It’s Not So Much That the Cubs’ Offense Is Missing
A table:
| Team | PA | OPS |
| Nationals | 197 | 0.716 |
| Blue Jays | 264 | 0.713 |
| Indians | 203 | 0.694 |
| Dodgers | 263 | 0.679 |
| Red Sox | 108 | 0.655 |
| Giants | 192 | 0.616 |
| Cubs | 219 | 0.613 |
| Rangers | 110 | 0.575 |
| Mets | 32 | 0.354 |
| Orioles | 38 | 0.321 |
Here are the 10 playoff teams, sorted by playoff OPS. You see that all the figures are fairly low — this is always the case, because hitting is tougher in the playoffs. But at the bottom, the Orioles went away after one game. The Mets went away after one game. The Rangers got swept. Then there are the Cubs! The Cubs rank seventh, and they’re by far the worst among the four teams remaining. Point being, the Cubs haven’t hit much. They’re still in a good position, all things considered, but they haven’t hit much.
So what, right? It’s literally 219 plate appearances. It’s literally six games. That’s practically nothing. I just found a six-game stretch around the turn to September where the Cubs hit equally poorly, and nobody noticed. The easiest possible answer here is to point to the size of the sample. But, these are the playoffs, which means all the details matter. And there’s another factor here, one that makes easy and absolute sense.
One of the things I kept hearing all summer was that the Cubs were beating up on lousy opponents. And, yeah, they definitely were, which is what good teams are supposed to do against lousy opponents. The Cubs’ overall numbers were slightly inflated in part because they simply didn’t have to play against themselves. But it’s not like the Cubs *only* hit well against crap. They were pretty good, no matter what, and there are lots of ways to try to show this, but I’ll show you one way in particular.
I gathered a table of every single pitcher to pitch against the Cubs in 2016. I then sorted all the pitchers into four groups, in ascending order of adjusted FIP, or FIP-. I used this as a proxy for talent. The group with the best pitchers averaged a weighted 72 FIP-. The next group came in at 93. The two remaining groups came in at 112 and 147. You go from really good pitchers to really bad pitchers. Once everything was sorted, I started calculating how the Cubs’ hitters performed against the pitchers. The group with the smallest sample against the Cubs still had just short of 1,300 plate appearances.
Here’s a table, showing the relevant data:
| Group | PA | Cubs OPS | League OPS | Cubs K-BB% | League K-BB% |
| Very Good | 1290 | 0.667 | 0.632 | 18% | 19% |
| Pretty Good | 1899 | 0.739 | 0.716 | 13% | 13% |
| Pretty Bad | 1759 | 0.775 | 0.782 | 9% | 10% |
| Very Bad | 1387 | 0.916 | 0.893 | 4% | 6% |
You can pretty much ignore the last two columns. Those are just there to show the Cubs never really got undisciplined. The meat is in the OPS columns. Take the Very Good group of pitchers, the ones who averaged a 72 FIP-. The Cubs had 1,290 plate appearances this year against those pitchers, and they managed a somewhat paltry .667 OPS. Yet, the league averaged a .632 OPS against the same pitchers — Cubs included — so you see the Cubs were still good, relatively speaking. They were above-average against the very good pitchers. They were above average against the pretty good pitchers, and the very bad pitchers. They were slightly below-average against the pretty bad pitchers, which is odd, but probably nothing. I didn’t, for example, control for the specific Cubs hitters facing each group. This research was done somewhat with simplicity in mind.
The Cubs can hit, and the Cubs did hit. They pretty much hit against all pitchers, but when you’re talking about the best pitchers, then suddenly even good hitting starts to look a little like lousy hitting. And now we can finally get to the very fundamental point. The Cubs, in these playoffs, have come to the plate a combined 219 times. During the season, the pitchers they’ve faced allowed a weighted-average OPS of .610. That’s .610, which, for example, is in between the OPS figures allowed by Jon Lester and Madison Bumgarner. Roberto Osuna allowed a .603 OPS. Max Scherzer, .619. Not every opposing pitcher has been equally good, but on balance, it’s been kind of like every Cubs plate appearance has come against a Cy Young candidate.
