ST. LOUIS — It’s not uncommon for a team to go through hot and cold streaks, but the 2026 Chicago Cubs appear to have taken things to a different level.
With June around the corner, the Cubs already have a pair of 10-game win streaks and a 10-game losing streak, leaving them 31-27 entering Saturday’s game in Busch Stadium against the St. Louis Cardinals.
Hitting allegedly is contagious, but apparently so is slumping.
The Cubs hit .261 in March/April with a .780 OPS, averaging 5.5 runs per game and 1.4 home runs per game. Entering Saturday’s game, they were hitting .213 in May with a .656 OPS, averaging 4.0 runs per game and 0.9 home runs per game.
“It’s just a weird thing,” manager Craig Counsell said Saturday.
The weird thing is that the first eight games of May were part of the 10-game win streak, and they scored 59 runs in those 10 wins. In the 10-game losing streak that followed, they scored 25 runs and were held to one or no runs on four occasions.
The Cubs’ offense the last month has been as unpredictable as the Chicago weather, and no one has been streakier than Ian Happ. The Cubs left fielder went 7-for-15 with three home runs and 10 RBI in the last three games, after hitting .172 with 3 home runs and 7 RBI in his previous 27 games, striking out 42 times.
“It’s the confounding part about baseball, you know, why do we go on streaks like this?” Counsell said. “We just have to accept these streaks are going to happen. This is how it works. Sometimes home runs come in bunches. You take them when you can get them. Obviously, he’s had a big last three days.”
Should we expect the Cubs to continue this soft parade of severe ups and downs this season?
“I don’t know,” Counsell said. “That’s what you learn from this.”
Is this team streakier than most teams he’s managed?
“I don’t know what about a team would say they’re streaky,” said the manager in his 12th season. “I think our hitters are normal from that perspective. The nature of the way the season has been from a hitting perspective, we’ve had seven or eight guys really on, or seven or eight guys really not on it. It’s largely the same group that wasn’t that way a year ago.
“It’s kind of the nature of a baseball season, and why we love the game. It surprises us and challenges us.”
Happ has no explanation for his hot streak, except that he’s seeing the ball well. He thought Friday’s 6-5 loss to the Cardinals would pay dividends because the Cubs had more scoring opportunities.
“You put up five runs in a game, you feel good about it,” Happ said. “When we keep giving ourselves opportunities, just keep doing that and doing that, and we’ll have a couple here where we put up seven or eight.”
Brown watch
Chicago Cubs starting pitcher Ben Brown delivers during the first inning of a baseball game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on Monday, May 25, 2026, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/David Dermer)
Ben Brown, who started Saturday night’s game, has been the Cubs’ most effective starter with a 1.89 ERA in his previous four starts.
Does that mean he’s got a spot in the rotation when everyone else is healthy?
“He’s got an opportunity and he has absolutely made a lot of his opportunity,” Counsell said, declining to make a definitive statement to no one’s surprise.
Brown added two pitches — a sinker and changeup — to his four-seam fastball and knuckle-curve, which have been instrumental in his improvement. The added confidence is another factor, but part of that is because of the two pitches.
“The two pitches and the struggles of last year are all pieces that get you to the present,” Counsell said. “They all matter. They’re all relevant. We tell ourselves stories in our own heads.”
Being put on the postseason roster last year was also a factor.
“Ben was like ‘I don’t just want to be on the playoff roster, I want to be part of this thing,’” Counsell said. “And that’s part of what he put on himself going into the offseason.”
American Tarp Story
Fans known as the “Tarps Off” crew cheer during a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates at Busch Stadium on May 21, 2026, in St Louis. (Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images)
The Cardinals continue to market the viral sensation of “Tarps Off,” where young men take off their shirts and twirl them around in a section of the right-field bleachers.
Counsell said he enjoyed it, and it’s basically a harmless thing that began organically by a group of fans.
But as we’ve all seen with organic trends before, it was usurped by the marketing department of a large corporation to help promote lagging ticket sales resulting from a planned rebuild following poor decision-making by Cardinals executives in recent years.
Naturally, the Cardinals have manufactured “Tarps Off” towels. It appears they made an AI-generated rules sign for the section. The next step will probably be to put a celebrity fan in the “Tarps Off” group for more publicity, or maybe get a corporate sponsor for the section.
The young men who innocently started the trend won’t make a dime off this, but the billionaire owner of the Cardinals will no doubt profit from their idea.
That’s the American way.
History lesson
The Cubs and Cardinals played the 2,528th game of their rivalry Saturday, but one of the more memorable moments happened 15 years ago next week.
On June 5, 2011, Cubs closer Carlos Marmol blew a lead in a 3-2 loss to the Cardinals, causing starter Carlos Zambrano to utter the words that would go down in team history:
“We stinks.”
Perhaps no other player encapsulated the feelings of Cubs fans over the years more than “Big Z.”