Jason Ross

Brutal, man. I feel for that guy so much. He has had injury after injury and he keeps coming back. He looked devastated. I hope a combination of fhe replay making it look worse and some initial shock from Amaya has made what is a bad ankle sprain look worse in the moment. But that reminds me so much of Alexander Canario's injury and that threw a massive wrench in his development and career.

Ugh. My fault.

Hasnt given up a run since July 9th.

Great game from Cade Horton. He is a dude.

But...do they have to?

That is a special type of hell. In all honesty, love my students. I get middle schoolers. We're super cool with each other. I could not listen to them butcher songs all day.

Middle schoolers are the worst. Source; I start my 15th year teaching middle school history tomorrow at 9am est.

The Cubs swing at 32.8% of first pitches, while the Brewers swing at 29.5%. The Cubs aren't leading the league in first pitch swinging, in fact, they're 11th. Also important to note, they have the fifth most first-pitch strikes thrown to them - it makes sense that teams who get first pitch strikes swing at them. There is no direct correlation between scoring runs and swinging at the first pitch. The Cubs lead the lead in runs per game and are 11th in first pitch swinging. The Brewers are second in runs scored and are 26th in first pitch swings. Arizona is 6th in runs scored and 27th in first pitch swings, the Phillies are 6th in runs scored and 2nd in first pitch swings, and the Tigers are 8th in runs scored and 10th in first pitch runs scored. They're pockmarked around. You're creating a narrative that the Cubs are somehow an egregious first-pitch swinging team when they are not, nor is there any evidence to suggest that first pitch swing% and runs scored are connected. Beyond that, guess what team watches the most strikes in the league? Milwaukee. Both teams get virtually the same amount of strikes and makes virtually the same amount of contact. And a good reminder, The Brewers aren't some magical, super consistent offense either. They had the 20th best wRC+ through May 31st, which means they were straight up bad offensively through the first 1/3rd of the season. They're hot right now, absolutely! But you're creating stories to explain events that don't check out. The Brewers have been no more consistent than the Cubs, swinging at first pitch strikes does not correlate with runs scored, and the Brewers stand and watch way more strikes than the Cubs do which balance everything out anyways. What is happening right now is far more to do with the Brewers having just a really awesome run of results. They've gotten some positive variance, they're getting some good results and it happens. The Cubs at the same time have had the opposite. But the theory you propose here has no underlying data to support it.

No worries! I was just trying to figure out the connection. I think we're all frustrated right now. I try to remain positive, but the amount of times I've said "horsefeathers this, enough baseball for me" as I turn the thing off in the sixth, is at a season-high currently.

They're pitching him slightly more off the center of the plate. But they did that in March through April too (more in and over the plate May-July) and he crushed then, so there is nothing in the heat map to suggest pitchers have just thrown their hands up in the air and said "pitch him like he's Nick Madrigal!" or that he should particularly struggle with this zone-attack. He's getting a pretty normal distribution of strikes, both in the zone and based on his heat map. It leads me to, once again conclude, this isn't something pitchers are really doing to Kyle to cause this. It could be finger-related, but it could also be typical slump that even elite players are prone to (and slumps can be mechanical, mental, etc, as well). Full year: March - April: May - June July - Now

wRC+ > OPS for this very reason - OPS does not properly weight his OBP and he was getting on base. He was 7% better than league average using the superior metric, so while the slugging has been down, he was a decent offensive performer in July. I'd obviously like that number much higher, but Freeman, Alonso and a lot of other really good hitters have months that sat below 60 wRC+. These things happen. On the respect aspect, I'm not sure that's true. He's seeing a little more than his average in the zone, up around 4% in August. But because we're at such a small sample size, if you just cut August 1st from the sample, it drops 2% and you're well within standard deviation, so I'm not sure that pitchers are really doing that. His two highest zone% were two of the first three games of the month. At this point we're just micro-slicing data into unusable sample sizes. The biggest issue I've seen is that his timing has just been a bit off. He's hitting a lot of things to CF instead of RF right now. Whether that's due to his finger (though he hurt the finger a month before the backslide, so I am unwilling to fully jump on the correlation bandwagon there), a bad month that just happens, a bit of mental frustration himself...I am unsure. Beyond that, most of his other stuff is pretty normal. The bat velo is down a bit too, but that's mostly over August and not really something we see happen with the finger injury in June, either.

To be fair to Tucker, most of the "awful" has been from August 1st - August 10th. His July wRC+ was a 107.

