Matthew Trueblood

These days, we have great tools for noticing when a pitcher makes an interesting change. Sometimes, though, we're too quick to get excited about them. Image courtesy of © Sam Greene/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK When the Cubs acquired José Cuas, many were quick to notice and discuss what the team saw in him. Cuas not only brought an extreme release point and valuable movement characteristics on his fastball to the table, but had the potential to tweak his breaking ball and unlock something he never quite accessed while pitching for the Royals. The hope was that the Cubs could bring him in and get immediate help based on careful usage, but also that they could develop him into a more prominent weapon in the longer term. They've mostly managed the first objective, and they've taken some of the most important steps toward the second. Cuas has a 1.20 ERA in 15 innings as a Cub, thanks to a much higher ground-ball rate than he had with the Royals. He's only allowed one of eight inherited runners to score, though he's also bequeathed eight baserunners to other relievers, and only one of those has come home, so his ERA is somewhat deceptive. Cuas only has 10 strikeouts in 63 batters faced, though, and has walked 12 opponents. Both of those rates are miserable, and would augur big trouble ahead, absent any other information. Some fans and analysts have been excited (rather than worried), though, because they've noticed that Cuas rebuilt his slider about three weeks ago. Here's a scatterplot of his pitch movement this season, before the Cubs went to Detroit on August 20: That's when he altered his slider. Here's the plot showing his movement since that time. As you can see, there's a whole lot more movement on his revamped breaking ball. It contrasts especially nicely with his sinker. That pitch, coming from the most extreme lateral release point in baseball (no one throws from further toward third base than does Cuas), could be a nasty, bat-missing breaking ball. Between when he unveiled that new offering and when he entered Friday's game in the eighth inning, he had pitched eight innings and allowed just one run, on two hits. He earned enough of David Ross's trust, especially against right-handed batters, that Ross turned to him in that eighth inning of a tie game. In truth, though, that trust isn't yet earned. Cuas's more compelling movement is nice, but unless and until it's paired with better control and command, it's not nearly enough to make him trustworthy in that kind of situation. In those aforementioned eight innings, Cuas had only allowed the two hits, but he'd also walked four, against just four strikeouts. The limiting factor, or at least the first of them, is his inability to land that sweeping breaking ball in the strike zone. Here's where those sliders, with all that movement, have ended up since he made the adjustment. Considering just how much it moves, that pitch might occasionally draw a chase from a right-handed batter, if it's been set up by the sinker. It's not a pitch Cuas can throw at all early in counts, though. Hitters don't even have to respect the possibility of it until they see at least one strike with the fastball, or at any time when they're ahead in the count. He was actually better able to use the slider he had before. It didn't have the same extreme movement, but he could put it in and around the strike zone with reasonable frequency. An even greater problem is Cuas's utter inability to command the sinker right now. That's too many misses off the armside edge of the plate, but it also means hitters can sit on the version of the pitch that wanders too much over the white of the plate and hit it authoritatively. On Friday, that's just what happened to Cuas. On the first pitch of his outing, he threw something of a meatball to Lourdes Gurriel, Jr., who singled sharply on it. Then, to Gabriel Moreno, he showed that inability to find the strike zone that has led to so much traffic on the bases. The slider, however nasty it might be in theory, is irrelevant to Cuas's profile right now. Until he demonstrates the ability to throw strikes with the fastball, the pitch might as well not exist. Cuas still has the potential to emerge as a worthy high-leverage reliever, but that potential has not been tapped yet. Ross erred in going to Cuas with so little margin for error on Friday, and it will continue to be an error to use him in any similar spot, until they fix the command deficiency that has rendered his good raw stuff only halfway useful. Meanwhile, when faced with the temptation to get excited about a player having made an adjustment that shows up in their advanced data, we all ought to be careful not to ignore the feedback of actual results. Valuable changes are those that generate real value--not just hypothetical improvements. View full article

The Cubs are developing the terrible habit of wasting very good pitching performances. Last weekend in Cincinnati, there was little David Ross could have done to prevent that. Friday at Wrigley Field, he was the biggest culprit. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports As I've documented recently, David Ross doesn't run a bullpen quite the way most other managers do in MLB in 2023. He seems to have a flatter hierarchy and less bifurcated mentality about his relief corps, and it can be difficult to tell (from the outside) in whom he truly has faith at a given time, and how much. Recently, injuries and fatigue have made it even harder to suss out who he likes, and when he likes to use them. Exigency has dominated his decisions of late. On Friday, though, there were some rapid revelations about where he has everyone lined up, and not all of them flatter the skipper. Before we delve too deeply into that, though, let's pause to set the scene. After six innings Friday, the Cubs and Diamondbacks were tied 0-0. Zac Gallen and Jameson Taillon, half-improbably, put on perhaps the best pitchers' duel of the season to date, and neither ever truly blinked. Rather, Ross lifted Taillon, who had thrown 77 pitches in six innings, with a season-high nine strikeouts and just two baserunners allowed. He'd worked under slightly more stress than those simple facts relate, because both times that a runner had reached base, it was Corbin Carroll, and he then matriculated to third via a stolen base and a throwing error each time. Still, removing Taillon at that stage was an extremely proactive move. It's not radical, by the standards of the modern game, but it was certainly surprising. If anything, Ross has recently erred on the side of letting his starters go deeper than expected. He let Javier Assad and Justin Steele each complete eight innings within the last week, and he pushed Jordan Wicks to his failure point in Wednesday's win over the Giants. With Wicks and Steele, though, Ross had ample margin for error. With Assad, he was managing around an exhausted bullpen. This time around, he was walking a tightrope, with no runs on the board from his offense, and he had a fresh and healthy pen. (That last fact is pivotal here, and we'll soon revisit it.) He probably also remembered Taillon's outing in Detroit last month, when he had a no-hitter through five innings, and then was knocked out of the game before escaping the sixth, having allowed a grand slam to pulverize a four-run lead. In light of all that, I find no fault with the decision to turn to the bullpen early, even though I think it was a close call and am sympathetic to those who balk at that choice itself. In Taillon's stead, Julian Merryweather took the mound for the seventh, and he immediately redeemed Ross's dubious decision, punching out all three Arizona batters. It was an exciting performance--the kind of thing that first reclaims the crowd (who had been slightly confused and enervated, at first, by Taillon's disappearance), then jolts them. Merryweather was the right man for the job, if Taillon wasn't. The Cubs couldn't do anything with Gallen in the seventh, though, so the game remained tied going into the top of the eighth. When the bullpen door opened this time, it was Jose Cuas who emerged. That's when everything got fairly confused. Prior to Friday, Adbert Alzolay hadn't appeared in a game since blowing the save in the second game of last Friday's doubleheader with the Reds. That was the end of a turbulent week for the Cubs' formerly untouchable closer, and during the ensuing week of inactivity, Ross let it slip that he was dealing with something. It's become clear that the issue is as benign as that ostensibly euphemistic description would have you believe. It's only natural, and delightfully normal, for Alzolay to be dealing with some fatigue, soreness, or even tightness at this stage of a season in which he's been relied upon pretty heavily. Last year, he pitched only a small handful of innings, after a long injury rehabilitation. We don't think about reliever innings the same way we count them for starters, but they count, too. When Cuas entered the game to begin the eighth, though, a minor panic swept Cubs Twitter, and not without foundation. If Alzolay were down again Friday, with such an obvious and high-leverage