With the wind in their face, Cubs showing they can handle the pressure

Here’s how well things are going at Wrigley Field these days: Before Tuesday’s game, a reporter asked manager Craig Counsell if it’s “really tough” on the coaching staff and players to win so many close games because the intensity of it all is so “wearing.”

“I would call it fun,” Counsell said.

And that was before it took 11 innings to put away the Colorado Rockies 4-3 on another chilly late-spring evening when the wind was blowing in at Wrigley.

Oh, the humanity! Will the Cubs (34-21) survive being … good?

“It hasn’t been wearing at all,” Counsell said Tuesday afternoon. “This is what you want, to be in these situations. No team goes out there and just sits there and it’s 7 to 1 in the fifth every day. That’s just not how the game works. You’ve got to scrape and claw to win every big-league game. And it’s always going to be that way. But that’s the fun of it, trying to do that every night.”

You would’ve thought the Cubs would have a 7-1 lead at some point in the first two games against lowly Colorado, which dropped to 9-46 and 3-24 on the road with Tuesday’s loss. But as a former Cubs manager used to say, they can’t all be oil paintings.

In reality, when the wind is whipping in at Wrigley Field, it’s the great equalizer. Cubs executives pray for that weather when good teams like the Phillies and Dodgers come to town. But they want a jet stream to Waveland when the likes of the Rockies are on the other side.

Maybe that kind of challenge is good for a team’s soul, because the big-swinging, best-offense-in-baseball Cubs showed once again they can win it any way they want. After falling behind by a run in the top of the 11th, they tied it on Michael Busch’s check-swing single to left and won it on Matt Shaw’s blooper to right. According to the team’s game notes, the Cubs are now 10-7 this season when the wind is blowing in at the beginning of the game, compared with 4-0 when it’s blowing out and 3-1 when it’s a crosswind.

Just a few days ago in Cincinnati, the Cubs won a game 11-8 after scoring seven runs over the seventh and eighth innings. On Tuesday, they led 2-0 early and had to wait until the game’s end to lead again.

The Cubs have 16 comeback wins this season and three walkoff ones through 55 games. No wonder people are so worried about Counsell’s heart rate.

They also improved to 8-4 in one-run games. Last season, they were 23-28 in that scenario.

That tracks. In recent years, you’ve watched Cubs games and expected something to go wrong. Not at a 2024 White Sox level, but still. Frankly, that kind of North Side pessimism goes back to the waning days of the 2018 season, when everything went south just two years after the World Series.

This season, you watch and expect the Cubs to win, no matter the deficit and even with some shaky bullpen outings and a variety of injuries. The lineup, which is first in baseball or close to it in most offensive categories, is deep and dangerous.

“I’ve been with teams with really good offenses, I’ve been with teams that don’t, and it’s a bad feeling to know that an early deficit is going to make that game a real challenge,” Cubs president Jed Hoyer said. “And this team has been unbelievably resilient. I think that builds some character early in the season.”

Injuries have been creeping up on the team over the first two months and I suppose that builds character too, or at least reveals how good of a job a front office has done at building depth in the upper levels of a farm system.

Justin Steele, who is out for the season after elbow surgery, showed up Tuesday with a brace on his left arm, and Shota Imanaga (strained hamstring) keeps working to get off the injured list sometime in the next month or so. Catcher Miguel Amaya is out for at least six weeks with an oblique strain, and reliever Porter Hodge is dealing with a similar injury. But the Cubs are mixing and matching — Reese McGuire has been a nice addition to the best catching corps in baseball — and still winning.

Hoyer described Sunday’s game in Cincinnati as one of those “games that people remember.” More than a lot of sports executives, Hoyer understands the power of narrative, but more importantly, he knows how those kinds of situations make a team stronger.

“You need some moments to build that camaraderie,” he said. “You need to have heroes who aren’t the same heroes over and over.”

The usual heroes are nice too. Every day we find a new way to rave about the toast of Chicago, Pete Crow-Armstrong — his jerseys are selling so quickly, Sports World on Clark and Addison has to order extra letters to make its own — and even on a night when he didn’t get a hit or a walk, he still came through with his speed.

He knocked in the second run of the game with a hustling fielder’s choice and then scored the tying run in the 11th on Busch’s excuse-me single only after stealing third. He was the first guy on the field to celebrate the rookie Shaw’s heroics.

Shaw was sent down in mid-April after a slow start at the plate, and since he’s been back, he’s 11-for-31 and the Cubs are 6-2. Hoyer’s immediacy in making changes this season hasn’t gone unnoticed. Given that he’s in the last year of his deal, you might expect his patience to be thin, but it’s more than that. Expectations have returned to Wrigley Field and everyone is acting (and playing) accordingly.

They say you can’t win a pennant in May and June, but the Cubs proved last year that you can lose one. They went 21-34 in those two months while the Brewers went 32-23. Milwaukee ended up winning the division by 10 games.

With Tuesday’s win, the Cubs are 16-8 this month and have a three-game lead on St. Louis in the division. June arrives on Sunday. Surely, Counsell isn’t getting any gray hairs from another close win. He might have to deal with some smile lines.

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