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MILWAUKEE — We hate to do it, but we’re going to have to use the S-word here.

That’s right: Schwarber.

How else to begin a Cubs-Brewers story than by diverting our attention to Nationals Park in Washington? That’s where Kyle Schwarber — remember him? — led off for the home team in the first inning Monday and bombed his 14th home run into the third deck in right field.

Then he came up in the fifth and whaled on another one, his 15th. No, not of the season. It was his 15th in June alone, the most by any Nationals player in any month.

Think the left fielder’s former team might have benefitted from that kind of production? Instead, the Cubs lugged a completely embarrassing June batting average of .186 into a 14-4 loss that opened a three-game series against the National League Central-leading Brewers. According to ESPN, that would rank as the fourth-worst average by any team in any month since about the dawn of time.

The 2003 Tigers hit .184 in April. The 1972 Rangers hit .183 in September. The 2014 Padres outdid ’em all by hitting .171 in June. Indeed, we are using all forms of the word ”hit” very loosely.

Coming off an offensively frustrating long weekend at Dodger Stadium and facing a Brewers team that’s scary because of its three-headed monster of starting pitchers — Freddy Peralta, Brandon Woodruff and Corbin Burnes — and its best-in-baseball record of 25-10 since May 22, the Cubs could use anyone with a bat and a pulse.

Alas, the Schwarber ship obviously has sailed. And Anthony Rizzo and Willson Contreras weren’t in the lineup Monday. Rizzo left the game Sunday in Los Angeles with tightness in his lower back, an issue that has caused him to miss handfuls of games before. Contreras, the biggest workhorse catcher in baseball this season, was hit in the left hand by a 98 mph pitch from the Dodgers’ Joe Kelly during the weekend and needed a day to recharge.

According to manager David Ross, however, the crux of the Cubs’ offensive trouble isn’t whatever Rizzo, Contreras, Kris Bryant and Javy Baez — the team’s core four stars — aren’t doing. It’s that the overall quality of at-bats up and down the lineup is lagging.

The Cubs struck out so often in Los Angeles — at least 14 times in three consecutive games, a first for the franchise since 1901 — that they had to try to work counts Monday no matter who was in the lineup. And they did to a somewhat encouraging extent before the game got away from the bullpen in the Brewers’ 10-run eighth inning.

Joc Pederson led off the first with a walk against Peralta, setting the table for a two-run home run by Ian Happ. Pederson and Happ walked in the second after a single by starting pitcher Kyle Hendricks, though the Cubs failed to score. In the seventh, catcher Jose Lobaton got on with a walk before pinch hitter Patrick Wisdom tied the score with a homer.

Relievers Ryan Tepera and Trevor Megill were lit up mercilessly for 10 runs in the eighth as the Brewers turned an exciting game into a charade, winning their sixth in a row, running their season mark against the Cubs to 7-3 and leaving the Cubs four games back in the division.

All the swing-and-miss lately has been painful to watch. Some of it can be attributed to the ongoing absences of infielders Nico Hoerner and Matt Duffy, who clearly are two of the best on the team at seeing pitches, working counts, making contact and keeping pitchers out of dominant rhythms.

Before Hoerner, Duffy and fellow infielder David Bote all went on the injured list in late May, the offense functioned much more as intended.

”There were a lot of singles that were hit,” Ross said, ”where right now we’re a little bit more swing-and-miss, a little bit more solo homers. . . . We’re finding ways to stay in games, but we do need to roll out a two-out knock with a man on second every once in a while.”

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Scottie Pippen hasn’t been afraid to share his thoughts on a variety of topics surrounding the NBA lately.

In an extensive interview with GQ, published last week, Pippen characterized former Bulls coach Phil Jackson’s decision to give rookie Toni Kukoc the final shot of a playoff game against the Knicks in 1994 as “racial.” The six-time NBA champion famously refused to go back in the game.

Pippen was asked to elaborate during an appearance on “The Dan Patrick Show” on Monday. His response resulted in a further ripping of Jackson and eventually flowed into calling former teammate Michael Jordan selfish.

What Pippen said about Jackson

Patrick explicitly referenced the GQ interview, and Pippen reiterated that he felt he was owed the opportunity to try to win the game for the Bulls.

