Author Topic: Cubs in '11  (Read 57336 times)

Ray

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2101
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #450 on: May 11, 2011, 12:44:00 am »
Fun with numbers.

Cubs are #10 in the NL in runs scored per game (#13 in total runs).  But, Cubs are #5 in team OPS.

The only NL team who is as out of whack as the Cubs in runs scored/OPS are the Braves.  They are the converse.  Braves are #5 in runs scored but #10 in team OPS.

Not surprsiingly, Braves outperform their runs scored/OPs because they are #1 in team OPS with runners in scoring position.  Cubs, on the other hand, are #15 in team OPS with runners in scoring position.

Diagnosis:  a fluke.

Most teams are pretty close in relative runs scored and OPS. The correlation is not perfect by any means but, for example, top four teams in runs scored (Cards, Reds, Marlins, Dbacks) are 1.2.4, and 3 in overall team OPS.

Braves are laughably out of whack.  They are .697 OPS overall, but .872 OPS with runners in scoring position.
Cubs are .720 OPS overall, but .613 OPS with runners scoring position.

So, here are the Cubs outperforming the Braves in OPS overall but in the roughly 1/4 of total ABs--in which there are runners in scoring positon--Braves are outperforming Cubs by a whopping .259 points!  That is the kind of thing you sometimes see one month into the season and it is a total fluke and will not continue for long.

It's certainly possible or likely that Cubs will not be the fifth best team in OPS for the season, but no way you will see this kind of relative disparity between overall and scoring position for too long.  Ditto for the Braves.

this is what i was getting at the other day, though you explained it better than I, and why if the pitching gets straightened out with Wells coming back, Garza's luck improving and Cashner hopefully having a decent year, i can see them getting hot in June and July.  I'm also curious to see what McNutt has later in the year after a lil more seasoning. 

I'm sure some of the higher obp/ops's will drop, but some of the lower ones will most likely rise to offset that...thats just baseball.

I, in no way, am guaranteeing they have a run, just saying i can see it.

craig

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 13098
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #451 on: May 11, 2011, 07:16:58 am »
I think the disparity is interesting.  My fear is that if the rankings are going to meet, it may be more a case of the OBP and OPS moving back towards 10th than of the runs-scored moving up to 5th. 


CurtOne

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 27253
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #452 on: May 11, 2011, 07:53:25 am »
yep

brjones

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 25868
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #453 on: May 11, 2011, 08:58:41 am »
Further, if you reduce Cubs OPS by 12 points to reflect Kosuke's impact on OBP, Cubs overall OPS is still out of whack compared to their OPS with runners in scoring position.  They are still better than NL average in overall OPS with the Kosuke reduction and still near the bottom in OPS with runners in scoring position.

Still, I don't think the raw OPS tells the whole story with the Cubs.  They have one guy getting on base well, and they have one guy (way down in the lineup where he never comes up with Kosuke on base) who is hitting with power.  No one else in the lineup is a plus on the OBP side, and few are even average on the SLG side.  The lineup is not balanced at all, and it makes it difficult to score.

On paper, the OBP and HR output (and SLG and OPS) don't look bad.  But in practice, so much of it is coming from Fukudome and Soriano respectively that it's almost impossible to produce runs.  With no power, they have to string 3 hits together to get even 1 run.  But since the bottom 8 spots in the lineup are having trouble getting on base, stringing 3+ singles together in one inning is a rare occurrence.  And since everyone is struggling to get on base, Soriano's the homers they do get are mostly solo.

If the extra base hits start coming and we find 2-3 more guys who can sustain an OBP over .350, they'll start scoring even when Fukudome and Soriano inevitably regress. 

brjones

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 25868
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #454 on: May 11, 2011, 09:21:35 am »
By the way, I know in my head that things should improve just because their hitting with RISP will regress towards the mean.  But it's still hard for me to believe that because they have been so awful for the last few years.  Ever since the 2008 playoffs, this team has looked like they tighten up and get scared any time things start going well.  I'm not sure how they're going to overcome that...most of the roster has turned over in that time, and they still just don't seem to be able to handle pressure.

