The 2016 Cubs Are Already a Success
After a few months of mostly meaningless regular-season baseball, the Cubs begin their pursuit of a World Series title tonight. This is the best team the Cubs have had in a very long time, and 108 years since their last championship, Cubs fans are understandably excited about the possibility this roster provides. After spending most of their lives waiting until next year, this really could be the year they’ve been waiting for.
Unfortunately, it feels like this Cubs team will be defined by these next three weeks of baseball. The team is so good that they’ve created their own heightened expectations, and with the best roster in baseball, anything short of ending the World Series drought will be seen as a failure. But the unfortunate reality of postseason baseball is that the Cubs are far more likely to fail than they are to succeed.
Right now, our playoff odds estimate that the Cubs have about an 18% chance of winning the World Series. Relative to the other teams in the playoffs, that’s pretty high, but overall, it still makes it a pretty unlikely outcome. If we were to reframe the Cubs chances of winning it all, we could say that they’re something close to the odds that Jon Lester would get on base in any given at-bat this year.
This is just the reality of postseason baseball. Even one of the best teams we’ve seen in some time is only a little bit better than the other good teams, as the spread in talent between rosters in baseball is much smaller than in other sports. This isn’t the NBA or the NFL, where the best team just dwarfs their competitors. Even in roster construction, baseball really is a game of inches; you get little advantages here and there that add up to more wins over a long season, but at the end of the day, most everyone is still pretty evenly matched.
And that is compounded by the fact that home-field advantage in baseball has a significantly smaller effect than it does in other sports, so the Cubs reward for winning the most games in the regular season is that they get one extra game out of five where their advantage is akin to something like four percentage points. The Cubs also get to face the Wild Card team, who had to use their ace to earn the right to play them, but I’d imagine the Cubs don’t feel all that lucky to have to run through Johnny Cueto and Madison Bumgarner to advance to the NLCS. In leagues like the NBA, where the pool of playoff teams is much larger, the high-seed/low-seed first round often feels like a formality, but in baseball, every single round is something close to a coin-flip.
That makes every playoff baseball game more interesting and more tense, but it also makes the postseason a pretty lousy way to judge the success of a baseball team in a given year. In reality, what happens over the next three weeks will change how history talks about the 2016 Cubs, but it shouldn’t do much to impact how we view the success of this team. The 2016 Cubs have already proven to be one of the best Cubs teams in history.
They won 103 games, and that was with sequencing working against them: BaseRuns expected them to win 107. Their +252 run differential was more than 100 runs better than the next best NL team. They were third in MLB in runs scored and first in runs allowed, a balanced domination that is rare indeed in this day and age where most teams are trying to win every year. They won their division by 17.5 games, and basically had the title locked up by May.
The regular season, the 162-game grind that tests both the top and bottom end of a roster, is pretty good at weeding out good teams and bad teams. Those six months are the real test of team quality, and the Cubs aced that test. But because we like our sports champions to be determined by tournaments, the 2016 Cubs’ legacy will likely be determined by whether or not they can play slightly better than .500 ball for three weeks in October.
From a league perspective, crowning a champion with a postseason tournament ensures that there will be plenty of interest in the sport all year long. If MLB had the same setup as the English Premier League, we’d have all lost interest in the championship race a while ago, as the Cubs would have had it mostly locked up by August. Postseason tournaments are exciting, dramatic, and fantastic entertainment for the fans.
But as a way to determine a team’s enduring legacy, and judge their season as a success or failure? The playoffs suck at that. They weren’t designed to highlight real differences between teams, or reward the best teams for their accomplishments. And yet, we still judge a team’s season based on what happens during three weeks in October.
For Cubs fans who have been waiting a lifetime for a World Series title, and because I like it when great teams are rewarded for being great, I’m rooting for the Cubs to win it all this year. I hope the best team really does win, and that Wrigleyville gets to throw the kind of party it hasn’t seen in over 100 years. But if it doesn’t happen — and it probably won’t, unfortunately — then I hope the 2016 Cubs are remembered for what they really were: an historically great baseball team, one of the best Cubs teams ever, and a success regardless of what happened in October.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Great article!!! However must there be a Cubs article here about every day…… If not every other. I do get the relevancy with their first playoff game tonight, but it’s a bit much.
I read every single article posted to FanGraphs, and it’s about once a week. Several other teams also average once a week by post count.
Yeah why would he write about playoff teams during the playoffs. In more curious how the Padres golf games are going.