slot available, it would be a full week of inactivity, and there would be no hedging or explaining it away. Just as urgently, though, if Alzolay was unavailable, it made the decision to send Taillon to the showers so soon much less defensible. As it turned out, Alzolay was available. He'd come in, in fact, to pitch the ninth. By then, alas, the Cubs trailed by a run, so it was a bit of a waste, other than as an occasion to restore his confidence and prove to everyone that he's healthy. That's because, upon entering the contest, Cuas made a mess, and Mark Leiter, Jr. was unable to clean it up. After the fact, and even in the moment, much was made of the short recent run of success Cuas has had, since tweaking his slider under the guidance of the Cubs' pitching development team. I'll have a separate piece about that tomorrow, but for now, know that the adjustment is real, but the story is much more complicated. It was also mentioned that, with three right-handed batters due to start the inning, Cuas made more sense than Leiter, who runs reverse platoon splits when his splitter is working well. Leiter's splitter was back in the arsenal Friday, but it wasn't enough to get out the pesky Carroll. Cuas had left with two runners on base and one out, and after getting one strikeout, Leiter almost got an inning-ending lineout from Carroll. The ball fell inches in front of the sliding Seiya Suzuki, though, and the lone run of the game came home. Charged with facing Geraldo Perdomo, Carroll, and Ketel Marte, Leiter got two of them, and he came excruciatingly close to getting the other. Ross was managing his bullpen in the new mold, which dictates that skippers seek out specific matchups based on handedness, pitch type, and swing paths. The argot en vogue is a "pocket"--a section of the opponent's lineup suited to that particular hurler. There's nothing wrong with using pockets as one tool for managing bullpens, especially given how many innings teams typically ask of their relievers these days. It's a valid paradigm. However, it can also be a trap. It's a product of one of the more pernicious traits of modern sport, and of modern society, which is that everything has to be justified by a sheen of optimization, and that once that sheen is in place, the elected course of action becomes unassailable. By and large, fans on Twitter shrugged at Ross's failed strategy for the late stages of the game, pointing to the pockets he picked as ones that made sense. I'm all for process over outcome, but the ability to explain a line of thinking does not perfectly justify it. Pockets aren't the only valid way to conceptualize bullpen usage, and they're not well-suited to games like Friday's, when the starter went deep (and might have gone deeper) and the full strength of the bullpen is at the manager's command. To be clear, my objection isn't particularly to saving Leiter for that pocket of the Arizona lineup. It's in entrusting to Cuas such a delicate situation, even against Lourdes Gurriel, Jr., Gabriel Moreno, and Jordan Lawlor. If Ross was deeply committed to using Leiter against the set of lefties and switch-hitters at the ends of the Diamondbacks' lineup card, he needed to be willing to use Alzolay early, and go to him to work the eighth instead of the ninth. If that sounds outlandish, because it breaks from the traditional role Alzolay has carved out in the bullpen, so be it. Pocket thinking is inconsistent with the rigidity of the closer's role. Ross could have left Taillon in for the seventh, facing Tommy Pham, Christian Walker, and Alec Thomas. That would have saved Merryweather for the righties who began the eighth, while keeping Leiter available for the lefties if needed, and then Alzolay could have worked the ninth. He could also have elected to trust Leiter against the relatively non-lethal righties, starting with a clean inning, in the eighth. The path he chose was, by any reckoning other than the hyper-modern one that seeks an objectivist refuge from criticism at the expense of better, nuanced decisions that embrace the risk of rebuke, the worst possible one. Clearly, because a data-driven adjustment has altered Cuas's profile, he's been convinced that he should trust him quite a bit. That's an error. Because the Cubs weren't able to touch Gallen, anyway, it looks like a relatively bootless transgression, but those taut, challenging games are the ones they need to win--not only to knock back rivals like Arizona and Cincinnati and keep pace with the Brewers and Phillies, but to learn how to win them if they get an opportunity to do so in October. If nothing else, there was an open lane to extending that game to extra innings, where Gallen surely would have been lifted and the Cubs might have broken through. Hopefully, Ross learned from this defeat, because the Cubs can't afford any more avoidable ones for the balance of the campaign. View full article

Sometimes, the most valuable thing in the world is a bit of self-knowledge. Knowing one's limitations is valuable everywhere, but especially in the batter's box. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports The Cubs signed Ian Happ to a contract extension in April partly on the strength of the good season he had from the right side of the plate in 2022. He has always been a patient, powerful hitter from the left side, but last year, he was a more complete switch-hitter than he had ever previously showed. He hit .305/.350/.438 against southpaws last season, which was easily his strongest showing against them since his rookie season of 2017. It was certainly not the primary reason why the Cubs wanted to keep him around, but that improvement was a crucial part of the overall success that did lead the team to retain him. Here's the thing: that year was a lie. Happ himself would probably tell you so. He struck out 39 times in 137 plate appearances from the right side, and he drew just seven walks in those trips. He ran a .425 batted average on balls in play, not because he scorched the ball or took advantage of overshifted defenses, but because a .425 BABIP can happen pretty easily over the course of about 90 balls in play. Even a handful of his 12 extra-base hits weren't really him hammering a ball and finding a gap, but rather, ground balls that happened to stay fair and scoot past the third baseman. By and large, Happ has lacked power and plate discipline from the right side throughout his career. He's not a total zero, but he's the guy you slot in at the very bottom of your batting order against a lefty, not a middle-of-the-order hitter, which is what he can legitimately be as a lefty swinger. He got off to an atrocious start in this regard in 2023, too, and it looked like last year might be a welcome but ultimately meaningless blip in a career of ineptitude against lefties. He was batting .158/.256/.211 against them through May 15. Notice, though, the gap between that batting average and the OBP. That came about because Happ started taking a much more patient tack in his trips against lefties, almost right away. Certainly, that was his plan by the middle of May. Since May 16, he's hitting .243/.330/.430 off of lefties. In 125 plate appearances, he's drawn 15 walks, and he's only struck out 25 times. He's socked four home runs off of them in that time, too--twice as many as he managed in all of 2022. The secret to his newfound success isn't in what he started doing; it's in what he discontinued. Happ is just not swinging as much against lefties as he's done in the past. In his career, the only season in which he had a lower swing rate against southpaws than the 46.3 percent he's putting up this year was the shortened 2020 campaign. Very often, he's been well over 50 percent. We rarely talk about it this way, but every swing is a tiny statement of faith in oneself. On any given pitch, a swing guarantees a strike, whereas a take can get you closer to a walk and/or better able to sit on a pitch you can hit with some leverage in the count. You should only swing when you think the probabilities and payoffs of that decision make the cost worthwhile, and the worse or less often you hit the ball, the less frequently that decision makes sense. Happ has (probably not in so many words) noticed that he can’t hit right-handed, and he’s adjusted accordingly. Here's his swing rate by pitch location as a right-handed batter in 2022. Here, by contrast, is the same chart for 2023. Look at the way he's cut the plate in half. Pitchers can still get him out away, if they can locate on the outer edge. Happ will simply bet on them missing that target. He's ready to hit the ball hard if it's over the heart of the plate, and he's going to take it for a ball if it's a miss away. If they hit the corner, Happ tips his cap, because he's come to understand that his right-handed swing just can't produce anything valuable by chasing out there. Knowing what he can and can't hit hasn't led Happ to start mercilessly crushing left-handed pitching. He doesn't have that in him. His strikeout rate has plunged, though, and with a few walks to keep the line moving and a small improvement in power, he's become a competent hitter in any matchup. His expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA), based on batted-ball quality and strikeout and walk proclivities, has never been higher than .291 against lefties. That's a miserable number. An average xwOBA hovers just a little above .320. This season, though, Happ's is at .314. If he keeps this up, he'll be a perfectly cromulent third hitter in David Ross's batting orders, even in October. Speaking of matchups and of the postseason, though, that's another dimension of Happ's game that deserves a quick touch. Historically, he's been a jumpy and lousy hitter in clutch moments. In 2021 and 2022, especially, he seemed to get overanxious when he had the opportunity to come through with a big hit. This season, he's learned the value of continuing to press the rally, even if it be by leaving the big blow to the next guy. It's made him much better. Here are his swing rates and wOBA by season, when batting with the tying or go-ahead run either at bat or on base in the sixth inning or later. Ian Happ in the Clutch Season Swing % wOBA 2017 52.5 0.292 2018 44.4 0.365 2019 45.8 0.494 2020 46.4 0.254 2021 47.5 0.332 2022 49.3 0.242 2023 42.1 0.436 Obviously, Happ sometimes comes up in moments like that as a left-handed batter, facing a righty. Even in those cases, though, he's learned to be more patient than might be his wont, because it's going to help the team in the long run if he gets on base in front of Cody Bellinger and Seiya Suzuki. It's also instructive to see that, good hitter or bad, it sometimes pays to take a more calm approach in a moment that feels anything but calm. Often, it's the pitch you lay off that earns you the mistake you turn into the killing blow. Happ has always shown an awareness of that, in general. It has tended to get away from him when the moment gets big, but this year, that's changed. Swinging dramatically less often would be a decent prescription for what ails several hitters through the league. Only certain guys are capable of it, though, and among those who have some impressive power seasons on their resume, it's understandable if ego interferes with that kind of adaptation. Happ hasn't allowed it to do so. He knows what he does well, and where he's weak, and he's doing his best to make his strengths stronger and his weaknesses less exploitable. It sounds easy not to swing, but Happ is proof that it can be both difficult and devastatingly effective. View full article

Ever since the All-Star break, but especially since acquiring Jeimer Candelario, the Cubs offense has been hugely productive. They just need one more key cog to find traction again. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports It's no surprise, really, that Dansby Swanson has gone through some prolonged slumps this year. Throughout his strong, decorated career, he's been a streaky hitter. In 2021, he batted .189/.267/.316 in April; .278/.312/.557 from May 1 through June 7; .206/.277/.363 from June 8 through July 6; .318/.372/.593 from July 7 through September 1; and then .172/.272/.241 the rest of the regular season. Last year, he had a .432 OPS through April 20; a .950 one from April 21 through July 4; and a .691 mark from there through the end of the regular season. Readers will note the blatantly arbitrary nature of those endpoints, and I freely admit the fact. Within each of those longer slumps and streaks, too, there were warmer and colder spots. Moreover, every hitter (every ballplayer, really, but especially every hitter) is less consistent than you think, anyway. Still, even seasoned and serious baseball people (and certainly fans in Atlanta, where he was a fixture for several years and there's more granular familiarity with him than there could possibly be after 140 games here in Chicago) will tell you that Swanson runs hotter and colder for longer than most hitters with his overall talent do. This campaign has been, by Swanson's standards, a relatively gentle rollercoaster. He's had a couple of true cold snaps, with an OPS around .560 from Memorial Day weekend through mid-June. but he's kept them shorter than in the past. He also had an OPS north of 1.000 from July 3 through the first week of August, though that span was interrupted by his stint on the injured list with a bruised heel. That burst of torridity helped save the Cubs' season, and bought the team time for Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki to escape long funks at the plate. It got them over the hump and helped bring Jeimer Candelario to town. It compounded the value of Cody Bellinger's even hotter July. It's important not to overlook the value of that well-timed streak, from a player who cares much more about winning than about his own statistics. Now, however, we're getting the other side of the Full Dansby, at long last. Since August 7, Swanson is now batting .179/.273/.264, in 121 plate appearances. He's still fighting up there, but he's going very badly, and has been for quite a while. It's nice to be able to point to his ability to draw walks during these slumps, but as the numbers from 2021 help to show, he always does that. In fact, by and large, Swanson's walk rate is a reverse indicator of how well he's going at the plate. When he's hot, he's aggressive, and he doesn't miss his pitch or foul it off, so he rarely gets deep enough into counts to walk. When he's cold, he grinds out walks because he can do little else to help the team. The following might sound antithetical to that, but it's true: Swanson's pull rate is also a pretty good reverse indicator of his performance. While his aggressive swing would seem conducive to pulling the ball with authority (and can be), the more often he's pulling it, the less well he's usually doing, overall. Swanson's issues, when he gets going wrong, seem to relate powerfully to timing, and that jibes with this data. When he's on, Swanson squares the ball up and uses the whole field, especially the middle portion. If he's systematically pulling the ball, he's probably systematically mistiming his swings somewhat, and that's when his rates of strikeouts and groundouts rise sharply. Thus, it was encouraging to see Swanson drive a ball deep to right-center field on Tuesday night, even though it found a glove for a harmless flyout. That's the kind of batted ball that indicates Swanson is doing well. His single in the ninth inning was, technically, a ground ball to the left side, but it was scalded, and more to center than to left. Swanson has six hits since Sunday, and just completed two straight games without a strikeout for the first time since mid-August. It's a stirring testament (as if we needed more of them) to the Cubs' depth and diligence that they've been a mostly functional offense during Swanson's protracted struggles. He's batted second or fifth every day, and taken only a small handful of late innings off in blowouts, since coming off the injured list on July 22. He's getting a lot of important plate appearances, and he's been very unproductive for just over a month. David Ross waited out Happ, though, and has been rewarded by a resurgent August and early September. He'll wait out Swanson, too, and keep writing him into important spots in the lineup. As much as that might anger fans, it's the right way to handle Swanson, especially after it just worked for Happ. Even while he scuffles at the plate, Swanson has huge value, because he works his way on base often enough not to be an automatic out, and because of his superb defense at shortstop. His particular brand of leadership has also suited this team perfectly. Imagine the impact, though, if Swanson can get hot down the stretch, with this lineup otherwise operating at a high and finely pitched hum. A hot Swanson is the difference between the Cubs being Wild Card contenders and the Cubs being World Series contenders. View full article

The Cubs are hot, the weather is cooling, and This is Not a Rebuild now sounds like a much less ludicrous statement than it did a year ago. In fact, it's sort of an understatement. Image courtesy of Matt Trueblood via Spotify for Podcasters With the Cubs having turned a corner and become contenders for more than just a Wild Card berth and quick exit, the gang is a little giddy. Discussion topics include, but are not limited to: Jordan Wicks's excellent season, thrilling first few starts in MLB, and place in a potential playoff rotation The remaking of the Cubs lineup into one about as fearsome as those of Atlanta or the Dodgers Justin Steele's extraordinary transformation How very, very wrong three of the four of us were about Nick Madrigal What the team is doing with the end of its roster during the expanded roster phase of the season, and whether it makes sense Then, stick around at the end, as we feature the first two special guests in TINAR history: Sorkin and Lincoln Trueblood. We're tri-generational now, baby. View full article

As I said in the piece, though, it’s that very macro trend that I want to decry, and to highlight for others to better notice. Owners are intentionally setting higher prices and shrinking the capacity of their parks with the aim of *lowering* attendance but increasing revenue. The Rickettses are just the latest to wade deeper into those waters.

