, the Cubs loaded the bases with a pair of singles and a walk, only to see the struggling Dansby Swanson strike out to end the threat.
“That’s the only opportunity we created,” Counsell said. “That’s just not enough. That’s not gonna win you games.”
It’s on the players right now to win. Counsell has shaken around the lineup. The Cubs have sat multiple struggling players, inserted a hot bench bat (Michael Conforto) more regularly and recently called up a rookie (Pedro Ramírez). Nothing has led to wins.
“We gotta play better,” Counsell said. “We gotta swing the bats better, we gotta pitch better, we need more guys contributing to good stuff. As a coaching staff, we gotta figure out a way to get the players there. Offensively, we are equipped to be way more consistent than this and way better than this. We need to show it.”
Cubs manager Craig Counsell is looking for any answer to his team’s offensive woes and has made several lineup adjustments to try to jump-start his club. (Charles LeClaire/ Imagn Images)
Nothing seems to be working right now for the Cubs, who have lost nine games in a row and have had a season full of ups and downs in their first 54 games of the year. Counsell didn’t start Seiya Suzuki and Nico Hoerner on Monday. On Sunday, Swanson sat along with Ian Happ, who was getting his second day off in a row.
None of it has helped the team turn a corner. In his return to the lineup, not much seemed to change for Happ, who went 0-for-3 with a walk and a strikeout. This isn’t his first slump, as an individual or for the team. Happ is a veteran who has experienced plenty of ups and downs in his career. In fact, his early career was marked by inconsistency and high strikeout totals. His 2022 season, though, was a turning point.
After team president Jed Hoyer traded away the World Series team core the prior summer, Happ earned everyday playing time and a regular defensive spot in left field. The extremes of his slumps waned and his strikeouts dipped significantly.
From 2017-2021, Happ struck out 30.8 percent of the time. Over the last four seasons, Happ’s strikeout rate dipped to 23.4 percent. But two months into this season, Happ has seen his strikeout rate jump all the way up to 33 percent.
“I think there’s probably more factors, but if I had to venture a guess, it’s a little bit timing stuff and swinging through more fastballs than I have the past handful of years,” Happ said when trying to explain why his strikeouts have climbed. “When you’re not putting pitches in play early, you end up hitting with more two-strike counts and that just leads to more strikeouts.”
Happ’s 29.5 percent whiff rate on fastballs is his highest since 2020. He’s also whiffing at breaking balls at a higher rate (43.5 percent) than he has since 2017. Hitting coach Dustin Kelly pointed to an issue that used to dog Happ early in his career that has, at least temporarily, returned.
“The heater up, which has always kind of been an issue,” Kelly said. “He’s offered a little more at those and hasn’t managed the top. There are times when he’s fouling that pitch off and living to see another day. It seems like right now he’s just under it.”
On pitches in the upper third or above, Happ is swinging at a 38.3 percent rate, his highest since 2022. This was after he set a career low in 2025 (31.1 percent). Early in his career, Happ was consistently above 40 percent. He’s also swinging and missing at those pitches 15.2 percent of the time, his highest rate since 2020. Last season, he was at 9.9 percent, the lowest of his career.
“I’m not fouling them off as much right now, especially the up-and-away fastball,” Happ said. “I’m not chasing the fastballs. So there are some good indicators. But I’m not getting to the one at the top and at least fouling it off. Obviously, there’s some timing bias there.”
Kelly agreed that it’s a timing issue, saying the mechanics of Happ’s swing are where he wants them to be and his swing plane isn’t altered in any significant way.
Counsell also noticed that Happ seems to be behind in counts frequently, especially of late.
“He’s just really caught in between,” Counsell said. “The fastball is beating him, the breaking ball, he’s way out in front of and they’re throwing a lot of strikes, and he’s behind in the count constantly. So he’s up against it 0-2, 1-2, feels like every at-bat.”
Overall, Happ is taking strikes at a 31 percent rate, which would be the highest of his career. He’s also taking a lot of called third strikes — his looking strikeout rate is 31.5 percent. Happ is known for his patience, but he’s rarely been this passive.
“I don’t know if that’s a product of the strike zone, maybe guys are competing more in the zone,” Happ theorized. “Could be some of the bullpens we’ve faced being more prone to throwing more strikes. I don’t have a great answer for you.”
One theory posed to both Kelly and Happ was that perhaps with Happ’s increase in power, it naturally has to come with a higher strikeout rate. Happ currently has a .211 ISO, which would be the first time he’s topped .200 since 2021. Kelly thought it was possible, but Happ didn’t believe it to be true. He pointed out that he’s not cheating on fastballs, he’s hit a decent number of opposite-field homers and four of his 10 long balls have come on breaking pitches.
The swings in production aren’t yet as extreme as they’d been early in his career. So for now, the big question is whether he can reduce the swing-and-miss and get back to driving the ball with authority. Despite a batting average (.211) that’s much lower than recent seasons, Happ is at a 121 wRC+ on the year, right around where he’s been over the last five years, thanks to a high walk rate and some solid slugging numbers. At some point, though, he has to get back on track.
Happ isn’t the only one in a funk in this Cubs lineup. There are numerous at the moment. But Happ knows he needs to be one of the hitters who helps the team right itself before the club falls too far behind in a Central division it once seemed ready to take control of.