I’ve been saying this for 15 years about the 2001 Mariners, and nobody seems to agree. They didn’t make it to the World Series, much less win it, so they’re a footnote at best in the discussions of “great teams.”
Who are the great teams? This is a fictional list/conversation in the first place… which the ’01 Mariners are certainly part of.
Oh, you think because the Mariners won 116 regular season games and the Yankees won 21 less than that… and then by losing 4 out of 5 games to those same Yankees by a total run differential of 3, what, you think somehow that’s not enough to prove the Mariners were a crap fluke and the 92-70 Diamondbacks were the best team? Umm. No. Welcome to American sports, you’re our new best friend. Follow us on Twitter. Curt Schilling is here. He’s cool. The 9-7 NY Giants can magically use their -6 regular season point differential to catch the ball on some guy’s helmet and the best team in NFL history gets their diamond tiara snatched away by Steve Harvey’s mild illiteracy therefore becoming a giant pile of stinky loser. Seriously… welcome. Have you met Joe Buck? He’s coming.
The vast majority of your colleagues in the BBWAA disagree. Probably because it’s easier to write “CURSES” narratives.
Damnit Dave! Stop hedging! How many wishy washy articles are you going to write before you just come out and say (or maybe you’ve already written this article, in which case, my bad!): MLB should reformulate its champion crowning process? It’s obvious you wanna… just do it!
Would be delightful if the Cubs pulled a 1904 Giants and just boycotted the World Series tournament. “Nah thanks, we’re already the league champions. Later losers. See you next year, Love Theo”
You usefully cite the EPL, but could have included that they also have a big tournament sporadically played throughout the season, the FA Cup, which is prestigious, and inclusive of lower division clubs, but is wholly separate from the season’s points champion. A spring training tournament with real incentives to win would also be kinda fun. Like, tie the results to the amateur draft, or something weird like that. Just mix it up MLB, this current setup is fake spicy.
MLB with two tiers and relegation would be a joy! Never gonna happen in a million giant piles of years… but wooohooo would that be a fun change.
It would be even more interesting if all the minor league franchises were set free from their ties to a major league club and then you implemented a relegation system. Send the Padres and Rays down to AAA for a while.
No I disagree, the current 30 team league would need to be broken up into two tiers, maybe current triple A teams could play their way in some sort of staggered process, so you could have 20 or so teams in each tier. But yeah, combined records of 2017-2018 dictate the initial schism, or whatever, and then promote and relegate from there. What a dream. And it would be more cliche Americana as well, would help sell the phony idea that we live in a meritocracy. And, would help fuel our collective schadenfreude! Yes I love this idea.
But also the Spring Training tournament winner gets the first pick in the MLB draft, which is also going to be realigned to start with 16 year olds. Or 10 year olds. Or younger. I could go for drafting babies.
As soon as you disassociate AAA teams from MLB teams, it’s no longer a development league. Meaning prized prospects get thrown out there on two days rest after taxing their young arms just for the hope of a promotion.
Hard pass. (that said, college football and a relegation system….)
The Cubs actually face two problems, only one of which is mentioned in this article. The first, discussed, is that the odds of winning several short series in a row are relatively small even for a team that is favored, at least slightly, in each series. The second, not mentioned, is that according to FG’s own odds, the Cubs are not even favored to win every series. The Dodgers are favored to win a potential LCS matchup with the Cubs. In another article yesterday, Jeff Sullivan also claimed that the Dodgers as a team are slightly stronger overall than the Cubs.
It seems odd to celebrate the Cubs as one of the greatest regular season teams in history, with Dave even saying he hopes the “best team” wins, yet not even regard them as the best team in the postseason, when best is defined as the team favored to win a matchup with any other team.
Update: Yesterday, the Dodgers’ odds of winning the LCS, if they got there, were better than the Cubs’. Today, they’re about even. I don’t know why the change, since no NL games were played last night, maybe some roster change. But it doesn’t change my point. The Dodgers are considered about as good in the postseason as the Cubs.
These odds are produced by running just a few thousand simulations, it was recently mentioned in a FG chat.
This is so they can be re-run after every playoff game.
This might be an example of fluctuation despite not overall change in fundamentals. More likely, some of this, and some changes due to potential AL championship matchups.