MLB organizations are literally in the business of winning baseball games. The people they chose to either helm their VP of Baseball Ops or their General Manager (each organization has a different name for these) has one job; win baseball games. If they don't win baseball games, these people are fired. The people MLB organizations pick to win baseball games are almost exclusively data-dorks. Andrew Friedman was an analysist for a financial firm. AJ Preller went to Cornell and graduated Summa Cum Laude. Craig Breslow with the Red Sox did pitch in the MLB, but he has a degree from an Ivy League school in molecular biophysics. You can do this for almost every person helming a successful MLB organization. If teams thought the "eye test" mattered, MLB organizations would be run by former MLB players exclusively not data-dorks from Ivy League schools or financial analysts. If MLB teams feel as though the best way forward in terms of determining wins and losses are through data and not the eye test, then maybe regular people like you and I, who's entire business is not winning and losing baseball games should have some hubris and recognize that our personal eye test is not applicable. And to clarify just a bit more, my post was not some eyetest vs data argument, you've created that stawman yourself. You're right, his timing is a little off. But Kyle Tucker, even with those struggles has been one of the best hitters in all of baseball. Yes, even the very best hitters in baseball have rough months. Jose Ramirez has been awful so far in August (78 wRC+), Pete Alonso was terrible in July (51 wRC+). Freddie Freeman was terrible in June (54 wRC+). Kyle Tucker's worst full month on the season is a 106 wRC+ in July. His August is trending towards being much worse than that, but he's got two-thirds of it to go and all he needs is like one big week. My post was about being positive about how good Kyle Tucker is, and that there is even some bad luck baked in. Instead, you wanted to make it about the eye test instead of the context.

In the nicest possible way, what does this have to do with the article? My article has nothing to do with "the team" and everything to do with "Ian Happ". It feels as though this is an attempt at a "gotcha" because the Cubs lost last night. With that said, multiple things can be true simultaneously; the Cubs are a good team, the Cubs are in a frustrating stretch of poor play, and Ian Happ is a good hitter that people complain unfairly about. In fact, the Cubs could have the worst record in baseball and every word written about Ian Happ here (maybe not the "give the Brewers hell" comment) would remain true.

Because they were micro-tweaking his swing. They have done a ton to it, but they couldnt just rip it down. By tweaking bit by bit they got him comfortable with each change. This is the result of very good coaching.

Oh I know. It's why I made sure to say you weren't doing that - it's also just a typical "gotcha!" argument I see when people want to fight you about fWAR, too! Yep. Usually good teams are at the top of both lists. There will always be variations, but that's okay. PCA right now is swinging and missing too often. He's doing a better job controlling the zone, post-ASB his chase rate and his swing rate are both down...he's just a little off. His sweet-spot% is down and his zone contact is down. He's getting hittable pitches and just isn't getting them right now. Normal slump, he'll be alright. His profile of high-swing, high-power, high-chase is a volatile profile. There will be times he will be unstoppable and others when it's just not there. Good news is that even with the issues he has a 107 wRC+ post-ASB so he hasn't been a pure disaster. His walk rate has cratered however, and I think a few walks and keeping that better plate approach will help get him better pitches in the zone.

Zumach recently said that all is fine, that there is an aspect of load management, trade gamesmanship and the like that has caused his sudden disappearance. It does not appear to be an injury, which is the good thing. Greg is really plugged into these things, so I'll default to him.

fWAR is not a direct 1:1 with runs scored. fWAR is an approximation (albeit, a pretty darn good one) of total value by an individual player which attempts to take a player's offensive value, his base running value and his defensive value, while factoring in what position that player plays, and boil it down to a (usually) single digit number with one decimal point. Needless to say there is a ton going on behind the scenes here. Team fWAR is adding all of that approximate value together to equal the value of the team adding yet another layer of "behind the scenes" depth. fWAR, by definition, is attempting to determine how many added wins a player (or a team) has over the anonymous "replacement level player" Run differential is simply just adding runs scored vs runs given up. They're not really measuring the same exact thing even if they're attempting to display similar information - who is better than who. I would argue aggregate fWAR is more telling than RD, as sometimes RD can be skewed (score 20 runs against a bad Rockies team and you can see a significant bump in RD, for example) more easily. As well, most of the time the best fWAR teams are about the same as the best RD teams, so while they may be a few places off, we rarely see a team in the bottom-5 in fWAR leading in RD. Not yelling at you for this, just thinking to the void, but it's these kinds of "gotcha games" that people play with data that gets people thinking the wrong way about it. I know you're just thinking out loud here, but when people play the "fWAR is dumb!" card. they tend to fall back on these arguments.

