squally1313

9.5 up for making the playoffs, 4.5 up on home field in the first round, 5 back on Milwaukee (who's bullpen is quickly becoming a giant mess)

115 wRC for Happ. His bad baserunning is probably going to keep him under 3 wins unless he stays hot the rest of the year, but with the soft schedule I wouldn't be surprised if he keeps up his (overall) metronomic hitting ways (122, 119, 121 the last three years)

Willi Castro and Luis Urias (cut by the Athletics, playing for the Brewers AAA team) were offered as upgrades to Nico Hoerner like, 2 months ago in a whole article around these parts. Nico rocks.

PCA getting all the right results at the plate is encouraging. One of those guys that needs to see the ball go through the hoop I feel like.

Good point on the directional thing, so the implication for a team that might be expected to consistently underperform would be a team full of players who generally go back up the middle? Fair point but one that hasn't really been borne out in recent data. Below starts in 2025 and then goes back in time.

But wouldn't you expect a dip in BABIP if that was the case? League wide it's .291, same exact number as last year (where the difference between xwOBA and wOBA was only 2 points).

Yeah I've started to get a little hesitant to lean on it just because like, if everyone is underperforming then no one is, right? I'm a little comforted(?) that Dansby, Seiya, Happ, Busch, and Tucker are all in the top 76 in terms of the difference between xwOBA and wOBA, and, like you said, we don't have any of the 77 players outperforming their xwOBA. But still weird.

101 wRC on the year for Dansby. His xwOBA was .360 going into today, which is his career high either by that metric or his actual output, and 51 points higher than his actual output so far this year. I probably need a smart person to explain why league wide xwOBA is 11 points higher than wOBA, but even if you should be discounting xwOBA a little bit, he's fourth in all of baseball, per Savant, in the difference between actual and expected.

Cubs offense fixed!

'one weakness of this cubs offense is that they strikeout a lot' the cubs have the 4th lowest K rate in baseball

PCA is, per the rules above, broken, but the Cubs up 1-0 early

Yeah I mean, one game sample size and all that, but this pitcher is very, very bad (among qualified starters, he's the only one with a negative fWAR, given up the second most home runs in baseball, has a 5.42 ERA and is actually overperforming his peripherals).

You can't put up a .430 OPS, even if you're prime Andruw Jones out there. But the amount of value PCA brings to the table defensively means you can't just look solely at the offensive output. Obviously isn't apples to apples, but kinda works since WAR is a cumulative stat. In 2023 Castro had 409 PAs, put up a .750 OPS, very good baserunning (15th in baseball metrically, 31 SBs) and slightly above average defense and was worth 2.5 fWAR. PCA in 2024 had 410 PAs, so an equal amount, had a .670 OPS (down 80 points), very good baserunning (17th in baseball metrically, 27 SBs) and elite defense, and was worth 2.6 fWAR. Oversimplifying by a lot, but based on this comparison, what PCA brings defensively is worth like 80 points of OPS. Seiya Suzuki as a .670 OPS guy would be pretty downright unplayable, though, in a somewhat separate topic, there's no reason to think that's his talent level at the moment.

This is a good thread to remind everyone that these weird ups and downs are not Cub specific, they're just baseball. The Cubs didn't even make this, tellingly. Apologies for making you click through to X, feel free to ignore.

I think, conceptually, the only way to statistically say the offense is broken is by looking at what they did in August. Like, here are some assorted sample sizes of the teams offensive production in terms of how they rank league wide. YTD: 4th in fWAR, 10th in wOBA, 4th in xwOBA, 5th in wRC June 1-July 30: 3rd in fWAR, 5th in wOBA, 1st in xwOBA, 3rd in wRC July 1-July 30: 3rd in fWAR, 5th in wOBA, 1st in xwOBA, 4th in wRC July 1 -today: 16th in fWAR, 22nd in wOBA, 4th in xwOBA (hm), 20th in wRC August 1-today: 23rd in fWAR, 28th in wOBA, 7th in xwOBA (hm again), 26th in wRC So really you've got a month of them having at least (very) bad results. Should we give it slightly more weight because it's the most recent month? Sure. Is it dumb to throw away the season based on a months sample size when we still have a brand new sample size of a month that we basically haven't played yet? I kinda think so. If we spend September with bad results/bad metrics, and I'm having to defend them as like 'we'll, they're just playing out the string, making sure they don't get hurt'....I'm going to feel worse about their chances. But, since you asked for optimism/pessimism: Optimism: We're into September and Matt Boyd and Cade Horton's collective arms are still attached to their shoulders, offensive production can turn quickly and all signs are saying that it should, and I think the talent is more than sufficient on that side of the ball. Pessimism: By far the biggest: there are 12 teams, only one can win, there is a 90% chance it won't be us and everyone who shows up in the game threads when we go down 2 runs can gloat about how they were right to be miserable all year. More specifically, we have like 5 good pitchers, and that doesn't seem like nearly enough.

FYI https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2025-standings.shtml TLDR: you're mostly right

We have to go all the way back to 2023 to find a World Series winner that went under .500 during the year against winning teams. Before that, it was all the way back in 2021.

This is since 8/1. Obviously you have to buy in on the value of the expected stats, and obviously acting like the xwOBA is going to show up just in time for the three game series, but....there's plenty of reasons to hope.

We're just....short in the rotation and short in the pen, and both of those things were pretty obvious 4-6 weeks ago. A good bullpen (very statistical based analysis coming) is going to have 1-2 consistently good arms, and then 2-4 guys who are going to run hot and cold. We've got Palencia, Keller, Thielbar, none of them elite (27th, 30th, 44th in fWAR, 15th, 17th, 39th in FIP) and then we just....bet low on Kittredge and Soroka? With....maybe 3 healthy starters at any given point? This is also not exact science, but sort qualified relievers by FIP, and in the top 100, you have 20 pitchers listed as pitching for more than one team, which is a rough approximation for being traded (or dumbly waived at some point I guess). We got one of them, Kittredge, 62nd. And did basically nothing else besides a tenth guy off the bench. It wasn't enough.

I will say, to balance out my ‘things are fine’ schtick, it remains incredibly frustrating that other teams, when choosing not to trade for a good starter, went and tried to build bullpens of doom and we were like ‘um, the worse Rogers brother? The hurt guy?’

Sure, elder mostly sucks (check his August starts though, pretty sure he just shut down the Phillies), but we put up 16 baserunners and 7 runs in 9 innings against the starters in the other two games this series. 20 baserunners, 8 runs (7 earned), 16 innings isn’t some explosion but it’s…fine?

At the risk of thread copping or whatever, I’m just not going to let the soft part of the bullpen blowing a lead in the 7th inning really concern me all that much. They aren’t pulling Cade Horton throwing a no hitter after 5 for Ben brown and drew Pomeranz next month. Keep everyone healthy, don’t ride your good relievers into the ground, and see if you can get some of the struggling arms right. And, obviously, score more runs.

Sorry what

Their 60th pathetic horsefeathers loss of the year!

In their last 9 games against playoff teams they are 4-5