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We will go in the way back machine to kick off this offseason’s Remember Some Cubs series. So far back, we can rename the series to Remember Some White Stockings for today. We’re going to talk about Ross Barnes and his season for the 1876 Chicago White Stockings. Charles Roscoe Barnes was born on May 8, 1850, in Mount Morris, New York, about 60 miles east of Buffalo. At 18, he started playing baseball with the Rockford Forest Citys. Barnes officially became a professional in 1871 when the Boston Red Stockings signed him to play. This was the inaugural season of the National Association, which is widely considered the first professional baseball league, as far back as FanGraphs logs stats. In his five years with the Red Stockings, Barnes led all position players in FanGraphs WAR (20.8), batting average (.390), wRC+ (159), runs (459), and stolen bases (73). His signing with the Chicago White Stockings after the 1875 season prompted the formation of the National League. In the 1876 season, the second baseman had his best season. Barnes led all position players in fWAR with 6.6. The next closest player, teammate Cap Anson, was at 4.0. He led the league in batting average, hitting .429, while the next closest person, George Hall, hit .366. He scored 126 runs, which, of course, led the league. George Wright finished second, and he scored 72 runs. According to a 2022 article by Jayson Stark in The Athletic, only four players in baseball history have led their league by 30 or more runs: Aaron Judge, Rickey Henderson, Babe Ruth, and Ross Barnes. Barnes' 54-run lead remains a record. The White Stockings, of course, won the first-ever National League pennant. To avoid regurgitating his fantastic work, you should check out what Nate Silver wrote about Barnes in 2007. Silver created a method to examine how good a player’s sustained peak was, then compared that to the next best player in baseball at the time. Barnes was the best player in baseball for four of the top six seasons, and the gap between the best player and their next closest competitor was the largest. How was Barnes so successful? According to his SABR profile, Barnes mastered the art of what is called the “fair-foul” hit. Back then, baseball had different rules, including that if a ball landed fair, no matter where on the field it landed, and then rolled into playing territory, it was a fair ball. Barnes was great at using this to his advantage to rack up hits. This fact has caused some dispute over Barnes’ true baseball skill. The National League banned the fair-foul hit in 1877, and his batting average plummeted from .438 in 1876 to .272 in 1877 in just 99 plate appearances. His lack of playing time stemmed from, it would seem, an illness. The SABR profile quotes a Chicago Tribune article from May 19 that said Barnes was so sick that he was “physically incapable of exertion.” Rumors also surfaced via the Chicago Times that he was lying about the illness. Regardless, he was never the same. He didn’t play the 1878 season before signing with the Cincinnati Reds for the 1879 season and posting a .266 batting average. He then took another season off before rejoining the Red Stockings in 1881, where he hit .271. Illness or not, he was just never the same player. Barnes still should be remembered whether or not he was overly reliant on the fair-foul hit. The hit was legal during his six-year run as the best player in baseball, and nobody else was able to utilize the success that he did despite everyone being free to do so. I’m confident that Ross Barnes is the best player I never even knew existed. View full player

To that point in the season, Marmol had a 6.00 ERA, and had just given up four runs to the Arizona Diamondbacks in a disastrous outing a few days prior. After walking the first two hitters he faced, Marmol then struck out the next three in a row, putting out the fire that he had started. This was the essence of Carlos Marmol: enter a game, walk a bunch of guys, then strike a bunch of guys out. Rinse and repeat. His appearances were never smooth, and while I don’t think anybody ever felt like the game was securely in hand when he took the mound, he almost always got the job done at the end of the day. I feel like, due to the rocky nature of his outings, Marmol has become forgotten in Cubs history. However, he just may be one of the greatest relievers that this franchise has ever seen. Marmol signed with the Cubs as a 16-year-old catcher and outfielder in July, 1999. After hitting only one home run and posting a .559 OPS in the minor leagues in the 2002 season, Marmol officially converted to become a pitcher that offseason. Following a steady rise through the minors as a starting pitcher, Marmol made his major-league debut in 2006, at age 23. He ended the year with 19 mostly unsuccessful appearances (13 starts and six out of the bullpen), as he had a 6.08 ERA and an even 1.00 strikeout-to-walk ratio. The right-handed pitcher made his 2007 debut on May 19, with a scoreless inning of relief, and thus began his reign of chaotic dominance. He would finish the season with a 1.43 ERA, third among all relievers, and his strikeout rate of 33.7% was second. His walk rate, while bad (12.3%), was 18th-worst. (Remember Some Cubs bonus: future Cub Brandon Morrow had the worst walk rate among relievers that year, at 17.3%.) I would be remiss to discuss Marmol’s strikeouts and walks without mentioning the culprit for his effective wildness: his slider. Nobody, Marmol included, had any idea where that thing was going to end up when he threw it, but man, was it nasty. Batters hit only .167 against him in 2007, which was fourth-lowest in MLB. If he was capable of getting the slider anywhere near the plate, hitters were either swinging and missing, or hitting very soft contact somewhere. The wild relief pitcher followed up his 2007 season with an equally good 2008 season. Then, he really started to lose control of where he was throwing the baseball. The 2009 season saw his strikeout rate drop to a still-good 27.8%, but coupled with a rise in walk rate (to a major league-leading 19.4%), the slippage made him (for that one season) a good, but not great, pitcher. Which brings us to 2010. That strikeout rate jumped right back up, and Marmol led all qualified relief pitchers with 2.7 WAR. He set the all-time record for the best K/9 ratio for a pitcher (minimum 50 innings) with 15.99 strikeouts per nine frames. (Another Remember Some Cubs bonus: In our current era of strikeout mania, this has since been broken several times, with Aroldis Chapman currently holding the record at 