The Cardinals Lay Waste to the Cubs’ 2019 Season
With a four-game sweep that took Chicago’s playoff odds from likely to long-shot, the Cardinals put the Cubs’ season in the trash like an uneaten commemorative cake. Due to the Cubs’ recent run of success, and the painful way the club lost four, one-run games at home (while holding the lead or being tied in the ninth inning in three of those games), their fall is the most-attention grabbing aspect of the series (and we’ll get to that). But the sweep was massive for the Cardinals in its own right. Look at the Cardinals’ odds to win the division in the second half:
While the Cardinals still have some work to do, the division title is very likely theirs after failing to make the playoffs the last three seasons. At the beginning of the series, the team had some ground to cover, with a 58% chance at the division. Losing the first game of the series likely would have taken those odds below 50%. Despite the Brewers winning four straight, the Cardinals were able to push their chances upward due to their three-game lead over Milwaukee with just six games to go, while also eliminating their rival from division contention. The series might be viewed as microcosm of the season for St. Louis. The Cardinals offense was typically inconsistent, scoring nine runs in one game, and just nine total runs in the other three. Jack Flaherty pitched fantastically, continuing his run as the NL’s best pitcher in the second half. The bullpen was solid despite multiple short starts from the rotation, and the defense played its part, turning seven double plays.
A year ago, the Cardinals played the role of the Cubs. After going 39-23 in the second half after firing Mike Matheny just before the All-Star Break, the Cardinals got their playoff odds up to 79.5% with series against the Brewers and Cubs to close the season. But the Brewers swept the Cardinals in St. Louis, dropping the team’s playoff odds down to 19.6%. When they dropped the opener to the Cubs, those odds fell under 1% and their season was essentially over in four games. Speaking of a season essentially ending after four tough games:
The Cubs playoff odds hadn’t dropped below 35% since they finished the 2014 season 73-89. If you think a team dropping more than 50 percentage points in four games calls the playoff odds into question, consider that the Cubs odds of getting swept were 3.4%. The Brewers odds of winning four straight games at the same time was 12.5%. The odds of both happening at the same time are 0.4%, around one in 240. That’s what it took for the Cubs to enter the series with 58% playoff odds and leave it under 3%. And it’s actually worse than that for the Cubs when we consider the Cubs’ in-game chances.
Here’s the win expectancy graph for Thursday’s game:
In the ninth inning, the Cubs’ win expectancy was just above 60% and their playoff odds at that moment were roughly the same. An inning later, Matt Carpenter — relegated to the bench and entering the game only because Kolten Wong injured his hamstring — hit a homer. The Cardinals won, taking their division odds up to 82% with the Cubs’ playoff odds dropping to 41%.
Friday was a little worse:
The Cubs had a roughly 70% chance of winning the game with a 1-0 fifth inning lead. Their playoff odds were around 44% at the time. Yadier Molina, who looked like he might have to come out of the game after taking a foul ball between the legs, hit a bases loaded single to drive in two runs. The bullpen did the rest, and the Cardinals division odds moved up to 89.4% with the Cubs’ playoff odds moving down to 21.4%. Saturday was a disaster:
The Cubs took their game odds over 75% in four separate innings, including over 87% in the bottom of the eighth, with their playoff odds at an estimated 26%. Craig Kimbrel entered the game and two pitches later, Yadier Molina and Paul DeJong hit homers to give the Cardinals the lead. Carlos Martinez, pitching in his fourth straight game after being hospitalized for asthma-related respiratory issues following a series in Colorado, closed out the ninth inning with a 99 mph fastball to strike out the mostly injured Javier Báez. It was Martinez’s second-fastest pitch of the season.
Sunday might seem inevitable in hindsight, but it didn’t have to end like this:
The Cubs took the lead in the sixth and in the bottom of the eighth, and their win expectancy reached over 87%. Then, as has happened to the Cardinals before when down to their last time at bat, a triple went over the head of an outfielder who might have been playing too shallow and got a bad read on the ball. Tyler O’Neill pinch ran for Jose Martinez and scored on a shallow Dexter Fowler fly ball. A single by Tommy Edman and a double by Paul Goldschmidt gave the Cardinals the lead. Andrew Miller finished off the sweep.
It would be unfair to call the series a microcosm of the Cubs’ season. The team was 51-26 at home heading into the series. The Cubs’ offense put up a 109 wRC+ during the season, with equally good numbers in medium- and high-leverage situations. The bullpen wasn’t good all year, but it wasn’t generally terrible. The team was 19-23 in one-run games entering the series. The Cubs have played like an 85-90 win team all season long. That’s not how they played over the weekend.