I think the key is the definition of best in context. You are describing defining best as team favored to win a matchup with any other team whereas the premise of Dave’s article is that over a full 162 game regular season the Cubs were the best this year. I think it could be said over the regular season the Cubs “were” the best but based on the projections for the playoffs the Dodgers “are” the best. I don’t think it’s too odd to say the Cubs were the best but not favored to win the NLCS since many factors changed the Dodgers outlook going forward compared to their entire regular season (acquiring Hill and Reddick, calling up Puig and him performing better, getting Kershaw back)
But these claims about the Cubs being ‘the best’ have been made consistently and basically constantly since the beginning of the year, before Kershaw was injured and before Puig started playing badly enough to need a comeback. Since joining the Dodgers, Reddick’s WAR is literally 0.0, this can’t possibly have had a signficant effect. Hill’s has been 1.3 but so has Chapman’s. How could these changes possibly have changed the Cubs from being a team of historic greatness to not even the best team of 2016?
I am genuinely confused. Is your point that the Cubs were not the best team of 2016? By win-loss and run differential they clearly were. If that is your point I am curious how you define the best team in baseball for a given year and who you think it would be if it’s not the Cubs this year? I just think a distinction is not being made between who was the best in the 2016 regular season and who projects to be the best for up to 3 playoff series. My point was that things have recently changed for the Dodgers to make them project better than they otherwise would.
Sullivan’s article yesterday gave statistics showing that the Dodgers are better than the Cubs three days after he himself wrote that ‘the Cubs are clearly Team No. 1 moving forward’. I am also genuinely confused and asked about it there but didn’t get any answer. Read those articles and see if you can make sense of the situation.
I have read them and don’t presume to speak for Sullivan or what he meant. I was just more or less adding my input on this article that I think it is possible for the Cubs to have been the best in the regular season and also not be projected to be the best or have the best odds in the playoffs. I also think the point is more that this has been one of the Cubs best season in their history regardless of what happens in the next few weeks.
Better in post season because they can rely strongly on Kershaw/Hill/Bullpen.
Regular season Kershaw and hill are 40% of rotation. Postseason they are 50%. The bigger percentage of the best pitcher in the game is very valuable.
I understand that a team can have the best record in the RS, including run differential, wOBA differential, or however you want to define it, and still be considered an underdog in some specific matchups in the postseason. But the Cubs were dominant in the season, no other team was close. The Dodgers had a lot of injuries, but putting those players in does not seem to make up that difference. If it does, then maybe people should be saying, the Cubs were the best team this season, but only because the Dodgers had so many injuries. At full strength, the two teams are about equal. That seemed to be the conclusion of Sullivan’s article.
Again, I think two factors need to be distinguished clearly: the probability of winning several short series in a row, which works against any team, no matter how good. And the probability of beating any other team in a short series. It seems to me that if a team is historically dominant, it should be favored in a short series against any other contemporary team. If injuries to some lesser RS team make that much difference, then I question the historically dominant label. If factors that may be more important in a short series, like pitching–which according to Sullivan, gives the Dodgers a big edge–than again I don’t see how a team can be historically dominant. To me, historically dominant means best in the RS, easily, and favored to win any short series in the postseason as well. If not the latter, then we have to qualify our talk about how good that team is.
According to jeff sullivan’s article yesterday, the cubs aren’t even the favorites in the playoffs, the dodgers are. How exactly did that happen to a team which was declared in may to be historically great, added aroldis chapman, and didn’t suffer any meaningful injuries?
Clayton Kershaw innings pitched expectations increased.
When did they increase? From the time period when he was injured? But for the entire season, including before the time when he was injured, the Cubs were declared to be clearly the best team in baseball, even if the Dodgers had a healthy Clayton Kershaw.
You asked how exactly did the Dodgers odds go up higher than Cubs odds on FG. Increasing Kershaw’s allocation of innings dramatically increases their odds of winning series — so since the Dodgers didn’t become a new team yesterday but their odds temporarily went much higher, their playing time expectations obviously changed.
How did they increase?
Depth Charts SP for LAD: Kershaw 279 IP (28.15%), Hill 227 IP (22.91%), Maeda, 220 IP (22.20%), Stripling 58 IP (5.85%). Ignore the innings, review innings share.
In the regular season, David Price (15.98%) and Max Scherzer (15.64%), didn’t even manage 16% of team SP IP despite leading their leagues in IP.
Substituting Kershaw for any Dodgers starter not named Rich Hill is going to have a monstrous fWAR delta on that playing time.
