Trying to be a bit more circumscribed here, and stick to a single overall narrative, rather than draw up a balance sheet on every single game.
After we won the first two games of the series and were .500, I somewhat arbitrarily posed that we treat the next ten games as a sort of first 10 game stretch, with some of the flukiness and weather mostly behind us. This would take us up through the now-beginning medium-length road trip, and start to give us some sense for how this team really stands.
Hard to do much better than pick up the first two games, and head to Chicago on the heels of a 4 game sweep. More good news: Bell's power has woken up in a big way, Martin looks like he might have what I saw someone refer to aptly as "unheralded rookie upside," and Frazier continues to hit everything and field adequately. The starting pitching remains the biggest strength, even if these "first" two games of the 10 game stretch were powered by an offense that suddenly doesn't look so overmatched, albeit mostly against mediocre and bad pitching.
Luckily for us, it's a stretch to even lump the Cubs pitching together with mediocre, because they've just been bad. The Cubs are never going to be pushovers with their roster, but we're hitting them at a good time, and a lot feels tied up in the Taillon-Lester battle to start the series tomorrow. If Taillon can best Lester, we'll have picked up a key win vs a team that's also struggling, and might be able to dream on a winning streak that extends for a little bit, which would be unthinkable given the Dickerson injury on top of everything else. If we lose, it looks like a difficult series to pull off, but the name of the game during the whole thing will be to make the Cubs pitchers work and get into the already stretched bullpen.
I won't look further down the stretch of games, because there's enough to mull over just with the Cubs matchup. 5-3 does seem very possible over this stretch, making it a 7-3 period, and giving us a just fine 10-6 record. I think the conservative move is to assume we will drop one of the two three game series. Maybe 4-4 is a safer conservative prediction, which would still be fine even if it's not as sexy. We certainly have momentum to dream on something better, such as perhaps 6-2/8-2/11-5, but for starters I'll be thrilled if we can take this series vs. the Cubs, fully cementing ourselves towards the top of the division in the early going.
Two final notes: I've seen it a few times, but not here – we have have the lead in the 7th inning in every game so far. Obviously you can say we should have at least another win or two, and we should, but that's the kind of thing that will lead to a healthy number of wins, and the chance to bank several in a row, which is what we might be in the midst of now, if things go well on this road trip. The other is that Melky Cabrera has been absolutely crucial to the success of this offense. He is just running a clinic at the plate, and hitting for some power as well, with at least passable speed to be able to score runs on the basepaths. I kind of like him where he is, though I could see an argument to move him up in the order. It would be nice to see him hit a couple of HRs this week, and for Kang and Marte to handle the lefties well.