“Can I get one shot?” he rhetorically asked.

Patrick kept pressing on the -racial point.

“Have you talked to Phil about this? By saying it was a racial move, then you’re calling Phil a racist.”

Pippen responded: “I don’t got a problem with that.”

Patrick: “Do you think Phil was? Or is?”

Pippen: “Oh, yeah. I mean, do you remember Phil Jackson went and left the Lakers, wrote a book about Kobe Bryant and then came back and coached him? Who would do that? You name someone in professional sports who would do that. I think he probably exposed Kobe in a way that he shouldn’t have.”

Patrick responded that, in his opinion, Jackson was disloyal, rather than a racist.

“That’s your way of putting it out,” Pippen said. “I have my way. I was in the locker room with him. I was in practices with him. You’re looking from afar.”

What Pippen said about Jordan

Patrick then brought up how Jackson drew up a play in

Game 6 of the 1997 NBA Finals for Steve Kerr instead of Michael Jordan. Pippen corrected Patrick to say that the play was for Jordan, who had an exchange with Kerr in the huddle before that play.

“You know all those cameras sitting in the huddle, who they was working for? You know who Michael was speaking to when he said that? That was planned. That was speaking to the camera. . . .

“Had John Stockton not came down, trust me [Jordan would have shot]. That was building his own documentary because he was controlling the cameras. . . .

“That was not naturally spoken. That was rehearsed.”

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You know what the problem with sexual assault is?

It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

The damage to victims lasts a lifetime, like a tumor that keeps growing or a virus that eats you up from the inside.

Then there’s the damage from the inevitable cover-up, the attempt by higher-ups — be they coaches, managers, parents, heads of churches or organizations — to keep the crime from becoming known.

This part usually doesn’t end well, either. Sometimes the abused plaintiffs are stiffed for lack of evidence and/or the expensive legal maneuvering of the defendants, or they win their court cases and are ”rewarded” years later with money, which is something but does little to assuage the wounded soul.

Sometimes the perpetrator of the sexual assault is sent off to prison, which is good. Justice helps, but it cures nothing. Because, as stated earlier, this thing just keeps on giving.

Enter the Blackhawks.

They have a mess on their hands.

According to a lawsuit filed by a former player, known at this point only as ”John Doe,” the Hawks had a video coach on staff named Bradley Aldrich, who allegedly sexually assaulted the plaintiff and another player in 2010, just weeks before the team won its first Stanley Cup title in 49 years.

Other players have come forward and said that Aldrich was well-known on the team as a sexual deviant and that the lawsuit, in essence, is justified. Former skills coach Paul Vincent told the Canadian network TSN that he informed the Hawks’ top brass about the alleged assault in a meeting and that nobody did a thing.

My own questioning got a former employee, who doesn’t want to be named, to say of the Hawks’ knowledge of Aldrich’s alleged assaults: ”They all knew. Big-time.”

So now the lawyers come in like a herd of elephants. The Hawks have the high-billing Chicago firm Jenner & Block doing an ”independent review” of the charges, even though the Hawks are paying the bill. If that’s how ”independent” works, it’s interesting.

The accusers have their own legal team, of course.

Compounding matters is that the Hawks also are being sued by a man who was sexually assaulted at age 16 by Aldrich in 2013 in Houghton, Michigan. The man claims the Hawks gave Aldrich a glowing performance review upon his leaving the organization, thus sending an alleged pedophile on to further employment governing young men, this time as a volunteer high school coach.

This last bit of hand-washing, giving Aldrich a greased path to somewhere else, is reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s habit of quietly sending on pedophile priests to distant parishes, like small-town sheriffs kicking drunks into the next county.

But, see, this stuff doesn’t go away. Not with a kick, not with a shrug, not with a cover-up.

The Hawks might have cleared the runway for their wondrous and magical five-year run to three Cup championships by 2015, but at what cost? Executives John McDonough (now retired), Stan Bowman and Al MacIsaac and skills coach James Gary — all of whom allegedly were told of the alleged assaults — might be asking themselves that question this very moment.