Yep. It’s also why most renovations you see lately shrink the capacity of the park. They want to artificially constrict supply, and they’d rather create 500 high-value, high-priced seats than leave 1,000 (or even 1,500 or 2,000!) more traditional seats. The Guardians have decreased the capacity of What Used to Be The Jake by like 5,000 over the last several years.

There are good vibes all over Cubdom right now. In particular, the players can be heard praising the fans at Wrigley Field after every fresh new victory. Alas, there's a bit of tension between perception and reality, there. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports Firstly, let's be clear: I don't wish to question or impugn the authenticity or enthusiasm of anyone who has attended Cubs games at Wrigley Field recently. The crowds have been lively, and the team has given them ample opportunities to stand, roar, and sing. They've done it with all the gusto the playoff race demands of them. The fans are doing their jobs. That said, we need to reconcile the lacuna that exists between the encomiums lavished on the fans by announcers, players, coaches, and each other, and the pesky number at the bottom of every box score. Here are the official attendance figures for the Cubs' last five home games--last week's series against the Brewers, and the first two games of their current set with the Giants: Monday, Aug. 28: 35,097 Tuesday, Aug. 29: 33,294 Wednesday, Aug. 30: 31,769 Monday, Sep. 4: 39,452 Tuesday, Sep. 5: 28,684 Those are highly respectable numbers, compared to how most teams draw for weekday contests just before and after most students' school terms begin. Obviously, the penultimate one is much inflated by the fact that it was Labor Day, but it's still a great number, and the others are fine. Compare them, though, to a very similar set of contests in 2007: Tuesday, Aug. 28: 40,884 Wednesday, Aug. 29: 40,512 Thursday, Aug. 30: 40,790 Monday, Sep. 3: 41,070 Tuesday, Sep. 4: 37,834 That was a weeknight series against the Brewers, and the first two of a set starting Labor Day against the Dodgers. Obviously, that year, that meant the team's chief rival in the division, and then a big, well-traveled West Coast fan base coming in on a holiday. It's as close to apples-to-apples as such comparisons can be, although the apples aren't exactly the same variety. The attendance drop is huge, and it's not a lie. It's not fake. The crowds recently at Wrigley have been plenty enthusiastic, and the new lights there certainly bring them into clearer focus for both players and cameras than they were in the past, but it's an irrefutable fact that they are also markedly smaller. (For what it's worth, by my less scientific reckoning, they're also less loud, despite the many players who have talked about how loud they are. I suspect the ambient ballpark noise, including much louder stadium sound over improved speakers, is being baked into that discussion in a way that doesn't really reflect fan engagement.) Over the decade and a half between this season and that one, the Ricketts family has bought the team, and they have massively overhauled the fan experience at Wrigley Field, to the detriment of all but the richest and most powerful. That's by design. The attendance figures are lower, not because fans are less excited about the team, but because the owners have consciously remade their park to let fewer of them in, and to ensure that whoever does get in has already paid so much that they'll gladly fork over the exorbitant secondary costs associated with the experience. Were the 2007 Cubs, fresh off a winter spending spree and with a new manager at the helm, a bit better-marketed than this year's team? Sure. Are Cubs fans now, inevitably, a bit less hungry for a champion (and thus less deliriously devoted to a team with some chance of becoming one)? Yes. Still, I don't think the fact that there are fewer fans in the stands reflects those realities, or that it mirrors broader trends in baseball's overall attendance or in America's economy. I don't think there's a whole lot more to this story than the bleakest and most infuriating facts: The owners of this team want the ballpark experience to be reserved for those who will pay an astronomical sum for it. They've succeeded in crafting the most profitable version of a good team, at the expense of the version that would be the most fun or best serve the community of which a good team should be such a delightful part. They stand to gain handsomely, though, by continuing to sell the fans on the idea that Wrigley is every bit the communal experience between players and fans that it has ever been, so count on continuing to hear the crowds trumpeted on Marquee as mind-blowing and special. I don't want to bicker about whether the players are imagining things when they say the atmosphere at Clark and Addison is electric. I think many of them, having only been in professional baseball since about 2015 or later, simply don't have a frame of reference for what big baseball crowds used to look like. The Ricketts' model is not their own. Most of the league is doing this. Few owners care to invite or encourage a broad swath of their fan base into their parks anymore. Having made all of their expenditures back before the first click of a turnstile (thanks to real estate investments, TV rights deals, and the appreciation of their franchise), they don't court in-person fan experiences as a way to build their brand and engender generational loyalty. They just maximize the supply-and-demand equation in their own favor. Thus, there are vanishingly few places and few occasions where a large crowd that looks like the community of which it is ostensibly a part can really gather--and most of the time, even when they do, it's at a modern park that ensures a certain remove from the players. It's great that Justin Steele and Nico Hoerner find Wrigley Field to be a thrilling place to play in 2023. I think Carlos Zambrano and Ryan Theriot would find it a bit less exhilarating. You can choose whether to believe that Wrigley Field's renovations under its new stewards have diminished it or not. You can choose whether to believe that the fans who regularly attend are, in some measure, fundamentally changed, because they're selected and cultivated differently. I wish to cleave only to the assertion that Wrigley Field is as it is--whatever it is--solely because the Ricketts family wants it that way. In some measure, that has always been the privilege of team owners. Now, though, it feels much more like their place, and less like a place the fans have made and defined for themselves. View full article

It's becoming irresistible. No matter how rational one tries to remain, this Cubs team has begun to insist upon its excellence. Get on board, or get run over. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports In sports, it's common to see perfectly good teams (who everyone knew to be good all along) talk incessantly about how no one ever believed in them. Unearned indignation is the one performance-enhancing drug no one has banned yet. If and when the 2023 Chicago Cubs achieve something significant enough to elicit those champagne-soaked "I told you so"s, though, they'll have come by them more honestly. I've lost count of the number of times I've considered this team to be on the ropes, or even struggling to climb up off the very canvas. At the bare minimum, they reached that kind of crisis point: On May 17, when they lost their fifth straight game by blowing a 6-1 lead in the final two innings in Houston. They'd lost by a combined score of 27-4 in their last two games in Minnesota, and the finale of a sweep at the hands of the defending champions seemed to confirm Chicago's unreadiness for serious contention. On May 28, when the surging young Reds swept them at Wrigley Field on Memorial Day weekend. The Cubs fell to a new low-water mark of eight games below .500, and into last place in the NL Central. On June 8, when the Angels completed yet another sweep of the drain-circling Cubs. That pushed Chicago to 10 games below .500, and seven games into their 10-game West Coast road trip, they had scored a total of 16 runs. On July 3, when the Cubs went to Miller Park needing to at least split a four-game series with the Brewers and lost the first contest 8-6, thanks to a five-run bullpen implosion over Milwaukee's final two turns at bat. That widened the Crew's division lead to seven games, and the Cubs fell to 38-45. More than halfway