Finis

The Brewers sent the Cubs packing with a 3-1 win last night at a rocking American Family Field to clinch the NLDS. Put another way, the team that finished 22nd in homeruns during the regular season bested the team that finished with the sixth most longballs by outhomering them, three taters to one. Best of all, ex-White Sox Andrew Vaughn hit the deciding go-ahead homer for his new team in the fourth inning. Oh, where to start? The emperor’s new clothes seems the best bet, the emperor here being Cubs’ team chair and de facto owner Tom Ricketts. This is the man who claims his cash cow is but a small or medium market franchise. Hence, only the tenth highest team payroll this year, per sportrac.com. Up until around 9:30 or so last night, Ricketts was probably feeling downright proud of himself. Why, his team with a $211.9 million payroll had a good shot at advancing to the NLCS. Not like the Mets, who didn’t even make the postseason despite spending $342.4 million on player salaries. Too bad the real small-to-medium market team, the one with the eighth-lowest payroll ($121.7 million), won when it counted. The other team? Oh, they played the analytics-driven game of longball and launch angle all season while their opponents opted for on-base percentage. The team that had the sixth most homers in the regular season lost the division, let alone the NLDS, to the team that finished with the second-highest on-base percentage. And that really mattered because the home team won every game in the series. Would the Brewers have won game five if it were played at Wrigley Field? I really, really doubt it. But we’ll never know, courtesy of front-office decisions made by Jed Hoyer and company, at the behest of their emperor. Which leads me to my last point, that Emperor Ricketts also subscribed to the Jerry Krause dictum that players and coaches alone don’t win championships, organizations do. That’s were willing to spend $40 million in the 2023 offseason to make Craig Counsell the highest paid manager in baseball. (The Dodgers’ Dave Roberts signed an extension at the beginning of 2025 that gives him $8.1 million a season to Counsell’s $8 million.) The Cubs thought Counsell provided more value than any potential free-agent signing. In other words, they spent money to save money, however imaginary the savings might be. Great philosophy, only it didn’t work for the Krause’s Bulls after Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson left, and it’s not working for the cash cow on Addison. Let’s see if the postseason changes anything.