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Baseball: Two months in, two MLB teams tell the storyMLB’s season crossed the two-month mark Thursday. Two teams, one in each league, explain the fun but odd vibe of the 2026 season to date:
The Cubs are 31-27. Because they play in the National League Central, they enter play today five games back of the always-good Brewers and in the thick of a wild-card hunt that will have seven teams fighting it out for three spots. (This assumes the surprising 29-29 Nationals fade away and the 24-33 Mets, despite their giant payroll, don’t get back into it.) The Cubs have one of MLB’s best lineups and five Gold Glove defenders, but their pitching staff has literally fallen apart. They have two winning streaks of 10 games but also just got off a 10-game losing streak Wednesday, making them the second team in league history — along with the 2017 Dodgers — to have three such streaks in a season. They did it in two months.
The Athletics are 27-30. Because they play in the American League West, they’ve led their division for most of the year and enter the day a game and a half behind the disappointing (to date) Mariners. The A’s haven’t exactly been good, but their first baseman, Nick Kurtz, is a 23-year-old titan who’s on a possible Hall of Fame track in his second season in the bigs. Catcher Shea Langeliers has been the most valuable player at his position, per FanGraphs WAR. They just called up lefty Gage Jump, Keith Law’s No. 37 prospect before the season, to add some juice to a pitching staff that has been among the league’s worst.