The pitchers in the Very Good group, once more, allowed a combined .632 OPS. The playoff schedule has been tougher than that. So now the Cubs’ .613 OPS makes a lot more sense. You’d still expect it to be something better than that, but, oh, by the way, the Cubs also have a team playoff BABIP of .224. Playoff BABIPs are typically somewhat suppressed, but not like that, and the Cubs haven’t been hitting the ball too weakly. There have been some easy outs, sure, but fold in a few more base hits, and the Cubs would be right where they should be. You can’t expect a lineup to slug when the pitchers on the mound are playoff-caliber. That’s what the Cubs have gone up against, Giants closers be damned.
This is all almost embarrassingly simple. I feel a little bit weird even putting it together into a post, because it’s stuff you all probably understand. But there’s a point to always keep in mind: In the playoffs, there’s almost no such thing as a bad pitcher. As such, offense is bound to suffer, and no lineup’s immune. The Cubs have shown they can hit good pitching. They just don’t dominate good pitching, because nobody does, and what’s happened in the playoffs isn’t a shock. It’s normal, and today’s Rich Hill assignment doesn’t promise to make things a whole hell of a lot easier.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Nice, concise explanation. Thanks. I don’t think you can head off the narrative, though. 🙂
It makes sense, but I have to ask; how much of that -slightly- below average OPS can we attribute to the Cubs pitchers mashing in the first series? How much further below average are the position players?
Everyone knows that the the team that wins the World Series is the team that demonstrates the Will to Win! It is the team that possesses, nay, embodies the utmost testicular fortitude. Hard work and grit in the most clutch.. ah man I can’t anymore.
Great Article, makes a ton of sense, thanks a lot.
Also, the city that gets the most redemption from winning.
So the Nats had the best playoff offense. Great. So that means Nats pitching must have been that much worse than the Cleveland’s.
The Nationals just sucked at sequencing. They left 41 runners in base in the 5-game series, including 11 in the decisive game 5 loss. They also outscored the Dodgers 24-19 in the series, and all three losses were one-run games.
My supposition this season has been not so much that the Cubs are beating up on generally bad pitching so much as that the Cubs’ offense is highly dependent on walks and therefore could be expected to vary their performance much more than other teams according to the control which the opposing pitcher has in a particular game (to take a fresh if anecdotal example, we can see this in the 3rd and 4th games of the nlds, in which they did pretty well against Bumgarner but very poorly against Moore–Bumgarner’s control is generally significantly better than Moore’s, but this was not the case in these particular games). Of course all teams hit worse against pitchers with good control (I would assume), but the variation with the Cubs would be expected to be a lot greater.
The reason for supposing this is based on the Cubs’ hitters’ data, which are generally pretty average other than walks:
Hard%–19th highest
LD%– 8th highest
HRs–13th most
Strikeouts–15th lowest
Slugging–10th highest
Average–14th highest
Infield hits–10th highest
IFFB%–20th lowest
BB%– highest
In playoff games, the assumption would normally be that pitchers are going to have above average control (again, because that’s how their teams got to the playoffs) and so this might be predicted to have a disproportionate effect on a team which relies on walks as heavily as the Cubs do. In order to empirically test this, I looked at all the playoff series since 2000 and compared the BB% of the hitters on the two teams. In cases in which there was a difference of 0.5% or greater in the hitters’ BB%, the team with FEWER walks won 58 out of 98 series (59% of the time). In cases in which the difference was 2% or greater, the team with fewer walks won 14 out of 21 times (67%). And in cases in which the difference was 3% or greater the team with fewer walks won 4 of 5 times (80%).
Actually you have specifically said earlier that they only beat up on the reds and brewers.
As always I have to ask of you which is it? Sometimes your argument is about too small a sample size, then your next argument has 10 plate appearances as a definitive sample.
