Will the Cubs use the offseason to address second-half hitting slump?

It was hard to come away from Chicago Cubs President Jed Hoyer’s end-of-season news conference and think that this is a front office overly concerned by the offense’s second-half struggles.

“The totality of what our offense did was exceptional,” Hoyer said last week. “We were fifth in baseball in run-scoring in a difficult home offensive environment. So I think our offense overall was terrific. I don’t know if we have any control over the shape of how that happens, to be honest with you.”

When Hoyer talks about “the shape,” he’s referring to when the offense is playing at its best and how they get to being a top overall offense by season’s end. Both the 2023 and 2024 teams were better offensively in the second half than in the first. The opposite was true in this past season.

“I think some of that stuff is random, when guys are hot and when they’re not,” Hoyer said. “If you look at the totality, we had a really excellent offensive team. We did have some struggles in the second half. We had a collection of players in the first half at the same time that were playing exceptionally well, and then some of those same players were struggling in the second half.”

Some believed that adding a star bat to the lineup would limit the down moments. Or at least limit how extreme they would be. So, by that thinking, right fielder Kyle Tucker’s presence was supposed to solve this issue. Of course, his hand and calf injuries cost him both time and production in the latter part of the season.

The idea that a star like Tucker is needed to make the offense hum brings about another question: What happens if the impending free agent walks as many expect? Center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, who was brilliant in the first half and slowed by season’s end, can’t be expected to repeat what he did in the first half for an entire season. And that alone may not be enough.

“Clearly, Kyle had a huge impact on our offense this year,” Hoyer said. “If he’s not here then that’s a void and we have to figure out how to replace that. But there’s a lot of different ways to do that. And so I think that’ll be the focus. There’s no question that if you don’t retain a player of his caliber, then you have to replace that WAR in some other ways. That’s something we’ll be really focused on. But how you do that can take many different shapes and forms.”

From Cody Bellinger to Tucker, it’s been a recurring theme for the Cubs to have to replace production that could be potentially lost from a position player departing in the winter. Going young on offense and investing more in the pitching could be an option. But that would only make questions about the offense and the lack of consistency more legitimate heading into next season.

Hoyer, though, pointed out that perhaps these inconsistencies aren’t that rare for a team.

“There’s no doubt we’ve had some ups and downs,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re actually any more extreme than other teams. We’ve looked at that. As a team in general, we were unbelievably consistent all year. But we did have some big lulls.”

The table below shows what Hoyer is getting at, specifically each club’s output of runs scored broken down by month and where they ranked among all 30 MLB teams.

Breaking things down by month isn’t a perfect science, but it gives a quick picture of how the Cubs’ offensive season looks in parts. The results show that every team had some pretty extreme lulls. After an elite April and May, the Cubs looked more average or slightly better in every subsequent month but for August. That seemed to be the outlier of the group. Similar to July for the Los Angeles Dodgers or the Toronto Blue Jays’ combined March and April.

Compare this to 2024 and one can see the stark difference. In May and June of that season, the Cubs ranked 26th and 27th in runs scored, respectively. They were much better in all the other months, but the extended offensive struggles, paired with not enough pitching to overcome them, sank their season. The Cubs were able to pitch their way through one down month this season and largely avoided an elongated poor stretch on offense.

Runs scored is the most straightforward way to analyze the offense. But looking under the hood showed the Cubs were incredibly good in various aspects. Consistently, they didn’t chase and they were aggressive in the zone. Their strikeout rate was low and they often slugged. Their power dip did coincide with their biggest offensive lull, which is unsurprising. But they were not a one-dimensional offense and they managed to stick with a strong approach — even if the results didn’t always match, which Hoyer would suggest were largely due to bad luck in runner-in-scoring-position situations.

Hoyer’s point, essentially, is that every good offense has its struggles. There may not be an easy solution to avoiding the down moments. The Cubs’ downs weren’t as drastic as previous seasons. And the slump can be easily pointed to by Tucker getting hurt and Crow-Armstrong not equalling his MVP-caliber first half.

Chicago’s goal has to be to continue to add good players and hope their young players, like Crow-Armstrong, third baseman Matt Shaw, right fielder Owen Caissie and catcher Moisés Ballesteros, continue to grow and develop more consistency.

If that happens, perhaps they can remain a top-10 offensive group. Because as frustrating as the bad stretches were, the Cubs ultimately put out a strong lineup regularly over the course of the season.

“In general, I think our offense is really good,” Hoyer said. “And we’ll just continue to have meetings and talk through, ‘Are there ways that we can potentially reduce some of the ups and downs?’ But I think that’s pretty difficult.”

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