Cubs Can Win World Series By Addressing One Major Weakness In October

[N.B. Lindberg]

Image courtesy of Denny Medley-Imagn Images

The Chicago Cubs are a team of extremes. They have the best position player core in baseball by a comical margin. They lead baseball in both offensive and defensive value, and their 37.8 fWAR leads the second-place Dodgers by an unfathomable 11.0 Wins Above Replacement. Of course, at the other end of that extreme is their pitching. 

Their pitchers have combined for 6.0 fWAR, which gives them a slight edge over the Royals (5.1) and Nationals (4.8) for the worst mark in baseball. Despite dodging the cellar, this is the worst pitching staff among National League playoff teams. In most situations, a staff of such ill repute would doom any World Series journey from the start, but the Cubs actually have a road map to a title, and a simple one at that: keep the ball in the park. 

This is far from groundbreaking analysis, but giving up home runs is bad, and the Cubs love to cough up a gopher ball. They’ve given up the second-most home runs in baseball (231) and have the highest home run to flyball ratio (14.4%) in the sport. Soft toss in a below-average strikeout rate (20.8%), and the only thing Cubs pitchers have done well is limit walks (8.2%).

Despite this overall inability to pitch well, the team's run prevention isn’t awful. Thanks to an elite defense, they finished the season with a team ERA of 4.12 (14th), a significant improvement from their xERA of 4.54 (24th) and FIP of 4.60 (25th). 

On paper, the Cubs will enter every series at a serious pitching disadvantage. They don’t have a real ace, their bullpen is shaky, and the back of their rotation is bland. But they do have the best defense in baseball, which can be a game changer. If we take the Cubs’ ERA and ERA estimators at face value, their defense shaves off around 0.45 of ERA. That’s nearly a full standard deviation (0.538) of team ERA, which is why and how this team found a way to win nearly 90 games in the regular season.

However, the only way their defense can make up for their pitching is if the ball stays in the ballpark. 

No team in baseball suffered more at the hands of the long ball. They gave them up at the highest rate in baseball, despite also having the depth chart best suited to turn fly balls into fly-outs. But that also means they have the most to gain by limiting them. The Cubs’ xFIP, which assumes a league-average home run to flyball rate, was 4.19 (16th). If they can get there, while maintaining their massive defensive advantage over the rest of the league, suddenly their team ERA would be 3.74 (by our previous ERA vs. ERA estimator calculation). That would have been the league’s eighth-best ERA. But why stop there?

Cubs' Hypothetical Run Prevention
HR/FB	HR	FIP	ERA
14.40%	231	4.60	4.15
11%	176	4.11	3.66
10%	160	3.97	3.52
8%	128	3.68	3.23

*HR total based on 1604 fly balls; ERA is calculated as FIP-0.45

This table, effectively, is meant to show just how important keeping the ball in the park is. If the pitching staff can turn a few of those homers into warning-track blasts, the Cubs' ability to keep runs off the board will increase dramatically. Perhaps playing in a pitcher-friendly place like Petco Park will actually be more beneficial than staying at home and dealing with the wind gods in Wrigley.

Any team that wins the World Series is going to need something(s) to go their way. That’s just the nature of short-series baseball, but the Cubs really only need one thing to swing their way: home run variance. It limits their greatest team weakness while accentuating one of their strengths. If their gloves and sticks live up to the billing, all their pitchers need to do is keep throwing strikes and hope the gophers think there are six more weeks of winter. It's simple, but that’s how the Cubs can win the World Series.

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