through the season, they were slogging toward a win total in the high 70s. On July 17, when the Nationals won the first game of a three-game set at Wrigley. That made three losses in four games coming out of the All-Star break, for a Cubs team that needed to turn a corner immediately or be disassembled at the trade deadline a fortnight later. Drew Smyly was well into his blue period, and that game was an especially maddening, typical loss. They fell behind, tried to come back, and were insufficient, multiple times. It felt, at that moment, like a microcosm of the season. Had any of these turned out to be the final blow they all had the potential to be, the front office would have ended up selling off impending free agents (and maybe others) at the end of July. David Ross's future with the team would be highly uncertain--and even that might be a euphemism. Some subset of the players who make up this roster are locked in for the long run, and would have been even if things had turned sour, but much of the surrounding picture might have changed, and the team might have faced another year or more of rebuilding. At the very least, those are five points at which the risk of 2023 falling irretrievably through the cracks was very real. Every time, though, the team met that challenge. On each of the first three occasions, Marcus Stroman took the ball the next day and did something dazzling. He wasn't just a stopper; he was a momentum-changer. The game immediately following the collapse in Houston was a Friday night in Philadelphia, and Stroman allowed only one run in six innings. On Memorial Day, after that ominous Cincinnati sweep, he one-hit the formidable Rays before a roaring Wrigley crowd. Deep in that desperate road trip, after the Anaheim debacle, he went 6 2/3 innings and allowed just two runs in a bounceback win against the Giants. At some point, Stroman went from being a one-man solution to one of the team's problems, as he lost the supernal command of his sinker and slurve he showed early on and tried to pitch through mounting discomfort in his hip. That only underscores another way in which the team has been astoundingly resilient, though. When Cody Bellinger went down for a month, it cleared the path that Mike Tauchman followed back to the big leagues, and Tauchman became an invaluable role player. In answer to Stroman's Memorial Day gem and subsequent injury, Justin Steele was every bit as good on Labor Day. The day after that miserable loss in Milwaukee, on the holiday that subdivides the unofficial summer of which Memorial and Labor Days are the bookends, the Cubs blew another four-run lead. That time, though, they miraculously froze the Brewers there, and then Ian Happ and Miguel Amaya made a pair of extraordinary defensive plays to win the game in extra innings. The day after they slipped to the very brink of irrelevance with that loss to the Nationals, they trailed again, as late as the sixth inning. but Seiya Suzuki struck a game-tying two-run homer, and then the Cubs scored 14 more times before the end of the night. The team hasn't just responded to every threat; they've done it with a tenacity and on a scale that seemed unthinkable a moment before it happened. They've looked ill-prepared, or overmatched, and then within an inning or two, they've flipped that script. Suddenly, the other team mishandles a ground ball, or throws a hair wildly. Suddenly, it's the Cubs batters who can't miss when someone hangs a slider. Since they escaped the last of the crises enumerated above, the Cubs have been the best team in baseball. Since the All-Star break, only the Dodgers (33-15) and Orioles (33-16) have better records than Chicago's 33-17, and both of those teams came right out of the break streaking. Once that kind of corner is turned, a team acquires the privilege of defining a crisis differently. They haven't been in serious danger of coming undone at any point in the last seven weeks, but there have been moments... August 16 at Wrigley, when the White Sox (having won the previous night) threatened to hand the Cubs a third straight loss at the front end of what they'd hoped would be a soft spot in their schedule. That was the night when an improbable escape by Michael Fulmer set up even more improbable home-run heroics from Nick Madrigal and Christopher Morel. Back-to-back walkoff losses this past weekend in Cincinnati, when the bullpen was understandably tired but the offense was less understandably bootless. Not only did the seemingly invincible Adbert Alzolay take a tough loss, but the team wasted truly brilliant pitching performances by Hayden Wesneski, Javier Assad, and even Smyly, and they then trailed three different times Sunday, when a loss would have meant limping out of town with only a one-game lead on the Reds--a lead rendered imaginary by the Reds owning the tiebreaker between them. Instead, they scored 10 runs in the final two innings to make a nailbiter into a laugher. Tuesday night. Apparently, this is going to be a regular thing now. The Cubs had to come back from down 3-0 and 6-4, but they not only did so, but made the game nigh comfortable in the end. Suzuki had another two-run game-tying smash. Morel had another crowd-detonating three-run homer. The Cubs are 10-4 in their last 14 games, and three of those four losses were one-run games on the road that came within a few inches of being wins. They're 13-5 in their last 18. They're 22-11 since the start of August, and 32-14 since that outburst against the Nationals that turned out to be the final time they really faced failure. The Brewers have played stellar ball themselves, with a 28-19 record since the break that has stymied the Cubs' designs on the division lead so far. No matter. The sheer relentlessness of this team won't necessarily push them past Milwaukee, or deep into October, but it's already made this the most resilient team in Cubs history. They've overcome greater adversity than did any team helmed by Joe Maddon, Lou Piniella, or Dusty Baker, so even if they don't go as far as a couple of those teams did, they have proved themselves in a way none of those groups did. The brutal length and intensity of a big-league season sometimes demands that both players and fans stop defining success or failure based on what anyone else does. The Cubs keep winning series, and winning games they look like they're about to lose. Whatever else other clubs do, they're having the best kind of success August and September can offer, and August and September sometimes offer a purer, more lasting memory of success than October can, anyway. This is far from the best Cubs team in recent memory, and rooting for them hasn't always been fun, by traditional definitions. Yet, they've written a phenomenal story already, and Tuesday night was further evidence that it's not nearly over. View full article

For the Cubs' most tenured starting pitcher, command is everything. This year, he's having a hard time pinning it down to begin games. Image courtesy of © John Jones-USA TODAY Sports It's not as though Kyle Hendricks has ever had as wide a margin for error as most pitchers enjoy. With his relatively simple pitch mix and lack of velocity, he needs to have good movement and location to get opponents out consistently. He's more dependent on the former (and less so on the latter) than most fans believe, but everyone understands that when Hendricks lacks command of either his sinker or his changeup, he's in for a long day. For the most part, Hendricks has thrived this season, and his mistakes have been within that narrow margin. Since the All-Star break, though, he's struggled significantly with commanding his fastball to its desired location on the third-base side of home plate, and it's put the team in early holes that could be avoided. They could be, that is, if Hendricks can by some means break the pattern. First, a clarifying note: As I've written often, Hendricks's changeup has long since become (basically) two different pitches, and the difference between them has never been more stark. He's also been increasingly reliant on that pitch (well, those pitches) to both lefties and righties this year. That has increased the importance of distinguishing his four-seam fastball from his sinker. He throws the former in conjunction with his fading changeup, to left-handed batters, and the latter as a pair with the cut-change he uses against righties. For the purposes of this quick study and presentation, though, I'm lumping the two fastballs together. There's