Matthew Trueblood

The 2024 Chicago Cubs started hot. Now, though, more than half their season has been spent ice-cold. What does that tell us about the essential character and quality of this team, and what comes next? When you try to trace a path from where the Cubs are now to the 2024 postseason, you run into two related but distinct problems. Firstly, the team's record isn't very good. Their loss Friday against the Cardinals dropped them to 33-37 through 70 games, and they face a substantial deficit in the NL Central. Secondly, though (and probably more importantly, in the eyes and minds of fans), they have played very poorly over the last seven weeks. After an 18-12 start, they went 15-25 to reach that Friday low point. Take either of those things on their own--a sub-.500 overall record through 70 games, and a truly lousy stretch of 40 games somewhere in the season--and you can overcome them. The 2019 Nationals were 32-38 at one point. The 2021 Atlanta club was 33-37. There have been about two dozen division-winning teams who lost at least 25 of 40 games at some point, over the 55 years in which divisions have existed, including the 2003 Cubs. If we're even one tiny fraction more generous in drawing comparisons, we can note that Craig Counsell's own 2023 Brewers were 16-24 in a 40-game span from the very beginning of May through mid-June, which couldn't be much more similar to the Cubs' current jag. Put the two things together, though, and the path to a campaign the Cubs would call successful (based on expectations entering this season) gets narrow in a hurry. In the Wild Card Era (since 1995), 155 teams have started somewhere between 32-38 and 34-36, through 70 contests. Of those, though, only 35 got there in roughly similar fashion to the Cubs, with a winning record through their first 30 games and then a tumble to the wrong side of .500 in the ensuing 40. Of those 35 comparable teams, in these terms: 16 of 35 had winning records over their final 92 games 9 of 35 got to 85 or more total wins 15 of 35, like these Cubs, went 16-24 or worse in that stretch from team game No. 31 to No. 70; and Of those 15, only one team--the 2008 Dodgers, who snuck into the playoffs at 84-78--even got to 80 wins. In other words, based on recent history, starting hot and then going this cold for this long spells major trouble. It implies a pretty small chance of recovering and finishing the campaign as a winning team. The confluence of health, talent, and luck required to be a good team over 162 games usually eludes teams who get this deep into a season in step with the Cubs, to this point. This might be obvious, or not, but let's be clear about it: These data do not condemn the Cubs. Every team season is unique, in some small way. Picking out these endpoints (not selectively, to distort things, but arbitrarily, to make the data clean enough to analyze) gives us a sample size that seems significant, but it isn't necessarily so. No one has come back from as brutal a sag through games 31-70 and ended up winning 85 or more games in the last 30 years or more, but that doesn't mean the Cubs won't, for sure. On the other hand, it underscores the issue here. Even during that 18-12 start, there were games the Cubs let get away, in frustrating fashion. The mess the bullpen made in San Diego is the most stark example, but helpfully, they left another indelible memory later in that road trip, in Arizona. If the Cubs start 20-10, as perhaps they should have, this stretch doesn't pull them back into the data set drawn from here, because they're 35-35 even after this lull. They didn't, which means their margin for error the rest of the way is quite small. Many people disagree with me about this, but I view the Brewers as a legitimately good team, with staying power. Despite their own considerable pitching injury concerns, I think they'll wend their way from their current 41-29 record to a final one of at least 87-75, which would mean going .500 the rest of the way. Of the 35 teams in the small study above, only seven got to that number (actually, six, but I'm giving the 1995 Mariners some extra wins to account for the truncated schedule that year). Those 79-66 Mariners, of course, had three Hall of Famers at their peaks, in Randy Johnson, Edgar Martínez, and Ken Griffey Jr. Griffey missed half of the season with an injury, which contributed to their lousy record through 70 games. The 88-74 1997 Dodgers got truly monster years from Mike Piazza and Raul Mondesi, and enjoyed a healthy, workhorse starting rotation. Six pitchers combined to make 156 of their 162 starts, and starters pitched 1,014 innings for them. The 89-73 2008 Mets had three players with good Hall of Fame cases--David Wright, Carlos Beltrán, and Johan Santana--playing at their very best, with each producing at least 6.9 bWAR. You probably remember the 88-74 2008 Brewers, but in case you don't, three names: CC Sabathia, Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder. The 87-75 2009 Marlins were much more forgettable, but Hanley Ramírez and Josh Johnson each had the best seasons of their dazzling, too-short peaks that year. Even in the shadow of another wondrous outing by Shota Imanaga Saturday, it's hard to make the case that the Cubs have any player on the level of the 13 guys name-checked above, save perhaps Mondesi. (That was a very fortuitously timed career year, for Mondesi. He signed a contract that made him one of the 10 highest-paid players in baseball that winter, and then literally never produced even half as much bWAR in a season again.) These were teams powered to their impressive recoveries by true superstars; the Cubs don't have a superstar. Let's look, though, at the last two teams to rebalance themselves and end up as winning teams after starting with such a surge-and-swoon maneuver. They are the 2012 Oakland Athletics, and the 2021 Seattle Mariners. The 2012 A's are famous, in one very nerdy corner of the baseball internet. They're a team who believed in and evinced team chemistry so much that they seemingly willed themselves to a 60-32 finish after a 34-36 start. Powered by extraordinary part-time contributions from mid-June arrivals Brandon Moss and Chris Carter, they ran down the two-time defending AL pennant winners from Texas, beating them on the final day of the regular season to claim the division title. That team also had an edge on the rest of the league. Batted-ball stats were in their nascency, even inside many teams' offices, and the A's were the first team through the breach in the fly-ball revolution. They got a massive advantage that way, and their mixing and matching and clubhouse magic took care of the rest. They were also insanely balanced and deep on the pitching side, though, with 12 different pitchers who had at least 35 innings pitched (and as many as 181) and an ERA under 3.50. Let's not waste our time on the 2021 Mariners, an irreproducible burp of a team who went 90-72 while being outscored by 51 runs, thanks partially to winning 10 of their last 13 after being virtually eliminated. The A's are the only real model the Cubs can follow. Do the Cubs have leaders and great clubhouse guys like those A's teams did? There's some evidence of that. Dansby Swanson, Ian Happ, and Nico Hoerner were selected as the backbone of this team partially for their personalities and their leadership. They all wanted Cody Bellinger back because of his fit within the clubhouse, and it's hard to deny the similarities between Mike Tauchman and guys like Jonny Gomes and Brandon Inge, who drew such rave reviews for their impact off the field. Specifically, pitcher Brandon McCarthy and other members of the 2012 A's mentioned the way Gomes and Inge invited and set at ease young or incoming players, making them feel valued, at-home, and important. That group of leaders created a culture under which unproven players thrived and improved, and it powered them to many close wins and unexpected positive contributions. The hope, certainly, would be that the Cubs are getting the same thing from Swanson, Happ, Hoerner, and others, when it comes to players like Pete Crow-Armstrong and Michael Busch, but also ones like Tyson Miller, Porter Hodge, and more. The incumbents have to consistently work to uplift and empower their less established (but equally important) teammates. Maybe that interpersonal genius will congeal into a ball of light in the center of the team's clubhouse and bring them together this summer. As silly as it sounds to put it that way, baseball chemistry can be just that beguiling and delightfully unpredictable. There are some of the ingredients here that were present in Oakland in 2012. Maybe they just need the right catalyst to start a chain reaction. The troubling truth, though, is that the Cubs are missing the other half of Oakland's winning recipe. They don't have the mixture of good health and good depth that the A's had that summer, on the pitching side--or at least, we don't yet have any indication that they do. Nor do they seem to have the drop on the league, the way that team did. There's nowhere in either the run production or the run prevention ledgers where the Cubs seem to have some clever accounting tricks at work, the likes of which might turn them into a juggernaut this summer. Again, while the past is prologue in baseball, it's usually an enigmatic and incomplete one. The 2024 Cubs get to write the rest of their own story, even though the one they've authored so far is discouraging, and even though history is not exactly on their side. This team might get big performances from a couple of linchpin players in the second half, but there are no salvific superstars here. The key things to watch for, in the coming weeks, are a coming-together by this team that changes the way they relate to one another and the way they play as a unit--and then some glimpse of a greater genius behind the scenes than we've been able to see so far. View full article

