squally1313

He's another bat, but you can't carry both of them, so it goes back to this comparison. I don't know where this .813 OPS/174 points higher thing is, he's a .796 OPS v Turner's .816 career against LHPs. The Cubs are 7th in wRC against LHPs this year. The main reason it isn't higher isn't because of Turner's 89 wRC in 54 PAs, it's because of PCAs 61 wRC in 83 PAs or extreme outliers like Busch at 25 wRC in 37 PAs. This is just mediocre RHB for mediocre RHB because we all watched 30 PAs in April and some of us got tired of it. If we someone want to make short side of 1B platoon a priority, we can do better. The below list (2023-2025 v LHP, minimum 100 PAs) is littered with LHP killers that are better than both Turner (84th) and Burger (147th).

The second one is fellow ex-Cub Justin Wilson

Does Father Time just have a scheduled meeting with the players in the offseason between age 39 and age 40? You realize that when talking about a sample size of 50 PAs so far this year and roughly 100 in a full season, comparing the 'guy who was good in 2022, 2023, 2025' to 'the guy who was good in 2022, 2023, and 2024' is pretty much the definition of flipping a coin right? It's a move for the sake of making a move. There's no real way of knowing if it would help or hurt the team because it would be a 50 PA sample size that would be largely BABIP influenced. I just feel like at times this board gets very trigger happy. Pressly sucked for 3 weeks? Cut him! Berti made an error at third? Cut him! Dansby or Happ has a bad couple weeks? 8th in the lineup! We'd be on essentially a brand new bench and bullpen if we just bailed on people for a bad sample size worth of PAs/innings, and we would have replaced those players with similarly flawed players. It's fine to just....not make moves. It's especially fine when the team is very good.

You said Burger would be a 'sure thing' as to production v LHP. That wasn't the case all of one year ago. Justin Turner is a career 124 wRC hitter against LHP in his career, better than 2025 Burger and career Burger. You're going to counter and say that he's 40, so we should just throw out the rest of his career because of 54 PAs this year, and then you want 2024 (where Turner essentially matched Burger's 2025 production and exceeded his career production) to just not exist because Burger had a bad year and Turner got 6 months older in the offseason. Ultimately Burger would be free and if you want to swap them out I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over it, but saying definitively that he would be an upgrade is just not really backed up by any material data set.

Yeah I don't know, I just don't really watch the game in terms of a pitcher profile and our performance against them, anecdotal or not. Last year we were supposedly 5th in value against both, top ten for both in 2023. Again, not sure how accurate those stats are in IDing the pitches, how they calculate the 'value' piece, etc. But just (lightly) challenging those types of claims that are in the 'Why Are The Cubs Uniquely Bad At This' vein....kinda my annoying quick.

I was quoting you Justin Turner 2022 v LHP: 109 wRC Justin Turner 2023 v LHP: 142 wRC Justin Turner 2024 v LHP: 119 wRC

I don't pretend to be an expert on this stuff, so someone tell me if I'm doing this wrong, but when I go to Fangraphs, offensive team stats, pitch level data, statcast pitch type value, the Cubs are 4th in baseball against cutters and 2nd in baseball against sinkers. So we may actually be in good shape for that type of arsenal?

So is it a 'sure thing' he'll produce against LHPs, and if so, why didn't he last year

Red Sox reliever A: 1.50/2.33/2.04/2.52 ERA/xERA/FIP/xFIP, choked out his girlfriend Red Sox reliever B: 2.16/2.28/2.15/3.25 ERA/xERA/FIP/xFIP, did not choke out his girlfriend

Chapman to the cubs, probably

Guys I’m worried about the offense

Dansby Swanson and Nico Hoerner as also consistent and dangerous offensive threats are like, top 5 players in baseball. I'd love that too but let's be honest about the kinds of players they are. The pitching picked up the slack? They're last in K rate over that two week stretch. To give them credit, they are first in walk rate over that stretch. 4th in BABIP is the key number here. The other team is putting the ball in play, and our very good defense (made up of, yes, struggling offensive players) is turning those balls into outs. There's a lot of ways for a team to win ballgames, there's a lot of ways for individual players to contribute to winning games. Wanting all of it, all the time is fun in theory, but things are going to wax and wane.