a good and simple reason for this. I want to talk specifically about location, and while he pairs his pitches differently, Hendricks is pretty consistent in aiming for that outside edge to lefthanders (and the inside one to righties) with his heat. That's where both pitches set up their partner changeup varietal best. Thus, we can safely examine them as a group, without breaking things out by specific fastball type or handedness. Here's where Hendricks's four-seamers and sinkers have gone in Innings 3 and 4 of his starts this year. You can see him missing on some occasions; coming over the plate to fool hitters or steal a strike on others; and teasing the corners to induce chases at still others, but it's pretty clear that Hendricks is trying to paint that corner most of the time, right? Look how well he does it late in his starts, from the fifth frame onward. That's why they call him Professor. He's clinical. He's careful. He's precise. Alas, early in games, that same refinement is not at all in evidence. Here are his locations in Innings 1 and 2 of starts this season. These heat maps are made of objective data, but they can invite some subjective readings. To lend greater clarity to the problem, then, consider these less negotiable facts: Hitters have a .395 weighted on-base average (wOBA) against Hendricks's fastballs in the first two innings, and a .350 mark thereafter; and They're batting .293/.341/.440 against Hendricks in his first 25 pitches of outings in 2023, but for the rest of his appearances, they run an OPS just south of .600. Simply put, for whatever reason, Hendricks has trouble locking in the command of his fastballs prior to his starts this year. He's only walked 20 batters for the campaign, but half of those have come within the first two innings, and nine of them within that first 25-pitch window. Wildness, even if it be comparatively mild, is a problem for Hendricks, because any batter who reaches base might wreak havoc on the bases and augment the opponents' hope of another hit. Hendricks once controlled the running game well, but no longer, and he has had to yield to more pulled contact in order to get more weak contact on the ground this year. The Cubs offense has, by and large, provided sufficient margin for error to make up for the fact that Hendricks has gotten into an unusual number of jams and given up a few too many early runs. Like any success Hendricks finds without command of the fastball, though, that state of affairs feels fragile. He's been good, but needs to be even better in order to sustain anywhere near the results he and the team have enjoyed recently. That might mean a new approach to the pre-game bullpen work, if Hendricks is idiosyncratic that way. It might mean leaning more on his changeups early. He's used the fastballs about 62 percent of the time through two innings, then 58 percent of the time in the third and fourth, and it's come all the way down to 51 percent thereafter. If Hendricks is going to scuffle with finding that edge, he might need to swap a few of those early fastballs in for sharper changeups--even if it means that he's less effective later. At this time of year, surely, David Ross will be proactive with his starting pitchers, anyway. Hendricks is a savvy veteran, more than capable of this type of adjustment. The Cubs must be aware of the problem: it shows up in even a relatively cursory watch of the early portions of Hendricks's outings. The question is whether this is an unchangeable aspect of aging, and of his body turning ever so slightly and slowly away from his craft, or whether it's something more easily identified and corrected. View full article

In a world full of stuff monsters and velocity gone wild, the Cubs have found one of the most unlikely ace-caliber finesse pitchers in recent memory. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports It's strange to think of Justin Steele as a pitcher dependent on deception and command. He's not as young as we tend to imagine, but he's sufficiently new on the scene to feel like a young arm. He hits 95 miles per hour, occasionally, and his cutter sits just south of 92 on average. His secondary weapon is a slider. For as long as there have been radar guns, guys who can throw 95 have been power pitchers, and the slider has been the breaking ball of choice for power pitchers. The game has changed, though--perhaps even more radically than we can conceptualize as we watch each season slowly unfold. Steele's heat, which is under 92 miles per hour 57.3 percent of the time, is as tepid (based on pure velocity) as that of Kyle Hendricks was a decade ago, when the young twirler was sitting right around 90 miles per hour. Average Fastball Velocity Among Pitchers Who Threw 200+ Fastballs, 2008-23, Selected Seasons Season 25th %ile FB Vel. 50th %ile FB Vel. 75th %ile FB Vel. 100th %ile FB Vel. 2008 89.6 91.3 93.1 98.2 2013 90.7 92.4 94 100 2018 91.3 93 94.7 100.5 2023 92.5 94.1 95.7 101.7 The proliferation of guys who throw triple-digit fastballs has been well-covered, but it's harder to notice that what was a healthily above-average fastball 10 years ago is now almost precisely the median one. Needing to hump up a bit to touch 93, which is Steele's situation, used to mark a pitcher as roughly average. Now, it makes them solidly below-average, and they need to do something else very well in order to be a useful pitcher. Obviously, Steele has now put the question of his utility well out of reach, and is closer to being the best pitcher in baseball than he is to being a fifth starter. That transformation has been extraordinary, particularly in light of his inability to overwhelm people with sheer stuff. Steele has come to grips with the fact that movement and command are the keys to his success, and as a result, he's remade himself on the fly. Little has really changed in Steele's game this year, from a macro perspective. He's slashed his walk rate, which is notable, but it's tempting to view that as merely an improvement, rather than the result of a conscious and substantial adjustment. He's still mostly throwing two pitches: a cutter (which some algorithms persist in calling a four-seam fastball, but which is very much a true cutter) and a slider. He's hitting the zone more with both of them than he has in the past, but again, one could fool oneself into seeing that as a factor of improved mechanics or repetition of his delivery. That's not it. Rather, Steele has made some major and multi-layered tweaks to the way he attacks hitters, including slightly reshaping that fastball. By embracing the cutting action of it (and giving up on the idea that it's a cut-ride four-seamer, taking the ride out of it in a steady progression), he's consistently hit the inner half of the plate (to right-handed batters) with the pitch more and more often--especially the upper part of the strike zone to that side. Doing that, alone, is valuable. It's hard to overstate how much hitters hate when a pitcher can locate anything hard to their glove side (inside to opposite-handed batters, away from same-handed ones) and above the belt. Jacob deGrom throws so hard that his fastball would be good no matter how it moved or where he put it, but the reason that he's unhittable (when he's healthy) is that he can command his heat to that portion of the strike zone. It's very tough for hitters to see and square up. Steele has taken it further than that, though. To see how, let's start by breaking down his approach into the one he uses against right-handed hitters, and the one he employs against lefties, and by comparing those approaches in 2022 with the same in 2023. Against righties, Steele spent 2022 trying to work from up and away (with that fastball, still acting more like a four-seamer then) to low and in (with the slider). In 2023, while he's become even more dependent on that fastball, he's allowed its natural cut to become its defining characteristig. He's inside more often, and the slider works in a more purely vertical contrast with the cutter. Notice that Steele hasn't missed above the zone or away from righties nearly as often this year, nor as badly. Naturally, he's missed more often inside against them, and down, but fewer of his misses have been with the fastball (or cutter, as we know it to really be), and those balls that miss in and down on righties have to pass through the hitting zone in the eyes of the hitter. For precisely that reason, he's getting more swings, and especially more chases, this year. Against