ST. LOUIS -- In the past, there would have been little doubt Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo would have come through in a key spot in a baseball game. In fact, earlier on Monday night he seemed to break out of his slump with an opposite-field RBI to put the Cubs up 3-1 against the St. Louis Cardinals. And the night before he had walked in his final at-bat. Good things were starting to finally happen again for him.

But here Rizzo was in the ninth inning with the game tied 3-3 and men on first and third with one out. The team’s best two-strike hitter needed to take a two-strike approach and somehow, someway get that run home from third. Instead, he lined softly to third base, and teammate Dexter Fowler was doubled off on the play. A few minutes later the Cubs would lose 4-3, their eighth loss in their past 12 games. A 2-for-26 road trip became 2-for-27 for Rizzo.

"I would like balls to fall, but what are you going to do?" Rizzo said before the game. "The law of averages will work out."

He might be right, but a closer look at his season points to a very strange year for the Cubs top hitter of a year ago. There’s the 11 home runs and 35 RBIs, good for fifth and second in the National League, respectively. That’s certainly impressive. But then there’s the .239 batting average, which dips to .231 in games deemed late/close this year. And his numbers against lefties have plummeted. He’s hitting .156 with a .296 on-base percentage, though the sample size is still small.

"I’d like to hit them a little better, but when you hit balls hard and they don’t fall, sometimes it spirals," Rizzo said.

Let’s examine how hard Rizzo is hitting them, because this is where it gets weird. Going into Monday’s game, according to ESPN Stats and Information, Rizzo’s batting average on balls in play was just .218, tied for 172 out of 180 qualified hitters. That would indicate a lot of bad luck, however BABIP can’t be looked at in a vacuum. Maybe they’re not falling in for Rizzo because he’s not hitting enough line drives: his percentage is 16.2 percent this year, down from a career mark of 22.6 percent. Last year he hit line drives 29 percent of the time.

Here’s where it gets even trickier, BABIP doesn’t include home runs, which have been where Rizzo has had his success this year, so his slugging percentage is still decent at .526 which is right around his career best. And even stranger is his "well-hit" percentage which is 23 percent, the highest of his career.

What’s this all mean? It basically means when Rizzo isn’t hitting home runs he’s not hitting the ball with as much authority as in the past, though when he gets a hold of one he really gets it good. But even that conclusion isn’t exactly on the money as he’s tied with Ben Zobrist for most hard hit ground balls on the team, yet Zobrist is hitting .556 off them and Rizzo is hitting .333. Of course the more dramatic shift on Rizzo could come into play with this stat as well. We could go around and around with the numbers, but there is some definitive good news.

Rizzo’s strikeout to walk percentage is at its lowest of his career, just 0.86. And as of the weekend he was on pace for more than 100 walks and less than 100 strikeouts, which no Cub has done since Gary Matthews in 1984. That's a great foundation to work from.

"Rizz is going to hit," manager Joe Maddon said on Monday. "Season in progress it’s going to heat up ... It’s just the grind of the season. It comes and it goes."

In discussions with Rizzo, the Cubs' manager doesn’t believe he needs a day off nor does Rizzo think he has to make any drastic changes. He already opened his stance up earlier in the season, which produced good results. He’s just anxious for those to return, especially against left-handers.

"I’m doing the same thing I always do," Rizzo stated. "There’s nothing more to do, and there’s nothing less to do. Just stay with the program."