Official 2023 Chicago Cubs Season Thread Vol: (17-17)

The Chicago Cubs clinched a spot in the post season last Friday night, which prompted a series of interviews from the men at the top, Tom Ricketts and Theo Epstein. Epstein appeared on 670 The Score on Sunday morning, while Tom Ricketts held an interview with CBS Sports and made an appearance on Kap and Co. You can listen/read the interviews at the links listed above, but I’ve consolidated some of the key points, down below. Here’s what the leaders of the Cubs had to say about their team’s big push in 2015, starting with team President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein …

Epstein agrees that it is pretty unreasonable, and thus special, to expect four or five rookies to perform the way they have and end up with a winning team. History tells us it shouldn’t have worked; adjustments, slumps and readjustments are difficult and occur across the board, but somehow this team has weathered through them.

Epstein recalls a question from the trade deadline, “Why didn’t you add any bats?” And his response, at the time, was that he was committed to his young players and wanted them to develop and push through their slumps. The thing is, he didn’t think it would happen in August and September. He fully expected and was prepared for a slow second half, offensively, and these guys completely surprised him. (Me: nervous laughter.)

Epstein was impressed with Joe Maddon’s managerial prowess at the beginning of August, when he started realigning position players (Starlin Castro) and pulling starters early (Jason Hammel) in order to win the games that really mattered. Epstein believes that Maddon made those calls at exactly the right time and that he has been a huge part of their success.

Epstein recalls the late nights in 2012-2013 when he would sit with the other front office executives poring over their roster and minor league depth charts with a heavy sigh. While they were excited for the future, they were reasonably anxious and nervous. They had just drafted a high school kid (Albert Almora) and anxiously wondered, “How are we going to be good by 2016?” (Me: more nervous laughter.) He never questioned that he would get the Cubs where they needed to be, but did wonder how long it would actually take.

A lot of rebuilds fail because teams run out of time, owners get anxious, teams dip into free agency and give up on their young players too soon, but the Cubs held steady and the success came at the right time. I’m guessing we may owe Tom Ricketts a bit more credit/gratitude than we typical put out there. It’s not easy to sit through so many losing seasons – and I’m not saying that is the only way – but he found the right guys, made a plan and stuck with it. That takes guts.

For what it’s worth, Epstein says that Ricketts has been the “most patient one, out of everybody.” He recalls his first meeting with Ricketts and how he intimated a need for a systematic change, based on young players and scouting and player development, throughout the entire organization.

Epstein braced himself for the second half drop off of the younger players, and that seems to have played a big role in their trade deadline decisions this year. You can be upset and kick the dirt about that, but, given how well they’ve played since then and how difficult it would have been to catch the Cardinals, it may have all been for the best. They didn’t give up anything of note at the deadline and they are likely where they would have been anyway.

Jon Lester rented out a bar and held a party for the entire team to celebrate clinching the playoffs. That’s what veterans do, and this is an awesome team.

Epstein reasserts that he’d like to stay with the Cubs after his contract expires after next season and that ironing out an extension won’t be a problem. I wouldn’t worry about this, folks. I don’t think anyone – on either side – wants to see Epstein go anywhere else, right now.


Moving on to Chairman and Owner Tom Ricketts …

After Joe Maddon jokingly made some comments about Wrigley Field concerts affecting a ground ball hit to Starlin Castro, Ricketts confirmed that concerts would continue at Wrigley Field. No one is allowed on the infield during those events, and the concerts create revenue that is poured back into baseball operations. Works for me.

Kaplan asks Ricketts, “You’re going to playoffs this year. How much quicker did it happen than expected?” To which Ricketts hilariously responds, “Uh….it’s been quite a few years, if you don’t recall.”

But when pressed, Ricketts recalls a conversation he had with Epstein at the end of the 2014 season, where Epstein said something along the lines of, “We had such a great second half, 2015 doesn’t have to be about development.” Ricketts agreed and Epstein said, “Let me see what I can do.” Then Joe Maddon and Jon Lester agreed to come to the Northside and everyone gained a ton of confidence.