17.67 K/9 in his 2014 season. Marmol’s 2010 season remains a Cubs record, though.) Marmol’s 6.7 WAR from 2007 to 2010 was eighth among all relievers in baseball. His 33.9% strikeout rate led all relievers, and his 14.9% walk rate was fifth-worst. He hit 30 batters, which also led all relief pitchers and further compounded the issue. But still: to underscore just how unhittable he was, and to add to the list of things he led relievers in, hitters hit only .152 against him. His slider was worth 53 runs above average, according to Statcast, which made it the third-most valuable pitch for a reliever across those four seasons. For those curious: Heath Bell’s fastball was worth 55.6 runs above average, and, of course, Mariano Rivera’s cutter was worth 54 runs above average. Make no mistake about it: Despite the walks, during his four-year peak, Marmol was elite. Then started a downward trend: he continued walking and striking everybody out in the 2011 and 2012 seasons, but his slider went from completely unhittable to somewhat hittable, which inflated his ERA to 3.76 across those two campaigns. He was designated for assignment by the Cubs in June of 2013, in the wake of a really rough start to the season. He would go on to throw 21 ⅓ innings for the Dodgers to finish 2013, and then 13 ⅓ innings for the Marlins the following season, and would never appear in a major-league game again after that. For his Cubs career, Marmol ended up with 6.8 WAR, per FanGraphs. That’s third all-time for Cubs relievers. Bruce Sutter and Lee Smith are well ahead of him, with 16.1 and 14.9 WAR, respectively. Passing two Hall of Famers is tough to do, though, so coming third on this list is nothing to sneeze at. He was far from perfect as a pitcher, but that is also what made him so fun to watch. Watching him walk the bases loaded was never fun in real time, but it only made it so much more fun when he’d strike out the side immediately after that. View full player

Despite no major moves being made, it was still a jam-packed first week of the offseason for the Chicago Cubs and Major League Baseball as a whole. Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images Cody Bellinger will be back with the North Siders for the 2025 season. Kyle Hendricks is now an Angel. Roki Sasaki will be posted and made available to MLB teams. Those all generated fairly major headlines. However, if you blinked, you might have missed this news, courtesy of Sahadev Sharma and Patrick Mooney at The Athletic: the Cubs will be making major structural changes to their scouting department. I’d recommend reading the whole article, but I’ll list some notable quotes here—the first being areas the Cubs will be expanding. That, at face value, is good! This is something that good teams do. The Cleveland Guardians, Milwaukee Brewers, and Tampa Bay Rays are all known as heavy analytics teams, and they have all had much more success than the Cubs since 2016. But, of course, there is a trade-off. This comes pretty close to confirming a Bob Nightengale report from a couple of months back that “the Cubs told their scouting department that they no longer will scout games at any level except the complex league and the Dominican Summer League.” Yikes! On one hand, I get it. Many teams feel that technology can fill the role in baseball that scouting has done for years. Why do I need a scout to tell me that Aaron Judge hits the ball hard when Statcast can just definitively tell me that he hit the ball harder, on average, than any other major leaguer this season? On the other hand, though, this doesn’t feel like a decision that the big-market Chicago Cubs, the fourth most valuable team in Major League Baseball, should have to make. Two more lines from Sharma and Mooney’s article particularly bug me: Newsflash: the aftermath of 2016 has not been particularly successful! The Cubs had a disappointing regular season in 2017, which was salvaged by a run to the NLCS. They have since made the playoffs only twice, no times in the past four seasons, and are 0-3 in those two playoff appearances. They consistently chase the small-market Milwaukee Brewers in the NL Central standings. To be clear, this is no dirt on Sharma and Mooney, who do great work. They even mention skepticism about this strategy, given the lack of results so far. Let me get this straight: We acknowledge that the Yankees and Dodgers, who just played each other in the World Series, combine analytics and scouting. For some reason, the Cubs are not striving for that. Instead, they admire the Cleveland Guardians—the same small-market Cleveland Guardians that consistently run a payroll half that of the Cubs and have a valuation between three and four times less than the Cubs'. I recently had the pleasure of reading Future Value by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel. Ironically, I finished it the night before this article by Sharma and Mooney was published. It is a fantastic read, and I would suggest that any hardcore baseball fan check it out. They blend scouting stories with information on how the job is done and ultimately make a compelling case for keeping scouts around on some level. There is one quote from late in the book that I want to focus on in regards to so many MLB teams trimming their scouting staffs in favor of technology and analytics: Not only are the Cubs trying desperately to imitate teams like Cleveland or zagging while everyone else is zagging, but they’re most likely late in doing so anyway. In the same way, if someone tells you that there is some stock that you should invest in, you’ve most likely already lost your chance to make money on that stock. I’m sure the Guardians are constantly innovating and finding new ways to improve their models. I worry that by the time the Cubs even catch up, the Guardians will already be on to something new. Which isn’t to say that the Cubs shouldn’t even try. You have to start somewhere. But for a big market team that has money to spend, cutting your scouting department to save a buck feels like a really bad sign. Instead of cutting costs, the Cubs should look for ways to implement their resources and utilize a vigorous scouting staff and a full analytics department. Go out and create something better than Cleveland has; don’t imitate it. Because you’re the Chicago Cubs. Not the Cleveland Guardians. View full article