They won over 60% of the games. If you didn't think there was going to be a two week stretch where we ranked in the 20s for offensive performance, I don't really know what to tell you. The fact that we went through it with a winning record is pretty impressive. The thing about having a team of Dansbys and Nicos and PCAs is that even when our offense is 23rd (I have them 21st in wRC, but splitting hairs), our baserunning over that stretch is 8th, and our defense is 9th. That stuff matters, that stuff is valuable. Dansby will not hit like Carlos Correa, but Dansby will most likely outperform him in the aggregate. Same for Nico/Altuve. If you don't buy into the defensive/baserunning stuff, fine, that's a different argument and one we'll have to probably just disagree on. Being 19th in total offensive value (hitting plus baserunning plus defense) over 2 weeks is not a big deal.

I think generally when I see sample sizes that are clearly designed to highlight poor performance (or vice versa, I guess, but we don't see that a lot around here), I just inherently think it's cherrypicked . 54 PAs, 52 PAs, starting the team statistics after their 12-3 stretch, 4 series against teams over .500 (were the teams over 500 at the time? or are they now over 500? whichever one makes us look worse?) over a 6 week stretch....like, come on. Can we not use generally agreed upon cut off dates? End of the month, last two weeks, hell, maybe even since the beginning of the year (which isn't that big of a sample size!). And ultimately, in this selected sample size of 'since the start of the Rockies series'.....they're 8-5! The rest of the offense has been able to pick up the slack, because we've been winning 62% of our games. Should I worry about offensive struggles and what they portend going forward? Absolutely. Am I worried about Dansby (xwOBA 36 points ahead of his actual wOBA YTD), and Nico (third best 2B by fWAR YTD) because of 50 PA samples? No.

This team definitely has flaws and definitely has areas to improve to maximize their chances going into the fall. As mentioned earlier by maybe you, this was a team that even the optimists were expecting to top out around 88-90 wins, and that was before losing Steele for the year and Shota for a while. But I think what frustrates me about these types of criticisms, is that, at the risk of putting words in your mouth, the venn diagram of 'people complaining about their record against over .500 teams' and 'people disgusted by them dropping a game/series to a bad team' is basically just one circle. And from there it's like....where are these 60 losses supposed to come from? Should they just go winless against the 4-6 78 win teams they're going to face this year? The team needs pitching, I think they need it more than others do. The offense ran historically elite for a while there, and has come down to being some form of mediocre/average/good, depending on how you want to slice up the samples. Skubal is the best pitcher in baseball, Gore and Wheeler have been top ten this year, we've faced all three of them in the last week. Luzurdo is 13th, though he's struggling, and we get Skenes two days after that, so it's not letting up yet, but....there's only so many top 20 pitchers in baseball. It won't last.

Highest on base percentage and slugging in that stretch if you were looking for something less ‘nerdy’ but I get the sense I know where this is going and will just say that yes, clearly they don’t have the Clutch Gene or The Will To Win and there can be no recovery from those flaws.

Well thankfully there’s no ghost runner in October so no need to include this game in the otherwise normal ‘games since April 23rd against teams over .500’ sample.

12 games scattered over 6 weeks with elite performance in the rest of the games? Pretty textbook ‘looking for something to worry about’

As mentioned earlier, the cubs are 17-17 against over 500 teams this year, so they are doing exactly what you are saying in the last sentence.

The cubs since 5/15 have the most offensive fWAR in baseball. I don’t know what sample size we’re slicing and dicing in this argument but it’s probably fine.

Makes you wonder why those other teams struggle so much to beat bad teams as consistently as we do

Good for them? I guess we’re bad?

The cubs are playing at a 100 win pace 40% of the way through the season while receiving, due to injuries, 0.3 fWAR from their top two starters. understandably, people are very upset about this.

Wait, we’re going to extras? I was told we ‘bent over’ and lost.

Ok you take the Mets I’ll take the rest of the NL