'We've not made things easy': Hoyer holds court amid Cubs' skid

MILWAUKEE -- Given the Cubs’ play out of the gates in April, Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer held out hope that the slump that arrived in May would be followed by positive regression. The calendar is about to flip to July, the Trade Deadline is looming and Chicago’s issues have persisted.

“It's felt sort of like two weeks turned into four, turned into six, has turned into eight,” Hoyer said. “That's the reality.”

Hoyer met with reporters for nearly a half-hour in the visitors’ dugout on Friday at American Family Field, where he then watched the Cubs drop a 4-2 decision to the National League Central-leading Brewers. The North Siders have lost six of eight, remaining in last place in the division with dwindling postseason odds.

There is roughly a month remaining until the July 30 Trade Deadline and Hoyer is facing a familiar situation as a year ago. The Cubs were 10 games under .500 on June 8 last year, but then picked up the pace, winning 10 of 12 near the end of July to move above the break-even mark. In the process, Hoyer shifted into buy mode at the Deadline.

The Cubs need a similar streak to convince Hoyer and his front-office team that adding pieces at the Deadline is again the appropriate path.

“You never know when a team's going to get hot and turn it around,” Hoyer said. “We did it last year when certainly no one was expecting us to do that. I think that the best way I can say it is, this has dragged on a lot longer than we had thought. And now we've locked ourselves into a really tough stretch of schedule.”

In Friday’s loss, Cubs starter Jameson Taillon turned in a quality start, but the grand slam he yielded to Jackson Chourio in the fourth inning was all Milwaukee needed. Save for a two-run burst in the fourth -- one featuring a homer by Seiya Suzuki -- Chicago’s lineup stalled out against Colin Rea and a trio of Brewers relievers.

The Cubs have now slipped to 22-26 in games decided by one or two runs. That includes an MLB-high 19 losses in one-run contests. There has been a domino effect within that trend. The offensive issues, especially with situational hitting, have heaped pressure on each pitch. That is particularly true late in games, and Chicago’s bullpen is currently beset with injuries.

“I don't have all the answers,” Taillon said. “But we're not putting wins in the win column. And that's clear. This started out as a funk. We started the year well, and then it turned into a little bit of a funk, and now it's turned into something more than a funk. Yeah, it needs to change or things are going to change.”

Hoyer said there has not yet been an uptick in inquiries from other teams about the potential availability of Chicago’s players at the Deadline. At this point on the calendar, the back-and-forth has felt fairly standard. And with the muddied NL Wild Card picture, the list of teams residing in a buy-or-sell gray area is long at the moment.

What Hoyer has to grapple with right now is the fact that his ballclub headed into Friday’s game with 11.9% odds of reaching the playoffs (8.1% for a Wild Card and 3.8% for the division title), according to FanGraphs. Only the Reds, Nationals, Marlins and Rockies had lower postseason odds in the NL.

“The spot we're in, that we put ourselves in, we have less room for error, no question about it,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “There's [a lot of] games after this series, but we've not made things easy for ourselves, that's for sure.”

When the Cubs rattled off wins through mid-to-late July last year, the increasing chances of reaching the October stage was key in Hoyer’s decision-making process.

“It wasn't just a purely emotional thing,” Hoyer said. “It was very much based on playoff odds and where we were and how we felt about the team. So there's some art to that, and there's some real science of like, ‘OK, where are we? And what decisions are we going to make?’ We're still in June. I really don't want to go there.”

Hoyer was then asked if selling at the Deadline was off the table.

“We have to play well this month,” Hoyer said. “You have to be a realist when you get to that point. That's not where we are mentally [right now], but yeah, always in this job, you have to be a realist. You have to make the best decisions for the organization based on the hand you're dealt that year. And we'll see what that is.”