It's Flag Day, and the Chicago Cubs welcome the St. Louis Cardinals to Wrigley Field for the first time in 2024. When they take the field, the flags waving above the center-field scoreboard will tell the story: this is a team flapping blandly and ineffectually in the breeze. Image courtesy of © Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports It's unkind to both parties, but the 2024 Cubs powerfully evoke former Cubs righthander Edwin Jackson, circa 2013. That was the first season of Jackson's four-year contract with the team, signed after the first season of the Theo Epstein-led rebuild as (they hoped and believed) a relatively high-floor innings eater. It went sideways right away. Jackson didn't break; he didn't undergo surgery and miss an entire season. He didn't crater and run an ERA north of 6.00, either. (That came in 2014.) No, in 2013, Jackson took every turn in the rotation, and he struck out 135 batters against 59 walks, in 175 innings. His 4.98 ERA was ugly, but his 3.79 FIP suggested that there was some bad luck involved. He was clearly a below-average pitcher, but he wasn't a trainwreck. He was, if possible, something worse: bad and boring. That's how the 2024 Cubs feel, 69 games into the 162. They're a talented team, coming off a season in which they won 83 games and had underlying statistics that implied they could have been even better. There are positive signs, including not only the remarkable Shota Imanaga but the progress the team is making in terms of pitching development, as evidenced by the campaigns Ben Brown, Jordan Wicks, and others have had. On the whole, though, they're stubbornly below-average, and it's hard to figure out how that will soon change. Their series loss in Tampa Bay this week laid bare the problems at hand. The Cubs showed power, speed, and starting pitching prowess, but they couldn't consistently put together threats and score runs, and they couldn't get through 27 outs of shutdown, shutout baseball. Thus, though they played as well as they have in some time against a team suffering from issues similar to theirs, they lost two out of three. Since their 17-9 start, they are 16-27, and in the last five weeks, the only series they won was the two-gamer against the White Sox last week. Rock bottom is miles away. So is the promised land. This team is very much in the middle, but it's not at all a happy medium. As was true with Jackson over a decade ago, this team is maddening, because it's clear that they could be better than this but equally clear that they don't know how to get to good from here. They're just good enough to lose a lot of close games, and not good enough to win any significant number of more typical, three- or four-run contests. The Cubs are: 24th in batter strikeout rate, fourth in walk rate, 23rd in ISO, and 20th in BABIP, settling them at 22nd in team wOBA 13th in starter strikeout rate, and eighth in starter walk rate, contributing to a ninth-place standing in starter opponent wOBA Eighth in reliever strikeout rate, but 25th in reliever walk rate, contributing to their landing at 23rd in reliever opponent wOBA 24th in Defensive Runs Saved If you cast about enough, you can find ways in which the team is extreme--mostly in bad ways. Earlier this week, we talked about their ghastly inability to control the opposing running game; nothing has changed since. They're also 28th in MLB in fastball velocity in late-game, high-leverage situations; they remain a little behind the league in that regard. Mostly, though, they come in 20th and 23rd in a lot of places, and it cancels out (and then some) the places where they come in ninth or seventh. There are elements of a better team here, but when you look at the big picture, it's hard to make the case that they're something other than what their record says they are. There are too many things they're not only not good at, but not even average at, and there are no important things they do best out of any team in baseball. Jackson was just starting a four-year deal, and the team was locked in with him when things got much worse in 2014. This front office, the top decision-maker within which was part of the group bringing in Jackson back then, needs to think hard about how they can avoid being cornered the same way they were with Jackson. Nominally, the team is committed to the likes of Seiya Suzuki, Ian Happ, Nico Hoerner, Dansby Swanson, and Jameson Taillon for multiple seasons beyond this one. Maybe they need to explore ways out of their investment in this particular core, since it's clearly not a good enough one to win the way they should expect to. Maybe they need to be open to trading Justin Steele next month, while his value is sky-high and they have a chance to get star-caliber talent in return for him. Taking any kind of seller's stance heading into trade season would be grossly disappointing, but at the moment, 'grossly disappointing' is following this team around, anyway. View full article

You can see it in the way he's playing, but you can also see it in numbers, for proof. With the Chicago Cubs struggling to produce runs and their season in some early peril, their big free-agent prize is doing his utmost to put the team on his back. Early this season, Bellinger was a fine hitter, but he didn't show much interest in fulfilling Full Count Tommy's glorious vision of a future with fewer full counts. He continued to take a highly selective approach early in counts and switch into a more aggressive (or, read another way, defensive) mode when pitchers put his back to the wall. It's not that Bellinger was just up there trying to work walks until he got to two strikes, but he only swung at a small pool of pitches: those he thought he could pull in the air, up and in. Arguably, though, he was too focused on that, and ended up underneath the ball too often, rather than hitting it hard on a line. Cody Bellinger, Through May 31 Split Lo/Med/Hi Hit% Swing% Promising Cont. % Hard Hit% Sweet Spot% 0 & 1 Strikes 23/19/58 45 17 38 28 2 Strikes 25/40/35 74 26 26 37 It's not quite fair to suggest that this approach wasn't working. When the calendars flipped to June, Bellinger was hitting .260/.323/.458. Given the overall offensive environment in MLB so far in 2024, that was pretty good, and that goes double when you account for the fact that Bellinger had to miss time in the middle of that stretch with fractures in his ribcage. What was working reasonably well for Bellinger, though, wasn't good enough for the Cubs, whose floundering offense needed a go-to guy. Some time in late May, Bellinger recognized that, and he flipped a switch. He's not passive in any way right now. He's decided to don the cape and be this team's superhero, if he possibly can. There are pitches Bellinger showed very little willingness to attack over the first two months, when he still had strikes to play with, that he's now swinging viciously at. He's in playmaker mode. You can see it not only in the fact that he's swinging hard and doing it early in at-bats, but in how he comports himself once the ball leaves the bat. Bellinger Leadoff Double.mp4 These changes mean setting his sights in different parts of the zone, based on situation and the opposing pitcher's stuff, and covering the zone more completely. It's working nicely for him, over the first fortnight of this month. Cody Bellinger, June 2024 Split Lo/Med/Hi Hit% Swing% Promising Cont. % Hard Hit% Sweet Spot% 0 & 1 Strikes 18/35/47 49 24 41 35 2 Strikes 27/46/27 71 27 40 47 It wasn't until the count reached two strikes that Bellinger cashed in for a game-winning home run Wednesday night, but he's had good luck getting much more aggressive in other big situations recently. Bellinger Attacking on 2-0.mp4 Now, there's an obvious but important caveat to consider: Bellinger's aggressiveness borders on counterproductive at times. He's been bizarrely consistent if you break his performance for the season down by month, but it's a patina of consistency that you can see right through with some close inspection. What's really happening is a rapid, unpredictable, partially inscrutable evolution, whereby Bellinger is trying to become more of what he knows his team needs him to be: a proactive slugger. He's hitting very differently, by getting after the ball early in counts and seeking more damage, even if that's costing him some of the balanced aspects that defined him last year. Month PA AVG OBP SLG K% BB% Hard-Hit% Sweet Spot% Mar./Apr, 97 0.226 0.32 0.44 16 11 37 33 May 98 0.29 0.327 0.473 16 5 30 30 June 43 0.3 0.326 0.45 21 2 41 41 By gearing up for a wider variety of pitches and locations with zero or one strike on him, Bellinger has seen his overall swing rate skyrocket, and he's more vulnerable to a good changeup than he is when he's in a more patient mindset. Bellinger Fooled on CH.mp4 This is still not the more wonderful version of Bellinger @FullCountTommy predicted we might see, but he's closing ground. If Bellinger can now adjust a bit more, to keep the newfound aggressiveness and better zone coverage without suddenly striking out a lot or something, he might have another second half akin to the one that made him the team's MVP last year. At the very least, he's materially changing, trying to get better by finding the hittable pitches early in at-bats. View full article