The date was August 29, 2002, and the Cubs were in Milwaukee for what was, essentially, a battle for last place in the National League Central. Mark Bellhorn stepped to the plate in the top of the fourth inning, facing lefthander Andrew Lorraine. Bellhorn, hitting right-handed, hit a home run to deep left-center field, plating Alex Gonzalez and staking the Cubs to a lead. But the rally didn’t stop there. Lorraine was chased from the game just six hitters later, replaced by the right-handed Jose Cabrera. Thus, Bellhorn came back up to the plate, with two outs and two on, in the same inning. Being a switch-hitter, he took this plate appearance from the left side of the plate. Miraculously, Bellhorn did it again, hitting a home run to deep right field, giving the Cubs a nine-run lead and making baseball history at the same time. There have been many instances in baseball history in which a player has hit two home runs in the same inning. It has happened 60 times, to be precise. On this day, however, Bellhorn became just the second player ever to hit a home run from each side of the plate in the same inning, joining Carlos Baerga, who did so in 1993. Kendrys Morales has since done the same feat, and they are still the only three players to accomplish that feat. This is both the beauty of Mark Bellhorn, and the beauty of baseball: On any random day, in any random game between two teams that are a combined 61 games below .500, you can witness history, from a player that would only go on to hit 69 home runs for his entire career. It's a nice thing. Bellhorn was drafted out of Auburn University by the Oakland Athletics in the second round of the 1997 MLB Draft. Despite performing well in most of his minor-league action, he hit only .198/.296/.316 in sporadic playing time at the major-league level from 1997-2001. He was unceremoniously traded to the Cubs on November 2, 2001, for a young minor leaguer named Adam Morrissey, who would never appear in the major leagues. He started the 2002 season with the Cubs at the big-league level, and thanks to his ability to play multiple positions, he found himself filling in as a utility player for much of the early season. The versatile defender appeared in games at all infield positions, as well as two innings in left-field, for the Cubs that season. Bellhorn really seized his opportunity to become a full-time player, with home runs on back-to-back days on April 11 and 12, and never looked back. His .258/.374/.512 batting line was good for a 135 wRC+ on the season, a figure that was second on the Cubs behind Sammy Sosa and 31st in all of baseball, according to FanGraphs. Unfortunately for Cubs fans, Bellhorn failed to live up to his 2002 season the following year. His power cratered and he hit only .209/.341/.317 in 173 plate appearances, before being traded to the Rockies. He eventually ended up with the Boston Red Sox for the 2004 season, where he regained his old form and became a postseason legend, helping the hungry Red Sox end their 86 year World Series Championship drought with clutch home runs in both the ALCS and World Series. Afterward, following three very unsuccessful seasons for the Red Sox, Yankees, Padres, and Reds, Bellhorn returned to the minors for good, before eventually retiring in 2009. In some ways, Bellhorn was a bit before his time. From 2002 to 2004, his 27.4-percent strikeout rate was second-worst in baseball. On the flip side, though, his 14.7-percent walk rate was 15th, and when you factor in the home runs, his 45.3-percent three-true-outcome rate was fifth. If Bellhorn was around today, maybe he would have been appreciated just a little bit more. Even at the time, though, he was a cult favorite in the Windy City. View full player

With so much buzz around Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto this offseason, the continued globalization of baseball has been obvious. Ohtani and Yamamoto, who came to MLB via Japan’s professional baseball league, Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), are joined in free agency by Shōta Imanaga, who is also hoping to become an MLB star. Most probably remember Matt Murton for his sensational MLB debut season in 2005, or for his fiery red hair. What many may not know, or have forgotten, is that after his MLB career fizzled in 2009, Murton made the jump to NPB and became a star in Japan. Matthew Henry Murton was born on October 3, 1981, and was drafted into Major League Baseball by the Boston Red Sox in the supplemental portion of the first round of the 2003 draft. After steady production in his first year or so in the minor leagues, the outfielder was traded to the Cubs in the 2004 deal that is, perhaps, more famously known as the Nomar Garciaparra trade. What is funny in retrospect about the Garciaparra trade is that Murton actually produced more than double the WAR that Garciaparra did for the Cubs, according to both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference. [Ed. note: I'm glad you can laugh about this. "Funny" is not the word this 1989 baby would use for that turn of events.] Murton got the call to the big leagues in July 2005, after hitting for a .343 average across the two highest levels of the minors to that point in the season. He continued hitting for a high average with the Cubs, as he went on to hit .441 that July, and he finished the year with a .321/.386/.531 slash line. His emergence earned him the everyday job in left field for the 2006 season. He continued his steady performance, to the tune of a .297/.365/.444 slash line, and his 2.8 WAR was actually good for third among the position players for what was an otherwise dismal Cubs team, according to FanGraphs. With the additions of Cliff Floyd and Alfonso Soriano heading into the 2007 season, Murton was relegated to part-time duty, and was sent down to Triple A after not producing much for the first few months.. However, upon his recall in July, he hit .310/.375/.543 to close out the year, and proved to be a valuable platoon partner with the left-handed hitting Floyd in right field for a division-winning team. In a crucial late-season game against the Brewers, he hit a huge home run. Alas, that was about it for Murton in a Cubs uniform. With Kosuke Fukudome heading to the Cubs the following season, and the completely random emergence of Reed Johnson and Jim Edmonds, Murton didn’t see the field much in 2008, and was a throw-in to a July trade with the Oakland Athletics for Rich Harden. Murton only got 31 plate appearances the rest of that year for the Athletics, and made his way to the Colorado Rockies for the 2009 season, where he again saw very little playing time. This led him to the Hanshin Tigers of NPB, where he became a legend. Not only was Murton one of the best players in NPB during his first season over there in 2010, he broke the single-season hits record, previously held by Ichiro. He finished his first season there with 214 hits and a .349 batting average. Shogo Akiyama has since broken this record, with 216 hits in the 2015 season. The outfielder enjoyed five more fruitful seasons in Japan after 2010, before attempting an unsuccessful MLB comeback with the Cubs in 2016, and then the Tigers in 2017. After that, Murton called it quits for good. Murton was a high-contact player in his time in MLB, as he struck out in just 14.1 percent of his plate appearances for his career. That can be a valuable player, but Murton didn’t add a ton of power, and for someone who was relegated to a corner outfield spot, power hitting is a must. Thus, he struggled to make a major impact in MLB. But through perseverance and a willingness to give it a go somewhere else, Murton was still able to make an impact on baseball somewhere else in the world. That is a great and noteworthy accomplishment. [Ed. note: As was that homer in 2007. I was at that game. It was nuts.] View full player

