The Cubs will start tonight's game against the Brewers needing to score only 8 more runs to become the first team to reach 100,000 since the start of the National League in 1876.
Their 99,992 are 1.
Spoiler Alert!
The Cubs haven't often played the role of spoiler in a pennant race.
I wrote recently about the 1946 season, in which the third-place Cubs won 2 of 3 games at St. Louis on the.
2021 is the 75th anniversary of 1946, a year in which the Cubs were defending National League champions and posted a winning percentage they would not surpass until 1967.
In 1945, they had been 9.
Until a video review overturned the umpire's call of safe, Tony Wolters appeared on Sunday to have become the first Cubs catcher to steal home in nearly 55 years.
It would have been only the Cubs'.
Cubs top pinch hitters, Part 1 By JohnW53 on Mar 17, 2021, 6:13am CDT +
Pinch hitting has not exactly been the Cubs strength down through the years.
In the 105 seasons since 1916, the first for which baseball-reference.com has batting splits, Cubs pinch hitters rank
20th of the 30 Major League teams in batting average (.223),
26th in on-base percentage (.302), tied for
22nd in slugging (.323) and tied for
24th in on base plus slugging (.625).
Their OBP is the lowest of any non-expansion team. The 4 teams below them are the Astros, Padres, Royals and Marlins.
The all-time leader in OBP is the Blue Jays (.326). The Rockies, second at .324, are No. 1 in average (.242), slugging (.385) and OPS (.709). The Rockies lead the runnerup Jays by 4 points in average, 28 in slugging and 25 in OPS.