The Chicago Cubs didn’t quite make it to October.
On Wednesday, Sept. 30, they lost in San Diego to the Padres to complete a two-game sweep in the NL Wild Card Series.
Yes, the Cubs were a playoff team this season — but as it turns out, not for long.
It’s a disappointing end to a campaign that featured so much good, highlighted by Pete Crow-Armstrong’s certain triumph in the NL MVP race.
The Cubs could never quite figure out their pitching, though, as injuries ravaged their rotation and then even hit the guys they acquired during the season to make up for that.
The surprise in San Diego, though, was that the Cubs’ bats never put up a fight. They instead made the kind of history they never would’ve wanted to make.
Cubs History
How’s it sound to have the worst slugging percentage in a playoff series ever?
That’s what the Cubs just did.
Check out this leaderboard (well, anti-leaderboard) from OptaStats:
Lowest slugging percentage in a multi-game postseason series, MLB history:
.145 – 2026 Cubs (NLWC)
.153 – 2020 Twins (ALWC)
.154 – 2022 Rays (ALWC)
.174 – 1998 Rangers (ALDS)
.179 – 2019 Cardinals (NLCS)— OptaSTATS (@OptaSTATS) October 1, 2026
Slugging percentage, for the uninitiated, measures total bases per at bat. So while going 1-for-1 with any hit is a 1.000 batting average, going 1-for-1 with the hit being a home run is a 4.000 slugging percentage.
This stat is almost always going to be higher than batting average (unless a player only hits singles), and the gap between batting average and slugging percentage can often tell you how much power a given player has.
But in this case, the Cubs’ slugging could hardly have been worse.
If they had put up a .145 batting average for the series, it would’ve been tough to beat the Padres. But with a .145 slugging? Pretty much impossible.
No Room For Error
Of course, it was made all the tougher by it being just a best-of-three series with all the games on the road.
Baseball’s regular season is long, at 162 games, and allows teams time to slump and time to bounce back from slumps.
The postseason is rapid fire and a totally different reality. If you’re in a funk for a couple days, your season ends.
The Cubs certainly picked a bad time to go cold, but that can happen in this game. The playoffs don’t provide margin for error to get back up and try again the next day in the way that the regular season does.
And so the Cubbies are going home. They flew to the West Coast for a few days in the hopes of extending their season. But they forgot to pack the thump in their bats, and now they’ll have to spend October at home rather than playing postseason baseball.
Cubs’ Season Ends in Historic Fashion