The hot rumor of this week is that the Chicago Cubs might try to acquire the cover athlete for this year's edition of MLB: The Show. It's the kind of notion that inevitably gets fans excited, but it also has a familiar ring of ridiculousness. Image courtesy of © Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports For the third time in four years, the Cubs have their fans painted into a corner. As was true in 2021 and 2023, this team entered this season with some measure of expectation and hope, and with relatively high stakes. As a result, the team has done its best to stay in "buyer" mode as trade-deadline season approaches, and fans are casting about for season-saving external solutions. This week, that means Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Pete Alonso. Here's the thing: the Cubs are a 32-34 team. That's the exact same record the Blue Jays have. Yet, in the minds of rumor-mongers, the idea here is that the Cubs are buyers and the Jays are sellers. Although the NL Central is eminently more winnable than the AL East, that idea stands right on the precipice of absurdity. Guerrero is not a free agent until after 2025. The Blue Jays face no more pressure to trade him than the Cubs should feel to trade Cody Bellinger. The Cubs have better playoff odds than do the Jays, according to FanGraphs, but it's a difference of degree (and relatively small degree), not a difference of kind. Using PECOTA from Baseball Prospectus, the two are in a virtual dead heat in terms of playoff odds. This is becoming an annual rite. Until the collapse that forced them to sell in 2021, the Cubs were treated like surefire buyers. That made sense at the time; it was the last gasp of the team's championship core. Still, even before they plunged into a losing streak that would have doomed anyone, that team felt like a paper tiger. Rumors that they would expend further resources to reinforce the group just felt out of place. Last season was an even more stark example. As late as July 20 or so, the Cubs were much more in a position to sell than to buy at the deadline, but rumors still focused on moves that would involve bringing in star-caliber players from teams who had better records than the Cubs did. This isn't hard to explain or understand. It's more fun to dream on acquiring stars and making splashes than on moves designed to improve a team's depth or ones that involve trading away short-term talent to build for the future. Still, it's emblematic of a strange problem that seems to plague Cubdom right now, from the ownership suite out to the bleacher seats. There's a bizarre sense among many people within the Cubs sphere that top-tier talent should always flow to the Cubs, no matter what the standings say or what other teams might be trying to do. During the offseason, this is slightly more plausible, although too many fans assume that other teams balanced on the line between going for it and rebuilding will happily slide to the latter side to accommodate the Cubs. As I've said several times, the Cubs should absolutely be more proactive in the trade market, and spend much more money in free agency. With a season underway, though, the team is much more locked in. They can continue to seek external improvements, but only the incumbent options playing better can heal what ails the Cubs in any meaningful measure. More importantly, it's ludicrous to keep hoping that teams exactly as good (or bad, as the case may be) will spontaneously decide that the Cubs should get their best players--or that the Cubs, absent evidence that they're going to turn the corner, should be interested in paying what it would cost to get a player like Guerrero. You have to earn the right to be a big trade-deadline buyer. That means either having a hot start and proving yourself one of the best teams in the league, or coming into the season as a clear and complete favorite in your division or league. The Cubs haven't done either of those things in any season since 2019. Right now, it's not even clear that Guerrero (whose defensive value is nil and who has hit too many ground balls this year to access the raw power still evident in his game) would give this team that much of a boost. He has some of the same flaws and vulnerabilities that have made Seiya Suzuki and Ian Happ so frustratingly inconsistent during their time as linchpins of the Cubs lineup, and bringing him in would not only cost a huge amount of controllable talent, but muddy the playing time picture for Michael Busch, Bellinger, and others. Jed Hoyer's group can and should have internal discussions about any talented player who might be available. The Blue Jays are no more likely to talk to them about Guerrero than they are to talk to them about Bellinger, though, and if the Cubs or their fans don't like that, there's a simple (though not easy) solution: the front office needs to build a much better roster, and then that roster has to play better. Until then, it'll feel pretty silly when rumors like these pop up. View full article

It's frightening to imagine where the Chicago Cubs' starting rotation would be, if not for their slender right-handed rookie starter. His stuff has always been good, but it's been impressive to see him throw so many strikes in his first bite at the big-league apple. He's far from alone in that regard, though. Image courtesy of © Albert Cesare/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK It's not shocking that Ben Brown has struck out nearly 29 percent of the batters he's faced in his first ride of the senior circuit. Although he only has two pitches on which he can consistently rely, they're two devastating offerings: a fastball that sits 96-97 and touches 99 miles per hour, and a power curveball that looks just like that heater to overwhelmed hitters. Much more surprising, though, is the fact that Brown is throwing strikes enough to rack up those strikeouts, and to keep runners from piling up on the bases. His walk rate is 8.8%, which is a hair worse than the league average, but it's felt more like a matter of feeling, testing, and trying to induce chases on close pitches than like a young hurler who ever loses contact with the zone. Because he doesn't have a third pitch with which to change lanes and force hitters to become more defensive, Brown has to try to prey on their aggressiveness. That's led to a few walks, but those walks are almost salubrious; they're necessary to threading the needle and getting strikeouts without giving up hard contact. For a pitcher with stuff as intense as Brown's (but also a spotty track record of strike-throwing in the minors, as Brown has), even average control is immensely valuable. He's thrown 84.6% of his pitches within 18 inches of the center of the strike zone, which constitutes a competitive pitch. That's almost exactly the league-average mark for pitchers who have faced at least 100 batters. He's throwing 90.4% of his fastballs in competitive locations, a full percentage point better than the league's average for four-seamers. Without a doubt, the Cubs and their young pitcher each deserve credit for that. Brown has had to work hard to get his control and command to this point, given the velocity with which he attacks on both pitches, his injury history, and the fact that control didn't come easily to him. As recently as last season, Brown looked too wild to merit a call-up to the big leagues. After being promoted to Double-A upon the Cubs trading for him in mid-2022, Brown walked 9.3% of opposing batters at that level between the second half of that year and the early part of 2023. When he went to Triple-A Iowa last summer, he walked a ghastly 16.2% of opponents. That was the key moment, though, because it was in Iowa that he was subjected to an automated strike zone--and forced to learn to drop the ball on the head of a pin. The Triple-A strike zone is shaped by technology, with two different modes of umpire assistance in force at different times during the weekly cycle of games. The computers believe umpires have been far too generous over the years. The zone at the highest level of the minors is minuscule; the global walk rate is 11.4% this year. Last season, it was an even more unseemly 12.0%. Those zones are, overall, bad for development, and they make for bad baseball. They're a superb reminder that we're not especially close to being ready to have robots call strikes for the best hitters and pitchers in the world. However, there's one redeeming caveat at play: Triple-A has become a crucible in which pitchers have to withstand severe heat and pressure, and the ones who survive it and matriculate to the majors have unusually good control by the time they come up. As you would guess, historically, rookies have been a bit more scattershot than the average pitcher when they arrive in the majors. These are guys who were in the minors, until now, for a reason, and for many of them, that reason is a dearth of control. They're trying to adjust, they're trying to handle the mental challenge of pitching in the big leagues for the first time, and they're working against a lack of reputation-driven help from umpires. In general, they throw fewer strikes, and have more bad misses than more experienced hurlers. Balls and strikes came under the direct influence of the machines in Triple-A at the start of 2023. Since then, we've seen a sharp change in the ability of rookies to throw strikes. Zone Rate and Competitive Pitch Location %, MLB Rookies, 2015-24 Season Zone % Comp Loc % 2015 48.7 83.5 2016 48.8 83.8 2017 49.9 84.6 2018 49.3 83.8 2019 47.9 82.9 2021 49.3 83.3 2022 48.9 83.3 2023 50.2 84 2024 51.1 84.7 Since the advent of the very strict computerized zones, rookies have had to wriggle through an unforgiving bottleneck to reach the majors. The only ones who do so are those who prove at least able to bite at the edges of the zone--and ideally, to consistently pound it with quality strikes. Brown is impressive, but he's not special. Right now, he's just another of several examples of pitchers who had to pass a more rigorous test to reach the majors than they had until last season. Again, overall, these non-human zones are bad for the game. Hitters matter, too, and if you're wondering why guys like Matt Mervis can put up such gaudy numbers in Triple-A but fall flat upon coming up to the big leagues, look no further than this very thing. Nor is having to fill up the zone or risk a great many walks the best way to develop many pitchers. Brown belongs to the class of those who have benefited greatly from this change, though. He just needed the control to tap into the ferocity of his stuff, and with each solid (and occasionally dominant) start he makes for the Cubs, we should all be reminded that his ruthless robot trainers helped mold him into this caliber of hurler. View full article

