Sometimes They Come Back: Remembering James Russell’s Results with the Cubs

In certain sardonic corners of the Cubs-related Internet, word that lefty reliever James Russell was back with the club on a minor-league deal was greeted with a “he was gone?” (Or, worse, a “he was ever here?”) (Or, worse still, a “World Series, here we come!”)

Although he departed less than a half-season ago, Russell’s time with the team has almost completely been forgotten by Chicago Cubs fans. While plumbing the depths of the collective Cubs fan psyche is an exercise likely to take you down rabbit holes of self-loathing you thought impossible, I’m going to take a stab at the four primary reasons Cubs fans totally let Russell go from their minds:

• His mixed start to 2014, emphasized by his failure to retire Miguel Montero in the 100th Anniversary Game, leading to an embarrassing come-from-ahead loss on that noteworthy day.
• The feeling that comes with the build up to the Trade Deadline when you know a player is going to be dealt, as it was with Russell last year (fans have a way of distancing themselves, not unlike former lovers in a cratering relationship (actually, it’s exactly like that)).
• The terrible Cubs teams for which he played (you’ve got to be a pretty serious nerd to care deeply about a lefty reliever on teams that lost an average of 93 games over a five-year period).
• His results were underrated, thanks in large part to advanced statistics.

The first three mostly did the trick, but I want to linger for a moment on that last one.

Generally, when we utilize advanced statistics to analyze player performance, we’re mostly interested from a predictive perspective. That is to say, the bottom-line results often interest us less than the underlying, suggestive performance—sure, the guy gave up seven runs, but how much of that is really attributable to his performance? How much can we take away from that performance, then, and how informative is the performance with respect to what comes next?

It’s all well and good when, for example, a pitcher gets through a few scoreless frames because none of the six guys he walked has scored, and the liners he’s given up have been right at his defenders, but that certainly doesn’t inspire confidence the next time the manager decides to hand him the ball. So, we regularly look at player performance through a certain lens: some of his numbers say he did X, but these better numbers say he should have done closer to Y.

I love this exercise. I applaud this exercise. I use this exercise liberally.

But what this exercise has conditioned forward-thinking baseball fans to do is to sometimes ignore the actual results a player achieves. We don’t really care that Jair Jurrjens allowed just 62 earned runs in 215 innings in 2009 and helped the Braves win a bunch of games, because everything from his walk rate to his strikeout rate to his LOB% to his HR/FB to his BABIP screamed terrible future regression. He didn’t actually pitch all that well, he was simply the recipient of divine results. And who cares about results that don’t tell us anything about the quality of the player’s current or future performance?

Well, we should probably care a little. Even if only for posterity and discussions like this one about how James Russell achieved notable results for the Cubs without ever really looking like a particularly impressive pitcher by the advanced stats. Those results should probably earn him a little more than a vague memory of a time when some long-haired lefty was a reliever or something for the Cubs but I think he was traded for a catching prospect or whatever I’m hungry let’s get a sandwich.

Russell was an unheralded 14th-round pick out of Texas for the Cubs in 2007, better known for his father Jeff than for his own arm. Although he was never a particularly well-regarded prospect by outsiders, Russell ascended the Cubs’ system rapidly (despite only so-so minor-league numbers), and surprised many by making the Cubs’ bullpen out of Spring Training in 2010.

From day one, Russell’s results weren’t quite matching what the underlying metrics suggested about his performance. For example, in that rocky 2010 debut, Russell managed a 4.96 ERA, but his FIP was 5.23. In 2011, Russell’s ERA improved to 4.12, but the FIP was still a lofty 4.74. By 2012, Russell had become a quality fixture in the Cubs’ bullpen, posting ERAs of 3.25 and 3.59 over the next two years, but the FIP once again told a different story, coming in at 3.53 and 4.43. Even in each of his halves of 2014 with the Cubs and Braves, his FIP exceeded his ERA. Russell’s career xFIP and FRA have also each been much higher than his career ERA.

(I don’t know if Russell’s got some secret sauce, and I don’t intend to use this piece as a platform to analyze whether there’s something unique about Russell. So I’m going to leave the advanced metric discussion there, but feel free to run with this if you’d like to dig in on that aspect. I can probably get you started with a combination of the relatively small samples you get from relievers, and Russell’s fly-ball tendencies.)

Whatever the advanced metrics kept saying about Russell—and, indeed, might now be saying as he returns to the organization as a potential second lefty in the bullpen—I think it’s worth pointing out that he’s posted a 3.23 ERA since 2012, and he was one of the Cubs’ best, most-reliable relievers in 2012 and 2013. He was in the top 15 in appearances in baseball each of those years, too, so he was giving the Cubs a lot. In those two years, Russell was worth 0.5 WARP, 0.8 WAR (FanGraphs), or 1.4 WAR (B-R), depending on your preferred method. In high-leverage innings—as high-leverage as the Cubs had in those years, anyway—that’s meaningful value that he actually provided.

I suppose I’m letting myself get carried away.

This isn’t supposed to be a love song for Russell—he had flaws, and I’m not sure how much better his addition to the pen would make this year’s Cubs team—but, instead, is an exercise in examining how we “modern” baseball fans think about a player as they’re playing.

The truth is, this whole thing was born out of my own reaction upon learning that the Cubs were bringing Russell back. I thought to myself, “Whatever. Fine as depth, I guess. But he wasn’t even that good when he was with the Cubs.”

It’s true that Russell’s past performance, in a number of ways, suggests he might not be a useful reliever this or any future year. But to say he wasn’t good in his time with the Cubs is flatly wrong. I caught myself just long enough to think back on Russell’s time with the Cubs, and remember that the results were often very good … even as I would have been saying every day during that stretch that Russell really wasn’t pitching all that well.