SAN DIEGO — Cubs manager Craig Counsell’s new team impressed him on a Sunday morning in the middle of spring training when he had the players run the bases.
‘‘The effort level was more than I expected,’’ Counsell said in a conversation with the Sun-Times, ‘‘and that was really cool for me.’’
As subtle an observation as it was, for Counsell — who has been in pro baseball for more than 30 years as a player, executive and manager — the drill was a reflection of the team leaders he had inherited.
‘‘There’s a lot of attention to detail, baseball rats in the group,’’ Counsell said. ‘‘And they’re thinkers. And they’ve thought about this stuff a lot already. That’s when you can tell about this group: They enjoy thinking about it.’’
The Cubs had plenty to think about after their 9-8 loss Monday to the Padres. After opening an 8-0 lead on the strength of two-run singles by Ian Happ and Cody Bellinger in a four-run second inning and a two-run triple by Dansby Swanson in a four-run fourth, they yielded seven runs in the sixth and two in the eighth — on a go-ahead home run by Fernando Tatis Jr. — to let it get away.
Counsell has managed plenty of teams with different leadership styles. What works for one group might not work for another. What works one year might have to shift the next. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula, but this Cubs team has seemed cohesive so far.
The same core of players were together last season, when the Cubs had to scratch and claw out of a hole to prove they were contenders before the trade deadline.
The Cubs have yet to be tested in the same way this season, but they were dealt a tough blow when ace Justin Steele suffered a strained hamstring in his Opening Day start. So far, they’ve coped well.
In a 5-1 homestand against the Rockies and Dodgers, the Cubs scored eight or more runs four times, despite cold, wet and windy weather. Entering play Monday, the Cubs’ 58 runs ranked sixth in the majors.
‘‘The consistency of the at-bat was just so good and from so many different places in the lineup,’’ second baseman Nico Hoerner said Monday. ‘‘I thought that was just really admirable.’’
Even during spring-training games, Counsell noticed the group packed together on one side of the dugout, talking a lot. That’s a theme president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer seized upon as well.
‘‘The leaders of the team are constantly thinking about how to get better, what can we do differently,’’ Hoyer said. ‘‘They’re always talking about their at-bats, talking about what they’re seeing.
‘‘I don’t worry about that with this group. It’s a very serious group. They get their work in, they’re focused, they want to prepare. You worry about a lot of things. That’s thankfully not one of the things I worry about with this particular group of players.’’
Constant baseball conversations were also a mark of spring training in 2023, when Dansby Swanson and Cody Bellinger were introducing themselves and Ian Happ and Hoerner, bridges to the old regime, were just beginning to come into their leadership roles.
Now they’ve all helped steer a team through a full season together. And thanks to Happ’s extension last year and Bellinger re-signing this spring, they’re all back.
Leadership on the pitching side is just as important, and the Cubs have a mix of veterans (starter Kyle Hendricks and reliever Hector Neris) and homegrown connectors (Adbert Alzolay) helping guide the group. But while starters take the mound every five or six days and relievers’ schedules are determined by role and the state of the game, the offensive core is on the field every game.
‘‘We have distinctive leaders here,’’ said Hendricks, the only player on the roster from the Cubs’ 2016 World Series championship team. ‘‘And you can kind of point to who they are. And maybe the past couple of years — two, three, four years ago — we might have lost that a little bit. But I know back in the years we were winning, we had distinctive leaders that you knew who to follow.’’
