Nelson Velazquez and WIllie Harris after homer

Arbitrary 24-Games-In Cubs Assessment

In Commentary And Analysis by Rice Cube14 Comments

Once upon a time in the ancient days of January 2023, I made some quasi-predictions of how the Cubs would fare throughout this season since they’d be playing against all 29 other MLB clubs. Suffice it to say that these Cubs have banked a few extra wins than I anticipated en route to their (as of this writing) 14-10 record with one of the best run differentials and overall statistics in the majors. The Baseball-Reference folks will update by the morrow, but let’s take a quick look at what’s been done in these 24 games so far.

Goodbye Until the Postseason, I Guess

  • Vs Dodgers: 3-4
  • Vs Oakland: 3-0
  • Vs Seattle: 2-1
  • Vs Texas: 2-1

I am only sort of kidding about the postseason thing, but if the world ended today, the Cubs hold the second National League Wild Card spot, behind Milwaukee (expected) and the current Central leader Pittsburgh (not as expected, but good for them I guess). The FanGraphs folks are still not too kind for the playoff odds, but still project the Cubs to have around 28.9% chance of making the postseason in some form or another, albeit with a slim (read: 0.0%) chance of winning the World Series. But there’s always next year! What is nice is that the Cubs won three of these series and had chances to win the season series against the Dodgers if the baseball only bounced the right way once or twice and maybe if Michael Fulmer hadn’t melted down, but that’s baseball for ya. Banking 10 wins against mostly competitive teams (and sweeping Oakland was nice, I was there, it was fun) is a good sign, especially when the Cubs don’t have to deal with them for the rest of the regular season.

Gotta Deal With You Again

  • Vs Reds: 1-1 (one of the games got rained out)
  • Vs Brewers: 1-2 (grumble)
  • Vs Padres: 2-1 (just finished too, see Nelly’s homer trot in featured pic)

I think the Cubs could have done better than .500 in this stretch, but the Brewers are still a capable squadron and the Padres spent a bajillion dollars on a roster full of mostly excellent players who happened to meet the Cubs during a slump, which is fortunate, and that obviously meant that a sweep was unlikely anyway, so winning the series before heading out to Miami is good. The Cubs will have a bunch of games against their two division rivals the rest of the year plus another series with the Padres in San Diego come June, so it’s fine if the Dads want to slump a bit more.

Taken together, the 14-10 record puts the Cubs on a 94-95 win pace, which would probably make us all very happy. I’m unsure how sustainable this offensive burst to start the season is, but with Nico Hoerner running wild and being a competent leadoff guy and the pitching and defense doing their thing, 14-10 is honestly a bit disappointing if you can imagine it, given again how they were just a few bounces away from like four extra wins. But then again, if we were asked in Spring Training whether we would be thrilled with 14-10 in this first brutal-ish stretch of the season, hell yeah we’d take it.

The whole “play good defense and pitch well while scoring some runs” plan appears to be working well, and that is despite some dead space on the roster that can be taken care of internally or via trade if the Cubs sustain this run into July. As they say in some Japanese anime I totally forgot, this isn’t even their final form! So it would be nice if they wiped the floor with the Marlins and Nationals before the schedule gets a bit tougher again. But even for the most curmudgeonly of us, the verdict in these first 24 games should be “so far, so good” and we’ll go from here.

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  3. berselius

    I probably complained about this last year, but I’m still bummed that mlb radio now localizes/nationalizes commercials for the radio broadcasts. The rotation of national commercials is….small. I do get to miss this year’s inevitably awful xfinity ad (dying laughing), though I’ve heard the new Scott’s lawn care ad campaign more times than I can count. They must have figured out I have a yard now but joke’s on them since it’s xeriscaped (dying laughing).

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    Rice Cube

    berselius,

    I think it’s at least better than ads for autoimmune therapies and boner pills, but perhaps they’re just not getting the diversity of revenue as in the past with everyone wanting to cut costs

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  7. Wenningtons Gorilla Cock

    berselius:
    I probably complained about this last year, but I’m still bummed that mlb radio now localizes/nationalizes commercials for the radio broadcasts. The rotation of national commercials is….small. I do get to miss this year’s inevitably awful xfinity ad (dying laughing), though I’ve heard the new Scott’s lawn care ad campaign more times than I can count. They must have figured out I have a yard now but joke’s on them since it’s xeriscaped (dying laughing).

    If you subscribe to XM or TuneIn those seem to still be the local broadcasts

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  12. berselius

    Just re-became a fangraphs member. I stopped supporting them after they hired KG…little did I realize that he left like a year ago (dying laughing).

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