Ricketts doesn’t believe there is a way to measure it, but he can’t imagine a manager being more important to a team than what Maddon has meant to the Cubs this year. He has taken responsibility when things have gone wrong, given credit where it’s due when they go right and has been a phenomenal in game manager, as well.

The lowest moment of the Ricketts family stewardship (according to Tom) came in August of 2010. At the time, the team had the oldest lineup, third highest payroll, third worst record, and one of the worst farm systems in all of baseball. That’s when he realized how much work he had to do. But since the new front office was put in place, Tom hasn’t looked back. He did his best to buy them time and give them everything they needed to succeed and he believes they finally have.

Ricketts admits that there were conversations, at one point, along the lines of, if this renovation doesn’t get done, we’re going to have to look into moving. (Me: To be honest, I never suspected that they actually entertained this idea.)

Asked once again on the contract negotiations for Theo Epstein, Ricketts reiterates: no one sees any road blocks, Theo and Tom have a fantastic relationship, and when the season is over, they will sit down and iron it out. I understand why people keep asking, but based on the sheer amount of optimistic comments from both Ricketts and Epstein, I just don’t think there is anything to worry about.

A deep playoff run would push back the renovation schedule … but Ricketts thinks that would be worth it (duh). He adds that the majority of the renovation is things that fans will never see. Specifically, he notes that $425M out of the $500M total renovation cost is dedicated to things like steel, concrete, piping, etc.

The big deliverable for the beginning of the 2016 season will be the new clubhouse – which Ricketts jokes was ruined by the champagne celebration this past weekend.

There was plenty more in both interviews, so I encourage you to take a listen. Overall, you can tell that both executives are excited about where the team is and remember how tough it was to get here. Neither can wait for the playoffs to start and are equally excited for what the future holds.
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Sunday night, Jake Arrieta came within sniffing distance of doing the almost unthinkable. By which I mean, Arrieta made a serious bid to hit two home runs. He also, at the same time, flirted with a perfect game against the Pirates, but that part is very thinkable. I don’t know how many times this year Arrieta has grabbed attention for taking a no-hitter or a perfect game deep, but it numbers somewhere in the “a lot”s, with Arrieta more or less existing on the verge of history. It doesn’t take a no-hitter bid to put him in that position — the bid is practically a foregone conclusion.

Eventually, Arrieta gave up a hit and put multiple people on base, but none of those people happened to score, Arrieta spinning another seven shutout innings. Two batters of a total of 22 reached, and one of them only did so because Arrieta did him the privilege of hitting him with a pitch. The outing was timed well, what with the Pirates being a rival of the Cubs. The outing was timed well, what with Arrieta in the running for the Cy Young award. And the outing furthered Arrieta’s case for maybe having the best season half that ever there was. However arbitrary season halves are, we’ve been splitting seasons at the All-Star break forever, and what Arrieta has done since the break legitimately defies belief.


The math: 14 starts, covering just over 101 innings. All of them have counted as “quality starts.” All but one, the Cubs have won, and in the loss they got shut out. Arrieta’s given up a dozen runs. Nine have been earned. He really has averaged less than a run allowed an outing.

For the sake of comparisons, we can make use of the Baseball-Reference Play Index. It makes everything that follows pretty simple. Let’s get started, looking for the best ERAs ever. I know we don’t love ERA, but that’s why this is a starting point. You can’t not acknowledge it somewhere. I decided to define a qualifying season half as one in which the pitcher started at least 10 games. I think it’s a good-enough cutoff, and now here’s a top 10:


View media item 1731134
Just starting with ERA, we find second-half Arrieta in third place. Baseball has taken place over many years! So, while Arrieta would have more company if his numbers were worse, instead his numbers are fantastic, and his peer group is small. I can’t speak to any players the search might’ve left out, perhaps because their data is incomplete, but consider this a post about statistics we know. No use involving players who don’t have full statistical records.