By now, it's clear to everyone watching closely that the 2024 Chicago Cubs will be defined by the tip of the balance on a thousand or so little things. Unfortunately, they're the very worst team in baseball at managing one of the biggest little things. Image courtesy of © Katie Stratman-USA TODAY Sports Four teams have surrendered more stolen bases than the Cubs have this season. That's the good news here. No team has caught fewer would-be base stealers than the Cubs have, and the Cubs possess the worst caught-stealing rate of any team in big-league baseball. Moreover, they've allowed 29 wild pitches and passed balls, a total exceeded by only three other teams. Add in their two balks, and they've given up 90 extra feet 87 times this year. That's not even the bad news, though. The bad news is that, of the eight times the Cubs have caught runners stealing this year, five of them were actually pickoffs. When a runner tries to advance or ends up in a rundown instead of simply being thrown out retreating to a base, the play is scored as a caught stealing, in addition to a pickoff. Miguel Amaya and Yan Gomes have only actually thrown out three of the 59 runners who have taken off against them this year. The dates of those outs were Apr. 8, Apr. 15, and May 6. Since that last date, the Cubs have played 30 games, and opponents have 31 steals. There's nothing more the pitchers can do for these two. They lead MLB in pickoffs, although that's made a bit easier by the fact that every team they see is itching and leaping to run. In addition to those five pickoffs that were also scored caught stealing, the team has seven straight pickoffs, the most in baseball. They're trying to slow runners down, but they're constrained by the new rules that took effect at the start of last season. Right at this moment, though, there's also little the front office can do--or at least that they should do. A trade for a stronger-armed catcher is certainly in order, but few teams are out of the race at this point in the season, and fewer still want to trade a catcher with this skill set, given the increasing importance of the running game throughout the league. Nor has this team done anywhere near enough to justify an expenditure of significant future value to get better in the short term. Right now, the Cubs shouldn't be thinking like buyers. Instead, they need to do some in-house problem-solving. Their options are extremely limited, but the winning one should be obvious: it's time to start pitching out. If the Cubs do that, they'll be pretty much on an island. The pitchout is dead; some stubborn nurse just refuses to unplug its life support. Right now, the league is on pace for around 40 pitchouts this year. That's 40 or so, in total, for all 30 teams. They might hit 50, which would mark a third straight season of increase, but it would also mean a seventh straight season with fewer than 100 pitchouts attempted across MLB. As recently as a decade ago, there had never been a campaign in which fewer than 300 were attempted. The above only goes back to 2008, which makes the trend look less stark and shocking than it actually is. The data is a bit less clean for the 20 years from the dawn of the pitch-by-pitch tracking era in 1988 through the arrival of PITCHf/x, but there were around 1,000 pitchouts league-wide in some of those campaigns. Obviously, there are good reasons for this. The stolen base became much less prevalent in the 1990s and 2000s than it had been in the 1970s and 1980s, and it got even less prevalent in the 2010s than in the 1990s and 2000s. Fewer dangerous runners means less need to throw an intentional ball in order to thwart them; that's one reason for the dwindling number of pitchouts. Another is that they don't work all that well. Sam Miller showed that managers don't guess right often enough, and that catchers don't get their man often enough, to justify pitchouts, back in 2013. Two years later, Ben Lindbergh documented the trend and quantified the gains most teams realize in caught-stealing rate when they pitch out, ending up at the same conclusion. It doesn't really surprise me, and probably doesn't surprise you, that the new rules and the attendant rise in stolen bases haven't begotten more than a few extra pitchouts. Sabermetric orthodoxy sets hard, just like the much less closely interrogated conventional wisdom that preceded it. Without those new rules, the tactic might have died out altogether within a few more years. The pitchout makes the sacrifice bunt look downright popular. Time to change that. The Cubs' catching corps, under the present rules, breaks all the normal math that makes pitchouts bad ideas. They've caught a whopping 5% of basestealers this year, and none in the last five weeks, with runners going more than once a game. The numerical framework that killed the pitchout assumed a normal distribution of caught-stealing percentage centered around 25-30%. The worst teams in baseball rarely dipped below 20%, which is closer to the average in 2024. Most teams saw opponents attempt a steal maybe four times a week, but not six or seven. In Lindbergh's piece from almost a decade ago, he found that catchers take about 0.1 seconds off their pop time when the team pitches out, and that they catch runners at about twice the normal rate (it was 52% in his sample) because of it. He also gave a "guess right" rate of 19%, from the manager's side. In other words, 19 percent of pitchouts coincided with steal attempts. Miller, though, also found that the more a team pitched out, the more they tended to be right about when to do so. Then, too, we can assume that the Cubs would be right more than 19 percent of the time, because runners are going against them so often. Let's bring the expected out rate on pitchouts that are also steal attempts all the way down to 40%, because Amaya and Gomes are below-average throwers. Given that number, a 20% correct guess rate would yield outs on 8% of all their pitchouts. If they do it 50 times the rest of the year, they'll only catch four runners. They'll throw 40 extra balls for no reason at all, and fail to stop six runners, despite the pitchout. That doesn't sound like an awesome set of tradeoffs. Turning a strike into a ball is worth about 0.1 runs to the offense. Of the 50 extra balls thrown, 18 probably would have been balls anyway, Still, that means that throwing 50 pitchouts would cost the Cubs 3.2 runs, based just on the impact they would have on the count. Based on the relative values of steals (around 0.19 runs) and outs via caught stealing (around -0.44 runs), Amaya and Gomes would thus have to catch four more runners than expected in that sample of 10, or the Cubs would have to guess right more than 20 percent of the time. The thing is, that's all perfectly plausible. If Gomes and Amaya did throw out four of 10 runners with the pitchout on, that would be four more than we should expect them to throw out without one, based on the progress of this season. If they throw out five of 10, then they've definitely exceeded their expected success rate by enough to justify the pitchout, because their expected success rate on stopping runners is in the mid-single digits, if it's not zero. Again, too, the team might guess right more like 25 percent of the time, at least until runners get wise to the tactic and stop going so often. More than the math, though, there's psychology and common sense here. The Cubs are enduring too many long innings, too many stressful situations for their pitchers, and too many helpless moments for their defenders in the field. Too many walks, singles, and fielder's choices are turning into doubles. They don't strike out enough batters to live that way. They need runners who reach base to remain potential outs via force play, rather than immediately transforming into imminent scoring threats. The team needs to assert itself against the running game. The pitchout is an imperfect, almost defunct way to do it, but it's what they have left in the options box. View full article

