THE SPRECHER IS CHILLING.

Toward the end of August, the Milwaukee Brewers took a three game lead in the National League's Central Division.  The Cubs got as close as a game and a half around Labor Day, and then, reverted to form.

The Cubs of early June to early September hit like a playoff team, pitched like a playoff team, fielded their positions like a playoff team and — let’s see, what else? — won like a playoff team, too.

We watched with our very own eyes as they put together a 50-28 stretch over essentially half a season. There’s no faking 50-28, folks. It takes a good team — a well-oiled machine — to run up a record like that.

But the Cubs the rest of the way? They turned out to be a ridiculous team, one that was allergic to leads, prone to stultifying gaffes and, bereft of any hints of confidence, in no way, shape or form capable of winning important ballgames. It took a bad team — a burned-out car sputtering along the shoulder of the highway, just trying to make it to the off ramp — to play its way out of the National League wild-card race the way the Cubs did.

Sun-Times sports pundit Steve Greenberg concludes, "This season just needs to be over."  It now is.  Even a ten game winning streak by the Brewers that had the cognoscenti chattering about free hamburgers wasn't enough to finish off the Cubs.  That, Mr Greenberg says, was self-inflicted.

[T]his was a Cubs collapse. No, they didn’t go into the season as one of the NL favorites. Yes, they played pretty well on the whole, perhaps even exceeding expectations. Certainly, there are reasons to be hopeful about what’s in store. [Manager David] Ross believes the Cubs are a year away from a special opportunity, along the lines of the jump the Orioles made from 2022 to 2023.

But, again, let’s not pretend the Cubs didn’t blow a shot at the playoffs. Those don’t grow on trees, you know.

It's a familiar story. "Despite a difficult July and early August, the Milwaukee Brewers have recently won four of six games from the Cubs, and are in a position to overhaul the Cubs for the division lead, if the end of the season endurance grind wears the Cubs out."  That was 2018, and it took 163 games for the Brewers to overhaul the Cubs.  Professional baseball has since gone to a tie-breaker formula, under which the Brewers winning the season series with the Cubs determines seeding.  By the time the final games came around, the Brewers taking two out of three and the season series in Milwaukee was moot.

The endurance grind, though, is on sports pundits' minds.

Instead of trading free-agents-to be Cody Bellinger and Marcus Stroman, [president of baseball operations Jed] Hoyer acquired infielder Jeimer Candelario and reliever Jose Cuas. It looked like the right decision as the Cubs continued their hot play into August, eventually taking over the second wild card spot in the NL. They went from 10 games under .500 in June to 10 games over .500 into August.

"We were playing unbelievable baseball in July to even put us in this situation," Bellinger stated. "It could have gone either way. We fought until the very end. The last few weeks were on the frustrating side than any of us wanted it to be."

At one time this month the Cubs were 3.5 games in front of the next wild card team but that lead began to evaporate shortly after labor day [c.q.] - a week where the Cubs alternated start times at Wrigley Field, playing day/night/day/night/day. They seemingly never recovered.

That Wrigley Field schedule has long been a possible explanation for the Cubs running out of gas. Although there has been night baseball at Wrigley since 1988 (a drought-busting thunderstorm materialized on August 8, the planned first night game) I believe there are still local restrictions on how many night games the Cubs may schedule.  Sports pundits over the years have suggested that having to play half the schedule during the dog days of summer and the unsettled transition days in September takes more out of the body than being able to play after sunset.  That sequence of alternating start times suggests another possibility, disrupted circadian rhythms, although players on the visiting teams face that same disruption over the three or four days of the series.

Now the baseball playoffs commence, and those might go on until Hallowe'en.  The two division winners with the best regular season records get to watch the Brewers host the Diamondbacks and the Phillies host the Marlins in the wild card round.