The obvious next step from ERA — raw RA, folding in unearned runs. That top 10:

View media item 1731136
Just by runs, now we get Arrieta in first. And many would argue runs are a better measure than limiting to unearned runs. You’ll see some recent years, here, because offense has trended down, and these numbers are unadjusted for context. But just consider the message here: by runs per nine innings, Jake Arrieta’s second half has been the best season half — that we know of — all-time. Emphasis on “all-time.” It’s not something that can’t be debated, but there’s no debating the significance.

Let’s leave these metrics behind, though. Let’s throw away a little bit of sequencing and look simply at how the pitchers have been hit by their opponents. I went into the numbers and manually calculated wOBA allowed, with help from ours Guts page. Though Baseball-Reference makes OPS figures available, I thought I might as well go to the next step. Another top 10:

View media item 1731137
Once more, we find Arrieta in first. Now, he’s in first by the smallest of possible margins, but he does hold the tiebreaker over Schupp if you keep following the decimals further to the right. And Schupp had his second half literally a century ago. It’s true that, since the All-Star break, Arrieta has allowed baseball’s second-lowest BABIP. That’s partially fueling this, but then, there’s a difference between talking about true talent and talking about results. Since the break, Arrieta leads baseball in groundball rate. He’s among the leaders in soft-hit rate and hard-hit rate. He’s given up just two home runs. He hasn’t been hit hard, so why try to pretend otherwise? About that .192 wOBA — Giants pitchers this year have a .208 wOBA. So, there’s that.

Of course, I have to note that, in that same table, 2015 second-half Clayton Kershaw is fourth. This is a good award race.

Now one last table, introducing an adjustment of sorts. For every pitcher, I calculated wOBA allowed. We also have league wOBA, so I created a wOBA- statistic, dividing wOBA allowed by the league mark and then multiplying by 100. Our last top 10:

View media item 1731139
Pedro basically had to take the lead. Though his wOBA allowed that half-season was 11 points worse than Arrieta’s, the league wOBA now is 27 points lower than it was when Pedro was going to work. So the adjustment allows Pedro to vault out in front. I wouldn’t consider it an insult to argue that Arrieta might be having a slightly worse half-season than Pedro Martinez had at his peak. Arrieta, of course, is second here. Further adjustments would rearrange the table — I could split up the AL and NL wOBAs. Pedro was in the AL; Arrieta is in the NL. I’m also not considering park effects. You can’t adjust for everything, and sometimes it’s okay for a stat to be imperfect. All the stats are imperfect. By just about any imperfect stat you look at, Arrieta is having an all-time season half. If not the very best, then one of them. And there has been an awful lot of baseball.

If the schedule keeps up, Arrieta gets one more go. According to the Cubs website, he’s to be the Friday starter against the Brewers. Arrieta, naturally, is going to start the wild-card game against the Pirates, but that isn’t scheduled until October 7, which would put Arrieta on regular rest. So there’s one more chance for him to boost his numbers. The outing will probably be abbreviated, but it’ll bring an end to his second half. It’ll set the numbers in stone, and then we’ll have an even better idea of how this season half compares to all the others.

But it’s enough to say: it compares really well. It’s been a historic half season. And we split the numbers at the All-Star break. Arrieta pitched against the White Sox the Sunday before. He allowed a run and two hits in nine innings.
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CINCINNATI -- If you’ve watched the rise of the Chicago Cubs this season, you know there’s one thing that could derail their championship hopes: getting a runner home from third base with less than two outs.

The Cubs are the worst in baseball at it, converting on just 41 percent of their opportunities going into the final week of the regular season. League average is 51 percent. The Boston Red Sox do it best, successful on 58 percent of their chances. If scoring does indeed come down in the postseason, and home runs are scarce, then manufacturing runs is paramount.

“Theoretically you’re going to stay in the middle of the field, you’re not going to try and do too much,” manager Joe Maddon explained. “If the bases are loaded you’re going to try and score one run, not try to get all three of them in.”