The late Joe Paterno, Penn State’s legendary football coach, casually dismissed for years the hideously rampant pedophilia of his top assistant, Jerry Sandusky, at what proved to be a devastating price to him, the school and the victims.

The harm disgraced Dr. Larry Nassar did at Michigan State and as the head physician for USA Gymnastics to hundreds of athletes — including Olympic champions — is mountainous, simply because those in charge looked away.

As punishment, Michigan State alone has been ordered to pay $500 million in damages to victims. Nassar himself got 175 years in prison.

I don’t know if there’s something about Michigan, but famous University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler, who died in 2006, is now under attack by many former players who claim he disregarded the decades of sexual assaults then-team doctor Robert E. Anderson perpetrated on his athlete victims. Their charges are backed up by a 240-page report commissioned by the university.

One former Michigan player, Daniel Kwiatkowski, says he was told by Schembechler to ”toughen up” and ignore the abuse. Matt Schembechler, one of Bo’s sons, claims that when he told his dad that Anderson had abused him during a physical at age 10, Bo punched him and ”went into a rage, hitting, screaming, spitting.”

Yeah, you can kick the can down the road, but the can doesn’t go away.

The Hawks are staring at that little beauty right now.

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At least two people were wounded, including a 14-year-old boy, in a shooting Monday evening in East Garfield Park.

The shooting happened about 7:50 p.m. near the intersection of Madison and Springfield Streets, Chicago fire official said.

The teenage boy was transported to Stroger Hospital in fair to serious condition, fire officials said.

A 34-year-old man was taken to the same hospital in serious to critical condition, police said.

This is a developing story. Check back for details.

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Nyoka Bowie always wanted to be a mother, but she had no children of her own and so took on a motherly role with her group of friends.

“She always had the answers to everything, or she’ll figure it out if she didn’t,” said a close friend Sameka, who didn’t want her last name used. “She could always help anybody.”

Sunday night, Bowie was standing with a group of people in Marquette Park when three gang members apparently out for revenge fired into the crowd.

Bowie, 37, was hit in the chest and died. Ten other people were wounded in one of the worst mass shootings in Chicago this year – a year that is on pace to be one of the most violent in decades.

“I feel like a part of me is lost,” Sameka said. “And I feel like the city of Chicago has no love left.”

Just two hours earlier, about six miles away in South Shore, a crowd of people were waiting for their food outside a restaurant when a gunman opened fire from a black SUV.

Kristina Grimes, 23, was shot six times and was pronounced dead at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Five other people were wounded, including a 15-year-old boy hit in the knee and foot.

Grimes had been a standout swimmer at Willowbrook High School who as a teenager dreamed to one day go to the Olympics, her stepfather Michael Carr said.

“She could be a really sweet girl,” Carr said as his voice quivered. “[I’ll] just remember her as a caring person and someone who laughed hard. She always helped people.”

Police said both women appeared to be innocent victims of gang violence.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the two attacks stemmed from “internal gang conflicts,” decrying them as “street justice” driven by a “thirst for revenge.”

Lightfoot lamented yet another summer weekend marred by mass shootings, and the wounds inflicted “psychologically” on people left “traumatized” in gang-infested neighborhoods.

“What’s also frustrating and heartbreaking is that, for some in our community, their thirst for revenge has no sense of decency. They don’t want to let the criminal justice system play itself out,” the mayor said.

“They want to engage in street justice, which is tragic and terrible,” Lightfoot said. “When they aim, they don’t get the target. They get the children and the innocent bystanders who have a right to live in our city without fear of being felled by gun violence.”

Chicago has seen at least 331 homicides so far this year, compared to 319 at this point last year and 247 in 2019, according to data kept by the Sun-Times. That’s an almost 4% increase over last year and a 34% increase compared to 2019.

There have been at least 1,842 shootings this year, compared to 1,625 at this time in 2020 and 1,171 in 2019. This year has seen a more than 13% increase compared to 2020, and 57% compared to 2019.

City Hall and police officials have stressed that the increase in violence from last year to this year has been slowing, with this June seeing fewer homicides and shootings than last June. Still, last year was one of the worst for gun violence since the mid-1990s, and this year remains on track for even more shootings and homicides.