The Chicago Cubs have the record they deserve. They might be a better team than this, but as the games pile up, their identity increasingly lives on the standings page. Image courtesy of © Katie Stratman-USA TODAY Sports It hasn't been a matter of winning blowouts and losing nail-biters--although, to be fair, it also hasn't been the other way around. Sixty-five games into the long grind of 162, the Chicago Cubs are at the bottom of the NL Central standings, and they've been outscored by 16 runs. They're below .500, and based on the runs they've scored and allowed, that's where they belong. Most preseason projections had them a bit better than this, and many pundits projected them to be a little bit better even than those projections. There are some track records and some contracts and some tantalizing tools here, all saying that this team could be even better than the 83-win season they had last year. Not least among the evidence, of course, is that their runs ledger from last year said they should have won more than 83 games, anyway. Alas, nothing is quite working in sync for them this year. When the offense has been able to push runs across relatively consistently, the pitching has faltered. When the pitching has hit its sweet spot (both healthy and competent), it's been the offense's turn to scuffle. The result is a lot of close games, but not enough wins. All else equal, it would be slightly preferable to have things go the other way. More blowout wins would mean a greater ability to moderate the workloads of key relievers and injury-prone position players, and that might mean hanging tougher when both the offense and the run-prevention unit go out of phase at once. Running hot and cold as a team leads to better outcomes than doing so as individual units, moving separately. That said, the real problem here is growing more obvious to everyone watching the Cubs closely, with each passing day: neither phase is quite good enough, and as a team, they're vulnerable to brutal stretches of play like the one they hit about a month ago. To avoid being that way, they'd need to do one simple but very difficult thing: be better, in one phase or the other. This is where their unexpectedly deficient defense looms large, along with the pitching injuries that have depleted both their rotation and their bullpen for much of the season. As the offensive production has ebbed and flowed, the pitching's inability to hover around average during their toughest stretches has cost them some of the close wins they could otherwise have eked out. That was the story early in the season, even as the offense played very well and kept them well above .500, and it's been the story recently, as the offense has come out of what was a month-long fug of ineptitude. Given a more competent Kyle Hendricks, a steadier Héctor Neris, or a healthy season for any of Justin Steele, Adbert Alzolay, and Julian Merryweather, the Cubs would have more wins right now. They might well on the right side of .500, and right on the heels of the Brewers. That's not how things have actually gone, though. Nor have the position players been especially healthy, and nor have the up-the-middle defenders around whom the team was theoretically built played according to preseason expectations or the team's needs. With all that happening, it shouldn't surprise us much that they're where they are. The fault, however, is not in the team's stars--or, in another sense of the word, it is. The front office, with its conservative approach to spending (especially on high-priced star players), exposed itself to the risk of this kind of frustrating underachievement. The Ricketts family, with its reluctance to spend the $250-300 million that should be their annual payroll budget, forced the front office to think like a more constrained club (think the Brewers or the Rays), knowing they aren't really set up to match those types of teams in terms of proactivity and ingenuity. Eventually, the team might get into a groove, with both the hitters and the pitchers healthy and hot at the same time for a long time. That happened last summer, albeit only at the last possible moment to avoid a July sell-off, and it lasted until mid-September, giving them a good chance to win 90 games and claim the NL Central--though ultimately, they squandered that chance. Unless and until they do get synced up that way, though, they'll remain maddeningly below-average. It's a product of bad luck, but that bad luck is a residue of bad design. View full article

Another game got away from the Chicago Cubs in Cincinnati Thursday. As the team tries to find some momentum on the strength of better health and an offense hitting its stride, they badly need one more solid arm--anywhere on the daily depth chart. Image courtesy of © Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports When last Jordan Wicks appeared on a big-league mound for the Cubs, the rotation was so incomplete that it was unfathomable that they would not need him as a starter any time soon. Kyle Hendricks's struggles were becoming more obvious by the day. Justin Steele was not yet back from his hamstring strain, and Jameson Taillon was still ramping up. The Cubs were scrambling. In the final 10 days of April, alone, they used seven different starters. Paradoxically, though, it was that version of the Cubs that played exceptionally well and sprang out to a 17-9 start. Since then, they're 14-23, even as the rotation has finally found some better health and stability. The reasons for that have been on display over the last week, as Shota Imanaga and Javier Assad have each been bitten by the regression bug; Taillon has continued to fail at the crucial task of stemming the tide when opponents start a rally within a given inning; and Steele searches for the next step in his evolution after a peculiar ace-caliber 2023. For weeks, the Cubs struggled to score, and the thin leads handed off by the rotation to an often-shaky bullpen always seemed to disappear, irretrievably. Now, the offense has revved up its engine, but the starters are unable to deliver larger leads (or often any lead at all), and the bullpen is struggling as much as ever. Thursday night in Cincinnati, Assad got hit a bit, and when Craig Counsell was forced to turn to Luke Little and Porter Hodge in high-leverage situations, they both failed to keep the lid on the game. Kyle Hendricks, still admirably trying it, couldn't even keep the game close when he was brought in to try and clean up Hodge's mess. Though they're now making a habit of calling up impressive-looking, hard-throwing homegrown relievers, the Cubs still haven't had much success developing them into actually useful pitchers. Jeremiah Estrada is having a marvelous season, but only after having been waived by Chicago and picked up by the Padres. Meanwhile, Keegan Thompson remains in the wilderness. Daniel Palencia and Adbert Alzolay both got sidetracked by injuries early on this year, but Palencia's inconsistency and unreliability pre-date the flareup that now has him shelved. Hodge and Little look like the latest in a parade of talented throwers who aren't going to translate that into skilled, productive pitching--at least in the short term, and perhaps not until they're wearing another uniform in a few years. That's what makes Wicks so important. He's on the cusp of a return, be it this weekend or after one more rehab appearance with Triple-A Iowa. Based on his performance before landing on the injured list, there are reasons for both optimism and caution. Yes, he's throwing harder and has a revised arsenal this year, but he wasn't actually piling up outs or keeping opponents off the board all that effectively before he got hurt. Given that fact, maybe it makes the most sense to insert him right into the bullpen. He could be a direct replacement for Little, in the short term, able to give the team more length when needed and certainly more capable of getting people out, for however long he's asked to do so. Having an actual lefty for medium-leverage situations--one more trustworthy than Drew Smyly and Little--would take some pressure off Mark Leiter Jr., who's been overworked and overexposed again this year. One could make an equally compelling case, of course, for unplugging Assad and plugging him back in, via a bullpen reset. The portly starboard slinger has run into some issues lately, and given his stuff, that's not a huge surprise. At the same time, Assad is a competitor and a command artist, and he's likely to get back on track soon. It might just make sense to let him slide into relief and pare down his arsenal for a few weeks, before bringing him back to the rotation when next a slot opens up. The most logical, obvious move, though, is to move Brown into high-leverage relief and set Wicks up as the fifth starter for the long term. Brown is a risk as a back-end reliever; he's going to give up home runs. He's also racked up strikeouts at an awesome rate early in his big-league career, though, and given the combination of his fastball velocity and the unique traits of his curveball, that doesn't figure to abate any time soon. Sliding him into the pen--with the mandate being that he keep exploring ways of locating and mixing his two great pitches to minimize the risk of giving up power--is the natural move. He could finish this season as the team's closer, and even in the meantime, the fit of skill sets and roles that would result from Wicks being the fifth starter and Brown taking Hodge's place in the bullpen is too good to ignore. None of this needs to be permanent. As we've previously reported here, Hendricks will reach 10 years of MLB service on June 26, at which point the Cubs can release him without interfering with his chance to claim full MLB pension and other benefits for the rest of his life. Given the way things have gone for him this year, that seems almost certain to happen, so another place in the staff will open. For the next two or three weeks, though, Wicks will be an important part of the team's plan, as they try to work around two highly-paid low-leverage long men they can't trust; a rotation full of players doing daily battle with the regression monster; and a deficient back end of the pen. They have to survive this tough stretch to advance into July as a serious contender, and Wicks might be the help they need to do so. View full article