Not completely sure of all the details of all the calculations but it looks like the assumption is then that the postseason projection is based upon the assumption that only 4 starters will pitch (I would guess there would be some adjustment for the 1st starter pitching the most innings, then the 2nd, etc.?)? Then it means that there are two different definitions of ‘best team’ going around. Since it can’t be the case that the Cubs are the best team and also the Dodgers are the best team, this means that when people have been statements about the Cubs being (ostensibly) the best team in baseball, this should have been qualified by saying that they are specifically the best team in regular season baseball, not (necessarily) simply the best team in baseball. Is this the situation?
Are you really not able to see that the cubs ridiculous depth made them the best team for the regular season. They are still the best team, but Kershaw being regular season Kershaw can carry the dodgers.
Plus health! This is one of the first times the Dodgers have been healthy with Hill and Reddick.
Say you’ve got two rotations. One through five, by WAR, the first rotation goes 8/6/6/0/0 and the second 4/4/4/4/4. Both rotations were worth 20 wins above replacement over the 162 game season, and their respective teams might be considered equal overall. And yet in analyzing a single do-or-die series between the two, the fact that the first team has a distinct matchup advantage in the top three lineup spots could reasonably be presumed to give that team an advantage in the series.
Jesus, man. The Dodgers can leverage Kershaw, Rich Hill, and Kenley Jansen by having them pitch a higher percentage of their innings than they could in the regular season. What is so hard to understand about this?
KERSHAW PLAYOFF STATS 64.2IP, 4.59 ERA…so unless thats too small of a sample size…
Yep. He has no idea how to pitch in the month of October. He’s amazing in January, though.
Scratch that he just posted a 5.40 ERA in 5.0 IP so it’s higher than that
That’s why the other 29 teams are breathing a sigh of relief they don’t have Kershaw.
Plz tell me how a guy with a 5 Era in 70 playoff innings can help?
Great article! As a Cubs fan I appreciate the way you’re approaching the debate of what constitutes the “best team in the game” and how do you determine it. Re: the best record in the regular season: I think that MLB could follow the lead of the NHL and create an award for the team with the best record in the regular season. It would take a long while for it to catch on as something almost as worthy as a WS championship, but they could give it a prestigious sounding name (like the NHL’s “President’s Trophy”) and stage a big presentation ceremony before the teams’s first game in the playoffs; that would help. Please please please stop calling for a 30-team table and a relegation system as in English soccer! That ship sailed a long time ago (the NL had a rough approximation in the 19th cen.), no one in the US is going to buy it, it’s a non-starter, etc., etc. With this many teams, you have to come up with a way to generate interest for the several teams who are going to neither win the championship outright nor be relegated. The Premier League does it by awarding the top 5 (or 6) teams in the standings places in the prestigious all-European leagues. Those clubs wind up playing a full schedule of games outside of the Premier League–they are literally playing in two leagues at once. And then all 30 teams get to compete for various national cups–again in tournaments that run simultaneously with the league schedule. I can’t think offhand of any way we could duplicate this with baseball here (i.e., if we scrapped the league and division setup and a postseason tourney)–and I can’t imagine the MLBPA supporting a system in which their members would have to play up to three separate schedules all at once. As for relegation, sending any team that’s been Major League all its existence into AAA would be that team’s death sentence; in English football, there is a long tradition of the clubs as local, neighborhood fixtures (there are at least 7 teams in London alone) that the fans are going to support anyway. It stopped being that way here a long time ago. There is no way you would be given enough time to make that system work before there was open rebellion amongst the clubs and the players both. Again, if you wanted to do things that way, it should have been built into the sport from the very beginning.
After sending absolutely unambiguous messages about the quality of the 2016 Cubs for the entire season–not specifically their chances of winning in the postseason but their quality relative to the other 2016 teams–the message of Fangraphs has become completely confused recently. Yesterday Jeff Sullivan wrote an article here presenting data suggesting that the Dodgers, not the Cubs, should be the favorites in the playoffs. This was three days after he wrote an article entitled ‘How the Cubs Stack Up Within Baseball History’ in which he wrote in the first sentence of the second paragraph ‘the Cubs are clearly Team No. 1 going forward’. Considering that neither the Dodgers nor the Cubs played any games during the three intervening days, it is not clear what caused this change of position. Dave writes here ‘I hope the best team really does win, and that Wrigleyville gets to throw the kind of party it hasn’t seen in over 100 years’, so apparently he thinks that the Cubs are the best team, so apparently he disagrees with Jeff’s recent assessment of the relative abilities of the Cubs and the Dodgers. What is this disagreement based on? What is going on here?
