After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Chicago Cubs.

Batters

I would argue that the current Cubs squad is a lot like The Godfather: Part III. Brilliance has been supplanted by mere competence, and most of the results look unimpressive when compared to the team’s peak. Like the latter days of Michael Corleone’s criminal empire, the Cubs have fallen from dominance. The manager for those teams is in Los Angeles, the front office’s leading light is gone, and much of the supporting cast has moved on. You can even pretend that whatever sum the Cubs lost in 2020 is a parallel to the $600 million stolen by Don Lucchesi and Archbishop Gilday through International Immobiliare! Heck, maybe Joey Lucchesi will throw a no-hitter against the Cubs.

Some of the central components of the Cubs’ more potent offenses remain in Javier Báez, Anthony Rizzo, and Kris Bryant. But none of them can boast a 2020 anywhere near their best season, and only Rizzo was really a key contributor. All three are free agents after 2021, and with the Cubs crying poor, it doesn’t seem like any big contract offers are in the works. If anything, the speculation this winter has been more about trades than extensions, particularly with Bryant. The larger issue is that all three have seen their projections follow a downward trajectory in recent seasons, so even re-signing all three would be no panacea. Read the rest of this entry »

In the final 2019 standings, fourth-place teams in their respective divisions finished an average of 30 games behind the first-place team. In 2018, that number was about 22, and in 2017, it was about 25. The distance between your average fourth-place team and their division’s first-place team fluctuates a bit year-to-year depending upon how super that season’s super-teams are, but it’s never close. The worse team will sneak in a few victories against the superior team over the course of 18 or so matchups throughout the season, but the two really aren’t supposed to be on the same level. One of these teams has a good chance of hosting a playoff series, and the other is having trouble selling tickets in September.

Our preseason playoff projections tend to reflect that space. Before the season was postponed and the schedule still ran 162 games, our projected fourth-place finishers in four of the six divisions were given a 1% chance or less at finishing first. The Phillies, the presumed fourth-place finishers in the NL East, were given less than a 5% chance of winning their division. Then there was the NL Central, where the Cardinals were pegged for fourth but given a 17% chance to finish on top, with a projected record that was within four games of the first-place Cubs. That would have been the tightest grouping of the top four teams in any division since the AL East in 1988.

When the new 60-game season was done, just five games wound up separating the top four teams in the NL Central, and from the looks of our Depth Charts projections, the race figures to be incredibly tight again in 2021. While the Pirates lag far behind the pack, the top four teams in the division stand incredibly close in talent level.

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After nine seasons, three division titles, a pennant and an historic World Series championship, Theo Epstein is saying goodbye to the Cubs. That surprising news came Tuesday afternoon, announced jointly by the team and its outgoing president of baseball operations. “I believe this is the right decision for me even if it’s a difficult one,” Epstein wrote in a statement released to the press. “And now is the right time.” Chicago will now be under the control of Jed Hoyer, the team’s general manager and Epstein’s long-time second in command, but the fate of both the franchise and its departing boss is less clear.

Taking over the Cubs in October 2011 after leaving the Red Sox under a cloud (and disguised as a gorilla), Epstein helped transform Chicago from National League also-ran and frequent cellar dweller into a juggernaut, culminating in the 2016 World Series win that ended a century-long title drought. He and his lieutenants drafted, developed or acquired virtually every important piece of that ‘16 roster, from Kris Bryant to Anthony Rizzo to Kyle Schwarber to Jon Lester to Jake Arrieta, and set the stage for what looked to be a dynasty. But diminishing returns and short postseason stays have left the Cubs in the championship cold over the last four seasons, and now their architect is moving on.

Those recent struggles may be part of Epstein’s decision to leave, though in a letter he sent to team employees and acquired by The Athletic, he claims that a decade at the helm was all he had in mind from the start. “Bill Walsh’s theory that in the sports industry a change in leadership after about a decade can be beneficial for both the organization and the individual has always resonated with me,” Epstein writes. Those of you blessed with the gift of being able to do basic math will note that 2020 minus 2011 equals nine, not 10. But per Epstein’s letter, a number of factors came into cutting his reign short by a year, including the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the team’s finances; the presence of Hoyer, who joined the club as GM when Epstein arrived; and, as Epstein put it, “decisions this winter that carry long-term consequences … best made by someone who will be here for a long period.” Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball, which has just gotten underway, and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West, AL East, and Central. Below is my assessment of the , covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a philosophical quandary after Miami’s 2–0 Game 2 win over Chicago: Is it really an upset loss if the higher seed never looked like the favorite? The Cubs — NL Central champs, No. 3 in the postseason field, blessed with talent — are gone. The Marlins — bottom feeders the last several years, season nearly ended by COVID before it got started, built out of spare parts and held together with string, in the postseason by virtue only of its expansion — are moving on. And after two games in an empty and chilly Wrigley Field, that result doesn’t feel like a fluke.