Before I get too far into this article, there is one confession I’d like to make. I am 28 years old. My earliest memories as a Cubs fan are something like Sammy Sosa hitting home runs, the 2003 playoff run, and then everything thereafter. However, in an effort to expand this series beyond “Remember Some Cubs Exclusively From the 21st Century,” I have been scouring Baseball Reference for some interesting Cubs to write about from the many years of Cubs baseball that happened before I became a fan. Of course, I know all about the Ron Santo and Ernie Banks types. But we all remember those guys. I’d much prefer to examine players that people really might have forgotten about, or just don’t know as much about. The other night, I stumbled on Steve Trachsel, and while I knew who he was, I had never done much of a deep dive into his statistics or his life. I now believe him to be, maybe, one of the most average pitchers to ever put on a Cubs uniform. Stephen Christoper Trachsel was born on Halloween, 1970, in California. Raised in California his whole life, Trachsel went to Fullerton College, and eventually Long Beach State University for one year in 1991. He played only one season there, but was a key hurler in their run to the College World Series. Given the soft-tossing nature of his pitching, Trachsel didn’t wow many scouts, but his performance in college eventually led to him being drafted in the eighth round of the 1991 MLB Draft by the Cubs. He didn’t have to wait very long to make his major-league debut in September of 1993, but it wasn’t until 1994 when Trachsel became a full-time fixture in the Cubs’ rotation. From 1994 through 1998, Trachsel made 183 starts for the Cubs and had a 4.35 ERA. Herein lies the beauty of Trachsel. My calling him one of the most average pitchers to ever put on a Cubs uniform isn’t an insult. There is value in someone who can average 30 starts and almost 200 innings per year over half a decade. The bittersweet beauty is that this type of pitcher is now a relic of the past, confined to the virtual baseball museums of FanGraphs and Baseball Reference, only waiting for someone to stumble upon the exhibit. Fangraphs has statistics that they refer to as “+Stats.” It can be difficult to look at a player’s stats from over 20 years ago and figure out if they were actually good or not. Baseball changes dramatically over time. Thus, the way that players play (and accumulate stats) changes as well. For example, Trachsel’s 6.5 strikeouts per nine innings over those six seasons with the Cubs would have been better than only three qualifying pitchers in 2023 (Patrick Corbin, Miles Mikolas, and Jordan Lyles, if you’re curious). His K/9+, though, was 97, with 100 being average. So his strikeout rate was just slightly below average, despite looking incredibly unimpressive to the modern eye. +Stats give us an easy way to take a look at any player from any era and figure out how they stacked up against their peers from that point in time. Anyway, Trachsel was almost exactly league-average in every single +Stat from 1994 to 1999. I already listed his 97 K/9+. He also had a 96 BB/9+. Opponents batting average? That sits right at 100. WHIP? That is right at 99. ERA+? You guessed it: 99. In baseball in 2023, you don’t see players with such average numbers throwing over 200 innings, year in and year out. A number like that is reserved for aces like Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer. Gerritt Cole and Miles Mikolas are the only pitchers to have thrown 200 or more innings in each of the past two seasons. Neither hit that figure in 2021. Trachsel did it for four seasons in a row, from 1996 through 1999. In addition to eating innings, Trachsel was also known for taking an incredibly long time between pitches, prompting Cliff Floyd to say that he “always hated facing him. He takes too damn long.” He was one of the handful of players who have been tagged with the sobriquet “the Human Rain Delay”. I’m sure he would have loved the pitch clock. After his stint with the Cubs, Trachsel had a rough season with Tampa Bay and Toronto, before eventually ending up with the Mets, where he started 160 games over six seasons and pitched to a 103 ERA +, because some things never change. Trachsel started the 2007 season with Baltimore and then came back to the Cubs to make three subpar September starts, before ending his career with Baltimore in 2008. Over the past few days, I’ve found myself wondering what Trachsel would look like if he were pitching in 2023. Would he be more effective if teams limited his times through the order, like we saw the Cubs do with similarly soft-tossing Kyle Hendricks this season? Would he even have been given much of a chance, given the lack of overpowering stuff and subpar FIP? Regardless, all we can do now is reflect on what he provided, and while he was never elite, Trachsel was a fixture in the Cubs’ rotation for much of the 1990s. He was given the start in the one-game playoff of 1998 against the San Francisco Giants, and took a no-hitter into the seventh inning as the Cubs clinched a playoff spot. For that, he’ll forever be etched into Cubs lore. View full player