JR

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 13654
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #455 on: May 11, 2011, 09:22:24 am »
Christina Karhl on the Cubs . . .

“Hurry up and wait” usually gets applied to a different high-expense enterprise, but you can understand how it could be applied to those wondering about the expenditures of the Cubs. For a third straight season, the Cubs will cost more than $130 million to employ, and the 2011 team is no more guaranteed to win anything this year than did the teams in 2009 or 2010, the seasons that followed their “streak” of two first-place finishes in the NL Central.

A critical problem in terms of payroll and performance is that the Cubs don’t have a ton of wiggle room in terms of who they employ. If timing is everything in playing the market, the Cubs’ timing was terrible, which may be the kindest thing you can say about some of their investments. That’s the legacy of the commitments made by general manager Jim Hendry during the team’s 2007-08 run and its immediate aftermath. Hendry was dealing with a caretaker owner and operating on short time and a win-now window. This is just the latest hangover season. The Cubs shelled out eight large per annum deals to Alfonso Soriano, Aramis Ramirez and Kosuke Fukudome in the lineup and to Carlos Zambrano and Ryan Dempster in the rotation. What little maneuvering room Hendry has had on his payroll the last couple of years has involved trying to work around those initial, unmovable investments.

Not that Hendry hasn’t tried. Turning Milton Bradley into Carlos Silva, dispensing with Ted Lilly and Derrek Lee, renting Carlos Pena, and trading away farm-generated depth to get Matt Garza to replace Lilly all boils down to trying to work around and endure the unmovable expenses in the meantime: Sori and A-Ram, Fukudome and the Big Z. That quartet is costing the Cubs almost $67 million this year, but you’d be hard-pressed to rank any of them among the top performers at their positions. All four are imperfect players, useful in isolation if you don’t bring up their price tags, but their value has taken a turn for the worse while the Cubs remain mired around .500 or worse. Hendry’s wriggling has brought no joy to Wrigleyville.

Can much be done with this lot as far as moving them? Not at these prices, and only Ramirez lacks full no-trade protection. Say you want to be generous, and offer the Cubs wholesale mulligans for 2010 -- for Zambrano’s squabbles and needless role changes or for Ramirez’s slow start and injury-ruined campaign. Play make-believe, and pretend those two are who they were before 2010. That still doesn’t make any of them easily swappable commodities because they’re no closer to being the star players their salaries suggest. There is still the inverse relationship between Zambrano’s bulk and performance over the previous five or six years to explain away; he’s a mid-rotation talent making an ace’s wages.

Skip the make-believe and consider the outfield duo. Soriano has degenerated into a latter-day Dave Kingman clone, a fragile bop-or-drop slugger who has posted a below league average OBP (for non-pitchers) since 2008, and someone whose defensive limitations turn every fly ball into an adventure. Fukudome’s little better, saddled with an inaccurate arm and little power for a corner, so his contributions can be measured by his excellent OBP and little else. That’s useful, but is it $13.5 million worth of useful? Between no-trade protection in the last year of his deal and a contract larded with an especially generous helping of a Japanese import’s perks, he’s no more swappable than Soriano.

As a result, the Cubs’ roster is larded up with players they can’t coax anyone else to be interested in. It would be easy to get frustrated and say Hendry needs to trade these vets away, but that would produce little benefit beyond the pennies on every dollar the Cubs would get back -- nobody will be giving up major talent in terms of prospects to get the next four months of Fukudome, let alone the next four years of Soriano.

So how far can the Cubs be left alone as is? The easy answer is “until they’re out of it,” and in the NL Central, that may not be until September. The agony of this particular Cubs season is that with two-fifths of the rotation down they can reasonably complain that they don’t know quite what they’re capable of doing within this division. The Cubs have gone 2-7 in the starts taken by Casey Coleman and James Russell during the absences of Randy Wells and Andrew Cashner, with only one quality start to show for those nine turns.