This June alone, there have been at least 10 attacks where four or more people were shot. Over the weekend, there were four such attacks, the ones in Marquette Park and South Shore and two others where a total of eight people were shot.

About a third of the 78 people shot between Friday evening and early Monday were wounded in just four attacks.

Ald. Stephanie D. Coleman (16th) on Monday addressed the mass shootings during a news conference in the parking lot of a shuttered Jewel-Osco store at 61st Street and Western Avenue, just a few blocks north of where Bowie was killed.

“This is not our city. We have failed. Now it’s time to right our wrongs,” Coleman, adding that the violence was the natural consequence of “deprivation of quality education,” resources and mental health services. Lightfoot should do more than focus on “getting the guns off the street,” she said.

“When the President reaches out to a city like Chicago, with a population of almost 3 million, it’s more than retaining guns,” Coleman said. “It’s about investing in our young people.”

Lightfoot, sounding an all-too-familiar theme, demanded that Chief Judge Tim Evans order the full resumption of criminal trials for the first time since the pandemic.

“We still have too many murderers that are not being held accountable,” she said. “I’m calling on our county partners — and particularly those in the criminal courts — open up the courts.

“Our criminal courts have been shut down for 15 months.” the mayor continued. “They need to reopen.”

Earlier this month, Evans announced he had asked a committee of criminal justice stakeholders to determine how to safely accelerate the reopening of criminal courts to in-person proceedings, including increasing the capacity for bench and jury trials.

But Evans’ news release noted that the courts “never really closed” and the “administration of justice, including hearings, bench trials, guilty pleas, findings of innocence and dismissal of cases have continued” for the past 15 months.

Lightfoot said anti-violence help offered to big cities like Chicago by President Biden last week includes a crackdown on gun dealers who are “selling to criminals and straw purchasers.”

Already this year, the Chicago Police Department has taken “almost 6,000 crime guns” off the streets, Lightfoot said, calling that a “fraction of what’s out there.”

As for the weekend attacks, the mayor said Chicago police detectives “have some promising leads,” though Police Supt. David Brown sounded less enthusiastic at a later news conference.

Brown said the Marquette Park shooting in the 6300 block of South Artesian stemmed from a year-long gang conflict in which the gunmen were seeking retaliation. Bowie was an innocent bystander, while one of the wounded men was targeted, he said.

The shooters’ car was seen but detectives have no license plate or description of the shooters, Brown said.

In the South Shore shooting, detectives know the gunfire came from an SUV but don’t have a plate number.

Bowie, the victim in the Marquette Park shooting, was known as “Yogi” to her friends. “Anytime you need something, it was always, ‘Ask Yogi,'” Sameka said.

Bowie’s apartment, which she rented from Sameka’s father, was a “sanctuary” for her friends. She loved to cook for them, especially breakfast after a long night out.

“She was just so much fun, it was never drama or anything with her, she was just an all-around good person and a good friend,” Sameka said. “She was a good confidant,.”

Sameka, who now lives in Tennessee, was born and raised in Chicago but said she’ll “never live there again” because of the violence. “I’m surrounded by death.”

Grimes, killed in the South Shore attack, was preparing for the next chapter in her life. About two weeks ago, she had called Carr and told him she was looking for a job.

“She said, ‘I miss you, I miss your smile. We’ve got to get together, go out for lunch,'” Carr recalled. “And [that was] the last thing I heard from her.”

Carr said he has been in tears for most of the day since he found out shortly before 4 a.m. that Grimes had died. He said she was a sweet and intelligent woman, and he fondly recalled the trips they took, like Sanibel Island in Florida, where they went kayaking in the ocean.

Carr, who lives in Romeoville, moved out of the city in 2002 and “vowed never to move back.”

“We all got to come together and do together,’ he said. “Seventy shootings in one weekend, that’s very excessive, I don’t think we can go in Iraq and find 70 shootings over the weekend.

“This is just, day in and day out. it’s every single day, same thing,” he added. “And so yeah, it hurts, it bothers me big time.”

Contributing: Cheyanne Daniels

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As the nation fights to put a lid on the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic remains a major problem in Illinois prisons — and it’s time the Pritzker administration stepped in to fix one glaring failing.