There are very few examples in baseball history that illustrate the whimsy of awards voting (particularly in the period before analytics was at the forefront of everyone’s minds) like Chris Coghlan's Rookie of the Year win in 2009. Despite posting less WAR (per FanGraphs) than multiple players, including future MVP Andrew McCutchen and the Cubs’ own Randy Wells, Coghlan won the National League award, likely because of his .321 batting average. Although he was the 36th overall pick and a standout player in the SEC at Ole Miss, Coghlan never found himself ranked on any top prospect boards. He played in the Futures Game in 2007, but even with that, his emergence in 2009 was a surprise to many. Sure enough, to say things fizzled out a bit for Coghlan after that would be an understatement. In over 1,000 plate appearances with the Marlins over the next four seasons, Coghlan hit just 12 home runs and had a .242 batting average. This poor offensive performance, plus the lack of defensive value, led to Coghlan being non-tendered by the Marlins after the 2013 season. The Cubs signed him to a minor-league contract before the 2014 season with very little fanfare. Amid all of the hype and excitement of the major-league debuts of all sorts of top prospects over the 2014 and 2015 seasons for the Cubs, Coghlan was one of the lone, stable veterans of the group. In 935 plate appearances, Coghlan hit .266/.346/.447, often finding himself hitting near the top of the lineup. He worked patient at-bats, drew walks, and generally was a very productive player. According to FanGraphs, Coghlan had the fourth-most WAR among offensive players for the 2014 Cubs, and the third-most in the 2015 season. Only Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo finished with a higher WAR than Coghlan during the Cubs’ coming-out party that second year. While Bryant, Rizzo, Addison Russell, Jorge Soler, and Kyle Schwarber rightly got so much hype during that season, there was Coghlan, quietly producing in the middle of the lineup and helping the Cubs make the playoffs for the first time since 2008. After the signing of Jason Heyward and the decision to bring Dexter Fowler back that offseason, the Cubs were looking at a starting outfield of Kyle Schwarber, Dexter Fowler, and Jason Heyward--not to mention, they still had Jorge Soler on the roster, and Ben Zobrist had the versatility to move into an outfield corner if necessary. Coghlan was the odd man out, and thus was traded unceremoniously to the Oakland Athletics for Aaron Brooks, who never pitched in a big league game for the Cubs. The news of that trade broke just minutes before Theo Epstein and Fowler made their dramatic entrance at the team's spring-training complex. However, as some may recall, that was not all for Coghlan in a Cubs uniform. With Schwarber out for the season (or, as we know now, until the World Series) with a knee injury, the Cubs traded Arismendy Alcantara to the Athletics for Coghlan in June. He never quite regained his previous form, but he still hit a slightly above-average .252/.391/.388 line in 128 plate appearances for the Cubs the rest of that glorious year. While he would only end up receiving three plate appearances in the entire series, Coghlan was the World Series Game One starter for the Cubs in right field, which is a trivia question I think many Cubs fans would get wrong. Obviously, Coghlan has a World Series ring with the Cubs, but really, it’s his production in the two years beforehand that he should be remembered for. Coghlan would go on to play in just 36 games for the Toronto Blue Jays in the 2017 season, where he was perhaps better known for this slide than his overall batting line of .200/.299/.267, and he never played in the major leagues again. Only 14 other players who won the Rookie of the Year Award went on to post a lower career WAR than Coghlan's. All of this is to say that Coghlan, likely, is one of the most forgotten Rookies of the Year in MLB history. But he shouldn’t be remembered for that award, at least not by Cubs fans. I fear that many have forgotten him, but for two seasons, he helped usher in a new era of Cubs baseball--one that would lead to the first World Series win in over 100 years. He posted 5.5 WAR over those two seasons, and was one of their most valuable position players and one of their best and most consistent hitters during a period when the younger guys got all of the hype. He even started Game One of the World Series for them. For all of that, we should not forget him. View full player

For today's Remember Some Cubs, let's go all the way back to the 19th century. Today, we’re going to try something new. Last offseason, I wrote seven different Remember Some Cubs pieces on the following players: Mark DeRosa, Mike Fontenot, Mark Bellhorn, Steve Trachsel, Chris Coghlan, Carlos Marmol, and Matt Murton. All players who played on the Cubs in the 21st century, or, in Trachsel’s case, just before, if you exclude a brief appearance with the Cubs in 2007. As someone born in 1995, I remember watching all those players except Trachsel. However, I have fond memories of taking the mound with him in Major League Baseball, Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. on the Nintendo 64, and getting crushed by my older brothers. We will go in the way back machine to kick off this offseason’s Remember Some Cubs series. So far back, we can rename the series to Remember Some White Stockings for today. We’re going to talk about Ross Barnes and his season for the 1876 Chicago White Stockings. Charles Roscoe Barnes was born on May 8, 1850, in Mount Morris, New York, about 60 miles east of Buffalo. At 18, he started playing baseball with the Rockford Forest Citys. Barnes officially became a professional in 1871 when the Boston Red Stockings signed him to play. This was the inaugural season of the National Association, which is widely considered the first professional baseball league, as far back as FanGraphs logs stats. In his five years with the Red Stockings, Barnes led all position players in FanGraphs WAR (20.8), batting average (.390), wRC+ (159), runs (459), and stolen bases (73). His signing with the Chicago White Stockings after the 1875 season prompted the formation of the National League. In the 1876 season, the second baseman had his best season. Barnes led all position players in fWAR with 6.6. The next closest player, teammate Cap Anson, was at 4.0. He led the league in batting average, hitting .429, while the next closest person, George Hall, hit .366. He scored 126 runs, which, of course, led the league. George Wright finished second, and he scored 72 runs. According to a 2022 article by Jayson Stark in The Athletic, only four players in baseball history have led their league by 30 or more runs: Aaron Judge, Rickey Henderson, Babe Ruth, and Ross Barnes. Barnes' 54-run lead remains a record. The White Stockings, of course, won the first-ever National League pennant. To avoid regurgitating his fantastic work, you should check out what Nate Silver wrote about Barnes in 2007. Silver created a method to examine how good a player’s sustained peak was, then compared that to the next best player in baseball