Cubs' Kyle Hendricks takes the 'L' in must-win game against Pirates. Is it goodnight and farewell?
On Sept. 3, 2014, Cubs rookie Kyle Hendricks took the mound at Wrigley Field and beat the Brewers. It was only career start No. 10 for the 24-year-old right-hander, but already he was 6-1 with a 2.02 ERA that was taking him from organizational question mark to a real part of the team’s plans. The Cubs were a last-place team that year, but they would win nine times in Hendricks’ final 10 starts and maybe, just maybe, had begun to head in a very promising direction.
“It’s almost as if we’re expecting to win more,” Hendricks said that night.
Precisely 10 years later, the Cubs turned to Hendricks for career start No. 266. This time, the Pirates were in town. On this home-stretch Tuesday, the Cubs needed to win to maintain any honest chance of catching and passing the Mets and Braves for the National League’s third wild-card spot. Their postseason hopes hanging by a thread — and with Justin Steele forced to miss his scheduled start due to elbow soreness — the Cubs sent out Hendricks to oppose Pirates rookie sensation Paul Skenes, which is not unlike racing a tired, old mule against a prime Thoroughbred.
Hendricks, 34, is hanging by a thread, too. In the final year of his contract, he has no real shot to remain a Cubs major leaguer. He arguably shouldn’t even be starting now, with the season on the line, considering how far beyond his prime he appears to be. He came in 3-10 with a 6.75 ERA and left the game after five innings with the Cubs trailing 2-0. That’s about as good as Hendricks gets anymore.
It was the third time this season Hendricks and Skenes have started the same game, but the oddity of it couldn’t ever wear off. One of them, the 22-year-old drafted No. 1 overall in 2023, was the NL’s All-Star starter, is on the short list of the sport’s rising superstars and rolls out of bed throwing 100 mph. No starter in the league throws harder than Skenes. And no starter throws slower than Hendricks, whose average four-seam fastball, a tick under 88 mph, ranks at the very bottom.
The previous time the pitchers went head-to-head, last week in Pittsburgh, Hendricks got blasted for six runs and didn’t make it out of the second inning. The Pirates wound up blowing a 10-3 lead, to no fault of Skenes.
“It’s just one of those days where it’s baseball,” Hendricks said of his performance. “It happens.”
It didn’t happen for a lot of years, not to him. Few Cubs pitchers have been steadier over their careers than Hendricks, the last remaining player for the 2016 World Series team. But all things must end, and Hendricks’ fall — and likely that of this Cubs team — has been as easy to see coming as one of his lukewarm heaters that leaks back over the heart of the plate.
The Yankees’ Anthony Rizzo will come to Wrigley on Friday, and it will be lovely for fans to say hello, but Rizzo, too, has seen better days. When he and Hendricks share a warm embrace on the field, which surely they will, each might see a knowing look in the eyes of the other: This is just about it, isn’t it?
The first time Hendricks and Skenes went at it was on May 17. It was Skenes’ second start and he was magnificent, no-hitting the Cubs through six innings. Hendricks, on the other hand, got lit up for 11 hits and seven earned runs.
“Just bizarre,” he said after that one. “So many soft hits, falling in front.”
If a different pitcher said that — or chalked up a crummy outing to, “It’s baseball” — it would sound a whole lot like lame excuse-making because that’s probably what it would be. But that’s not who Hendricks ever has been. Either way, the Cubs demoted him to a bullpen role after that May start and he might still be in that role, or not in the team’s pitching mix at all, had starter Jordan Wicks not gotten hurt a little over a month later.
The Cubs were Team Mojo when they got back to Wrigley after an 8-1 road trip that got them right behind the Mets and within three games of the Braves. But then they lost the homestand opener to the Pirates and followed that up a night later with Hendricks against Skenes. Mule, meet Thoroughbred (or did we already use that?). Nah, these Cubs aren’t Team Mojo. More like Team No-Go, which is what they were for more than half the season before heating up.
Maybe it’s fitting, in a way, that hope fizzled on a Hendricks night. He is the very man who took the ball on the greatest night at Wrigley that there ever was. That 2016 night against the Dodgers, he walked off the mound in the eighth inning having surrendered not a single run. The Cubs were going to the World Series. It was mayhem. It was wonderful. It was bliss. And now, the last of those players can say goodnight and farewell.