The numbers on Chicago’s side of things are grizzly: 18 innings played, one run scored, that coming on a single hit: Ian Happ’s solo homer off Sandy Alcantara in the fifth inning of Game 1. Since then, no runs in 13 straight innings, most of them quiet and all of them frustrating. You saw plenty of that in Game 2: After struggling to get the measure on rookie righty Sixto Sánchez and his booming fastball early on, Cubs hitters seemed to figure something out the second time through the order. In the fourth, Willson Contreras and Kyle Schwarber drew back-to-back walks to open the frame. One out later, Jason Heyward cracked a broken-bat single to right, and perhaps feeling pressure to get on the board, third base coach Will Venable sent Contreras — not a glacier like most catchers, but no one’s idea of Billy Hamilton — from second. The play was close, but a strong throw from Matt Joyce and a nice tag by Chad Wallach got him at home to end the threat and keep things scoreless. Read the rest of this entry »

The Miami Marlins haven’t had a winning season since 2009, and coming into the year, there was every reason to think that the club’s playoff drought would eventually extend into a second decade. But with an expanded field, key contributions from rookies, and unexpectedly solid play around the infield, Miami slipped past the velvet ropes for the first time in 17 years.

Amusingly, the Marlins are the only franchise in baseball to never lose a playoff series. After a 5-1 victory in Game 1 of the Wild Card round, they’re just one win from extending their perfect record.

The importance of any one playoff game underscores how differently most of us watch them than regular season fare. Granular events — a single at-bat, a pitch even — take on much more resonance. In the regular season, a failure to execute in the early innings will be forgotten minutes later. Watching closely though, you recognize how missed opportunities shape a game every bit as much as the highlights shown on SportsCenter. Viewed under the microscope, baseball becomes a game of chances taken and chances missed.

For the Marlins, the early part of the game was dominated by the latter. Take Garrett Cooper’s at-bat in the fourth. With one out and a runner on third, Cooper had a great opportunity to plate the game’s first run. On a windy day, against a pitcher with below-average strikeout numbers, this was an opportunity to hunt for a ball he could hit in the air. Instead, he swung at the first pitch and grounded to third. Jesús Aguilar couldn’t advance, and was ultimately stranded after another ground out.

An inning later, the Marlins spurned another chance. With two on and nobody out, light-hitting Chad Wallach was ordered to bunt. The run expectancy table suggests swinging away is the better option here, but it’s very close, and given Wallach’s weak bat and the quality of his opponent, the bunt seemed like a reasonable option. He couldn’t get it down though, and eventually tapped into a rally-killing double play. Read the rest of this entry »

Seventeen years ago, the Cubs and Marlins met for the first and, until now, last time as postseason opponents in the 2003 NLCS, a series that then-Florida took en route to its second World Series title after a grisly Game 6 collapse by Chicago. The goat will always be Steve Bartman, who even in a Wrigley Field devoid of fans will be mentioned on the series broadcasts somewhere between 15 and 20,000 times, but plenty of players deserve a fair share of blame for the way the Cubs’ dreams of ending a long championship drought fell apart.