He's not just the Chicago Cubs' WAR leader, at this point. He's an outright leader. He's not just a valuable role player; he's their MVP. Mike Tauchman was the reason the Cubs stayed afloat so long in 2023, and in 2024, he's been their heartbeat. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports It was just cute, at first. It was a nice little story. Mike Tauchman was a nice little complementary piece on a scrappy Cubs team, and he was from Palatine, Ill., so there was a nice little zing of extra emotion attached to him finding success with the club. He gave the media the saccharine storyline denied them when the Trey Mancini signing fell flat. Tauchman's arrival (and the way he quickly assumed a meaningful role) took some of the sting out of the Cody Bellinger injury last May and June. As that season progressed, though, Tauchman became unexpectedly indispensable. His availability and his broad-spectrum competence allowed the Cubs to use Bellinger at first base for much of the second half. He came up with huge at-bats throughout the month of July: a two-run, game-tying, ninth-inning double in Milwaukee; a homer and two RBI doubles in a night game against the Nationals at Wrigley Field; a leadoff single and a bases-loaded walk in the fifth-inning rally on the South Side a week later that sealed the Cubs front office's decision to buy instead of selling. Then, there was that magical catch to save and win a game in St. Louis. Tauchman lacks significant power, which puts a ceiling on his potential production and shrinks his margin for error. When he's not getting on base at an exceptional rate, his utility becomes fringy. He's now 619 plate appearances into his Cubs career, though, and he owns a .366 OBP. Even better, when the stakes get higher, he gets better. When you think of Tauchman, you think of patience and pitch recognition, and with good reason. He excels at fighting off tough pitches, and at discerning balls and strikes. This season, throughout MLB, there have been 12 plate appearances leading off a game in which the batter forced the starting pitcher to throw five different pitch types--to empty their arsenal one plate appearance into the game. Two of them were Tauchman, at the end of last month, against Miles Mikolas of the Cardinals and Colin Rea of the Brewers. He grinds his way through every trip, giving his teammates extra looks at a pitcher, wearing that pitcher down, and increasing his own chances of reaching base. To that end, Tauchman transforms as a hitter when the count reaches two strikes. Before that point, he covers the whole strike zone, but he doesn't get aggressive, at all. His swing rate is 41.7%, and he only chases 17.2% of pitches outside the strike zone. With two strikes, though, Tauchman goes into protect mode. He chases 32% of pitches outside the zone, and swings at 61.5% of all offerings, refusing to give away an at-bat by taking a third strike unless he's completely fooled. That's most of the time, anyway. In low- and medium-leverage situations, with fewer than two strikes, Tauchman swings just 40.4% of the time. In high-leverage situations, in the same counts, that number shoots up to 53.8%. In fact, overall, Tauchman becomes a different hitter (though, remarkably, no more prone to expanding his zone) when the stakes get high. Leverage Swing % Chase % High 54.6 19 Medium 47.9 20.2 Low 47.8 24.8 The ferocious energy that bursts out of him when he comes up clutch--the outbursts we saw when he stole that home run last July, or when he homered to tie the game late on Sunday Night Baseball in Boston earlier this year--stays well under control. It's there, though, and it subtly transforms him. You can get away with pitches to him in relatively unimportant situations that he will punish violently if it's time to cut it loose. Tauch to Tie.mp4 In his paean to Ted Williams in the wake of Williams's last game at Fenway Park, author John Updike wrote this: "Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money." Tauchman is hitting .476/.520/.762 in high-leverage situations this year. Is he, then, a vulgarity? No. What Updike said carried real merit, and echoes through the six-plus decades since for that reason. It overlooked something about the interaction between human nature and the gut-wrenching difficulty of hitting big-league pitching, though. Tauchman couldn't sustain the approach he uses to get on base so frequently and grind down opponents so effectively if he were even this small fraction more aggressive all the time. He might have a harder time staying healthy, since his swing gets a bit more violent in those situations. He might also just not be able to consistently barrel the ball with the same precision, owing not to a character defect, but to the fact that adrenaline naturally heightens a person's concentration and sharpens their vision. Tauch Off.mp4 If the balance of this season goes the way the Cubs hope it will, Tauchman won't finish the campaign as their top WAR guy. In a perfect world, he probably wouldn't start against most left-handed pitchers. Still, he's indispensable--still, again, and for the foreseeable future. Craig Counsell surprised some by revealing, late in spring training, that he had told Tauchman not to sweat about his roster spot when the outfielder showed up in mid-February. By now, it should be obvious why he did that. Tauchman adapts and excels by knowing and managing situations, and he's right at the center of what the Cubs want to do this year. View full article

After mashing his 11th home run Tuesday night, Christopher Morel is on pace to approach 30 for the Cubs this season. His overall numbers remain insufficient to his role as their cleanup hitter, though, so let's finish digging into the idea that he's been grossly unlucky. Ugh. It's hard to imagine a clearer demonstration of how hard being a great hitter in MLB is than this. The team, fans, and analysts have all rightly commended Morel for being more under control this year, especially in deep counts and with runners on base, which was the situation here. He still gets off a great swing against a fine pitch on the outer edge, and crushes it 405 feet to dead center field. But, there's that admonition against hitting it a long way in the air to center instead of to left, again. This time, it's because you have to clear the wall by more than you used to (in most places and with most center fielders), because the defense will take back your homers if you let them. But could Morel really have hit this any better, without being the lunging, strikeout-prone, pitchable hitter he was for too many long stretches the last two years? It's hard to imagine how. Last video: Morel 15.mp4 We've come full circle. This is much how his first couple bad breaks of the year looked. He hits it sharply, and again, this is a "high" ground ball, which has some expected utility. Still, it's a ground ball to the pull side. Defenses are ready for those, and it's hard to chalk them up as bad luck when they get gobbled up--especially when hit right at a defender, more or less. It's time to synthesize some of what we've seen here. I think I'd sum it up thusly: Don't set too much store by expected batted-ball stats, period. Don't expect Morel to get better just because he's due to do so, because I don't think he is. That said, do expect Morel to improve, if he continues to evolve and learns to lay off or adjust his swing a bit more on the ball in and off the plate. He has a unique swing. He gets the barrel way out in front, the same way great sluggers like Nolan Arenado do, but Arenado has learned to consistently elevate and pull the ball. He's similar to Willy Adames, whom he loves and respects, but like Adames, he can end up with deep funks and ugly OBPs when he doesn't have his approach perfectly tuned. Given the current bat path he uses, Morel will continue to hit into bad "luck" on a lot of pitches inside. We can see some of the reasons, but not all of them, absent more data on batted-ball spin and attack angle (which might well become public in the next year or two). He has to cover the whole plate, because his whiff rate will always be too high for him to simply cut it in half and work back from deep counts without running up his strikeout rate. Morel will do better, though, if he either tweaks that swing path or gets more selective on pitches that run off the plate inside. Changing his visual cues or mindset might also help him get around and pull the ball more sharply when it's on the outer third, too, and that's a vital component of whatever changes he'll continue to undertake. A few more of his well-struck fly balls have to go to left and left-center, rather than to center and right-center. We've seen evidence of him doing all of that over the last week or two, which has helped him come out of his latest slump and approach the production the team needs from him. That has to continue, but the signs point in exciting directions. Morel might not have gotten as unlucky as some stats say, but he's also not a finished product--and a breakout might be around the corner, if more because of an evolving process than because of a simple course correction in outcomes. View full article

