I was in the visiting clubhouse at PNC Park last May as the Chicago Cubs began to arrive for their game later that evening. Before games, at least for the period when media is present, major-league clubhouses are typically serene spaces. Players are often seated before their lockers, scrolling through their smart phones or listening to music on the device. There’s conversation, of course, there are players and coaches quietly examining video in the center visiting clubhouses, but there is typically not a frat-house atmosphere.

Then Anthony Rizzo walked in.

Rizzo appeared at the threshold of the locker room itself and boomed “What’s up [expletive]s!” beaming with a smile as he strutted to his corner locker.

The coaches and teammates present smiled and laughed. When I later departed, I walked past the visiting manager’s office, where Joe Maddon sat alone, rock music blaring.

It was not my first encounter with the Cubs’ clubhouse culture. I had briefly inhabited the old, cramped home clubhouse in Wrigley Field at the end of the 2015 season after the Cubs clinched a Wild Card berth. The narrow clubhouse was about the size of a batting cage. There I saw David Ross hand Maddon a bottle of spirits as a gift, and then embrace him. I asked then-rookie Addison Russell about his first conversation with Maddon. He said it was not baseball-related. They discussed some Stephen King novels, as Maddon had learned Russell was a fan of the genre. When Kris Bryant arrived to much fanfare early that season, Maddon didn’t talk to him about handling pressure and expectations, rather Maddon shared his favorite restaurants and places to bicycle in Chicago.

In my limited experience around the Cubs, I thought, This is a different kind of atmosphere: fun, loose, stress-free. This is a team that doesn’t feel overwhelmed by expectations. Sure, it helped that I was witnessing a club when in the midst of a historically good start. And sure, I was making an assumption off a small sample of behavior. But Malcolm Gladwell argued in Blink that human beings are adept at making accurate assessments very quickly.

So these anecdotes bring us to that time Maddon met Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney.

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On Tuesday, we looked at the best pitches in baseball last year when judged by whiffs and grounders. One thing we learned in that exercise: they were all thrown by relievers. Makes sense. They get a lot of advantages when it comes to short stints and leveraged situations. Let’s not hold it against them because the rest of the reliever’s life is very difficult. On the other hand, let’s also celebrate the starting pitchers separately, because many of them have pitches that are excellent despite the fact that they have to throw more often, to batters of both hands.

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While the 2016 campaign is over and the flurry of moves after the season has come to a halt for the moment, a whole year’s worth of data remains to be examined. Today’s post is an easy one and a fun one. Let’s find the best pitches that were thrown regularly last year.

Before we begin: the word “results” appears in the headline, but I’m not going to use results judged by things like singles and doubles and the like. The samples gets pretty small if you chop up the ball-in-play numbers on a single pitch, and defense exerts too much of an influence on those numbers. So “results” here denotes not hit types, but rather whiffs and grounders.

I’ve grouped all the pitches thrown last year, minimum 75 for non-fastballs, 100 for fastballs. I combined knuckle and regular curves, and put split-fingers in with the changeups. So the sample per pitch type is generally around 300 — a lot less for cutters (89) and a bunch more for four seamers (500) — but generally around 300 pitches qualified in each category. Then I found the z-scores for the whiff and ground-ball rates on those pitches. I multiplied the whiff rate z-score by two before adding it to the ground-ball rate because I generally found correlations that were twice as strong between whiff rates and overall numbers like ERA and SIERA than they were for ground-ball rates.

The caveats are obvious. Pitches work in tandem, so you may get a whiff on your changeup because your fastball is so devastating. This doesn’t reward called strikes as much as swinging strikes, so it’s not a great measure for command. On the other hand, there isn’t a great measure for command. By using ground-ball rate instead of launch-angle allowed, we’re using some ball-in-play data and maybe not the best ball-in-play data.