But that was then, and the failings of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood and Dusty Baker and Alex Gonzalez have little to do with whatever happens between these iterations of the Cubs and Marlins. The former are here by virtue of winning the NL Central, a mud fight of a division with four playoff teams that Chicago led virtually wire-to-wire; the Cubs are seeking to reverse a run of diminishing October returns. The Marlins, however, are here as predicted by roughly no one — literally no one, in the case of your humble FanGraphs staff — and thanks in large part to the rest of the National League East, the Braves excepted, being the equivalent of a stopped toilet. Even a long stoppage of play caused by over a dozen positive COVID-19 tests and the loss of nearly half the roster for multiple games wasn’t enough to slow down the Marlins, who snapped a playoff drought stretching back to that fateful 2003 season. (Fun fact: Every year the Marlins have made the playoffs, they’ve won the World Series, so get your bets in now.) Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, Trevor Bauer made a rather emphatic statement not only on behalf of his team, which is in the playoff hunt, but also for himself in the National League Cy Young race. Bauer pitched eight innings, striking out 12 against one walk and just a single run as the Reds moved above .500 to move into the eighth and final playoff spot heading into today’s action. Meanwhile, though it’s not yet clear if Jacob deGrom or Yu Darvish will get another outing to stake their claims, but Corbin Burnes pitches tonight against the Cardinals. Below you will find the NL WAR leaders among pitchers through last night’s contests:

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If I told you at the start of the 2020 season that the Cubs would win the division by a comfortable margin, you probably would rightly make some assumptions about the events that led to this result. Probably the most obvious is that a National League Central victory would involve big years from the three biggest names in the lineup: 2016 MVP Kris Bryant, 2018 MVP runner-up Javier Báez, and three-time All-Star and Gold Glover Anthony Rizzo. But that most obvious of assumptions would be wrong in this case. Through Tuesday’s games, these key contributors to the team’s success over the last five years have combined for just 1.1 WAR in 581 combined plate appearances, about the same WAR as players such as Kevin Pillar and Victor Reyes. In 2016, the year the Cubs won the World Series, this trio combined for 15 WAR, or 4.8 WAR per 581 plate appearances.

All three are eligible for free agency no later than the end of the 2021 season and their poor performances have changed their outlooks enough to potentially have consequences for both their career trajectories and future contracts. With their performance this year, the Cubs have gotten a taste of what the team’s future might hold if all three depart Chicago. There are mitigating factors all over the place — the shortened, odd 2020, Bryant’s plethora of injuries — but the fact remains is that for stars, the risk is fairly one-sided. What this means is that for the best players in baseball, it’s far more likely that events will reduce their value than increase their value; I can think of a lot of scenarios that would cause Mike Trout to underperform his WAR projection by five wins, but very few in which he’d exceed it by the same margin. Poor baseball is one thing, but uncertainty is also a problem for a superstar. How have the outlooks for these three changed over 2020? Let us count the ways. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s column leads with three perspectives on minor-league contraction, which is slated to occur once the current CBA expires at the end of this month. At least 40 teams are expected to lose affiliated status when that happens, with entire regions of the country finding themselves devoid of professional baseball. A wide-ranging look at the business side of the proposed contraction was provided here at FanGraphs, courtesy of SABR CEO Scott Bush, earlier in the week.

Today we’ll hear from a pair of broadcasters, each of whom paid his dues down on the farm before reaching the big leagues, and from an MLB general manager.

Joe Block, Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster:

“It’s a two-way street, because I can see where the economics makes sense for Major League Baseball. They’re trying to streamline the minor leagues, and I can see the rationale for that. There maybe are too many teams; there are so many organizational players, as opposed to actual prospects. Realigning some of the leagues makes sense for easier travel. From a business standpoint, those things make a lot of sense to me.

“At the same time, I worked in Billings and in Great Falls. Those were two of the greatest experiences of my life, and not just my baseball life. I was living in Montana during the summers. I know how important [baseball] is to folks that live there. The winters are brutal, so having a ball game to watch, a family event… the team is a fabric of the communities in those particular towns.”

Dave Raymond, Texas Rangers brodcaster

“Contraction will be very tough on young broadcasters. Minor League Baseball is the training ground. [Play-by-play] takes time to figure out, to become comfortable with your voice, how to present the game every night. how you control that action. There are executives at the Major League level who, when I’ve applied for jobs, told me, ‘I’ve got to see at least a minimum of 500 games in the minor leagues before we would really even consider a guy.’ It might be 1,000 games.

“Now we’ll be dealing with a smaller pool of potential broadcasters. The guy who would have had a job for a team that gets contracted might have been the next Vin Scully. If he never gets the opportunity, we’ll never know. Plus, even if it doesn’t materialize in the ultimate — a big-league play-by-play job — for so many people, simply getting to call games is a realization of a dream. It would be disappointing for young guys, and gals, to miss out on that opportunity if there is indeed contraction. Read the rest of this entry »