It's early June, and the Chicago Cubs' everyday cleanup hitter is hitting .195/.307/.371. Under normal circumstances, this would be a daily topic of anguished, even livid conversation. This seems to be a different case, though, because of who the player is and how he's come by this stat line. Let's dig deeper on it. Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports Almost everywhere you turn in the midst of conversations of everything going wrong for the Cubs right now, you hear the name Christopher Morel. His defense at third base has been genuinely problematic this year, and the decision to install him as the regular at that position looks pretty bad, but he's made some improvements since Opening Day, so the agreed-upon course for the moment there is patience. As Morel's offensive struggles pertain to the team's overall difficulty in consistently scoring runs, though, the conversation is even more complex. Seasoned baseball viewers have seen a more disciplined, controlled Morel in the batter's box this year. Without a doubt, he's taking better, smarter at-bats. He jumps at the ball much less often than was the case a year ago, and he did so less then than one year earlier. Statheads will note not only his elite raw swing speed, according to new bat-tracking data available via Statcast, but the numbers that show he's been very unlucky this season--in essence, that more of his batted balls should have gone for hits than have actually done so, based on their exit velocity and launch angle. Yet, some fans also cast a more skeptical eye on Morel, and on those who would hype his burgeoning skills despite his ugly overall numbers. They point out, firstly, that he remains one of the streakiest hitters you'll ever see. Even while looking more competitive than he did during a hideous slump last summer, Morel has already gone through a funk in which he not only didn't produce hits or get on base, but rarely even put the ball in play. He goes dormant for longer periods than you would like to see a cleanup hitter do, and for those disinclined to accept broad-brush numbers in making a granular assessment, the expected batted-ball data fails the sniff test. Let's meet in the middle, and engage with Morel's very strange season to date on the simplest terms possible. He's tied for 15th in MLB this year, with 15 outs on batted balls that had an expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) of .500 or higher when they left his bat. What if we just watched them all, to try and digest what they're telling us and hone our projections of Morel's future production? We'll start at the very beginning. Here's one from the very first weekend of the season, in Texas. Morel 1.mp4 Mm. Ok. Before we talk about that one at all, here's another, from the Cubs' opening series at home, against the Rockies. Morel 2.mp4 Ok, these aren''t that impressive so far, are they? Each is hit at more than 95 miles per hour, but they're just grounders to third base. The expected outcomes model is catching something real, in that they're well-struck and (this is a subtle but important factor) are what we might classify as "high" ground balls. They come more or less straight off Morel's bat, before gravity goes to work on them, rather than being hit downward and bouncing within 30 or 40 feet of the plate. I did research on this going back almost half a decade, and it's a real consideration. Higher grounders, as you'd guess, have a better chance to get through or force defensive mistakes than do choppers. Still, neither of these had any chance to be more than a single, and it doesn't even feel that unjust that they went for outs instead. Let's take a look at the next time he was cheated, in San Diego a week later. Morel 3.mp4 Line drive this time, but similar story. Morel hit that hard, but he didn't blister it or lift it much. It could have been a single. Despite the expected batted-ball data, it doesn't feel like it should have been one, exactly, and it wasn't splitting any gaps. The next day, he hit one considerably better, with some air beneath it. Morel 4.mp4 This, at last, is the kind of batted ball we're really thinking of when we say Morel has been unlucky, right? It jumped off his bat at 108 miles per hour, with some loft on it. It went to the biggest part of the park, in a setting (April in San Diego) that isn't terribly conducive to getting extra carry on the ball, but there's not much more you can ask of a hitter than to hit the ball that way. Maybe we'll come back to this one for further discussion later, but hitting the ball that hard and on a high line is surely a sign of a good (or at least gifted) hitter. Later in that road trip, as Morel settled into what would be a long and ugly slump, he nearly had a slump-preempter. Morel 5.mp4 Again, the expected metrics are being a little bit friendly, right? The probability of this ball (hit only 94 miles per hour) being any kind of hit is tiny. The thing is, if it's a hit at all, it's gonna be a home run. And look, it almost was one! Hitting long, high fly balls to the pull field is the single more valuable thing a hitter can do, before we bake in the costs (usually, a lot of extra strikeouts) of an approach centered around hitting them. Morel did that here. He wasn't rewarded. Gosh, that West Coast trip was long. The day after the above, in Arizona: Morel 6.mp4 To me, this is one of the most tricky and telling batted balls we'll study in this sequence. Morel got way out on (and a bit around) a ball off the plate inside, and he kept it fair, hit it squarely, elevated it at 106 miles per hour. If the ball is 20 feet to either the left or the right, it's a sure double, and if it's even 10 feet in either of those directions, it's a very tough play for the left fielder. At the same time, look at that swing. Was there any version of it where he could have hit that ball either 20 feet to the left or to the right? To me, it looks like he either could have yanked it foul or hit a much less potent strike to another part of the field. This was a good pitch, and Morel put a freakishly good swing on it, but that might not quite mean that he deserved any more than he got out of that swing. The thing about Morel slumps is, he gets going so badly that he doesn't even have bad luck. That lineout in Arizona came on Apr. 15. Over the next fortnight, he went 7-43 with 13 strikeouts and zero home runs. He only managed two doubles, and his OPS was barely over .500. He didn't have another hard-luck out, by our measurements, until Apr. 29. Morel 7.mp4 See, and that's not the kind of hard luck we've been hunting either. Morel got jammed badly. He still showed good bat speed and muscled a looping, hopeful liner toward right-center, and balls hit that softly but with that kind of loft very often drop into the grass beyond the reach of the infielder. When you think of bad luck, though, this isn't what it looks like. For today, we'll pause this revue here. Tomorrow, we'll tour the other eight instances in which Morel got jobbed, according to the expected numbers. At this halfway point, though, it's worth making a few observations: Some guys seem to hit screaming line-drive outs that look much more like the bad luck we picture when we say the words. Seiya Suzuki is a good example. Morel runs into misfortune at a different angle, figuratively and literally. Almost all of these came on inside pitches. That's something to watch, especially given the way Morel's swing works. He loves to get his arms extended. Maybe we need to give a bit more credit to pitchers when they successfully jam the very jammable Morel, and maybe Morel needs to cut down his swing rate on those offerings on the inner edge--and beyond it. Morel is a pivotal part of the Cubs' medium-term organizational plan, one way or another. This is an important topic to understand as best we can, so it's worth another round of conversation and breakdowns tomorrow. View full article

Absolutely no one thinks about managerial aging curves in MLB. The very notion of one seems almost nonsensical. The thing is, it might be a thing--and that might mean trouble for the Chicago Cubs. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports Like player aging curves, naturally, managerial aging curves are imperfect descriptions of individual performance. There are guys who peak early and guys who bloom late, on the field and on the top step of the dugout. In general, though, great managers were and are younger than you might realize. There's a plasticity to your thinking and a willingness to change around age 40 that dissipates as you enter and travel through your 50s. It's also much easier to relate to players (most of whom are between 22 and 32) when you're roughly 42 than when you're 52, and easier then than when you're 62. Craig Counsell will turn 54 this August. He has a youthful look that is only possible, at this age, in 2024, but that's his age. That's notable, because: Sparky Anderson took over the Cincinnati Reds at age 36. He had his last 90-win season, with the Detroit Tigers, at age 53, in 1987. Earl Weaver took over the Baltimore Orioles at age 37. He retired after the 1982 season, at 51. He made a brief return later in the decade, but without success. Counsell is entering an age range in which managers tend to struggle, in the middle of their 50s. The best and most successful managers (other than Counsell himself) of the last two decades--A.J. Hinch, Alex Cora, Dave Roberts, Brian Snitker, Terry Francona, Bruce Bochy, and Dusty Baker--all are either younger than Counsell or considerably older. Again, aging curves don't even apply smoothly to players, for whom physical changes during one's peak seasons have huge and obvious ramifications. At the moment, it looks like anyone who bet against Aaron Judge aging well after his historic 2022 season just because he was already past 30 were wrong to do so. Justin Verlander is still going strong in his 40s. Even more plainly, manager aging curves are going to be noisy, especially because we live in an era of better physical health and more continual intergenerational interaction than those of, for instance, Anderson and Weaver. The Cubs found their World Series-winning manager when he was already past 60. The last three World Series-winning skippers have been 65, 73, and 68 years old, respectively. However, when a manager who has had success in the past begins running into more adversity with teams as he enters his mid-50s, we have to pay some extra