The Cubs are 8.5 games out of first place and it’s just the first of June. Their pythagorean record is even worse than their actual 23-30 record. Pythag has them at 22-31. The only team with a worse Pythag than the Cubs is the Houston Astros at 22-33. Minnesota is worse in the AL at 17-36, but no other team …
Which types of players have been injured? (UPDATED)
Fellow Cubs blogger Doc Blume opined in the comments to today’s article at LOHO that part of the Cubs injury issues stem from the roster being filled with players with questionable medical histories, as the Cubs had no money to spend on better players. The lack of payroll room the past few offseasons pushed the Cubs towards signing/acquiring marginal, injury …
The emptiest batting averages
Colin Wyers looks at batting average and BP’s True Average to find the players with the emptiest batting averages. Starlin Castro and Darwin Barney at the top 2 and former Cubs Ryan Theriot and Aaron Miles are next. Jeff Baker is 7th and Marlon Byrd is 10th. As Colin notes, you can be a good hitter and still make the …
Grades so far: Infield
The Cubs are 33 games into their 2011 season and it seems a good time to check on how players are doing. I’ll break it into four parts. Click the link below to read more.
Cubs rWAR and fWAR
Most of you are at least somewhat familiar with WAR and how it works. I’d bet most of you are familiar that Fangraphs publishes their own WAR (fWAR) and Baseball Reference publishes their own. BRef’s WAR is based on Rally Monkey’s formula and it’s been referred to as rWAR for a few years now. There are some key differences between …
Cubs compared to their projections
I wrote this on Friday morning so it’s updated through Thursday’s games. I’m too lazy to update it to include Friday’s blowout loss. This is something I’ll try to update once a month just so we can see where players are at compared to their projections. It’s something SG has done on RLYW a few times over the last couple …
How bad is Koyie Hill?
Over the last two seasons Koyie Hill has posted a 51 wRC+ (weighted runs created, adjusted so that 100 is average like ERA+ and OPS+). wRC+, you may remember, uses wOBA. Oddly enough, it’s only 11th worst over those two seasons among players with 200 or more PA. It’s bad. It’s downright terrible, but he is a catcher so he’s …
Platooning 101
The day everyone has looked forward to is here. Obstructed View is no longer something we can hype though we had little to no intention of doing that. It just became fun to do it. Now we have to live up to the hype or face critisim and ridicule by the thousands of fans we raised expectations for. Anyway, this …