at the time. Barnes was the best player in baseball for four of the top six seasons, and the gap between the best player and their next closest competitor was the largest. How was Barnes so successful? According to his SABR profile, Barnes mastered the art of what is called the “fair-foul” hit. Back then, baseball had different rules, including that if a ball landed fair, no matter where on the field it landed, and then rolled into playing territory, it was a fair ball. Barnes was great at using this to his advantage to rack up hits. This fact has caused some dispute over Barnes’ true baseball skill. The National League banned the fair-foul hit in 1877, and his batting average plummeted from .438 in 1876 to .272 in 1877 in just 99 plate appearances. His lack of playing time stemmed from, it would seem, an illness. The SABR profile quotes a Chicago Tribune article from May 19 that said Barnes was so sick that he was “physically incapable of exertion.” Rumors also surfaced via the Chicago Times that he was lying about the illness. Regardless, he was never the same. He didn’t play the 1878 season before signing with the Cincinnati Reds for the 1879 season and posting a .266 batting average. He then took another season off before rejoining the Red Stockings in 1881, where he hit .271. Illness or not, he was just never the same player. Barnes still should be remembered whether or not he was overly reliant on the fair-foul hit. The hit was legal during his six-year run as the best player in baseball, and nobody else was able to utilize the success that he did despite everyone being free to do so. I’m confident that Ross Barnes is the best player I never even knew existed. View full article

The Cubs can pursue one of the best hitters in baseball and his name isn't Juan Soto. Image courtesy of © Troy Taormina-Imagn Images As Juan Soto continued to do Juan Soto things for the New York Yankees throughout October, I continued to be sad about the reality: he will not be a Chicago Cub this offseason. There’s been very little linking the two parties, and given recent precedent, I have no reason to believe that the Cubs will emerge as a front-runner. I would love to be wrong here more than I ever have. To keep twisting the knife, it feels like it would be a hand-in-glove fit, too. The Cubs sorely need to add some pop to their lineup, and right field is likely one of their few spots to do it, with Seiya Suzuki sliding over to designated hitter. What if I told you someone else was available that wouldn’t require a $600 million contract? Chandler Rome of The Athletic has recently speculated that Kyle Tucker could be on the move. While he is certainly not as good as Soto, Tucker would still be a huge upgrade for the Cubs’ lineup. For those unfamiliar, since his first full season in 2020, Tucker has been one of the best players in all of baseball. His 146 wRC+ is tenth in that timeframe, according to FanGraphs. His 20.9 WAR is 13th. He is a unique blend of, well, everything. He’s struck out only 16 percent of the time for his career, which means he typically carries a fairly high batting average. He’s always had an average to slightly above average walk rate, but that has been slowly improving over time: it ballooned to 16.5 percent in 339 plate appearances this year, leading to a career-high 180 wRC+. His career isolated power of .242 would have led the Cubs this year by quite a bit, and he’s also stolen 66 bases in the past three seasons combined. It should be reiterated that it is, of course, speculation that Tucker would even be available. However, the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. The Astros have one impending free agent this offseason in Alex Bregman. Tucker is a free agent the following offseason. If they want to try to recoup value for some of these guys, the time is now, and Tucker would almost have to be that guy. The issue? The Astros made the playoffs this year and would almost certainly be looking for guys who could contribute to the team now. Who might that be? For one, I’d imagine the Astros would immediately demand Pete Crow-Armstrong be the centerpiece of this deal, and the Cubs would likely refuse to do that. For me, PCA showed enough with the bat at times this season to make him untouchable in this deal. But what about Kevin Alcantara? He could immediately slide into the Astros’ everyday lineup in any outfield spot where Houston figures to be thin. He might be the kind of cost-controlled player Houston would covet in a deal like this. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t stop there. The Astros would likely ask for two guys who could help the major league roster next season and seasons beyond that. What about Jordan Wicks or Ben Brown to help them fortify their pitching staff? Lastly, Houston would probably go for someone a bit further away from the majors to start restocking their farm system. Would the Cubs also be willing to part with someone like James Triantos or Cam Smith? It should be mentioned that all of this likely hinges on Cody Bellinger’s looming contract decision. Should he opt-in, things will be cluttered in the Cubs’ pool of position players, but they could get creative. What if they traded Michael Busch to the Astros instead of Alcantara? This would open up first base for Bellinger to play full-time. It feels like a lot for Kyle Tucker when laid out like this. On the flip side, if the Cubs want to improve, they must be creative. They have a lot of prospect capital. It might be time to start cashing that in if they aren’t going to spend extravagantly in free agency. What do you think? Is this too much for one year of Kyle Tucker? Too little? What would you give up? View full article