Lastly what a terribly unscientific test. Did you compare talent level of the 2 teams in each individual series? What if it’s an average team that only made the playoffs because of walks? There is no controlled variable. Are you saying fewer walks in the series or fewer walks in the regular season. What if it’s correlation not causation? I.e. a team that doesn’t strike out happens to walk less but the real cause for them winning is not striking out…
You asked for data (in another thread), i gave you data. Sorry if you don’t like the data. It’s number of walks in the regular season. There are many possible explanations, you’re right, but this is something which should be investigated. Generally speaking people at fangraphs say the playoffs are a coin toss and don’t even try to explain playoff success or failure, so it’s not like there’s a lot of competing theories out there. If you seriously want to know about this, do a bigger and better study yourself. To be honest this is a finding i’m not very happy with myself because this last year the giants have changed from a low k low bb approach to a low k high bb approach which although it may sound ideal is i suspect a mistake in terms of playoff success. In terms of the giants i’d rather i was wrong about this. But i’m pretty sure i’m not.
This isn’t data, it’s meaningless numbers the way you constructed it. You offered a hypothesis and then used a small uncontrolled sample as definitive proof. ~ 100 series, some best of 5, some best of 7, did you count wild card games as a series? You used 2 games where pitchers pitched well as anedoctal proof! Offering the hypothesis is fine, nothing you did was helpful after that however.
Lastly comparing the teams by walk percentage, how many cases were both teams only average walking teams, both below average? Does one team being slightly below average and the other not walking at all really make you think that series is about approach?
Hmm. Seem to have touched a raw nerve here. It was all kinds of playoffs. I can divide it into WC, 3 of 5, and 4 of 7 if you’re interested in the results. For that matter you can count the data yourself.
If you’re referring to games 3 and 4 of the nlds, I didn’t mention that as proof of anything. My point in mentioning it is that the issue in terms of evaluating the cubs’ hitters (as I see it) isn’t categorizing pitchers into different levels of general quality as was done in this article but rather the issue of control in a particular game.
You failed to grasp my points. Your hypothesis implies approach is why teams lose. Well than different types of series would weigh approach more heavily. This is your hypothesis, I’m not going to do your work.
I was referring to your ” anecdotal example”. You basically used one game, which is a joke in an analytic community. You are talking about it effecting series and then say look at this one game for proof!
Look, obviously nothing I say is going to convince you, you’ve got your set of stats which demonstrate to you satisfaction that the Cubs are the best team in baseball (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and you simply don’t care about anything else, you don’t care about other stats and you don’t care about what happens in the postseason because according to you this doesn’t show anything. So have fun with your stats, if they make you happy.
This isn’t about the cubs, it’s about how poorly you tested your hypothesis to come to the conclusion that walking is bad.
Lol
That isn’t what i said. I hypothesized basing your offense on walking is not a good idea if your looking for postseason success.
And the way you want about your research wasn’t helpful to follow up on that hypothesis. I was pointing out how flawed it was.
Just to understand your comparison: I assume that the BB%’s you’re citing are regular season numbers for a team’s hitters?
Edit: cancel that, saw the answer below that it’s regular season.
What stands out and has most people freaking out is Rizzo and Russel going a combined 1-40 or something like that. Their OPS is like .200 or something. If not for Bryant and say Baez that Cubs OPS would be way worse than .600 right now.
In other words, if you look at the distrubution of the team offense, it’s highly skewed, not balanced at all. That’s why people are freaking out.
Now that’s not to say that this isn’t merely due to small sample size (it probably is) and that nobody thinks they won’t improve (they probably will), but it’s the way that .600 OPS is happening that’s got everyone noticing, not necessarily the .600 OPS itself.
Contreras has an 1.156 ops. Maddon is scared to put him in right field for some reason though. Frustrating.
….
Angel Hernandez just made another horrible, terrible, God-awful call. Fortunately it was overturned. Thank God for video replay. Fire Angel Fernandez!
I liked this article this afternoon, but it has not aged well over the course of the day.
As a Dodger fan, this is completely satisfying.
” The Cubs have shown they can hit good pitching. They just don’t dominate good pitching, because nobody does, and what’s happened in the playoffs isn’t a shock.”
