Hello Cubs World, 

I'm just thrilled to provide another blog entry regarding the Cubs. I'm less thrilled by the bullpen antics. But before I get into player details, let's just stop and appreciate a few basic predictions I made at the team level and how they have panned out.

My Off-Season Expectations: Team Position Player Rankings
The Cubs are performing up to expectations in the field, at bat, and baserunning. The most important overall offensive statistic for the regular season is simply runs/game. This stat captures the combination of power hitting, smallball hits/walks, and baserunning. Cubs are currently the second best overall RPB performer, which is only possible with a team high in all three areas of offense. Let's break this down.  

POWER HITTING
My Expectation: 6th-8th 
Reality at Game 44: 4th  (4th in slugging, OPS, extra base hits, and home runs per at bat). 

Why the difference: Carson Kelly.

If he drops off, we should expect Cubs to revert to my expectations, unless we see offsetting turnarounds from players like Justin Turner, Ian Happ, Jon Berti, and Nico Hoerner - all somewhat underperforming their usual slugging numbers.  

ON BASE HITTING (Smallball)

My Expectation: 4th-6th
Reality at Game 44:  Approximately 8th currently (10th in OBP, 12th in batting average, 4th in Walks/game, 12th in both sacrifice hits AND flies/game, and still #1 in avoiding double plays!!!!)
 

Why the difference: The recent Mets and Marlins series set them back, with 6 games of low average hitting. That's it.- about ten games ago, cubs were second in this set of stats, and first in walks. 

This has been a volatile stat for the Cubs. At times they have been elite in OBP and walks, but they have also struggled with strikeouts and batting average during tough stretches. The best explanation here is the Cubs have been extremely efficient at producing runs- they aren't stranding many runners or hitting into double plays, and they are sacrificing for RBIs with a high rate of success. Overall I still expect this club to pan out in the range I have predicted, but to get there they need higher batting averages from Suzuki, Tucker, and the Bench/3B. Both Suzuki and Tucker have had a steep drop-off in base hits lately, and that's caused the clubs batting average to nosedive more than anything else. 

BASERUNNING 

My Expectation: 2nd-3rd (Cubs have never historically been a #1 baserunning team!!!)
Reality at Game 44:  2nd overall (3rd in bases/game, 3rd in success rate/game, 4th in extra base hit percentage) 

Why the difference: no difference at all.

The Cubs would be #1 if PCA was hitting for less power - his chances to steal have dropped quite a bit - and if Happ and Swanson were stealing bases closer to their historical rates. Happ and Swanson are both capable of 15-20 SB, but aren't acting like it is a priority.  The team overall is focusing more on swing for the fences than stolen bases, and frankly that's a better strategy if you HAVE the elite power.  Who is quibbling over a few bags? The point is they are a perpetual threat, and only a few guys CANT add value with baserunning. 

STARTING PITCHING

My Expectation: 7th-9th
Reality at Game 44: Hard to evaluate, but I would say that Imanaga/Boyd/Rea are about 10th best as a trio, but the rest has been below average.  

Why the difference: obviously, losing Justin Steele and Javier Assad took two of our five top guys out of rotation. Imagine how much better the pen would look if we had Brown and Rea as the two long relievers....

BULLPEN

My Expectation: 14th-16th

Reality at Game 44: We slid into 18th-20th recently

Why the Difference, Despite tons of talent, and tons of depth, all of the top arms in the pen have had really BAD games- epic meltdowns between large seas of solid performance. We have seen meltdowns from Merryweather, Pressly, Hodge, and even Thielbar earlier in the season. Basically, every guy is good, but nobody is RELIABLE- all the top options are also guilty of singlehandedly losing at least 2 games, EACH- which is double the rate of disasters that the team can sustain. Sure, bullpens are always difficult, and are more often responsible for losses than starters. But think of these meltdowns as multi-run fielding errors- events so bad that they can squander the good actions of many other team members. To be a top bullpen, they need to cut their "oospies" events in HALF.

SUMMARY: SKILL PREDICTIONS
 

The Cubs are currently contenders at every level of the team except one- the bullpen. However, it is part of Jed Hoyer's Strategy to only focus on the bullpen during the second half of the season. Also, he has a fairly good track record of putting together second half bullpens (although there's been epic collapses there as well). If there's any one area of the team you can FIX midseason, its the bullpen. And, they held back enough money to get TWO arms midseason- expect that to happen.

TEAM WAR

In my early blogposts, I focused on concocting a high WAR roster. I argued that the Cubs have a 94.5 -96.5 win roster, assuming a healthy 26 man (that would include Justin Steele). I argued that the Cubs had a base roster of 96.5 wins, 2 of which were a 2 MOJO bonus WAR of 2 wins, because of their unusual depth and completeness as a roster. The rest of the wins can be calculated by summing the WAR projections of the individual players (its not any worse than ZIPS projections!)

Right now the cubs have a 25-19 record, but with the hardest schedule in the majors, and about to face the easiest schedule in the majors for the rest of the year. which we will use to project total wins.  

My off-season expectation: 96.5 wins

My adjusted Projection:  95-67 

Why the change: I lowered my pitching expectations. I now project the Cubs as having the 9th best starters and the 18th best bullpen UNTIL MID-SEASON TRADE MOVES ARE MADE. Why 9th? I expect Taillon and Brown to both go on a great tear, while facing easy opponents. 

currently I power rank them as 5th in baseball, trailing the Dodgers, Mets, Padres, and Yankees. 

...... and this assumes two fresh bullpen arms at trade deadline, Matt Shaw stabilizes 3B, and every starting pitcher returns to help, except Steele. 

Why the Difference: No difference, same confidence interval. Every player I over-projected was equally offset by another I under-projected- and none of those were terribly far off the mark. They slugged quite a bit better than expected, fielded a bit WORSE than expected (Swanson, Tucker, , #3B still not producing defensive runs), and gave up more home runs and walks at the rubber than I expected.  

Conclusion, Part 1: 
Thanks for following my Blog. The Cubs are still the class of the division and are about to go on a tear, a slugfest, and pitching correction. For part 2, I'll get into the detailed analyses of the players and my optimistic projections for the future of the pitching.