lefties, Steele can be a very different, somewhat more traditional pitcher. Instead of having to work fearlessly inside without the margin for error afforded by great velocity, he can live on the outer half. Last year, though, he was imprecise in his efforts to do so. He worked, in a mirrored version of that same way as to righties, from up and in to low and away, without much intentional variation. This year, he's been much more of an equal-opportunity visitor of the outer edge, working up and away with the cutter more comfortably, and inviting lefties to see that pitch out over the plate and chase it even off the edge. The flattening out of his fastball into a true cutter, and his mental adjustment to use it that way in relationship to his slider (even if he prefers to still call it a four-seamer, at least in public), has made Steele much tougher to handle. because his mistakes are less likely than ever to be in hittable areas of the zone. Worse yet (for his overmatched opponents), Steele can so brilliantly locate when he gets into this mental groove that he does have access to the outer third of the plate against righties. He just doesn't go there until he has the batter thoroughly set up. Here's a heat map of where Steele has pitched to righties before the count reaches two strikes this year. Inside, inside, inside, is the drill. The two distinct loci of greatest frequency (the larger, redder one up high where he throws the cutter, and the smaller one down low where the sliders go) show how good his command is on that side of the plate. Now, look at where Steele gets his whiffs against righties. He just violates the cues a hitter uses to attack every other pitcher they see in a given week. He comes inside when they look away, and he goes away when they look inside. His ball has unusual movement, and he's worked to ensure that that movement is well-disguised. The ball comes out of his hand with fairly well-mirrored spin, and then seam-shifted wake effects steer the cutter into a deceptively flat arc and give the slider more sweep and less depth than would be expected. Their movement is, really, converging, but the effect so confounds the hitter that they might as well be diverging sharply. He actually releases his cutter a touch lower and a touch further toward first base than his slider. This is new, and the latter fact is decidedly not normal. Even if a hitter can spot a slight difference in his release point, therefore, they're likely to wind up baffled. Steele's command and control aren't as fine as those of Greg Maddux or Cliff Lee, for whom cutters were a way of overmatching hitters they could not overpower. His repertoire doesn't have the depth or the versatility of a pitcher like Roy Halladay, who could both sink and cut the fastball in addition to some nasty secondary stuff. Still, while he's operating at this high a level, Steele is that caliber of pitcher. With Monday's outing, he put himself at the front of any conversation about this year's NL Cy Young Award. That's a testament to his talent, his mentality, and the open-mindedness that allowed him to change from a strikeout maven with an upside curtailed by control problems into a strike thrower who knows how to get outs against all types of hitters, even late in games and under playoff pressure. 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The time has come to expand rosters for the final month of MLB's season. The Cubs didn't turn to their top prospect, though, bypassing him for one who better fits their short-term needs. Image courtesy of © Jamar Coach/News Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK The easiest explanation for the Cubs' choice to call up Alexander Canario instead of Pete Crow-Armstrong to start September is that Canario is already on their 40-man roster. Adding Canario doesn't cost them a spot on that reserve list, and although they have that room at the moment, there will be some shuffling ahead as they try to keep their pitching staff as close to full strength as possible down the stretch. In truth, though, the reasons run a little deeper than that. For one thing, there's a little bit more flexibility when it comes to finding playing time for a right-handed batter than there is for a lefty right now. Mike Tauchman has hit a bit of a wall recently, but he remains a trusted and useful on-base threat against right-handed pitching. No one is nudging Cody Bellinger out of the lineup, and Seiya Suzuki has been the hottest hitter on the team for the last few weeks. Meanwhile, Christopher Morel has much more glaring flaws (and a lower floor when he's slumping) than Tauchman, and Patrick Wisdom's weaknesses are so easy for opposing teams to exploit that it's hard to trust him with any high-leverage plate appearances. Wisdom is a good entry point for a discussion about what makes Canario uniquely well-suited to fill a role on this roster, in the short term. Somewhat surprisingly, this above-average offense (overall) is the third-worst in MLB against four-seam fastballs, according to expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA). Wisdom is one of the exemplars of the problem. He's hitting .187 against four-seamers this year, and whiffing on 37.2 percent of the swings he takes against that pitch, according to Brooks Baseball. Statcast classifies pitches slightly differently, so the exact numbers are different, but Wisdom has the 10th-highest whiff rate in the league against four-seamers, out of 209 qualifying batters. Now that Statcast captures the action at Triple-A stadia, we can compare that directly to what Canario has done against four-seamers. Admittedly, the sample is small, and four-seamers in the minors are not the same as those he'd see in the majors, but Canario is hitting .417 and slugging .833 against four-seam fastballs this year in Iowa. He's whiffed on 29.4 percent of his swings against them, and you can count on that figure rising when he has to face big-league heat, but he's capable of doing big damage against that pitch. This is one reason why he hangs in very well against right-handed pitchers; they can't easily slip the heater by him. Crow-Armstrong is a different hitter than Wisdom or Canario. They both, to varying degrees, rely on power to generate their offensive value, whereas Crow-Armstrong better commands the strike zone. He doesn't have gaudy numbers against four-seamers, but whiffs on just over 20 percent of them at Triple A. Again, that would rise in MLB, but the main reason why Canario fits better than Crow-Armstrong at the moment is that he can hit (and hit for power) against that four-seamer. The Cubs need reliable power, and they specifically need it against that offering, Thus, Canario is a good fit. Nor is he without defensive value. Until now, the Cubs' only real option when facing left-handed pitching has been to use Bellinger in center field, with Jeimer Candelario moving to first base and Nick Madrigal at third. Now, they could conceivably keep Bellinger at first, using Canario in center and either playing Candelario at third or putting Madrigal there and letting Candelario be the DH. Canario can also spell both Ian Happ and Suzuki in the corners, where he's more than the merely adequate defender he is in center. The coming fortnight will be grueling, with 14 games in 13 days. Canario can help ensure that the anchors of the lineup remain fresh when it's over and there's still another two weeks of crucial games to play. Later in the month, if Crow-Armstrong gets hot, Tauchman continues to struggle, or Morel reasserts himself as an everyday designated hitter, we could see Canario and Crow-Armstrong swapped--especially if the waters are relatively smooth on the pitching side and the team doesn't need to burn further 40-man spots on the staff. Crow-Armstrong's speed and defense could have a major impact in the postseason, too, so calling him up for the final fortnight at the expense of Miles Mastrobuoni or Wisdom could make sense, even if Canario sticks. Right now, though, the team needs most what Canario does best. That, and the fact that Canario was better than Crow-Armstrong over the final week of August, made it relatively easy to call up the man the team got for Kris Bryant, rather than the one they got for Javier Baez. View full article

Absolutely cursed season. The worst, the worst, the worst. Although there were also like 15 awesome things about it. We might have to do a whole yearlong series in 2024 remembering the chaos and the rollercoaster of 2004.