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Right now, optimism is in spare supply here in Cub-land, I know. The Brewers seem like they may never lose again, the Cubs offense hasn't been quite as dominating as they had been early in the year, the deadline brought little excitement (and with Michael Soroka's injury, more disappointment than intended); it's just pretty easy to see the negatives right now. With that said, let me offer up some good news; Ian Happ is fine and seems to be the guy we want him to be once again. In fact, he's been fine for a while, though the stats lied to you for a while. They played a rude trick on us, so let's figure out just how they did it, and hopefully, how to prevent this from happening again. To begin to pull the curtains back on Happ's data, we need to take a quick journey to the recent past before we jump to look at the current day Happ; back to just a few weeks ago. The Wrigley Wire, a Twitter/X account, had a post that found a decent amount of traction, making enough waves across the internet that it appeared in a very popular reddit post and even on our own North Side Baseball forums. The tweet consisted of a breakdown of Ian Happ's recent games. showing his poor slash lines over a handful of of different time spans. These numbers caused a lot of ruckus in these circles and people got their pitchforks out directing even more ire towards the Cubs left fielder. I've noticed over the years, Happ tends to be a bit of a lightening rod for Cubs fans, which is likely why this tweet caught fire in social media circles. My theory on this is that he's just not very flashy; he's a good hitter, but just "good". He's a good (for a left fielder) glove man, but doesn't make a lot of flashy or notable "web-gems". He's a good base runner, but not a speed demon. And because of these good-not-great skills, his skills in the aggregate can be easy to sleep on. Many probably don't realize that since 2022, he's accrued the 12th most fWAR in the league at the OF positions (more than Fernando Tatis Jr., Mike Trout, Byron Buxton, Cody Bellinger and Michael Harris II). He's almost always available, and he's incredibly consistent. Getting back to the original tweet, it's important to note that while the above numbers as posted by the Wrigley Wire are accurate, they lack context. Slash lines just report back to us what happened, but never tell us the process behind how we got there and that process is the key to unlocking the lie; it's in the process that we can better tell the future. I know that feels counterintuitive to us and that his "results" (or in other words, his triple-slash-line) matter, but in a way, they don't help us predict the future very well. You can think of it this way: If I flip a coin ten times and get seven heads, it doesn't mean that the 11th time I flip it, I suddenly have a 70% chance of getting heads—it's still 50%. The results don't inform the next flip. But, if I was using a specific way to flip the coin that was resulting in more heads, now that would inform the next flip. The way we do things matters more than results in this case, and they do for the protagonist of our article, as well. To add some of that context to Happ's numbers, I've compiled a chart looking beyond just his triple-slash lines to attempt to diagnose the issues Happ had been having. Is he making bad swing choices? Is it a mechanical error? Maybe his contact quality has dropped off? To get there, we have to go to the predictive portion of his numbers, his processes, his batted ball data, and his approach. And when those curtains were peeled back, the trick had been revealed; Ian Happ was having a good season. Compared to his career line, nothing over that 37 game strand suggests an issue, instead he was playing better than normal Ian Happ plays! He was making more contact and chasing less, so it wasn't an approach issue where he was swinging at poor pitches. He was also making more hard contact, had better exit velocities, and was finding more barrels than normal, so his batted ball quality wasn't an issue. He wasn't inflating his hard-hit% or his exit velocities with hard ground balls that were unlikely to land as hits. He was hitting more fly balls and converting more of those into home runs, suggesting his power was just fine. Then, you get to the BABIP... a nearly .120 split between his career BABIP and his BABIP over that span. Ta-da! The ruse has been revealed, it was bad luck all along! I know, I know, the "it was bad luck" explanation is the equivalent of the magician's gimmicked prop failing in real time in front of the audience, but sometimes, it really is just bad luck. Happ had the fourth lowest BABIP in that 37-game span of any hitter in baseball and he hadn't been playing like a guy who deserved that outcome. Had he been making poor contact, you could convince me that the low BABIP numbers were earned, but this felt like bad variance. What Ian Happ was doing should have matched his production. In a way, you could even argue that Ian Happ was having one of his best seasons ever from an expected data point of view. Between 2022 and present, his wOBA over that span is .337. Despite his wOBA this season only being .319, his expected wOBA is .350, the second-best figure of his career. There were always enough signs that Happ was playing pretty well, but because we tend to live in a results-driven world, it was sometimes hard to see. This brings us to the All-Star Break and beyond. Over his last 70 PA's, Happ has posted a 134 wRC+. The 30-year-old-left-fielder has a 121 wRC+ from 2022-2024, so this is a great start for him on the second half of the year. When I add his current batted ball data into the chart, it becomes a little obvious that he's probably playing a bit better than we should expect moving forward; he's making a little more contact than normal and finding a few more barrels, but he's also very close on a lot of his career numbers, too. This feels like a great lesson in context. I don't mean to sound holier-than-thou here—we can all get caught up in the moment and I have been guilty of it myself—but context matters. Happ's batted ball data was trying to tell us not to panic, that as long as Ian Happ kept doing what he was doing, he'd probably be the guy he's been. And, go figure, his triple-slash "results" (though, to be fair, his exit velocities, barrels, and the like are all results in their own right, though that is an argument for another article) are matching the batted ball data again. It's easy to focus on the results, and it's a lot harder to go deeper into the "why", but this is what good organizations do—they ignore the noise. As fans, we have more access to these things than ever ourselves, and doing the hard thing can help inform us. Right now, everything feels gross and doing that probably feels harder than ever. Nothing feels right on the North Side and Milwaukee feels like they are going to run away with the division. There's still a lot of baseball left to play and there's a lot of time to change that. But, if we can leave the crushing pessimism in the bag for a minute, we can see that things with Ian Happ are starting to balance back out. Sometimes the data lies to us; it performs magic tricks and we have to look deeper to find how the trick is performed. Sometimes, it really is just a streak of bad beats. As the Cubs look to put things together over the next few weeks, Ian Happ's "resurgence" (though I'd argue he's been fine for a while) will certainly help. If the Cubs can get a few other hitters back (like Kyle Tucker, Seiya Suzuki and Michael Busch) the team will be able to give the Brewers hell down the stretch. Maybe, just maybe, if the Cubs' oft-maligned left fielder can get the results he deserves (or even a little positive luck!) he will be seen as a catalyst over the next two months instead of an anchor. Don't let the volatility trick you, Ian Happ is a great player. He might never be Juan Soto, but he doesn't have to be; he just needs to be Ian Happ to be enough. What do you think of Ian Happ's 2025 season? Do you think he has had a good season? Let us know in the comment section below! View full article