I realize this was written before tonight’s game, but, yes, it’s a bit shocking for a playoff caliber offense to:
a) Score no runs for 18 straight innings
b) Score half of their runs through three games of an LCS as a result of the opposing manager walking two batters to intentionally load the bases late in a tie game, putting his pitcher in a no-walks-allowed righty-lefty matchup.
c) Score just under 25 percent of their runs in a four-game LDS in one inning against a dumpster-fire bullpen, with just under half of the remaining runs driven in by a single and two home runs by the pitching staff (those pitcher home runs seem worth mentioning given that the article flags bad BABIP luck–it’s not as if that bad luck hasn’t been offset to some extent by good luck elsewhere).
This may be shocking bad luck, a shockingly exploitable weakness in the Cubs’ lineup, or something else, but arguing that it’s “not shocking” seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
Not to claim that the Giants’ bullpen was or is great, but in fact other than game 4 they were pretty decent in the nlds–7 innings and 1 run in game 2, 8 innings and 2 runs in game 3, that’s 3 runs in 15 innings, 1.8 R/9. The difference in game 4 was that they were exhausted from pitching 8 innings the day before (Law and Romo threw 2 innings each, which is extremely unusual for Law and unheard of for Romo); Moore has completely dominated the Cubs (8 IP, 2 hits, 1 earned run, 2 walks, 10 Ks, and had thrown 13 pitches less than his maximum this year) and had retired the last 9 hitters before Bochy made the incredible blunder of pulling him. So even against the Giants’ bullpen, the Cubs didn’t hit very well except on the one occasion that they were exhausted.
Aside from this, Baez’s homer landed in the netting attached to the wall and Bryant’s hit the top of the wall (having traveled a grand total of 355 feet)–both would have been outs if the ball had been hit a foot or two less–and the second run in game 4 was the result of Crawford making a 3-base error followed by a sacrifice fly.
Other than the pitchers’ hits, the one-inning explosion against a mediocre and exhausted bullpen, two very marginal homers, and Crawford’s error, the Cubs’ hitters only scored 3 normal runs (2 against Samardzija and Ross’ homer in game 4) in 39 innings. Even against playoff-caliber pitching that’s pretty shocking (to say nothing of what’s been happening in the nlcs).
Am I missing something or have they only played 7 games? The randomness of 7 games is why this is not schocking. Why are the pitcher home runs luck? Arrietta basically put up the same batting line as Baez this year. The Phillies managed to play above .500 for what like 60!! Games this year?
I don’t disagree with any of that. But if the point of this article was “this is not shocking because virtually nothing that happens over the course of seven baseball games can be genuinely shocking, statistically speaking” then I’m not sure why it needed to be eight paragraphs long and include two tables.
I don’t know if you have you seen the comments sections/ twitter folks saying they only beat up on the reds and brewers throughout the course of the season and that this was an expected outcome. It was always a plausible outcome, this article to me is saying them struggling shouldn’t be the expected outcome.
The simple answer is that Kershaw is still the best pitcher in the league, Rich Hill has been a beast this year and benefited from extra rest nursing his blister. and Jansen is getting more work and not tiring. The result is 7+ innings of pitchers with sub one WHIPs doing what pitchers with sub one WHIPs do.
In the regular season Kershaw, Hill, and Jansen had ERAs of 1.69, 2.12, and 1.83. That’s great but against the Cubs they’ve been 0.00, 0.00, 0.00, which is quite a difference. Even pitchers with sub one WHIPs don’t have ERAs of 0.00. And against the Nationals in the NLDS, their ERAs were 5.84, 6.43, and 6.75, they weren’t exactly blowing everyone away like they are in this series.
You love 1 game sample sizes now.
You don’t realize this is baseball, high variance game.
Those 3 have combined for 15 1/3 innings.
4 innnings and 4 earned runs would actually take them over their season e.r.a to give you an idea of the sample you are using.
Don’t feel embarrassed about simplicity, it makes for the most compelling arguments (as long as it’s the “right” kind of simple!).
How do the other playoff teams fare with this type of analysis? Have the Cubs faced the toughest pitching?