Isaac Paredes has a less-than-stellar partial season with the Cubs in 2024. To succeed again, he needs to go back to what he did with the Rays: pull fly balls. Image courtesy of © Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images The thought process behind the move was clear when the Chicago Cubs acquired Isaac Paredes from the Tampa Bay Rays on July 28. Viewing from afar, the Cubs were swapping out an underperforming third baseman with a very high ceiling in Christopher Morel for an overperforming one who has probably already realized his ceiling in Paredes. Paredes is a free agent as soon as 2028, while Morel is as soon as 2029, so the Cubs gave up one year of team control and two relief prospects in Ty Johnson and Hunter Bigge for the swap. The Cubs likely felt that Paredes guaranteed the team more production from the hot corner for the next few seasons. That wasn’t a crazy thought, either. The Cubs’ new third baseman boasts a 123 wRC+ since 2022, according to FanGraphs, which is 40th in all of baseball, right around names like Christian Yelich, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Randy Arozarena. Morel, on the other hand, was costing the Cubs defensively at third base and couldn’t seem to translate the ability to hit the ball hard into consistent offensive results. As a team trying to win now, the Cubs couldn’t afford to wait around for him to figure it out. Paredes did outperform Morel for the remainder of 2024, at least. That says more about how bad Morel was in Tampa Bay than anything else. Paredes posted a wRC+ of 86 with the Cubs, while Morel posted a putrid 59 wRC+ down in Florida. Comparisons to Morel won’t make Cubs fans feel secure in who their third baseman is for 2025; however, Paredes didn’t get the raw results in his two months with the Cubs to warrant security. What do the numbers beneath the hood say? A brief refresher on how Paredes succeeds: he hits the ball in the air. A lot. He also pulls the ball. A lot. This enables him to hit a whole lot of home runs that just barely sneak over the left-field fence, but hey, a home run is a home run, right? This gives him well above-average home run totals. His 17.4 percent career strikeout rate and 11 percent career walk rate combine to give him a well above-average .333 on-base percentage for his career. He’s patient, puts the bat on the ball, and does so in a way that maximizes his power, resulting in a good offensive player. The issue with this kind of offensive profile is that the line between the numbers he was posting with Tampa Bay and those he posted with the Cubs is razor-thin. Consider that his average exit velocity last year was 85mph, per Baseball Savant. That was 244th among 252 qualified players and put him around names like Nicky Lopez, Nico Hoerner, and Brayan Rocchio. Those guys have their uses as players, sure, but slugging third basemen, they are not. Let’s look at Paredes’ batted ball data before and after the trade. All stats courtesy of FanGraphs: Time LD% GB% FB% Before Trade 20.5% 29.0% 50.5% After Trade 30.1% 33.6% 36.3% He increased his line drive rate by roughly 50 percent! As a matter of fact, that 30.1 percent line drive rate was second only to Aaron Judge during this timeframe. That’s good, right? Recall how poorly he rates in average exit velocity. Baseball Savant said his average exit velocity on those line drives was 89.5mph, 167th of 186 players who hit at least 25 line drives during this time frame. This led to a .585 wOBA on line drives, which sounds good, but was only 137th of those 189 players. He had 28 hits on those line drives, and just six were extra-base hits, all of which were doubles. He doesn’t hit the ball hard enough to do much more damage than a single on a line drive. With that said, more line drives should never really be seen as a bad thing. Even if they are just singles, more singles are good! The issue here is that it cut into what made him good. Not only did he hit fewer fly balls, he also didn’t hit them to the pull side nearly as often, and his output on fly balls, and thus his home run total, suffered as a result. Here are his fly balls by batted ball direction and his wRC+ on fly balls before and after the trade: Time Pull% Cent% Oppo% wRC+ Before Trade 45.3% 31.3% 23.3% 96 After Trade 37.7% 34.0% 28.3% -7 Combine this lessened pull rate with softer contact on his fly balls, as well as fewer fly balls in general, and you have a player who was only able to hit three home runs in 212 plate appearances with the Cubs after clubbing 16 in 429 plate appearances with the Rays. Where does this leave Paredes for 2025? He’ll almost certainly be the Opening Day third baseman. He has enough of a track record that the Cubs won’t give up on him after 212 subpar plate appearances, and besides, they have plenty of other issues to address, like catcher and the bullpen. I hope that more line drives weren’t an initiative inspired by the Cubs. I assume he got in his head a bit, knowing that Wrigley Field has a very deep left-field corner, and tried to hit more line drives to compensate. But Paredes is who he is at this point. He has discovered a way to maximize what is mostly subpar batted ball quality, and he does so impressively. He needs to get back to that to be a long-term option for the Cubs at the hot corner. View full article

The Cubs tend to figure out their bullpen in the second half of the season but can they find a way to get there earlier in the season? Image courtesy of © Isaiah J. Downing-Imagn Images While the Chicago Cubs otherwise got off to a fantastic start to the 2024 season, it’s easy to remember just how much better that start could have been. There was the blown save in the season's first game against the Rangers. There was the lost 8-0 lead in San Diego. The backbreaker against the Marlins was in the first game of a doubleheader. All lost opportunities for a team that ended up being on the wrong side of the playoff picture. All in April To be fair, the bullpen did right itself: a rough first half gave way to a much better second half with a 3.51 ERA, good for eighth in baseball, according to FanGraphs. However, the damage was done. At that point, the Cubs had dug themselves enough of a hole thanks to bullpen meltdowns like the ones previously mentioned. Thus, it’s fair to assume that fortifying the bullpen will be at the top of Jed Hoyer’s offseason shopping list. He basically admitted as much in his press conference a few weeks back and took some level of responsibility for the instability of the bullpen early on. Hoyer said he didn’t give the team enough depth to withstand the early season struggles from Adbert Alzolay or the early season injury to Julian Merryweather. Indeed, this proved to be true. It also seems this isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed this phenomenon. Under Jed Hoyer, the Cubs have frequently pitched very poorly out of the bullpen in the first half, only to improve in the second half significantly: Year First Half Bullpen ERA Second Half Bullpen ERA 2020 5.30 (23rd) 3.53 (5th) 2021 3.40 (5th) 5.61 (28th) 2022 4.30 (24th) 3.86 (17th) 2023 4.01 (16th) 3.67 (8th) 2024 4.01 (16th) 3.51 (8th) In every season except for 2021, when they traded their three best bullpen arms, Andrew Chafin, Craig Kimbrel, and Ryan Tepera, at the trade deadline, the Cubs dramatically improved their bullpen ERA from the first half to the second half. What, exactly, does this mean? My first thought was that this would be a league-wide finding. All teams take time to find their go-to guys out of the bullpen in a given