You’re thinking of an earlier collection of Rangers pitching prospects, including Thomas Diamond, Edinson Volquez, and John Danks: DVD. They had a new batch of higher-regarded guys by the time in question here, including Martin Pérez, but Hendricks was (to use one good example) 43rd in the *Rangers system alone* entering that year, according to Rangers uber-prospect expect Jamey Newberg.

For reasons both valid and laughable, "luck" became the focal point of a taut, high-stakes series between the Cubs and Brewers this week. It's a serendipitous occasion to celebrate one of the great lucky breaks in Cubs history. Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports The 2012 Cubs were a moribund bunch. They started 3-11. They were, at various points, 15-32, and 24-48. By July 23, they were 38-56. That team was built to be taken apart, and on that date, Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer went about trying to perform that demolition. They agreed to a trade to send impending free agent Ryan Dempster to the Atlanta Braves, in exchange for coveted pitching prospect Randall Delgado. It was a big story, and it looked like the next big step forward for a team that had just installed their rookie first baseman, Anthony Rizzo, and signed slugging Cuban prospect Jorge Soler as an international free agent. Then, the deal collapsed, under the weight of Dempster's five-and-10 rights. Because of Dempster's service time and seniority with the club, he had to approve the trade, and he didn't. He later denied that that was the shape of the situation, but it was. Gone was the Cubs' shot at the highly-touted Delgado. A week later, they traded lower-wattage starter Paul Maholm to Atlanta, but got a lesser haul in return. Instead of the Braves, Dempster eventually landed with the Rangers. The Cubs and Texas slapped together a deal just five minutes before the trade deadline, and instead of Delgado (a consensus top-50 prospect in the game entering 2012), the Cubs collected two lower-caliber prospects, years away from the big leagues. Undersized third baseman Christian Villanueva was, at least, 100th on Baseball America's Top 100 list prior to that year, but soft-tossing fellow Class A player Kyle Hendricks was drawing no buzz whatsoever. On Tuesday, Hendricks softly tossed six innings of one-run ball in the Cubs' biggest win since Game 5 of the 2017 NLDS--a game he also started. Before that, he'd been the starting pitcher the night they won the National League pennant for the first time since 1945, and the starting pitching the night they won the World Series for the first time since 1908. Hendricks has been a delightful surprise, from his rookie year of 2014 to this resurgent season, coming just when he looked to be in danger of fading away. On Wednesday, he was everything the Cubs needed, keeping the Brewers so off-balance that they whiffed on, stared at, or mishit even several pitches right down the middle. Keep in mind that, to any given hitter, Hendricks is largely a two-pitch pitcher. He might sneak the occasional sinker in against a lefty, and he still theoretically has his big-breaking curveball, but he's largely focused on throwing his four-seamer and changeup against lefties, and his sinker and cut-change (treated as the same pitch as his lefty changeup by pitch classifiers, but really distinct) against righties. Here's his pitch usage against right-handed batters, by season. And here's the same chart for lefties. Here, with those in mind, is his pitch movement scatter plot for Wednesday's game. The fading changeups below the sinker cluster are the ones he threw to lefties. The ones bunched next to the sinkers but toward the glove side are the ones he threw to righties. The result is that, while the velocity gap between his fastballs and his changeups is shrinking over time, batters still have to deal with a reasonably significant movement differential. Righties have a much smaller one with which to contend, which is why he gets a higher whiff rate against lefties than against righties, but the lateral orientation of his movement contrast against righties means that they generate weaker contact against him than lefties do. Indeed, though his strikeout rate is the lowest it's ever been, he's also inducing the lowest average exit velocity of his career. With a fastball under 90 miles per hour and no real third pitch against any hitter, he shouldn't be able to continue having such success, but through brilliant sequencing and good command, he does. There's also luck involved. We have to admit, and even embrace that. Hendricks's approach means plenty of balls in play, which means that luck can intercede in lots of places. He's more than usually reliant on good pitch framing by his catcher, too. None of this diminishes the genius or the validity of his career. It's just a fact that necessarily informs any account thereof. When Hendricks pitched 7 1/3 innings in Game 6 of the NLCS and became the second pitcher ever (after Don Larsen) to start a playoff game in which his team faced the minimum number of batters, he needed some good luck, and he needed the awesome defense the team had arrayed behind him. People bristle when you remind them that luck exists in baseball. When you point out specific places in which it's played a heavy role, they act as though you'd stabbed them in that place. It's akin to the reaction of certain people who enjoy White, straight, male, and other forms of privilege, when the fact that those systemic privileges play a large part in shaping our lives comes up. It hits us, whether we be fans of a team that has had some good luck or members of a demographic that has had something a little more sinister on its side, like an accusation--like an invalidation of something we love, and which we desperately want to feel is fully earned. The breakthrough insight is this: luck is everywhere. So is privilege. No one succeeds (or fails) in life based solely on their own merit or their own diligence. We are all interdependent, and we are all subject to the vagaries of chance. That's not debatable. It also doesn't need to make us so insecure. Good and bad luck can collide and create chaos within a particular moment. A person who enjoys one type of privilege and gains handsomely from it in one setting can be on the wrong side of that divide and be damaged by the absence of privilege in another setting. What we all need to do is get away from the idea that our lives are our own, and that everything that happens must be through some purposeful, individual agency. When we treat what comes to us in life less preciously, less like something we won in a vacuum, we can better appreciate and understand our place in the world around us. The Brewers have been lucky in close games this year. That doesn't mean that Craig Counsell isn't an excellent in-game manager (he is), or that his superiority to David Ross in that regard isn't one reason for the Brewers leading the Cubs in the standings (it is). Using the fact of the Brewers' luck as some denigration of their success badly misses the mark, because it covers up the fact that every team needs luck (in addition to several other things) to compete for a playoff berth. If Ryan Dempster hadn't refused the first trade destination the Cubs found for him, the team wouldn't even have the pitcher who has racked up more WAR for them than any hurler since Carlos Zambrano. That's about as lucky as you can get. It doesn't make Hendricks's wonderful career or heroic outing Wednesday any less real or any less valid, though. Nor does the fact that the Cubs' winning hit was an infield single off the leg of Joel Payamps render their victory somehow illegitimate. The Brewers have gotten their wins in different ways than the Cubs have, and their luck is taking a different shape than the Cubs' this year, but it's silly to argue that either team has been luckier than the other, and lobbing calumnies back and forth based on the premise that they might have been betrays a misunderstanding of the enormous role luck plays in our lives--but especially in baseball. View full article