Easier said than done. Maddon has a plethora of young players learning how to hit in “big moments,” and getting a man home from third with less than two outs is the toughest of them all. The Cubs are hitting a lousy .233 in such situations. The next-worst team, the Seattle Mariners, is 45 points better, hitting .278. The Toronto Blue Jays are hitting .374 with a man on third and less than two outs -- that’s 141 points better.

“It seems like such a simple thing, to put the ball in play,” veteran outfielder Chris Denorfia stated. “It’s tough. You get pitched differently in those situations. You really have to call upon your discipline to know the situation and to know what pitches you want to offer at with a swing. It’s one of those skills that you learn along the way. There are games that come down to that. You have to do it.”

You might think the Cubs have trouble scoring runs in general, but they’re the second-highest scoring team in the National League since the All-Star break. But a lot of those runs came via home runs, not small ball. If the homers continue, then the Cubs should be OK. That’s not likely in the playoffs though.

View media item 1731166

As you might expect, the individual numbers are ugly but aren’t all tied to the rookies on the team. Anthony Rizzo is best at it, bringing home the run 55 percent of the time. Then there’s a drop off. Starlin Castro is successful 45 percent of the time, Dexter Fowler 44 percent and Kris Bryant is at 43 percent.

Then there’s another drop off as Jorge Soler gets it done 36 percent of the time, Addison Russell 33 percent, while Miguel Montero is at 30 percent and Chris Coghlan at just 21 percent. Some of it doesn’t make a lot of sense as Coghlan is the best on the team at getting a runner from second to third with no outs, but getting him home is another story.

“We end up putting more pressure on ourselves, but in reality the pressure is on the pitcher,” Bryant said. “If you can focus on that, you can feel more comfortable up there.

“I was good at it earlier in the year but lately I’ve been putting more pressure on myself. As the season goes on, your mind starts to tire a little bit.”

Maddon is trying to get his message across without hitting his players over the head with it. It’s delicate, as the more it weighs on their minds, the more it can affect them at the plate.

“The key is redundancy,” Maddon explained. “You have to repeat the same message until it hits home. It’s the velvet hammer approach. You have to repeat yourself, but if you repeat yourself too often it becomes a negative situation. … Young hitters, you can talk, talk, talk before the game in practice. You get out there and there’s 40,000 people and the pitcher is good and you’re little bit jacked up, and all of a sudden the game plan goes away.”

The eye test says Soler is one player who lets the moment get to him when there’s a runner on third and less than two outs. He has struck out nine times in 19 at-bats in that situation, while Bryant has whiffed 15 times in 27 at-bats as the Cubs have 77 strikeouts as a team. Think about that. They’ve had a chance to score 77 more runs by just putting the ball in play and haven’t even made contact.

“You try to take your shot with a strikeout for sure,” reliever Neil Ramirez said, explaining the other side of the equation. “You want to use your best stuff right there.”


Does this simply go back to the youth on the team? As Bryant stated, the pressure increases with a man on third and less than two outs, but if it were just the rookies who were struggling, then discounting a playoff run by the Cubs because they’re too young might make sense. But the failure and strikeouts with a man on third and less than two outs isn’t just the fault of a few young players. It’s a team-wide thing, save Rizzo.

“There’s no one size fits all kind of an answer,” Maddon said. “Everybody has to think on their feet in the moment and process that situation.”

Bryant says don’t change your swing, just your approach, while Denorfia implores learning from prior at-bats. The Cubs are searching for answers in a critical part of the game at a critical time of the season.

“We’re good at hitting three-run home runs,” Denorfia said. “That doesn’t always happen.”
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I've complained about it all season. :{
 
^
:lol
I'm sure Chester just trolling, or he lost some bet where he had to switch allegiances.....(looks at avy and sig) or maybe he just jumped on the wagon for real 8o

It'd be nice to see Jake get the Cy but I believe Zack gets it.
Bryant should definitely get ROY, and Rizzo got robbed for that silver slugger :{
 
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Funny part about this, and I don't know if he even remembers, years ago he mentioned maybe wanting to pick up baseball, find a team, follow, etc. But he didn't want Yankees, or Red Sox, nothin like that, just a fresh faced team to follow.

