Tim

lol - the Cubs are 4th in MLB with 5.5 WAR from second base. The Yankees are 24th with 0.9.

By fWAR: Fergie in '71

So, by the (vastly inferior) bWAR, it was Sandberg in '84 and Santo in '67 before that. But that was just National League. To find a Cub as MLB leader you have to go back to Banks in '59.

When was the last time a Cub led the league in WAR? I don't think Sammy ever bested Bonds (and others). Weird. Fangraphs is down right now.

Just got in. Did I miss anything good? :)

Trust me...it only gets worse.

Hey, I love listening to Scully for an inning, just for the nostalgia his voice induces. A full game grows weary by the end. A series is awful because the same stories get repeated each game.

What do you think it is? Meatball-rage over the Cubs not having some beloved ex-Cub in the booth? Bitterness over Len not being party of Harry's family of the damned? Inexplicable longing for dead soul-smarminess of Steve Stone? combination of the first one + disdain for their analytics pushing is my guess Bitter White Sox fans is my guess.

Gives plenty of time to make a beer run after work, but before the game starts.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to once again state that I'd like the team to make their first move for 2017 RIGHT NOW and sign Greg Holland.

huh...mlb gameday updated with the ability to see more detail about past ab's

And they're getting two hit by someone named Seth Lugo.

When is part two coming? :) This weekend. I've been really busy with work. And I also am a volunteer coach for a local high school football team. And our first game is Friday. So I've been really swamped. I am going to write a smaller piece, about Willson tonight though. Hey, you're infinitely ahead of my writing pace lately.

101

A perfect illustration about Duke's ongoing commentary about fielding hard hit balls and how good Russell is at it. Schimpf, apparently, is not.

When is part two coming? :)

this just keeps getting better

It is a different park in day games.

omg does that sound white trashy

Hendricks got the guy to swing at a pitch way low and outside, but he poked it softly down the line. Perfectly placed to hit the ump in foul territory after passing the bag fair.

Man, Wil Myers is just all kinds of messed up right now.

Reasonably.

Towering fly ball that he had to hold up on. The ball bounced off the wall straight to the CF, so Fowler could only get one base. He probably could have tested it if there were two outs, but with nobody out holding up was the right play.

Rizzo off days are the second worst off days.

Yeah I just tried to look it up, but it was an article and not a thread so I think it was lost in the board crash. I remember the title was a play on 3-2-1 Contact, it was something like "Contact Is the Answer and The Reason Why Alcantara Will Succeed Where Others Fail". I still have it in the database archive. The title is actually, "Why Alcantara will succeed where Lake and Olt didn't". If you can forgive the html tags, here is the text. The Cubs' frequently underestimated hopes for 2015 rest on successfully transitioning multiple position prospects to the major leagues while yet again putting together an adequate pitching staff on the fly. And one of those transitions is already underway: Arismendy Alcantara. One of the biggest reasons for underrating the Cubs' near-term chances is simply giving up on projecting rookies. It's easier to just throw up your hands, say “well, they are rookies, who knows what you'll get from them,” and mark them down for nothing. Cubs fans are feeling especially burned by Junior Lake, who turned 64 games of 284/332/428 (1.2 fWAR) last year into 213/242/371 (-0.4 fWAR) through 89 games this year. A piece that many thought was in place turned out to be irrevocably broken. Not to mention Mike Olt, who got rave reviews in spring training to earn a starting job, only to come in with 139/222/353 (-0.7 fWAR) in 72 games before being sent to Iowa. So while Alcantara is posting a 258/351/455 line (0.8 fWAR) through 16 games with the Cubs, many are understandably reticent to feel comfortable that he's going to be a useful player in the major leagues. But Alcantara is different, and here's why in one number: 77.3. I'll take a quick step back. One of the most interesting recent trends in the saberfriendly section of baseball fandom has been the exodus from the box score. New streams of data (detailed play-by-play, PitchF/X) have given us a new appreciation for results that could most accurately be described as more pure. A double in the box score could be anything from a 397-foot line drive off the wall to a botched chop-bunt attempt. So we look at stats such as contact rate, ground ball/fly ball ratio, average fly ball distance, and we start to get a deeper understanding. 77.3% is Arismendy Alcantara's contact rate through 77 plate appearances. Contact rate, literally the percentage of swings on which a batter makes contact (fouls included), is a wonderfully useful little stat. It stablizes very quickly, so that we can be sure we are seeing “real” talent more than variance in incredibly small sample sizes, as few as 40 plate appearances. It's fairly consistent year-to-year, and changes in it usually are a leading indicator on changes in production. The 2014 MLB average is 79.4%, and the normal range tends to run from 70% to 90%. Guys on the low end of the range tend to either be high-power guys who can make up for their low contact rate by doing more damage when they do make contact, or they bring defensive value by playing demanding positions to make up for their offensive weaknesses. Compare that with Junior Lake in 2013. In July, he put up a 68.1% contact rate in 61 plate appearances, and followed that up with 68.1% again in 123 Pas in August. A deeper takedown of all the ways that Junior Lake was a magical luckbox of unsustainability would be beyond the scope of this article, and sure enough in 2014, he has been exploited even further by MLB pitching, dropping his contact rate down to 61.4%. Mike Olt averaged 65.5% in the majors, coming up empty 34.5% of the time he took the bat off his shoulders. It was the same story in the minors: Junior Lake 2011, 21, AA, 69.0% 2012, 22, AA, 67.4% 2013, 23, AAA, 73.1% 2013, 23, MLB, 66.5% Arismendy Alcantara 2013, 21, AA, 73.8% 2014, 22, AAA, 74.1% 2014, 22, MLB, 77.3% Lake's 2013 AAA, a total of 170 plate appearances, stand out as an odd outlier from the rest of his career, and one that I'd be fascinated to hear a scouting take on why, but that's also another story. We can be fairly confident already that Alcantara has always been better at making contact than Junior Lake. Will he stay at 77.3%? Maybe. There's two opposing forces at work in the future: the downward pressure of the league getting a better “book” on him vs. the upward pressure of his talent getting better as he follows the aging curve. It's a young man's game in MLB right now, but at 22, Alcantara should still have some development left. But he can afford a drop even if the book gets the better of him. His overall profile is one of a guy that should play up beyond his contact ability. He can at least credibly play either CF (2014 MLB average 264/325/397) or 2b (254/311/370), he should be a plus baserunner, and he's got a chance to continue showing average power, all of which give him plenty of margin for error even if pitchers knock his contact rate down to the low 70s. It would take a pretty big collapse from where he is now for him to be anything other than a productive MLB player. And given that he'll be replacing plate appearances taken by such sink-holes of suck as Lake (-0.4 fWAR), Olt (-0.7 fWAR) and Darwin Barney (0.3 fWAR), it's not hard at all to imagine him being a 2-3 win upgrade for 2015. Put enough of those upgrades together across eight lineup spots, five rotation spots and the various bench and bullpen jobs, and we could be at least credibly thinking about something we haven't seen at Wrigley in six years.