But average-launch-angle allowed is problematic in its own way, and ground-ball rate is actually one of the best ball-in-play stats we have — it’s very sticky year to year and becomes meaningful very quickly. Whiff rates are super sexy, since a swing and a miss represents a clear victory for the pitchers over the batter — and also because there’s no room for scorer error or bias in the numbers. And while the precise way in which pitches work in tandem remains obscure in pitching analysis, we can still learn something from splitting the pitches up into their own buckets.

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If there were a rule that prevented World Series champions from making moves during the offseason following a championship, the Chicago Cubs would likely be one of the teams best able to withstand such a handicap. In their rotation, they return their four best starters and plan to move bullpen acquisition Mike Montgomery to the rotation. On the position-player side the team loses center fielder Dexter Fowler but remains pretty well insulated to withstand his loss by fielding good players at every other spot.

The bullpen, however, would be another matter under the terms of this hypothetical scenario. The Cubs entered the offseason with a number of questions in the bullpen, and they have answered those questions with high-risk, high-reward relievers who could give the Cubs one of the best bullpens in baseball.

Entering the 2016 season, the Cubs’ two best relievers were expected to be Hector Rondon and Pedro Strop. Along with depth in the form of Trevor Cahill, Justin Grimm, Adam Warren, and Travis Wood, the Cubs began the season with a bullpen that ranked eighth in our 2016 Positional Power Rankings. It was a solid, but not spectacular, group.

Sensing an opportunity to win their first World Series title in a considerable time, the club decided to shore up that bullpen at midseason by bringing in Aroldis Chapman and Montgomery. While Chapman didn’t perform as well in the playoffs as he did in the regular season, the innings total of Cubs relievers in the playoffs reveals the importance of the team’s midseason additions.

The Cubs’ two midseason acquisitions pitched roughly 50% of the team’s postseason bullpen innings, while the stalwarts from the beginning of the season recorded less than 20% of those crucial outs. Both Rondon and Strop suffered injuries in the second half and Cubs manager Joe Maddon was reluctant to rely on them in pressure situations. While Montgomery is still on the team, his role has likely changed. Meanwhile, is Chapman headed back to New York with the Yankees, and lefty Travis Wood is also a free agent.

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Yesterday, while ruminating about the Royals opportunities this winter, I suggested the following.

If I’m Kansas City, I’d rather send Davis to a team like the Cubs or Dodgers, a team that doesn’t really have a ninth-inning guy with whom they’re currently comfortable, and would pay a bigger premium for the upgrade they’d get in their bullpen. The idea of swapping Davis for Jorge Soler and something else is more interesting to me, for instance. Soler is, in some ways, the outfield version of Kolten Wong at this point; a mid-20s guy who hasn’t shown he can be an above-average regular yet, but has a long-term deal at cheap prices that makes him somewhat useful even if he just is what he is. Except Soler still has mythical upside: if he figures out how to hit like people think he could hit, his value would skyrocket.

The Royals, it seems, had similar thoughts.

Sources: #Cubs close to acquiring Wade Davis from #Royals for Jorge Soler.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 7, 2016

The deal isn’t done quite yet, because reviewing the medicals on a guy who went on the DL twice last year with elbow problems is no minor matter. But assuming the Cubs are confident that Davis is healthy enough, the deal sounds like it will go through, and likely as a one for one.

Source: #Cubs' trade with #Royals, if completed, will be straight-up: Davis for Soler. No other players.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 7, 2016

So, let’s talk about Soler and Davis. In a challenge trade, it’s usually hard to pull off a win-win deal, given that the performance of the two players isn’t going to be identical. This one, though? This looks like this could work well for both teams.

