The Cubs lost 2-1 to the Athletics on June 2 at Wrigley Field, dropping to 32-29 after another game that felt winnable until it wasn’t. Chicago scored first, got a solid-enough start from Jameson Taillon, and still ended up with only one run and four hits. That alone is bad. Add in two caught-stealing outs and a lifeless ninth after putting two on with nobody out, and this became a much cleaner indictment of the Cubs’ situational baseball.
How this one got away
The Cubs opened the game exactly the way you want to open a get-right game. Nico Hoerner scored in the first inning on Alex Bregman’s RBI groundout, giving Chicago a 1-0 lead before Oakland had settled in. But that was the only Cubs run of the night, even though the inning started with runners in scoring position and no outs. In a game that ended 2-1, leaving that first inning without a bigger blow was the opening mistake.
Oakland tied it in the third on Nick Kurtz’s solo home run and took the lead in the fourth on Zack Gelof’s RBI single. Taillon went 6 1/3 innings, allowed two earned runs, struck out six, and gave the lineup more than enough to work with. Chicago never paid that effort back.
The other killer: bad baserunning decisions
This was not just a quiet-bats game. It was a sloppy-baseball game. Baseball-Reference’s box material shows two Cubs runners caught stealing: Pete Crow-Armstrong was erased trying for third, and Kevin Alcántara was caught stealing second. In a 2-1 game where the Cubs only had four hits, voluntarily adding two outs on the bases is a huge tax on your own comeback chances.
The Kevin Alcántara out was especially damaging because it fit the larger pattern of unnecessary risk in a low-scoring game. The Cubs were not generating enough offense to survive aggressive mistakes, and every baserunning out made the later ninth-inning failure feel more inevitable. This is the exact type of self-inflicted damage that turns “we just needed one hit” into “we also gave away outs we could not afford to lose.”
Bad play-calling? Yes — but it starts with the bats
If you want to talk “play-calling,” this game is really about a stale offensive script. Chicago had runners on second and third with no outs in the first and produced only one run. It later put the tying and go-ahead pressure on again in the ninth, but the inning died in order after Hoerner’s leadoff walk and PCA’s single. There was very little evidence that the Cubs found another gear after Gage Jump settled in.
Player-specific blame
Alex Bregman: partial credit for the first-inning RBI, but the ninth-inning strikeout with two on and no outs is one of the defining at-bats of the game. In a one-run game, that is the moment where a veteran bat has to at least move the game forward, and Chicago got nothing from it.
Seiya Suzuki and Ian Happ: both were right in the middle of the ninth-inning failure. Suzuki finished 0-for-4 and followed the Bregman strikeout with a flyout. Happ went 0-for-3 and made the final out on a fly ball to center. When the middle-to-late-order bats all go quiet together, there is no one to hide behind.
Kevin Alcántara: 0-for-2 and caught stealing. In a game with no room to waste outs, the caught-stealing looms larger than the line itself because it is the kind of mistake that compresses your comeback window before the late innings even arrive.
Pete Crow-Armstrong and Nico Hoerner: these are the two main bats who deserve much less blame. PCA had two of the Cubs’ four hits, and Hoerner helped ignite both the first inning and the ninth-inning threat. PCA’s own caught-stealing mark still belongs on the mistake ledger, but compared with the rest of the lineup, these two at least created traffic.
Jameson Taillon: not blame-free, but clearly lower on the ladder. He gave up the solo homer to Kurtz and the RBI single to Gelof, yet six strikeouts and two earned over 6 1/3 innings should still be enough to win at home. This loss lives with the offense first.
The ninth inning is the whole story in miniature
Hoerner walked. PCA singled. Wrigley woke up. Then Bregman struck out swinging, Suzuki flew out, and Happ ended it with another fly ball. That is the game condensed into one inning: promise, leverage, and then a total lack of execution when the Cubs absolutely had to deliver.
Is all hope lost for the playoffs?
No. But the concern is no longer dramatic fan theater. After this loss, Chicago sat at 32-29, and the broader reporting around this stretch has focused on a brutal run of losses and an offense that keeps wasting winnable games. The standings are not dead yet. The style of these losses is the real problem.
The honest answer is simple: hope is not dead because the season is not over, but the Cubs are playing the kind of baseball that convinces people they are not serious. One-run home losses to a sub-.500 team are the exact losses that show up in the rearview mirror when the Wild Card race gets tight.
Bottom line
The Cubs did not lose this game because they were dramatically overmatched. They lost because they got one run and acted like it might hold. They lost because they made preventable outs on the bases. They lost because the biggest ninth-inning at-bats went nowhere. And they lost because the offense failed to adjust once the game stopped flowing in their favor.
If you are assigning blame, start with the lineup, keep the baserunning mistakes near the top, include the staff in the situational criticism, and leave Taillon well below the main culprits. If you are asking whether all hope is lost, the answer is still no. But the margin for pretending these are random losses is gone.