PITTSBURGH — In a season loaded with head-scratching results and standings that confound, perhaps no team has been more perplexing than the Chicago Cubs.
Among the pleasant surprises, there have been teams such as the Tampa Bay Rays surging into first place with ease or the young A’s taking advantage of an uninspiring AL West or the St. Louis Cardinals shedding the notion that this would be a rebuilding year. Even more plentiful are the bitter disappointments, including flailing division favorites in the Detroit Tigers, the woefully injured Toronto Blue Jays and bumbling behemoths in the New York Mets, who have been stuck in the mud virtually the entire season.
Then there are the Cubs, who enjoyed an extended stretch of euphoric highs before plummeting recently into a brutal skid of poor performance — all before the calendar flips to June. This dizzying volatility reached a new extreme Tuesday at PNC Park, where the Cubs were pummeled by the Pittsburgh Pirates 12-1, marking one of their least encouraging showings in a losing streak that has reached 10 games.
On Monday, Chicago dropped the series opener in Pittsburgh 2-1, a frustrating defeat but also one that yielded bright spots. Michael Busch homered for the second straight game, and right-hander Ben Brown threw six stellar innings, a refreshing pitching performance amid a slew of injuries that have ravaged Chicago’s pitching depth.
Silver linings were far more difficult to find Tuesday. Cubs starter Jordan Wicks — making his season debut as the latest pitcher summoned to fill in for a depleted rotation — surrendered five runs in the first inning.
“You can’t go out there and put your team in a hole like that and expect good things to happen,” Wicks said postgame. “This one’s on me. Set a terrible tone for the game today.”
After Wicks departed with the bases loaded in the fifth, reliever Ryan Rolison walked in the Pirates’ seventh run on four pitches. An inning later, an Alex Bregman throwing error allowed Konnor Griffin to scamper home for Pittsburgh’s ninth run. In the seventh, Cubs closer Daniel Palencia — pitching for the first time in nearly a week, without any save opportunities coming his way — served up a solo homer to Spencer Horwitz to make it 10-1.
By the end of the night, it was Chicago’s most lopsided defeat of the season, with the 11-run margin surpassing a 12-4 loss to the Dodgers on April 25.
Somehow, this is the same team that soared up the standings by winning 20 of 23 games from April 14 to May 8, building a 3.5-game lead atop an ultra-competitive NL Central. Sandwiched around a pair of losses in Los Angeles and a series-opening defeat in San Diego in late April, the Cubs rattled off two 10-game winning streaks, a stunning run of success rarely achieved by any team at any interval, let alone multiple times in one season.
“I’ve never seen a start of the season where you’re 55 games in and you’ve got two 10-game winners and then a nine-game losing streak,” outfielder Ian Happ said before Tuesday’s game. “That’s a lot of crazy stuff to happen in two months.”
This is the club’s longest losing streak since 2022, when Chicago lost 10 in a row in mid-June, a midsummer swoon en route to a forgettable 74-win campaign. This current stretch, on the other hand, comes in a season chock-full of lofty expectations, with that hype only amplified by the team’s terrific run of form early on. Through it all, the Cubs have tried to maintain some perspective on the absurdity of thriving to such a degree before falling into such a rut.
“There’s games in your 10-game winning streak that you probably should have lost, and you win, and there’s games on this stretch where we go, ‘Man, if this thing would have gone our way, we could have won that,’” left-hander Matthew Boyd said. “It evens out.
“You’re never as good as everyone says you are — and never as bad. You just stay the course, you understand who you are as a team, what your identity is, and just keep going.”
By playing so well early on, the Cubs built a cushion that has ensured their season hasn’t veered too far off the tracks with this latest skid. That’s a stark contrast to the reality of other teams that have endured prolonged losing streaks this season, such as the Mets, Phillies and Tigers, who are still trying to dig themselves out of daunting holes.
“You take a little bit of comfort in the fact that you can have a nine-game losing streak and still be multiple games above .500,” Happ said. “If we were having this stretch and now we’re 10 games under, we gotta climb out of it, but luckily, we’ve played well enough … this isn’t going to bury us.”
Happ’s sentiment is a sensible one. But after Tuesday’s loss, the Cubs are 29-26, tied with Pittsburgh for last in the division and 4.5 games behind the first-place Milwaukee Brewers. Granted, the Cubs’ record wouldn’t have them in last in any other division — in fact, they’d be second in three of the five — but the 2026 NL Central has been far less forgiving than in recent years.
“I think there’s a lot of well-rounded teams,” Happ said. “This division’s not getting decided in June or July.”
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Perhaps this divisional glow-up was already in progress — after all, the NL Central produced three postseason teams last year — but the competition level has ratcheted up in 2026, raising the stakes for every remaining divisional matchup. Such contests have been a mixed bag for Chicago so far. While the Cubs swept a four-game series against the Reds — including three walk-offs, a thrilling high point of their second 10-game heater — they were swept by Milwaukee at home last week and have now lost four of their first five against the Pirates. Their first series with the Cardinals looms this weekend in St. Louis.
“It’s a really good division,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said before Tuesday’s game. “I’m certainly envious sometimes when I look around baseball — there are some divisions that are really struggling. But not ours, and it’s what we have to deal with all summer, and I don’t think it’s going to go away.”
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