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On paper, it’s hard to see Jon Jay as any sort of upgrade for the defending World Champion Chicago Cubs. Prior to the one-year, $8-million agreement between Jay and the club, our Depth Chart projections featured Jason Heyward as the recipient of the majority of the team’s center-field plate appearances, with Kyle Schwarber receiving most of the time in left, Ben Zobrist in right, and Jorge Soler serving as a backup at each of the latter two positions. Adding Jay, moving Heyward from center to right, giving Zobrist the majority of time at second base, and forecasting fewer plate appearances for Javier Baez (who had appeared as the starting second baseman on the depth charts previous to the acquisition of Jay) does little to help Chicago’s projections. That said, the acquisition probably does have benefit for the 2017 club — even if the abundance of outfielders ultimately serves to diminish the trade value both of Soler and Albert Almora.

Despite his otherworldly defense in right field, Heyward doesn’t seem to be an ideal fit in center. While he can handle the position, the Cubs have appeared unwilling to make him the starter there. They re-signed Dexter Fowler to avoid that scenario this past year and were likely always going to find a replacement for Fowler this offseason. The addition of Jay gives them the opportunity to deploy a platoon in center now, with Jay handling the lefty side of things and a 23-year-old Almora taking a couple hundred plate appearances from the right. That’s a sensible solution. As sensible as it is, though, some questions remain regarding the Cubs outfield.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Chicago Cubs. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Washington.

Batters
The present document represents only the second of 30 total installments of these team-by-by ZiPS projections. Despite that, it’s likely that no other club’s hitters will receive such optimistic forecasts as the Cubs’ do here. Nor is that particularly surprising: Chicago’s field players produced the highest collective WAR figure in the league by some distance in 2016 — and only one of that team’s starters (Dexter Fowler) has left by way of free agency.

Kris Bryant (6.9 zWAR) receives basically the best projection possible among players who aren’t also Mike Trout. Anthony Rizzo (5.7) and Addison Russell (4.2) also profile as star-level types, per Dan Szymborski’s computer. ZiPS calls for the remainder of the team’s starters to produce wins at an average rate or better — including Jason Heyward (3.1), whose defensive forecast (+13 runs in right field) compensates for whatever offensive deficiencies he might continue to exhibit.

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It would be fair to label me a skeptic of Dexter Fowler’s defense skills. Despite recording basically average fielding numbers over his two years with the Cubs, Fowler had graded out as a distinctly below-average center fielder in every season of his career before joining Chicago ahead of the 2015 season. In each of the past two years his name has appeared in my early-season defensive-outlier posts, and before last season, I wrote an entire piece wondering if Fowler had actually improved as a defender or if he had merely benefited from better positioning.

Of course, even if the pre-Chicago version of Fowler is the real one, he actually still profiles as a decent player. He has a fantastic walk rate, has exhibited average power as a major leaguer, makes good contact — and, since leaving hitter-friendly Coors Field, has managed to produce a 121 wRC+, well above league average. Dexter Fowler the Hitter and Dexter Fowler the Fielder present two different points from which to begin an analysis of his future value. Let’s take a look at both.

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The Cubs won the World Series. I’m sure enough has been made of that. I’m not sure enough has been made of their defense. Or, if you prefer, their hit suppression. Don’t get me wrong, there have been articles about this very topic. But, you know BABIP. By BABIP allowed, the 2016 Cubs were the all-time best. The all-time best, over more than a century. It’s kind of unbelievable what the Cubs pulled off.

Like many statistics, league BABIP changes with the eras. You don’t want to compare raw BABIPs throughout history, just as you wouldn’t want to compare raw strikeout rates, or slugging percentages. I’ve calculated something very simple — the difference between a team’s BABIP allowed and the league-average BABIP allowed. Here’s a table of the top 10 since 1900, and, well, I told you:

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The results are in. Terry Francona is your American League Manager of the Year. Congratulations to him! He’s probably an excellent manager. I actually had a vote for the AL version of the award, and, well, I probably screwed it up. One part of the screw up was on me, and I’ll eat my crow. But here’s my excuse: I didn’t have the most important part of the year at my disposal when I made my vote.

I voted for John Farrell, Buck Showalter, and Terry Francona in that order. I think all three are excellent managers, and so I relied on the numbers I produced to try and help me make the decision.

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