Cubs get just as many wins in Japan as we all expected

That the Cubs are already 0-2 when 28 other teams haven't even sniffed a real game shouldn't be a surprise. They played the Dodgers after all, and nothing Jed Hoyer has done in the five years he's been the President of Baseball Nonsense for the club has ever indicated he's in the least bit interested with building a team that can compete with the best teams in baseball.

Flying 6,000 miles to get slapped around by the defending world champions shouldn't be that embarrassing, but doing it while the Dodgers didn't even play Mookie Betts or Freddie Freeman sure was. The Dodgers were like, "Hey Cubs, just to make this fair, we'll send our second best player back to LA before the games even start and we just won't use our third best player, see what you can do with that."

And the answer was, nothing.

The Cubs led 1-0 in the first game and got four hitless innings from Shōta, and that was about it.

There's no reason to not overreact because a two game sample in a baseball season is nothing, and, the Cubs haven't bothered to make an effort to even try to compete with that team, anyway.

How fun. The optimism of the inert.

When the Cubs traded for Kyle Tucker there were immediately two benefits. First, the Cubs lineup has some good players in it, but no stars. Nobody you have to pitch around. Tucker would give them that. Also, it would lengthen the Cubs lineup which just kind of fell off of a cliff after the first three or four hitters. So we had to look forward to.

Except, as soon as Jed traded for Tucker he started shopping Cody Bellinger because he didn't want to pay Cody, who had exercised an option to stay for 2025 when the Cubs had just assumed when they signed him last spring that he'd leave after 2024.

Not only did Jed trade Bellinger, he traded him for effectively nothing (actually, an ineffective nothing named Cody Poteet) and didn't bother to add another bat.

And so when the Cubs took the field on opening day against the Dodgers the "improved" offense still fell off a cliff after three batters. No team that thinks they can win anything should be batting Michael Busch cleanup or their rookie third baseman fifth. Not only are the Cubs doing that, but honestly, what better options does Craig Counsell have for the fourth and fifth spots in the lineup?

So the only shock that the Cubs scored eight runs in four games in Japan (two exhibition games against Nippon Professional Baseball teams and two against the Dodgers) was that they scored that many.

Here's another problem when you build your team to hopefully eek out a close race in a crap division. Your schedule doesn't care what your aspirations are.

The Cubs open the season with seven games against the D'bags, seven games with the Dodgers, six with the Padres, three with the Rangers and three with the Phillies. They do have three games against the West Sacramento A's, so maybe playing in a minor league ballpark will be more their speed?

When you see fans saying, "If the Cubs can just be close to .500 after April they'll be in good shape," and those fans are actually correct, you are right to question, "What the hell are we doing around here?"

The season restarts with another opener on Thursday night against the D'bags in Phoenix (fun to go from games that start at 5 a.m. to games that end around midnight--baseball sure loves its fans), and so the Cubs will spend the next few days cutting down to their real roster.

Sort of.

They had a 31 player roster for the games in Tokyo with a five man taxi-squad and 26 man active roster, so they were able to stock a 10 man bullpen with starters Jimmy Taillon and Bat Boyd placed on that taxi squad. Not that Craig appeared to remember that he had an XL bullpen as he let Ben Brown get knocked around the park for way too long in game one.

As we've discussed before, even your opening day roster isn't reflective of your best 26 players. Savvy teams know that the worst time to try to get players through waivers is during everybody's final roster cut downs at the end of spring.