But it would be fair to say that the sweep highlighted some of the Cubs’ deficiencies that have been present since April. The bullpen has been a known issue since last October but the team ignored the problem until June when they put all their eggs in the Craig Kimbrel basket. That failed. The Cubs’ stars have played well, but Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, and Javier Báez have all been dinged up at various points this season; that showed up all at once over the weekend. Chicago has had little to no starting pitching depth all season long and were forced into a bullpen game on Saturday without Cole Hamels. And while Alec Mills pitched well, expecting a clean game from David Phelps and company was never realistic.
Where the Cardinals go from here is obvious. They are headed to the playoffs, and despite the resurgent Brewers, they are very likely going to win the division and have Jack Flaherty lined up for two potential games in the division series. They’ll hope to get good news on Kolten Wong’s injury, but have a 2018 MVP candidate in Matt Carpenter coming off the bench to take his spot in the lineup.
As for the Cubs, Joe Maddon’s contract is up. The team has little on the farm to help them next year, and the only players with trade value are the types of players winning teams build around. They do have gobs of cash. If they do next-to-nothing like they did this past offseason, they’ll have a shot at the playoffs again next season. If they use some of the cash banked from massive revenues the last five years plus the new revenues coming from the upcoming Cubs-owned network, the Cubs will be in a very good position to get back to the playoffs. But on a rainy Sunday, neither the triumphs of the recent past nor the old refrain asking fans to “wait til next year” likely provided much comfort in the shadow of standings that signaled the season was all but over.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
Ouch
I’m actually really bummed about how that series turned out because I was hoping for a Team Entropy special: The Cardinals, Nationals, Brewers, and Cubs all tying for the same record, necessitating a three-way playoff for the division title before another three-way playoff for the wild card. The chances were low, but I was still sad when the chances of it went away.
Craig,
Apparently you’ve moved past the classy, tight rhymes “Craig Edwards“ part of your career and gone right into the over the top, blatant cash grab “Craig Cardinals Puff Piece Daddy Edwards” part. How pedestrian.
Yours,
sometimes the people just want you to play the jams. LOOK AT THAT GRAPH!
Ignorant, insulting comment.
imagine considering this a Cardinal fluff piece when it’s significantly moreso an early elegy series for the Cubs.
Okay. Addison.
So Maddon didn’t make your day, huh.
And the WAY they swept, late inning comebacks, was just so delicious to watch. I’m not a Cardinals fan at all, I just can’t stand Joe Maddon.
Same! I am more a fantasy guy, but if I had to be a fan of any team it would be the Padres, and I really, really do not want Maddon signing there. The idea of it really bothers me. Not only do I think his shtick is annoying, I also think he is a horrible coach.
Maddon, Russell…the Cubs are officially not loveable anymore.
It just goes to show you how much of a crapshoot baseball is. This is a team that once traded for Arrieta, Hendricks, signed Lester, got Chapman midseason. Now they’ve traded for Quintana, signed Darvish and Chatwood, and got Kimbrel midseason. And it’s presumably the same front office doing both things.
Baubo has it right!
Yu and Quintana have been pretty alright this year, though! They’ve been worth almost 6 wins between them. That’s not at all bad. Chatwood is poop and Kimbrel has also been poop, but Yu and Quintana are not the best data points against the FO. Descalso is a good one. Retaining Addison Russell is another. Not Yu and Quintana.
Yes and no. The Cubs have been the worst team in MLB at developing pitching since Theo joined the team and the Quintana/Darvish deals are a result of this. Quintana was mediocre last year and Darvish was nonexistent. If either pitched to expectations last year then maybe they don’t bring back Hamels for $20m and invest it differently.
Hamels pitched so well after coming to Chicago though last year. 2.36 ERA/3.42 FIP in 12 starts. So even if Quintana/Darvish had pitched well last year- they probably would have brought back Hamels with those numbers.
Darvish may have rebounded to a degree, but he’s still not anywhere near worthy of his contract. That’s like saying that Dexter Fowler’s rebound from a terrible player last year to an average player this year suddenly means his 5-year contract isn’t still a lousy deal for the Cardinals.
I wouldn’t say terrible. If he keeps producing around this level for the rest of the contract, it’ll just be vaguely bad.
They may be vaguely synonyms, but last I checked “lousy” doesn’t mean “terrible.” I only used the word to describe Fowler in 2018 and imply the same for Darvish in 2018, which is accurate on both counts.
Eh, it’s more the fact that almost exclusively relying on free agency and trades (instead of developing the majority of it themselves like the Cardinals did) to build their pitching staff was always an unsustainable model that was going to catch up with them eventually. That “eventually” happening in 2018 (and then continuing in 2019) just happened a little sooner than expected.
The Cubs focused WAY too much on their offense at the expense of their pitching during their rebuilding years. While a balanced development is ideal, if anything, you want to develop the pitching to carry the offense, not the other way around!
