There’s something odd about the Cubs’ starting rotation, and I wrote about it last week. All five pitchers have been working with reduced velocity, relative to where they were last season. When it happens to one guy, it’s a potential problem. When it happens to five guys…I suppose it’s a potential *huge* problem, but it’s also a potentially deliberate pattern. I speculated as much, offering that the Cubs might be trying to back off their main arms since they’re coming off an extended season, and preparing for another.

Jake Arrieta has been okay, reduced velocity or not. The same goes for Jon Lester, who looks like the same pitcher. However, it’s a different story when it comes to Kyle Hendricks. Like the other starters, Hendricks isn’t throwing as hard as he used to. But then, Hendricks is sitting on a 6+ ERA. He specialized in command and soft contact. Now he has worse command, and he’s allowing hard contact. As far as Hendricks is concerned, something seems awry, although it looks to me to be mechanical.

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Position: Chicago Cubs Baseball Systems Web Developer

Location: Chicago

Description:
This role will primarily focus on the development and maintenance of the Cubs internal baseball information system, including creating web interfaces and web tools for the user interface; building ETL (exact, transform and load) processes; maintaining back-end databases; and troubleshooting data sources issues as needed. The Chicago Cubs are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

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Sometimes baseball is good, and sometimes baseball is bad, but always, baseball is weird. It can be weird because a player gets hit by pitches in four plate appearances in a row. It can be weird because a game ends with a strikeout, and then everyone celebrates, and then the umpire decides the pitch the batter missed wasn’t actually missed after all, even though it clearly and totally was, and then the game awkwardly resumes and ends with a strikeout a second time. And it can be weird because a guy like Kyle Hendricks walks a guy like Tommy Milone on a number like four pitches. There’s always this undercurrent of weird, and from time to time it bursts to the surface like a baseball-y geyser.

Think about what we have here. This event just took place earlier Wednesday afternoon. Kyle Hendricks is the pitcher people have loved to compare to Greg Maddux. At times, the comparison hasn’t even seemed all that crazy, and Maddux could use a bucket of baseballs to go hummingbird hunting. Tommy Milone, meanwhile, is and will forever be Tommy Milone, and not only is Tommy Milone a pitcher, but he’s also a pitcher you might not have even realized was still pitching in the majors. He is! Although, this afternoon, he was both pitching and hitting. As a hitter, he walked on four pitches, against Kyle Hendricks. OK.

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You know how this works: Early into any season, many of us get obsessed with checking on fastball velocities. Big positive changes might portend great success — or surgery. And big negative changes might indicate future struggles — or surgery. It’s all guesswork in the first half of April, but it’s something, something potentially meaningful. Fastball speeds generally don’t lie to you. It’s this line of thinking that brought Jake Arrieta to my attention a short while ago; out of the gate in 2017, Arrieta wasn’t throwing the same stuff. He’s a high-profile pitcher, who’s put up high-profile numbers, and so any change is an important one.

I’ve kept my eye on Arrieta. I tend to dismiss pitchers who are dismissive of velocity changes, because they all say the same thing. At the end of the day, velocity loss is correlated to performance decline. There are exceptions, but there are exceptions to almost everything. Yet, there’s a complicating factor here. Arrieta’s velocity is down, and on its own, that’s troubling to me. But within context, perhaps we’re just observing something intentional. You know who else has lost velocity? Jon Lester. Also Kyle Hendricks. Also John Lackey. And also Brett Anderson. All the other guys in Arrieta’s starting rotation.

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Last night, the Chicago Cubs lost their seventh game of the season, falling to 6-7 in the process. In 2016, the Cubs didn’t lose their seventh game of the year until May 11, so this start represents a departure from last season’s 103-win, World Series champion.

That doesn’t mean there’s cause for concern, though. The team isn’t hitting all that well, but Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, Willson Contreras, and Addison Russell are all likely to improve upon their early-season lines. The offense, as a whole, ought to come around. The rotation is pitching well — Kyle Hendricks has had a rough start, but Brett Anderson has been a pleasant surprise — so nothing really to worry about there. The bullpen, though, might be worth a closer look.

The Cubs’ bullpen has put up a 4.10 ERA, which isn’t very good, and a 4.46 FIP, which is even worse. Through 41.2 innings, the team’s relievers have been slightly worse than replacement level as a group. They’ve blown four saves already, tied with the Marlins for the most in the National League — and for whatever shortcomings the save possesses as a metric, having a bullpen blow a lead four times in 13 games isn’t good.

On the whole, the bullpen has been bad. Has it been team-wide issue, though, or the product of a few poor performers? Let’s see.