Fewer than half of the 13,000 people who work in Illinois’ prisons have been vaccinated against the coronavirus, as Kyra Senese and Jacob Geanous of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Documenting COVID-19 project, reported this week in the Sun-Times. Meanwhile, two-thirds of state prisoners are vaccinated.

That means thousands of state prison workers are at risk of catching the virus and spreading it in their workplace and communities.

Equally troubling: To keep unvaccinated state inmates and personnel safer from the virus, Illinois corrections facilities have slowed the intake of convicted prisoners from county jails. This has resulted in a backlog of some 1,000 inmates in county jails who are awaiting transfer to state prisons. Jails are facing overcrowding, ballooning costs and an upswing in inmate fighting.

For the past year, the Pritzker administration has done a pretty good job of managing the pandemic, but they’re flatly failing here. The state should require vaccinations, as a condition of employment, for all state corrections employees.

Last week, San Francisco became the first big city to mandate its workers receive coronavirus vaccinations. And in Texas last week, more than 150 Houston Methodist Hospital employees refused vaccination — and as a consequence were required to quit or were fired.

These are the tough, but necessary actions needed to clear out the prisoner transfer backlog and to make safer the communities in which Illinois prisons are located.

An American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union spokesperson said it is urging members to get vaccinated, but clearly — more than a year into the pandemic — that effort alone isn’t enough.

“What happens in prison does not stay in prison,” Uptown People’s Law Center Executive Director Alan Mills told WBEZ in May.

“So even if the prisoners are 100% vaccinated, which, by the way, they’re not, the guards are still going to spread it among themselves and then they’re going to bring it back to the community, back to their families,” Mills said. “It’s a disaster waiting to happen in the communities around [prisons].”

The Pritzker administration can and should fix this now.

Send letters to [email protected].

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The Chicago police officer who shot and killed Anthony Alvarez during a foot chase earlier this year in Portage Park has been stripped of his police powers — an action that had been recommended by a civilian oversight board back in April.

Officer Evan Solano was relieved of his duties for the duration of an ongoing investigation into the shooting by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. COPA had recommended that the department take such action but Mayor Lori Lightfoot initially balked at the idea.

Police Superintendent David Brown declined to comment on Solano at an unrelated news conference on Monday.

“I’m going to defer until the investigation is complete but obviously we asked for additional information from COPA,” Brown said. “We received that and reviewed it and we’ve stripped him of his police powers.”

Police said the 22-year-old Alvarez was approached by tactical officers at a gas station, and the encounter escalated to a foot pursuit that began in the 3500 block of North Laramie Avenue. He was shot several times from behind by Solano.

It remains unclear why the officers confronted Alvarez.

COPA released a series of video from police-worn body cameras, as well as cameras from a nearby home. It shows Solano yelling, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun!” before firing five shots from close range at Alvarez.

Video shows Alvarez with a gun in his right hand, but the gun drops from his hand as he falls to the pavement.

The shooting happened two days after 13-year-old Adam Toledo was killed by a police officer during a foot chase in Little Village. Both deaths sparked outrage over police use-of -force with calls from Latino leaders for a moratorium on police foot pursuits. It also prompted mass protest as hundreds of people marched in Logan Square.

Solano was the subject of an additional internal police probe that showed him pulling a gun during an alleged road rage incident in Logan Square. In a viral video recorded in May by bystanders, Solano is seen in a police uniform exiting a red Ford Mustang with a backwards baseball cap.

After a heated argument, Solano confronts a man with a gun as bystanders shout at him to put it away.

Todd Pugh, an attorney for the Alvarez family, told the Sun-Times the removal of Solano’s power is long overdue but they are grateful it was finally done.

“We thought after the Logan Square incident he would’ve had his powers removed right away, but we are glad it’s finally being done,” Pugh said.

Solano began as a probationary police officer in 2015 and since then has had nearly a dozen investigations launched into his actions from CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs and COPA, according to his personnel records obtained by the Sun-Times.

These investigations include civil rights violations in relations to improper stops and searches, neglect of duty and other violations of departmental procedures.

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