What Do the 2012 Oakland Athletics Have to Do With the 2024 Chicago Cubs?

[Matthew Trueblood]

The 2024 Chicago Cubs started hot. Now, though, more than half their season has been spent ice-cold. What does that tell us about the essential character and quality of this team, and what comes next?

When you try to trace a path from where the Cubs are now to the 2024 postseason, you run into two related but distinct problems. Firstly, the team's record isn't very good. Their loss Friday against the Cardinals dropped them to 33-37 through 70 games, and they face a substantial deficit in the NL Central. Secondly, though (and probably more importantly, in the eyes and minds of fans), they have played very poorly over the last seven weeks. After an 18-12 start, they went 15-25 to reach that Friday low point.

Take either of those things on their own--a sub-.500 overall record through 70 games, and a truly lousy stretch of 40 games somewhere in the season--and you can overcome them. The 2019 Nationals were 32-38 at one point. The 2021 Atlanta club was 33-37. There have been about two dozen division-winning teams who lost at least 25 of 40 games at some point, over the 55 years in which divisions have existed, including the 2003 Cubs. If we're even one tiny fraction more generous in drawing comparisons, we can note that Craig Counsell's own 2023 Brewers were 16-24 in a 40-game span from the very beginning of May through mid-June, which couldn't be much more similar to the Cubs' current jag.

Put the two things together, though, and the path to a campaign the Cubs would call successful (based on expectations entering this season) gets narrow in a hurry. In the Wild Card Era (since 1995), 155 teams have started somewhere between 32-38 and 34-36, through 70 contests. Of those, though, only 35 got there in roughly similar fashion to the Cubs, with a winning record through their first 30 games and then a tumble to the wrong side of .500 in the ensuing 40.

Of those 35 comparable teams, in these terms:

• 16 of 35 had winning records over their final 92 games
• 9 of 35 got to 85 or more total wins
• 15 of 35, like these Cubs, went 16-24 or worse in that stretch from team game No. 31 to No. 70; and
• Of those 15, only one team--the 2008 Dodgers, who snuck into the playoffs at 84-78--even got to 80 wins.

In other words, based on recent history, starting hot and then going this cold for this long spells major trouble. It implies a pretty small chance of recovering and finishing the campaign as a winning team. The confluence of health, talent, and luck required to be a good team over 162 games usually eludes teams who get this deep into a season in step with the Cubs, to this point.

This might be obvious, or not, but let's be clear about it: These data do not condemn the Cubs. Every team season is unique, in some small way. Picking out these endpoints (not selectively, to distort things, but arbitrarily, to make the data clean enough to analyze) gives us a sample size that seems significant, but it isn't necessarily so. No one has come back from as brutal a sag through games 31-70 and ended up winning 85 or more games in the last 30 years or more, but that doesn't mean the Cubs won't, for sure.

On the other hand, it underscores the issue here. Even during that 18-12 start, there were games the Cubs let get away, in frustrating fashion. The mess the bullpen made in San Diego is the most stark example, but helpfully, they left another indelible memory later in that road trip, in Arizona. If the Cubs start 20-10, as perhaps they should have, this stretch doesn't pull them back into the data set drawn from here, because they're 35-35 even after this lull. They didn't, which means their margin for error the rest of the way is quite small.

Many people disagree with me about this, but I view the Brewers as a legitimately good team, with staying power. Despite their own considerable pitching injury concerns, I think they'll wend their way from their current 41-29 record to a final one of at least 87-75, which would mean going .500 the rest of the way. Of the 35 teams in the small study above, only seven got to that number (actually, six, but I'm giving the 1995 Mariners some extra wins to account for the truncated schedule that year).

Those 79-66 Mariners, of course, had three Hall of Famers at their peaks, in Randy Johnson, Edgar Martínez, and Ken Griffey Jr. Griffey missed half of the season with an injury, which contributed to their lousy record through 70 games. The 88-74 1997 Dodgers got truly monster years from Mike Piazza and Raul Mondesi, and enjoyed a healthy, workhorse starting rotation. Six pitchers combined to make 156 of their 162 starts, and starters pitched 1,014 innings for them.

The 89-73 2008 Mets had three players with good Hall of Fame cases--David Wright, Carlos Beltrán, and Johan Santana--playing at their very best, with each producing at least 6.9 bWAR. You probably remember the 88-74 2008 Brewers, but in case you don't, three names: CC Sabathia, Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder. The 87-75 2009 Marlins were much more forgettable, but Hanley Ramírez and Josh Johnson each had the best seasons of their dazzling, too-short peaks that year. 

Even in the shadow of another wondrous outing by Shota Imanaga Saturday, it's hard to make the case that the Cubs have any player on the level of the 13 guys name-checked above, save perhaps Mondesi. (That was a very fortuitously timed career year, for Mondesi. He signed a contract that made him one of the 10 highest-paid players in baseball that winter, and then literally never produced even half as much bWAR in a season again.) These were teams powered to their impressive recoveries by true superstars; the Cubs don't have a superstar.