Asking what could be can obscure the main point, though: The Cubs are stuck. Stuck with a lineup without patience or power -- or, as Mike Quade mused last night after 13 singles, without speed -- and a shallow team besides. The only thing top-shelf about the Cubs du jour is the expense of employing them.

Whatever the Cubs are capable of doing in the Central won’t be up to them indefinitely -- the Cardinals and Reds are much better prepared to go off on tears and more closely resemble 90-win ballclubs than these Cubs are. For the Cubs to get into this thing, they not only have to hurry up and wait on their own limited possibilities, they need bad things to start happening to other teams. It beats disassembling the team out of mere disgust, but if they’re closer to mattering come July, disgust might inspire a long-awaited teardown
.
« Last Edit: May 11, 2011, 09:26:01 am by JR »

JeffH

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6158
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #456 on: May 11, 2011, 09:34:49 am »
A true embarrassment.

craig

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 13098
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #457 on: May 11, 2011, 09:39:19 am »
In past, some posters have been strong bobby Valentine fans.  (Others not, of course.)  I heard him on the radio this week, talking about the continued decline in offense. 

Last year of course offense was way down, and it's down again this spring.  In the NL, more than half of the teams are hitting sub-.250, OBP'ing at .316 or less, and only 3 teams are averaging a HR/game.  Four teams have ERA's of 3.19 or better.  We've been getting a no-hitter a week, and there are several per week who carry a no-hitter through 5 innings. 

Valentine basically blamed it on the whole work-the-count/plate-discipline/take-walks/OBP philosophy.  He said so many hitters try to work the count and take the first pitch, and pitchers know stats too.  So Valentine's take was that hitters need to go up swinging and being aggressive instead of trying to take strikes and work counts.  Pitchers know lots of guys won't swing at the first pitch, and that with HR's down so much so what if they do?  His spin was that basically pitchers throw first-pitch strikes, hitters don't punish them for doing so, and the offensive downturn is the result.  It's nothing new that hitters do worse when they're down in the count, and the take-first-pitch philosophy is making it normal for hitters to be hitting behind most of the time. 

He also criticized the hitting emphasis on waiting back and using short-and-quick hitting.  That you need to start the swing earlier to generate more power. 

Heh, that's Valentine.  Who am I to judge? 

But two thoughts, as those views might relate to the Cubs.
1.  If Valentine is right, perhaps Hendry and Fleita are way ahead of the game.  They have guys hacking and being aggressive and first-pitch hitting, just like Valentine advocates. 

2.  On the swing-earlier swing-harder, I think the Cubs don't seem to emphasize that in the minors.  The Cub profile is the low-K-high-contact-low power hitter in the minors (Vitters, Lemahieu, Cerda, Gibbs, Szczur...) and with kids like castro and Barney. 


Cactus

  • Guest
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #458 on: May 11, 2011, 09:40:54 am »
Combining spring training and the regular season, Koyie Hill is 3-48.  And one of those hits was a bunt single.

Jes Beard

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 17183
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #459 on: May 11, 2011, 10:01:10 am »
In past, some posters have been strong bobby Valentine fans....

Would he bring an entirely new roster?

JR

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 13654
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #460 on: May 11, 2011, 10:07:49 am »
I was not a Bobby Valentine fan, and I have some doubts that Hendry and Fleita are ahead of the game. 

JeffH

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6158
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #461 on: May 11, 2011, 10:09:54 am »
Hendry and Fleita don't even know there IS a game.

brjones

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 25868
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #462 on: May 11, 2011, 11:07:38 am »
Has it been mentioned here that Doug Davis only threw 59 pitches last night?  That could mean that he's coming back on short rest to pitch on Saturday for the Cubs.

Reb

  • Guest
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #463 on: May 11, 2011, 11:29:19 am »
Yes, one of the Chicago papers noted that too.

Cactus

  • Guest
Re: Cubs in '11
« Reply #464 on: May 11, 2011, 01:40:56 pm »
IF Geo Soto goes on the 15-day DL, he will join Andrew Cashner, Randy Wells, and what other player?

No peeking.