Cleveland nods.
The front office has always been a little suspect. They also signed Edwin Jackson in their early years and inherited Javy Baez and Willson Contreras in the minors. They became the first wealthy team to openly tank for success and incredibly they did it for four years. And, after they finally reached success, they proved that they have no idea what they’re doing with player development. Not only have they failed to produce good prospects, they’ve been incredibly unsuccessful in producing even decent ones. This forces them to spend big on free agents to fill the back of their bullpen and their bench (Brach, Descalso, Cishek, etc). Cub-drafted pitchers produced 8 strikeouts this year for the team. That’s an unbelievably low number, especially when you consider the number of pitchers that the team has churned through in the bullpen. The number of bad contracts that this front office has given out is staggering. Aside from those you mentioned, there’s also Morrow, Smyly, Uehara, Heyward and Lackey. On a team with fewer resources, any of those deals would set the franchise back a few years.
Huh, putting it that way it does seem their front office maybe a bit overrate (caveat of flags fly forever and all that). Especially if you compare them to their tanking partner the Astros. The Astros seemed to have laid a much better framework of player scouting/development during their lean years that is portable to even when they became successful again. Whereas the Cubs kind of just stopped producing players once they became good.
I guess this just goes to show that when a team is tanking, they should be trying a lot more stuff than just hoping for better draft picks and finding hidden gems. You can also do a lot of experimentation and creative ideas that you can only do while being terrible and no one cares about winning. The Astros did that. And the Cubs didn’t.
Theo and team have had great big league talent produced from the Cubs farm system since they’ve been in charge. Where would the Yankees be without Lemahieu and Gleyber up the middle?
Cubs shouldn’t be too disheartened. The 6 games-in-a-row they’ve lost were by a combined 7 runs. The day before that sequence began, they won by 6 runs, so it’s almost a push. They destroyed the Pirates in the series prior, thereby ensuring their Pythagorean record is that of a playoff team. Run differential counts for a lot…
If you’re arguing that run differential has little value, one suggestion would be to look at the actual relationship between run differential and winning pct/playoffs/whatever. A sarcastic post with a single cherry-picked example isn’t going to convince anyone.
This comment is on drugs. Run differential has predictive value because we assume that scoring/preventing runs in one game taps the same latent ability as it does in the next game.
(This assumes that the same players are playing, which over the course of a month or two or five, is probably pretty fair barring season ending injuries.)
LOL, what??
If the Cubs do end up missing the playoffs, then the top two payroll teams – Red Sox and Cubs – will both miss the playoffs. (That’s going by Cot’s current estimates of payroll for CBT purposes. The Cubs were #3 at the start of the season and moved ahead of the Yankees during the season.)
It’s lining up that 4 of the top 10 teams by payroll will make the playoffs: Yankees (#3), Dodgers (#4), Nationals (#5), and Astros (#6). The other likely playoff teams’ payrolls rank between #12 (Cardinals) and #28 (Rays).
When the first sentence brings up the cake from 2014, you know it’s going to be a good one…
From a Cubs fan.
Not many would get that reference! Hahaha
From Cubs Spokesperson Julian Green.
“The Chicago Cubs are disappointed in how our Wrigley Field display cake was disposed of by the Field Museum following our successful charity event last night. The team made a decision not to serve the edible portion after the cake was on display outside Wrigley Field for most of the day. Though the cake was mostly made up of non-edible material, it certainly does not excuse how a celebratory display cake artfully created by Buddy Valastro and Carlo’s Bakery was handled.”
Thanks for the reply, that sentence was pure WTF? to me prior to this.
Not enough cool wardrobes this year for the Cubbie road trips. Maybe next year.
Great article, those stats are amazing. The win expectnancy charts are fun, but I mean the 3.4% sweep, and 12.5 for Brewers etc. What a season the NLC has had!
Assuming the Cubs go to FA reloading, will there be enough talent available?
I thought this wasn’t a terribly deep class…
…and there’s quite a few teams looking to fish that pond.
Eh. The NL Central is baseball’s second-worst division. 90-ish wins should take it, and the Cubs could get there next season with nothing more than better injury luck.
Gamblers count on luck.
Baseball and gambling don’t mix.
The “low” win totals of the NLC are due to parity, not rebuilders, like tbe ALC.
Gambling on the injured isn’t going to make the bullpen get better or starters younger. And the division is getting progressively tougher. And 2020 could see the Reds step up.
Standing pat isn’t likely to be enough.
“Baseball and gambling don’t mix.”
My bookie vehemently disagrees with this statement.
Assuming that he’s doing it right, your bookie isn’t gambling, his customers are. He wins regardless.