season. Do you think the Yankees thought Luke Weaver would be closing playoff games? But once they find those guys, they ride them more in the second half to much better results. Believe it or not, this does not appear to be the case: Year First Half Bullpen ERA Second Half Bullpen ERA 2020 4.36 4.52 2021 4.19 4.14 2022 3.86 3.85 2023 4.10 4.26 2024 3.97 3.98 It seems pretty random to me. In some cases, it was worse, and in some cases, it was better. In most instances, the difference is pretty small. This regime can build a good bullpen. They have done it on the fly mid-season multiple times! How do they translate that to the offseason? Why haven’t they been able to do so to this point? The Cubs have demonstrated the ability to identify and bring in bullpen arms that they think can help. They did so this season with Tyson Miller and Jorge Lopez. They need to build more contingency plans in the offseason so they don’t have to do so mid-season. This wasn’t just a blip on the radar of 2024 failures for Jed Hoyer and this front office but rather a consistent shortcoming that has to be addressed for next season. View full article

Most Improved. What does that mean to you? Maybe it's a player who struggled in 2023 and returned with better numbers in 2024. Or, maybe it's a guy who did very little for the first two months of the season and then turned it on in the second half? That's why we like getting multiple voters and ways of thinking. Find out who our choice was for 2024. As the MLB playoffs continue without the Chicago Cubs, it’s important to remember that this season wasn’t a complete loss. Plenty of guys made significant strides in the major leagues that might make us all more bullish on their outlook for next season, when hope will spring anew. Let’s take a look at the voting results for the Cubs’ most improved player. Honorable Mention Seiya Suzuki - 132 G, .283/.366/.482, 21 HR, 73 RBI, 74 R Suzuki received only one vote, but it was a first place vote, and candidly, that vote was me! So let me defend my selection a bit. He had a career year! 3.5 fWAR and 21 home runs are both career highs. However, that seems less impressive when you compare those figures to last year’s figures of 3.2 fWAR and 20 home runs. Here’s the thing: so much of last season’s production came in the second half of the season that it was fair to wonder what version of Suzuki we would see in 2024. The inconsistent but potentially great version? Or the one that is a top 30 hitter in baseball? He answered this question by posting a wRC+ of 130 or greater in every month except for May, when he was coming back from an injury. Make no mistake about it, Seiya Suzuki is one of the better hitters in baseball, and he proved that this season. Porter Hodge - 39 G, 43.0 IP, 52 K, 19 BB, 1.88 ERA, 0.88 WHIP One year ago, Hodge was coming off of a season in Double-A Tennessee where he posted a 5.13 ERA. Now, he has to be considered the favorite to be penciled in as the Chicago Cubs’ closer for the 2025 season. Stuff has never been the question for the flame-throwing reliever - it’s command. Hodge kept his walk rate to a bad but bearable 11.6%in the big leagues this season, down from 13.6% in Tennessee last year, and his K-BB% was 20.1%, up from 15.0%. Javier Assad - 29 G, 147 IP, 124 K, 63 BB, 3.73 ERA, 1.40 WHIP Assad had a higher ERA this year (3.73) than last (3.05) thanks, in part, to a higher walk rate. That might not feel like an improvement, however, continuing to induce soft contact and limit runs in a much larger sample size with the big league team is a meaningful development. He threw 147 innings in 29 starts with the Cubs this year, up from 109 ⅓ innings in 10 starts and 32 appearances overall last season. Dansby Swanson - 149 G, .242/.312/.390, 16 HR, 66 RBI, 82 R The Cubs’ shortstop certainly had a huge mid-season improvement in 2024. After posting just a 79 wRC+ in the first half of the season, Swanson hit for a scintillating 124 wRC+ after the midsummer classic. Part of that 124 second half wRC+ was buoyed by a .335 BABIP, but he did also drop his strikeout rate to 20.7 percent, which would be a career best for a full season. At the very least, he has given us all a much better taste in our mouths heading into 2025. The Top 3 #3: Miguel Amaya - 117 G, .232/.288/.357, 8 HR, 47 RBI, 32 R Similar to Swanson, Amaya had a really rough first half of the season. So much so that the catching position was looking like a real question mark heading into 2025. Thankfully, the Cubs’ catcher answered the bell in the second half of the season, posting a 113 wRC+, up from a lowly 60 in the first half. He made a meaningful swing adjustment right around the time the results got better, which you can read more about here. Improving the outlook at the catcher position should be one of the main priorities for Jed Hoyer this offseason. Amaya, at least, continues to be an intriguing player behind the plate for the Cubs going forward. #2: Jameson Taillon - 28 G, 165 ⅓ IP, 125 SO, 33 BB, 3.27 ERA, 1.13 WHIP After subpar results in his first season as a Cub, there was plenty of reason to believe that Taillon would be better in year two. I’m happy to say that he was absolutely much better in year two. He gave up fewer home runs in more innings pitched, trimmed his walk rate, and cut his ERA from 4.84 to 3.27, which was 16th among qualified pitchers this season. He was reliable, taking the mound just about every fifth day for the Cubs after an early season injury. The Cubs should feel very comfortable with Jameson Taillon being in their rotation heading into the 2025 season. Winner Pete Crow-Armstrong - 123 G, .237/.286/.384, 10 HR, 47 RBI, 46 R After a rough debut at the big league level last season, it was fair to question what kind of production the Cubs would get from Pete Crow-Armstrong this year. After Cody Bellinger cracked a rib and PCA was forced into action with the Cubs, it was fair to question what the Cubs would get from PCA over the course of his career. He hit just .203/.253/.329 in the first half, which included a lowly month of June where he hit .145/.192/.203. Then, it all clicked. The Cubs’ rookie was an above average hitter in the second half of the season, to the tune of a .262/.310/.425 line. The defense is as good as advertised, and he was a menace on the bases, stealing 27 bases in 30 tries. Combine all of that and the youngster was worth 2.7 fWAR, which was fifth among position players on the Cubs. The sky's the limit for PCA going forward. How do you feel about our choice for Cubs Most Improved Player in 2024? How would you rank the players? Let us know down below. View full article