New closer Wade Davis has been good. Koji Uehara has been fine. Carl Edwards, Jr. looks like he’s ready to step into a more prominent role. Mike Montgomery hasn’t been great, really, but he’s covered a lot of innings adequately. Hector Rondon seems like he’s probably back after a rough 2016 season, and Brian Duensing has only pitched two innings. If there’s blame to had it is coming from two guys: Justin Grimm and Pedro Strop. While Grimm’s start hasn’t been great, he’s also not expected to be more than the sixth- or seventh-best reliever on the team. Looking even closer, Grimm’s poor pitching hasn’t really even cost the Cubs. Here are the same pitchers by win-probability statistics.

Of Grimm’s six appearances, three have come in very low-leverage situations, one has been roughly neutral, and two have occurred in high-leverage situations. On April 10, Grimm came on in the seventh with the bases loaded and no outs with the Cubs holding a one-run lead. A pop fly and a double play later, the Cubs’ chances of winning moved from 39% to 79%, making up for Grimm’s few poor performances in low-leverage outings, as well as another appearance (April 14) during which he allowed two inherited runners plus a run of his own en route to turning a 2-1 lead into a 4-2 deficit.

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Often it seems that anything written in April, any attempt at analysis, any assessment of a player, must be accompanied by a disclaimer that it’s small-sample-size season. That same sense of caution applies to this report, certainly. It’s generally dangerous to read into any limited sample of work — especially at the beginning of a season, when we’re most starved for actual baseball, when we’re most apt to rush to a judgement or make an extrapolation.

Still, some things occur at this time of year that do matter.

Sometimes, of course, the adjustment and changes made in the offseason and during spring do lead to results.

And a good start for Jason Heyward was important — if for no other reason than to quell lineup controversy and ensure playing time.

Last October, the last time most of us saw Heyward, his swing was broken. There were times, as a neutral observer, that it was difficult to watch him struggle with his awkward swing, sapped both of power and confidence. Last season, Heyward’s average exit velocity of 87.4 mph ranked 282nd among hitters 379 hitters with at least 100 batted-ball events, a figure sandwiched between those produced by Delino DeShields and Kolten Wong.

While Heyward has always had a mechanical-looking swing, the production and velocity was well down from his 2015 levels, when he slashed .293/.359/.439 and produced an average exit velocity of 90.7 mph. That season, combined with his longer track record of defensive excellence and above-average offense, earned him an eight-year, $184 million contract.

That contract looked like one of the few errors made to date during the Theo Epstein Era in Chicago. Heyward was going to become a very expensive defensive specialist if he posted another 72 wRC+, if he suffered an unusual loss of offensive abilities in the midst of his prime, like Melvin Upton Jr.

So this offseason, with no monetary incentive, with pride and professionalism serving as primary motivators, Heyward went to work.

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Tuesday was a good day for the Cubs. Most of them are good days for the Cubs, but on Tuesday, they earned their first win of 2017, edging out the Cardinals 2-1. Jason Heyward and Javier Baez drove in the runs, but the star was Jake Arrieta, who spun six innings with just an unearned run going against him. He piled up six whiffs, and it was a good way for him to get things going. If the Cubs have any potential vulnerability, it has to do with rotation depth. As long as Arrieta and the other guys are clicking, the Cubs are at least as good as anyone else.

On TV, Arrieta looked effective. In the box score, Arrieta looks effective. But what was the deal with his fastball? This is an open question. I don’t have an answer. I just have evidence that makes me think thoughts.

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We’ve written a lot about the Cubs over the past year-plus. Nor is there any secret as to why that’s the case. After undergoing a deep rebuild, the organization resurfaced with a roster full of young homegrown stars and talented free-agent additions. The club played at high level throughout 2016, ultimately leading to one of the most exciting games in baseball history. The Cubs’ World Series victory was 2016’s best sports story of the year, and maybe even the best sports story of the past 50 years.

The Cubs haven’t been at the forefront of the winter newscycle. There have been plenty of other notable stories, of course. Chris Sale changed teams! Jerry Dipoto made a few trades! The Rockies signed Ian Desmond! And so on.

But the 2017 campaign is almost here, which means it’s time for projections, discussions about team depth, and then some more projections. So many projections. Most of which tab the Cubs to be the best or second-best team in baseball in 2017. I can’t envision a reasonable objection to either placement.

But what about 2018? How might the team fare in 2019? Using a combination of projection systems and other data sources, I peered into a crystal ball to see how well the Cubs are set up for a five-year run.

WAR Under Control

To project WAR, I used a method proposed by Tom Tango that weights the past three years’ WAR and applies an aging curve. The method isn’t perfect, particularly when it comes to pitchers, but I trust Tango’s methodology enough to go forward. For missing years, I gave the player 1 WAR.

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Getting better at something can open you up to new risks. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that getting better at something can make you realize that you have to get even better at it. Addison Russell has worked hard to become a decent breaking-ball hitter. He’s made strides. Pitchers have responded, though — and used his confidence against him. So he’ll have to take another step forward to keep pace.

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Previous editions: AL East / AL Central / NL East.

The World Baseball Classic is in its final stages, meaning that both the end of spring training and the start of the regular season are in sight. We’d better get through the remaining installments in this series quickly.

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