Second worst division because there are no 100+ win teams? The NLC is the best division because it has multiple teams vying for the playoffs until the end (no teams tanking). The Pirates made trades last year to try for a run this year (were competitive until shortly after the ASB). Even the Reds made trades looking to be competitive this year.
I agree that the NLC has more parity than most, and this isn’t the same as bad by any means. Once you get past small sample sizes, I like win-loss record as a measure of quality. The NLC is +11 games (aka above average). That’s better than the ALE, ALC, and NLW. The really bad division currently is the ALC, and the NLC didn’t play them this year except for regional rivalry series. National league won the inter-league series, so you can’t say the NL as a whole is weak, there’s no evidence I can see that the NLC was feasting on an unusually easy schedule and they were winning more than they lost.
How do you figure the NLC is the 2nd-worst division in baseball? If you go by wins outside the division, the NLC is actually one of the better divisions in MLB. As for 90 wins “taking” the division, that’s partly b/c there’s so much parity in the division (the Reds aren’t remotely pushovers, nor were the Pirates before they got hit by injuries and collapsed down the stretch). Put another way: do you honestly think the Cubs or Cardinals or Brewers wouldn’t have a higher win total if they got to play, say, KC/DET/CHW 57 times, or even BLT/TOR 38 times?
But what good does all the Cubs revenue do if they can’t/won’t go over the luxury tax?
Their payroll this year is well over the luxury tax threshold – about $30 million per Cot’s estimates.
They were just over the tax this year, but were very clear about how they were going to play it tight after that. I don’t know if it was confirmed, but I think I read that the only reason they signed Kimbrel was because they were able to save money due to Zobrist’s self-imposed suspension.
Money is a HUGE factor. It bought them the 2016 championship and made them a contender since…but the guys you sign huge contracts to start getting old.
Outspending the Cardinals and Brewers by a combined $250 million and being worse than both is sad. If there’s ever another article praising the cubs’ front office I’m gonna puke.
So you’re telling me that signing a veteran closer who did not pitch in Spring Training and almost immediately have him start attempting to close out MLB games is a bad idea? Gee, who would’ve thought?
This is incorrect. They did take their time in getting him ready before putting him into games.
If you’d have said that giving a 31 year old who was coming off a terrible post-season a 3 year deal at Chapman’s wages was a bad idea, I’d be with you. The Cubs gave Kimbrel plenty of chances to rest and get healthy, but he’s shown that he’s just not the player he was when he was young. And the Cubs gave him 3 years when no one else would. When they signed him I was happy and just assumed he was getting a similar deal to Keuchel- just the rest of the year. The extra years added on was just foolish.
They gave him some time to get ready but not nearly enough. They didn’t give him the entire month he normally would’ve had with Spring Training, and he logically should’ve required even more time to shake off the rust given he didn’t face any competition for an additional 2 1/2+ months beyond that, and also due to not facing quite the same level of competition he would’ve faced in MLB Spring Training.
Furthermore, they should’ve eased him in with relatively lower leverage situations rather than throwing him straight into the closer’s role.
The 3-year deal may actually be an overall win, as I expect he’ll be much better the next two years when on a normal schedule. He may be on the wrong side of 30, but before this season, save for possibly Chapman he had the best track record for a free agent reliever that we’ve seen in several years.
a question that I have though is what did Maddon did to him last weekend- is that going to poison the Chicago fan base to Kimbrel permanently? That was just totally setting Kimbrel up for failure- coming back from the DL.
Giving a 31 year old who was coming off a terrible post-season a 3 year deal was a bad idea PERIOD,
When are GM’s going to learn to stop handing out long-term big-dollar contracts to declining once-stars over 30?
Most GMs already have. That’s why the free agent market is drying up. Theo Epstein/ Jed Hoyer just don’t seem to get it yet. Their list of awful free agent signings is getting very long: Darvish, Heyward, Kimbrel and Chatwood stand out. The last Edwin Jackson contract is one of the worst ever too.
Great piece!
Good article, Craig. I can smell October baseball around the corner.
Cubs announcer was feeling the heat too and decided to take it out on the people of Pittsburgh. Paraphrasing since I don’t recall exactly, he said something like
“Lose Josh Bell for the season. Lose Marte. Lose your quarterback for the year. Closer is in jail. But hey at least they get to live in Pittsburgh… (both announcers laugh).”
so was that before or after that fateful 7 run 7th? Karma is a biatch.
Personally, I would much rather live in Pitsburgh than Chicago.
No question. Chicago’s just a bigger Cleveland with more violence.
Excellent article about a baseball tragedy. Nice use of graphics to make your points. Thank you.
“Mostly injured” Javy Baez? Mostly? He has a broken thumb and that was the only AB he’s taken in weeks (and hasn’t taken one since). It was a crazy idea to begin with by Maddon, but no need to belittle the injury here.