SEATTLE — There were moments Friday night at T-Mobile Park when Chicago Cubs left-hander Jordan Wicks and his changeup appeared to be an unstoppable pairing.
His changeup produced 12 whiffs on the Seattle Mariners’ 18 swings against the pitch, contributing to six strikeouts. But then Wicks struggled to put away some hitters, including a career-high tying four walks and hitting a batter for the first time in his big-league career to bring in the game’s first run. While there were positives to build off for Wicks, those command issues and struggles to finish at-bats led to four runs in five innings during a 4-2 loss to the Mariners.
“I thought essentially the game boiled down to a couple of chances where he was ahead in the count and ended up with two walks and the hit by pitch,” manager Craig Counsell said. “His stuff was good, he just let a couple counts where he had hitters to his advantage get away from him.”
Through three starts, Wicks hasn’t pitched more than 5 1/3 innings and has reached the fifth just once. When assessing his outing afterward, Wicks said he had too many deep counts, not enough weak contact early in the at-bats and threw too many pitches to force Counsell to go to the bullpen. Left-hander Drew Smyly and newly recalled right-hander Keegan Thompson did their part to give the Cubs offense a chance to come back, combining for four shutout innings with one hit and walk allowed while striking out five.
“The walks are the ones that really drive me nuts,” said Wicks, who has given up eight walks in 12 2/3 innings this season. “I feel like we’ve got way too good of a defense for me to just let people on via a walk. I feel like I’ve got to allow our team to work behind me as well.”
For as effective as Wicks’ changeup was, his four-seam fastball and changeup accounted for 81% of his pitches thrown Friday. He wants to be well-balanced with his repertoire and get his breaking balls cleaned up, which he felt weren’t very good in the outing.
“A lot of the stuff that we worked on coming into the season as far as before four-seam and the breaking balls and stuff like that, like, all that stuff, great, but we can’t still forget who I am and forget what makes me really good,” Wicks said. “I feel like a little bit of that we’ve gotten away from and we’ve kind of seen the consequences of that.”
Wicks could have let the game get away from the Cubs (7-6) early. The Mariners loaded the bases with nobody out in the second inning, and he responded by striking out Cal Raleigh and forcing Dylan Moore to fly out. He got to two strikes against Luis Urías before plunking him with a slider to bring home a run. Wicks locked back in, though, retiring J.P. Crawford to end the inning.
“That actually he should take as a positive because he was able to avoid a big inning,” catcher Yan Gomes said. “But at the same time, we were getting behind a lot of guys using a lot of pitches that we didn’t need to … but it’s one of those outings that he can learn from.
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“He’s got a lot of talent. He’s definitely got a pretty good arsenal in that he can just attack the zone even more and sometimes when the strikeouts aren’t coming as easy we can just go and get an early out, but at the same time he does have strikeout stuff.”
The Mariners made Wicks pay for three walks in the fourth inning, two of which he got ahead 0-2 on the batter. Following a mound visit with two outs and the bases loaded, Julío Rodríguez sent an elevated fastball to center field for a two-run single. The next batter, Ty France, jumped another fastball up in the zone, this one on the first pitch, to tack on RBI single to put Seattle ahead 4-0.
The Cubs couldn’t get much going versus Mariners starter Bryce Miller and the bullpen, finishing with three walks and just four hits. A two-out error allowed Gomes to score in the seventh and Michael Busch’s home run in the ninth accounted for Cubs’ only runs. Busch also doubled in the loss, accounting for both of the team’s’ extra-base hits.
Ian Happ extended his on-base streak to 13 games with a walk, reaching base in every game this season to tie him for the longest active streak in the National League.