Boras is not Kyle Tucker's agent. His agent is Casey Close of Excel Management Group. On the "good business front" I could not disagree more. Parades has been good, but also is tailor made for Houston, not Chicago, due to their fields. Cam Smith has been generally bad so far, posting a 95 wRC+. He's been brutally bad since the Cubs series and hasnt hit RHP all year. He may eventually be a good MLB player, but right now looks like a bit of a mess. And unlike when Shaw was struggling, under the hood stuff does not like where he is headed. He is in a spot where it is hard to pin point a real green flag; his K% is spiking and his BABIP is fine, meaning he isnt the recipient of bad luck; he has just been bad for a while. On the backend the Cubs got a hitter who has been performing like a top-15 hitter even with the bad run. Kyle Tucker is an elite baseball player. Parades is fine. Bellinger is fine. Cam Smith might be fine, or better. But only one of those *is* an elite player without a shadow of a doubt and we have got to stop worrying about trading good players to get elite ones.

Kyle Tucker - 142 wRC+ Cody Bellinger - 121 wRC+ Kyle Tucker - 4.3 fWAR Cody Bellinger - 3.2 fWAR Kyle Tucker has been 20% better offensively and been worth a full win more. The only reason it is this close is because Kyle Tucker has gone cold for a bit. In all of his full seasons, Kyle Tucker averages a 142 wRC+. which is what he's done this year. Cody Bellinger hasn't had a 142 wRC+ season since 2019, and he did it one time. Since his resurgence he has had a 122 wRC+, so these are pretty standard numbers. It should also be noted that Kyle Tucker has had bad batted ball luck. Bellinger has outhit his xData. This means moving forward we should expect Tucker to be better than he's been and Bellinger to be worse. Kyle Tucker wOBA vs xwOBA - .370 vs .390 Cody Bellinger wOBA vs xwOBA - .348 vs ,331 If Tucker had a .390 wOBA like his xwOBA suggests, he would be the 7th best hitter in baseball tied with Cal Raleigh. As is he is tied for 14th. Cody Bellinger is 48th, however if he had his xwOBA, he would be the 78th best hitter in baseball. Pay. Kyle. Tucker. It is not close between Cody Bellinger and Kyle Tucker. One of these players is an elite baseball player who has had bad variance and the other is a fine baseball player who has had good variance.

Cam Smith - 95 wRC+ Matt Shaw - 91 wRC+ Just leaving this here.

It wasnt as crazy, but I was a Dodgers/Phillies game back in 2002 that felt similar. Final score was 10-8. Both teams had multiple 3+ run innings throughout the game. Was a really fun affair, especially for someone attending who was neither a Phillies or a Dodgers fan.

Horton has barely pitched 250 innings combined with his senior year through today. He's far short of 150 IP in any single season.