Let's look, though, at the last two teams to rebalance themselves and end up as winning teams after starting with such a surge-and-swoon maneuver. They are the 2012 Oakland Athletics, and the 2021 Seattle Mariners.

The 2012 A's are famous, in one very nerdy corner of the baseball internet. They're a team who believed in and evinced team chemistry so much that they seemingly willed themselves to a 60-32 finish after a 34-36 start. Powered by extraordinary part-time contributions from mid-June arrivals Brandon Moss and Chris Carter, they ran down the two-time defending AL pennant winners from Texas, beating them on the final day of the regular season to claim the division title.

That team also had an edge on the rest of the league. Batted-ball stats were in their nascency, even inside many teams' offices, and the A's were the first team through the breach in the fly-ball revolution. They got a massive advantage that way, and their mixing and matching and clubhouse magic took care of the rest. They were also insanely balanced and deep on the pitching side, though, with 12 different pitchers who had at least 35 innings pitched (and as many as 181) and an ERA under 3.50. 

Let's not waste our time on the 2021 Mariners, an irreproducible burp of a team who went 90-72 while being outscored by 51 runs, thanks partially to winning 10 of their last 13 after being virtually eliminated. The A's are the only real model the Cubs can follow.

Do the Cubs have leaders and great clubhouse guys like those A's teams did? There's some evidence of that. Dansby Swanson, Ian Happ, and Nico Hoerner were selected as the backbone of this team partially for their personalities and their leadership. They all wanted Cody Bellinger back because of his fit within the clubhouse, and it's hard to deny the similarities between Mike Tauchman and guys like Jonny Gomes and Brandon Inge, who drew such rave reviews for their impact off the field.

Specifically, pitcher Brandon McCarthy and other members of the 2012 A's mentioned the way Gomes and Inge invited and set at ease young or incoming players, making them feel valued, at-home, and important. That group of leaders created a culture under which unproven players thrived and improved, and it powered them to many close wins and unexpected positive contributions. The hope, certainly, would be that the Cubs are getting the same thing from Swanson, Happ, Hoerner, and others, when it comes to players like Pete Crow-Armstrong and Michael Busch, but also ones like Tyson Miller, Porter Hodge, and more. The incumbents have to consistently work to uplift and empower their less established (but equally important) teammates.

Maybe that interpersonal genius will congeal into a ball of light in the center of the team's clubhouse and bring them together this summer. As silly as it sounds to put it that way, baseball chemistry can be just that beguiling and delightfully unpredictable. There are some of the ingredients here that were present in Oakland in 2012. Maybe they just need the right catalyst to start a chain reaction.

The troubling truth, though, is that the Cubs are missing the other half of Oakland's winning recipe. They don't have the mixture of good health and good depth that the A's had that summer, on the pitching side--or at least, we don't yet have any indication that they do. Nor do they seem to have the drop on the league, the way that team did. There's nowhere in either the run production or the run prevention ledgers where the Cubs seem to have some clever accounting tricks at work, the likes of which might turn them into a juggernaut this summer.

Again, while the past is prologue in baseball, it's usually an enigmatic and incomplete one. The 2024 Cubs get to write the rest of their own story, even though the one they've authored so far is discouraging, and even though history is not exactly on their side. This team might get big performances from a couple of linchpin players in the second half, but there are no salvific superstars here. The key things to watch for, in the coming weeks, are a coming-together by this team that changes the way they relate to one another and the way they play as a unit--and then some glimpse of a greater genius behind the scenes than we've been able to see so far.

View full article

[Brock Beauchamp]

What troubles me the most about this article is that two paragraphs in I started reading it in @Matthew Trueblood’s voice.

I… I don’t even know how to feel about that. 

[Billy62]

     Two really bad things are happening here. A totally anemic offense that is plating 1-2 runs per game rather consistently, and a back-end of a bullpen that has had some trouble closing out ballgames, but add to that a starting pitching staff that overall seems to be doing a credible job. So do we ride this out believing that this team will shake off this slump and return to their early season form? Do we wait for our growing list of injured pitchers to get healthy. Of course I don't know what is in the heart of the Ricketts clan or Jed Hoyer. If these trade talks and big money free-agent signings is just noise, I believe it is, then this team if it can't fix itself, will most likely miss the post-season bus by a pretty good margin. In this scenario this team loses about 89 ballgames and finishes 4th in the division. Of course there is always the possibility that they can extricate themselves and start swinging those early season bats, and only they know if this is possible. If this happens, even with the same bullpen, winning ballgames becomes easier when your plating 5-6 runs per game vs. 0, 1 or 2. I think its still a decent ballclub, sick, definitely, but not yet terminal. Maybe a new bat or new arm is going to be what the doctor ordered. We can only watch. 😞

[mul21]

Edited June 17, 2024 by mul21