attention to it--just as we would if an All-Star shortstop's production cratered just as they hit 30. It's possible that both parties recover, and that their difficult stretch proves to be just that, but it's harder to dismiss as inconsequential at 30 (for a player) or 53 (for a manager) than at 25 or 40, respectively. That makes this a very uncomfortable moment for the Cubs. While he had a tricky gauntlet to run and still managed (no pun intended) to pull out an NL Central title in 2023, that final season in Milwaukee was arguably his worst at the helm of the Brewers--not in terms of achievement, but in the way he handled the clubhouse and pulled levers within games. That was the season after he had failed to hold the team together in the wake of the Brewers trading Josh Hader in uly 2022. At the time, I was inclined to write off those issues as the result of an uncomfortable relationship between ownership, the front office, and the field staff, largely beyond his control. David Stearns left the Brewers to run the New York Mets at the end of last season, but before that, he'd stepped back into semi-resignation, after the team prevented him from making that very move to New York a year sooner. It was an awkward situation, especially in the shadow of the Hader trade, and the contentiousness that arose between the team and ace Corbin Burnes last spring exacerbated things--again, in a way not within Counsell's influence. Now, however, there's more to consider. As was true last year in Milwaukee, Counsell has been given a deeply imperfect roster and asked to turn it into a playoff team in Chicago--but this time, we can assume that he had as much influence over the construction of that roster as any manager in baseball. The ink on his record-setting contract is barely dry. He was vocal all winter about the way he expected things to work. He was in a position to succeed. Yet, two months in, Counsell is failing--outright, this time, instead of on some vague level rooted in very high expectations. The Cubs are below .500, and they've lost 14 of their last 19. Not since late 2015, after the Brewers had fallen far out of the race, has a Counsell-led team gone 5-14 over any stretch of 19 games. His trademark was the exceptionally strong finish, which he effected in 2018, 2019, and 2023 in breathtaking ways, but the secret ingredient to that success was an exceptional ability to avert long stretches of lousy play early. Counsell's teams would enter September within striking distance and then get hot, and the rest became history. Again, though, none of those teams ever lost 14 of 19. On Friday, Counsell used Patrick Wisdom (defensibly) as a pinch-hitter for Mike Tauchman, against a left-handed Reds reliever. At the end of the game, though, he then used Nick Madrigal as a pinch-hitter for Wisdom, with the tying run at first base and the winning one in the batter's box. He justified that choice after the game by noting that Wisdom faced a bad matchup in Reds closer Alexis Díaz. That's not untrue; it's just irrelevant. Madrigal also faced a bad matchup in Díaz, in that Díaz is an MLB-caliber right-handed pitcher. Wisdom could, by some happy accident, have run into a walkoff home run. The most likely outcome was a strikeout, but that would have been just fine. It would have brought Seiya Suzuki to the plate with Michael Busch still anchored at first as the tying run. If Suzuki had hit the same line drive into the corner that he hit when he actually came to the plate, Busch might very well have scored. Madrigal, of course, didn't score. He didn't come especially close to doing so, because he's a much worse and slower baserunner than Busch is. That Madrigal even got the privilege of being thrown out on that would-be huge hit, though, is a product mostly of good luck and bad Reds defense. Had they not flubbed a potential double play, Suzuki would have been up representing the tying run, with two outs, instead of as the winning one. Madrigal nearly grounded into a double play, which felt about as likely as a Wisdom strikeout, and his chances of coming up with a hit against Díaz were virtually nil. Putting Madrigal in for Wisdom there was a shockingly bad managerial decision--the kind we might have expected from David Ross, on occasion, but that Counsell was supposed to avoid assiduously. It's emblematic of a much bigger problem, too, which is that the manager doesn't seem to have figured out how to use this roster at all. He might still be an upgrade on Ross, but he might also be a skipper in decline. Worse, we can't even categorize this as "early" decline, exactly. Managers run into ruts around this stage of their careers, unless they're all-time greats and/or are equipped with excellent talent. The Cubs gambled on the idea that Counsell is an all-time great, with the deal to which they signed him, and they might yet turn out to be correct. They certainly didn't equip him with elite talent, though, and that might result in a setback they can't afford. View full article

For a year or so, now, it has been clear that the Chicago Cubs badly wanted to avoid bringing David Bote back to their big-league roster. After a woeful May in which they exhausted other options, though, Bote is once again shedding the 'Iowa' script above his uniform's Cubs logo. Image courtesy of © Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports Nick Madrigal heads back to Iowa in exchange for Bote, with Adbert Alzolay hitting the 60-day injured list to accommodate the reinstatement of Bote to the 40-man roster. It's a move that signals, in no small measure, a defeat for the Cubs front office, because they fought hard to make one of Madrigal, Miles Mastrobuoni, Matt Mervis, Alexander Canario, or Garrett Cooper stick to that roster spot, instead. Nothing worked, and now they're going back to Bote, which they desperately did not want to do. Presumably, Bote will become the de facto backup third baseman and second baseman, taking Madrigal's place in that role and keeping Patrick Wisdom's just about the same as it was. He's not the defender Madrigal is, but Bote has a chance to have some kind of positive offensive impact, and he won't embarrass himself when asked to man the hot corner or the keystone. If Madrigal were a successful version of his own profile, he'd be a better bench player than Bote. Ditto for Mastrobuoni. After months of failures from each, though, the Cubs have finally buckled and turned to an old friend to rescue them from the unrealized potential of his two younger teammates. You can make a case for the way the Cubs have handled Bote since outrighting him off the 40-man roster in November 2022. Once they did that, bringing him back came with risks. Gone is the luxury-tax loophole that kept Red Sox outfielder Rusney Castillo stranded in Triple-A for years after he busted as a big-leaguer, but even without that incentive to keep Bote stashed, the team had to think about what would happen if and when they did recall him. Firstly, barring a 60-day injured list placement, bringing Bote back had to mean losing another player, or passing up the opportunity to acquire one. That's a hurdle to bringing up any player who isn't on the 40-man roster, but it's a smaller one for teams when the player in question is a top prospect (or any young player) whom they hope will be part of the team for another half-decade or more. It's a trickier thing when it's someone like Bote, on the wrong side of 30 and with little time left on his contract. Perhaps more importantly, the team also knows they could lose Bote altogether if they bring him back and then need to outright him again--hardly a difficult scenario to imagine, given the way his last couple of seasons in the big leagues panned out. One thing front offices desperately try to avoid is having a player who couldn't succeed for them thrive elsewhere, on their dime. Bote is guaranteed $5.5 million this year, and that was one reason why he didn't get a call last season, even as he hit fairly well and the team went through a similar churn of options to round out their infield mix. This season, since this is the last year of the deal and we're already in June, it's less of a concern. That helped him finally get the call. Furthermore, though, they clearly just did not believe in Bote, and after his last couple years of big-league performance, that's understandable. Yet, he did hit .259/.356/.476 since the start of 2023, with a very playable strikeout rate and a great walk rate. In addition to concerns about the gap in talent and opponent quality between Triple-A and the majors, we might note the specific issue of the technology-driven, minuscule Triple-A strike zone, which would tend to juice the numbers for a player like Bote--especially with regard to those walks. His swing was always a grooved one, too, which meant that a smaller zone made it easier for him to cover everything a pitcher could really throw at him. He didn't post elite batted-ball data, especially for a player of his age and previous experience. He still hits a good number of pop-ups and ground balls. He does hit it fairly hard, though, and at this point, the combination of his ability to do that and his defensive versatility made it impossible to justify continuing to try to make Madrigal work instead of him. Whether Bote can recapture the magic he had in 2018 remains to be seen, but it certainly seems unlikely. Happily, this time around, he's a purely complementary piece, and he's spent the last year-plus in Iowa, becoming a better leader and getting comfortable with his non-priority place in the organizational hierarchy. He's as well-positioned to succeed now as ever, even if success will be defined in a smaller way than in the past. View full article