Cubs Heroes and Goats: Game 54

And the winner has a pretty decent chance to be different from the final Cuyler voting. But that's what the Cuyler poll is for.

Graphs for Game 54 (courtesy of Fangraphs):

Stats for Game 54:

Writer's Note: The daily selections of the three Heroes and three Goats are based solely on the top three and bottom three WPA scores for the game. The selections are not based on my subjective opinion.

THE THREE HEROES: As you probably expected, there was a bump on the Hero podium as a result of Jason Hammel's two-run single.  What you may not have expected was that his single actually caused a three-way bump on the Heroes as his .196 hitting led the team, only the second time this season -- and the fifth time in the past three seasons -- that a pitcher posted the best WPA on the day because of what he did with the bat.  And that's where the horse race for the top spot comes in.

• Superhero - Travis Wood (.175). He had one job to do -- get out of a bases-loaded jam in the eighth nursing a one-run lead -- and he did it, albeit with a hard shot that was hit in the neighborhood of Ben Zobrist.
• Hero - Jorge Soler (.169). Had it not been for the ivy eating his double in the fourth, he probably would have ended up on the top spot.
• Sidekick - Jason Hammel (.166). Seven innings, one hit, two walks, and third place. Nine times out of 10 that kind of an outing gets the Superhero.  But when the hit leads to two first-inning runs and it takes four innings to get the lead back, that's where the one out of 10 ends up rearing its ugly head.

THE THREE GOATS:

• Billy Goat - Pedro Strop (-.104). Put most of the stickiness into the sticky situation that was the eighth inning and didn't get a chance to get out of it for redemption.
• Goat - Addison Russell (-.103). Lands just a hair behind Strop on the Goats mainly due to his strikeout in the fourth just before Hammel's heroics.
• Kid - Trevor Cahill (-.071). So what's the acronym for being a righty that comes into the game to face one batter -- namely Paul Goldschmidt -- and not give him anything to hit?  Because RWAGPGATH (Righty who avoids giving Paul Goldschmidt anything to hit) doesn't really float off of the tongue all that well.

RANKINGS THROUGH GAME 54: Hammel puts a small amount of cushion into his third-place spot while Russell finds himself alone outside the cellar door.