Cubs Need to Revive a Nearly Extinct Baseball Stratagem to Save Their Season

[Matthew Trueblood]

By now, it's clear to everyone watching closely that the 2024 Chicago Cubs will be defined by the tip of the balance on a thousand or so little things. Unfortunately, they're the very worst team in baseball at managing one of the biggest little things.

Image courtesy of © Katie Stratman-USA TODAY Sports

Four teams have surrendered more stolen bases than the Cubs have this season. That's the good news here. No team has caught fewer would-be base stealers than the Cubs have, and the Cubs possess the worst caught-stealing rate of any team in big-league baseball. Moreover, they've allowed 29 wild pitches and passed balls, a total exceeded by only three other teams. Add in their two balks, and they've given up 90 extra feet 87 times this year.

That's not even the bad news, though. The bad news is that, of the eight times the Cubs have caught runners stealing this year, five of them were actually pickoffs. When a runner tries to advance or ends up in a rundown instead of simply being thrown out retreating to a base, the play is scored as a caught stealing, in addition to a pickoff. Miguel Amaya and Yan Gomes have only actually thrown out three of the 59 runners who have taken off against them this year. The dates of those outs were Apr. 8, Apr. 15, and May 6. Since that last date, the Cubs have played 30 games, and opponents have 31 steals.

There's nothing more the pitchers can do for these two. They lead MLB in pickoffs, although that's made a bit easier by the fact that every team they see is itching and leaping to run. In addition to those five pickoffs that were also scored caught stealing, the team has seven straight pickoffs, the most in baseball. They're trying to slow runners down, but they're constrained by the new rules that took effect at the start of last season.

Right at this moment, though, there's also little the front office can do--or at least that they should do. A trade for a stronger-armed catcher is certainly in order, but few teams are out of the race at this point in the season, and fewer still want to trade a catcher with this skill set, given the increasing importance of the running game throughout the league. Nor has this team done anywhere near enough to justify an expenditure of significant future value to get better in the short term. Right now, the Cubs shouldn't be thinking like buyers.

Instead, they need to do some in-house problem-solving. Their options are extremely limited, but the winning one should be obvious: it's time to start pitching out.

If the Cubs do that, they'll be pretty much on an island. The pitchout is dead; some stubborn nurse just refuses to unplug its life support. Right now, the league is on pace for around 40 pitchouts this year. That's 40 or so, in total, for all 30 teams. They might hit 50, which would mark a third straight season of increase, but it would also mean a seventh straight season with fewer than 100 pitchouts attempted across MLB. As recently as a decade ago, there had never been a campaign in which fewer than 300 were attempted.

The above only goes back to 2008, which makes the trend look less stark and shocking than it actually is. The data is a bit less clean for the 20 years from the dawn of the pitch-by-pitch tracking era in 1988 through the arrival of PITCHf/x, but there were around 1,000 pitchouts league-wide in some of those campaigns. 

Obviously, there are good reasons for this. The stolen base became much less prevalent in the 1990s and 2000s than it had been in the 1970s and 1980s, and it got even less prevalent in the 2010s than in the 1990s and 2000s. Fewer dangerous runners means less need to throw an intentional ball in order to thwart them; that's one reason for the dwindling number of pitchouts. Another is that they don't work all that well. Sam Miller showed that managers don't guess right often enough, and that catchers don't get their man often enough, to justify pitchouts, back in 2013. Two years later, Ben Lindbergh documented the trend and quantified the gains most teams realize in caught-stealing rate when they pitch out, ending up at the same conclusion.

It doesn't really surprise me, and probably doesn't surprise you, that the new rules and the attendant rise in stolen bases haven't begotten more than a few extra pitchouts. Sabermetric orthodoxy sets hard, just like the much less closely interrogated conventional wisdom that preceded it. Without those new rules, the tactic might have died out altogether within a few more years. The pitchout makes the sacrifice bunt look downright popular.

Time to change that. The Cubs' catching corps, under the present rules, breaks all the normal math that makes pitchouts bad ideas. They've caught a whopping 5% of basestealers this year, and none in the last five weeks, with runners going more than once a game. The numerical framework that killed the pitchout assumed a normal distribution of caught-stealing percentage centered around 25-30%. The worst teams in baseball rarely dipped below 20%, which is closer to the average in 2024. Most teams saw opponents attempt a steal maybe four times a week, but not six or seven.

In Lindbergh's piece from almost a decade ago, he found that catchers take about 0.1 seconds off their pop time when the team pitches out, and that they catch runners at about twice the normal rate (it was 52% in his sample) because of it. He also gave a "guess right" rate of 19%, from the manager's side. In other words, 19 percent of pitchouts coincided with steal attempts. Miller, though, also found that the more a team pitched out, the more they tended to be right about when to do so. Then, too, we can assume that the Cubs would be right more than 19 percent of the time, because runners are going against them so often. 

Let's bring the expected out rate on pitchouts that are also steal attempts all the way down to 40%, because Amaya and Gomes are below-average throwers. Given that number, a 20% correct guess rate would yield outs on 8% of all their pitchouts. If they do it 50 times the rest of the year, they'll only catch four runners. They'll throw 40 extra balls for no reason at all, and fail to stop six runners, despite the pitchout. 

That doesn't sound like an awesome set of tradeoffs. Turning a strike into a ball is worth about 0.1 runs to the offense. Of the 50 extra balls thrown, 18 probably would have been balls anyway, Still, that means that throwing 50 pitchouts would cost the Cubs 3.2 runs, based just on the impact they would have on the count. Based on the relative values of steals (around 0.19 runs) and outs via caught stealing (around -0.44 runs), Amaya and Gomes would thus have to catch four more runners than expected in that sample of 10, or the Cubs would have to guess right more than 20 percent of the time.

The thing is, that's all perfectly plausible. If Gomes and Amaya did throw out four of 10 runners with the pitchout on, that would be four more than we should expect them to throw out without one, based on the progress of this season. If they throw out five of 10, then they've definitely exceeded their expected success rate by enough to justify the pitchout, because their expected success rate on stopping runners is in the mid-single digits, if it's not zero. Again, too, the team might guess right more like 25 percent of the time, at least until runners get wise to the tactic and stop going so often.

More than the math, though, there's psychology and common sense here. The Cubs are enduring too many long innings, too many stressful situations for their pitchers, and too many helpless moments for their defenders in the field. Too many walks, singles, and fielder's choices are turning into doubles. They don't strike out enough batters to live that way. They need runners who reach base to remain potential outs via force play, rather than immediately transforming into imminent scoring threats. The team needs to assert itself against the running game. The pitchout is an imperfect, almost defunct way to do it, but it's what they have left in the options box.

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[Transmogrified Tiger]

The Cubs haven't allowed a disproportionate amount of attempts, and the difference in them being in their current spot in SB allowed and being above average is roughly 1 SB every 10 games.  There are tactical spots where they may need to make an adjustment like this if a particular team is likely to run them off the bases, but honestly I don't think the scale is a huge concern, certainly not to 'save their season' importance as the headline says.