Two different people can have different opinions, no?
Sullivan himself expressed two different opinions 3 days apart and he didn’t respond when I asked about it. I thought there might be some enlightenment here.
Depth plays a more important part over a full season, while having a dominant pitcher can make a team with less depth the favorite over a short series.
Your point being what?
I don’t want to put words in Hank’s mouth, but I think his point can be summarized as this:
Depth plays a more important part over a full season, while having a dominant pitcher can make a team with less depth the favorite over a short series.
I don’t think Dave is saying he disagrees that the projections from Jeff’s article are saying that the Dodgers project to be better as they are currently constructed. He is saying based on actual 2016 regular season results the Cubs proved they are the best team. Under that definition of best Dave hopes the best team wins. I think it is reasonable to feel that way and also be able to agree with projections that say the current Dodgers project to be better in the playoffs. Projecting to be the best going forward isn’t really objectively being better, it is after all a projection (though I don’t mean to dismiss or discredit projections). I’m not even saying I am for sure right, that’s just how I am understanding it.
(I teach semantics in a university, this may explain my interest in the wording) It seems a little strange to say that by ‘the best team’ he is referring specifically to the best-team-in-the-regular-season definition when the point of reference is in fact the postseason, not the regular season, and there is evidence that the Cubs are actually NOT the-best-team-in-the-postseason. He seems to be using the term ‘best team’ in a general sense without considering what specifically this refers to or considering that there are possible alternative definitions/measures for different contexts (such as are presented in Sullivan’s second article).
wow youre so worked up over this lmao
After sending a clear message about the quality of a child in 2016 for the details of each season, not for a chance to win here, but the quality of them in relation to private teams in 2016. The second -Fangraphs recently become confused by all this. Data Jeff Sullivan wrote yesterday presented here only Dodgers, Cubs, we should be the favorites in the playoffs. This was three days after writing an article entitled “How to Stack the panda in the history of baseball, who wrote in the second sentence of the first paragraph, Panda obviously some teams continue .. 1” since the Dodgers and raccoons have played video games for the intervention for three days, we did not know what caused this change in attitudes Dave, said: “I really hope to win the best-organized and entertaining type Vrigleiville not seen in 100 years,” seems to be the best team the Indians, they obviously do not agree with the estimates of relative capacities Mets and Dodgers Jeff. This is based on a misunderstanding? What’s going on here?
Since they were fairly heavy favorites to win their division, and also to have baseball’s best regular season record (odds per Bovada.com), the Cubs to this point have only done what they were supposed to do.
I absolutely don’t think they have to win the World Series to be “success,” or even get there at all. But I do think they have to advance to the NLCS. If they’re upset by Magic Bochy, especially with Bumgarner only pitching once, the Cub season as a whole is a grade B, not A.
And, of course, the “best team in baseball” gets rewarded by possibly playing one extra ROAD game in the World Series (if they get that far)
And the Cubs go up 1-0! I love watching the Giants lose playoff games.
johnforthegiants, Thr33rings, and JUICEMANE walk into a bar….
javy.
baez.
Dave, I fully admit I often don’t see eye to eye with you but rarely am I incensed by what I read of yours. Heck I read every day because I think it’s valuable to see other peoples’ perspective. But calling the regular season ‘meaningless’ seems tantamount to taking a whiz on some of the principles of this webstie! You even work against that statement later on when you excorate the playoffs for being so random. I guess I just fail to see what your point is here when you thoroughly contradicted yourself. But thank you for having the courage to write it and I’ll be there for the next one, love the conversation it elicits.
I think he’s saying the randomness of the playoffs is what make the regular season meaningless.
It would be interesting if MLB could cook in some further advantage in the playoffs for the best regular season team, but it is rare that the differences between division winners is this high. I very much thought it was unfair when there was a single wild card and there was almost no difference between winning your division or settling for the wild card. In fact, it sometimes was in a teams best interest to not win the division. I think it’s great for the game to give teams an incentive to win as many games as possible, so the more incentives MLB can offer the better. I think perhaps giving a team an extra home game for every 0.05 points of winning percentage difference between them and their competitor. So, in the Cubs-Giants series, the Cubs’ winning percentage of 0.640 would give them two additional home games than the Giants with their 0.537 winning percentage. So, no home games for them. This is pretty much the extreme though. This would have made every game down the stretch for the Cubs and Gnats have some significance.
The Royals had two great seasons,no love.
Even a lifer Twins fan like myself,can smell what the Rock is cooking.