The 2025 Chicago Cubs join the 2016 team in elite company

The 2025 Chicago Cubs have been making waves across baseball in their first 30 games of an extremely important season for the franchise. They were given a tough schedule to begin the campaign, as they did not face a divisional opponent in their first 29 contests of the year. Getting 20 of their first 29 matchups against the Dodgers, Diamondbacks or Padres was a tough draw for this year’s group. Despite the challenge, they handled their early gauntlet well, as they went 11-9 in those games against the NL West.

The Cubs began their regular season before 30 other big league clubs did, as they started off in Japan on March 18 and 19 against the Dodgers. They struggled to get anything going in that shortened two-game set and they dropped both contests against the defending World Series champs. Since the opening week of the season, the Cubs have looked like a completely different club and had Wrigley Field rocking the entire month of April.

There is an early vibe that this year’s squad could have something special up there sleeve. The organization hasn’t seen playoff baseball since the 2020 season that was shortened due to the pandemic. Even then, the Cubs were swept at home in a best-of-three series to forget against the Marlins. The 2025 Cubs joined the 2016 World Series team in some pretty good company following their 30th game of the season.

These Chicago Cubs have something in common with the 2016 team

The Chicago Cubs scored 181 runs through their first 30 games of the 2025 season. The only team to have scored more than that in the first 30 games of a campaign in franchise history is the 2016 team that plated 184 runs in that stretch. 2016 was the most important year in most Chicago sports fans lives and any time a Cubs team is put into the same breath as that group, heads will turn.

This year’s team is scoring at a high rate and have done so in various ways. There have already been a couple of extremely exciting comeback victories at Wrigley Field this season in dramatic fashion. The bullpen certainly didn’t help make those games any easier, but plenty of runs were needed to win those ballgames and that’s when this offense came through.

Kyle Tucker and PCA have been driving forces for the Chicago Cubs

When looking at the standout players in Chicago in the early going this season, it’s hard to look at many other guys besides Kyle Tucker and Pete Crow-Armstrong. Tucker has been everything the Cubs could have asked for and more after he was acquired from the Houston Astros back in December. He is already receiving attention for the All-MLB first team just a month into the season and he has instantly made everyone around him in the order much better.

Crow-Armstrong has broke through at the plate big time and it appears that the piece that the Cubs acquired in the Javier Baez trade almost four years ago has fully arrived in the Windy City. The centerfielder is getting on-base at a consistent rate and already has six home runs on the season. He was originally projected to have around 12 long balls in 2025, but that could be changed rather quickly.