So I told him I would help him pick one, and I said go with the Tampa Bay Rays. Young squad, bright future, no lame fans to deal with, and a great manager.

Now here he is, same manager, young squad, bright future, and no lame fans to deal with........ :lol


He's trolling the hell out of us, and will likely switch his avy/sig within a week, but for now, welcome another "long suffering" Cubs fan. :lol
 
dmxfury said:
Congrats Cubs fans on winning the Floppy sweepstakes :lol
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CP1708 said:
Funny part about this, and I don't know if he even remembers, years ago he mentioned maybe wanting to pick up baseball, find a team, follow, etc. But he didn't want Yankees, or Red Sox, nothin like that, just a fresh faced team to follow.

So I told him I would help him pick one, and I said go with the Tampa Bay Rays. Young squad, bright future, no lame fans to deal with, and a great manager.

Now here he is, same manager, young squad, bright future, and no lame fans to deal with........ :lol


He's trolling the hell out of us, and will likely switch his avy/sig within a week, but for now, welcome another "long suffering" Cubs fan. :lol
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:Nthat

Welcome aboard Chester!!
 
Christopher Kamka ‏@ckamka 2m2 minutes ago
200-K teammates in #Cubs history
2015: Arrieta & Lester
2003: Wood & Prior
2002: Wood & Clement
1970: Jenkins & Holtzman
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Pirates and Cards splitting the double header, of course. So we will be 2.5 back after tonight
 
Carrie Muskat ‏@CarrieMuskat 6h6 hours ago
#Cubs Starlin Castro led NL in Sept with .426 average in 23 Gs, and was 5th with 20 RBI (Bryant 6th with 19 RBI)
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In September, Starlin Castro led the National League with a .426 batting average.

That is a thing that happened.

Normally I wouldn’t rest so firmly on batting average, but, given that it’s Castro’s stock-in-trade if he’s going to be successful, that’s an especially good month for him. His overall numbers for September are even better: .426/.452/.750 with 5 homers, 5 doubles, and a triple. He walked only 2.7% of the time, but he also struck out only 13.5% of the time. He was good for a 225(!) wRC+ in September.

Get this: that was the HIGHEST wRC+ FOR ANY PLAYER IN BASEBALL IN SEPTEMBER, one point higher than Bryce Harper. If not for the fact that Harper had about 40 more PAs than Castro in the month, I’d probably be arguing that Castro should be the offensive player of the month in the NL.

And, as you know, it’s really been since he lost his starting job at shortstop – and made some mechanical and approach changes – that his season has turned around. Consider that, as of the day he lost his regular gig on August 6, Castro was hitting .236/.271/.304 with a 53 wRC+.

He’s now all the way up to .269/.300/.379 with an 81 wRC+. The average NL shortstop this year is hitting .253/.305/.373, and the average NL second baseman is hitting .263/.317/.385.

That’s right: even after the absurd depths of the struggles Castro faced in the first four months of the season (he was close to the worst offensive regular in baseball), he’s now, in total, hit like an average NL middle infielder.
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Mark Simon @msimonespn
Addison Russell ranks 4th in MLB in Defensive Runs Saved at 2B

Addison Russell also ranks 4th in MLB in Defensive Runs Saved at SS
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:hat

#FutureGoldGlove
 
Jon Lester 2015:

32 Starts
11-12
205 Inn
183 Hits
76 ER
47 Walks
207 K's
3.34 ERA
1.12 WHIP
2.93 FIP
3.07 xFIP
5.0 WAR


He always had that one unlucky inning, couple bad defensive games, could have had 16-17 wins with a little better luck. Either way, great year from Lester, 5 WAR is no joke for a pitcher, 13th in MLB to this point.
 
Cubs at 94 wins, Arrieta starting tomorrow vs Brewers.

Win this series, we get to 96-97 wins!!!! :eek
 
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