Bleacher Bums Forum

What destroyed the first 3 months of the season last year was the bull pen.

The bullpen was a HUGE problem.  But despite that, they were still just shy of 70 win pace before the mass trade-off in July.  So just replacing Dempster/Maholm, having Garza healthy, and letting Samardzija finish out September probably gets the 2013 team to about ~70 wins.  But they've done considerably more than that.

The Cubs were so terrible in 2012 that it's not a hard team to improve--there is a lot of low hanging fruit.  They got essentially nothing out of CF, 3B, and C (until Castillo took over).  Exactly one third of their games were started by the group of starters that included Volstad, (injured) Wells, Germano, Coleman, Rusin, Raley, and Berken.  The bullpen had only two pitchers (Camp and Russell) who had an fWAR above 0.2, but had 10 guys with negative fWAR coming out of the bullpen.  Just getting garden variety below average production out of most of these spots (as opposed to the black holes they were last year) will improve the team by 10 games.  And with the way the pitching staff has been rebuilt, they should get considerably more than that.