The 2015 Cubs Are the Most Talented Cubs Team at the Break Since 2008

Abstraction is an analytical tool that, almost by definition, is very bad at explaining individual events but very good at explaining the big picture. Meanwhile, talent—and specifically, talent which is related to playing baseball—is almost certainly something best understood at the macro level. It makes sense, then, that the more you abstract from actual results the closer you get to an understanding of ‘true’ talent. (I quibble with ‘true’ a little bit beause I’ve not yet been presented with a convincing case for what it’s true in relation to, but I’m comfortable using it as a rough equivalent of ‘baseline’ or ‘underlying’ for the purposes of this piece.) So, where do the 2015 Cubs stack up with their recent predecessors when it comes to true talent?

I’ve already let the cat out of the bag a little bit with the title of this piece, so what I’ll do here is walk you through the process by which I came to my main conclusion: that the 2015 Cubs are the most talented Cubs team at the All-Star break since 2008. To start with, you have to know a really basic thing: that luck has a lot to do with how many baseball games a given team wins. There’s a positive correlation between runs scored and wins, of course, but there’s significant variation around the trend line. How many times have you seen the Cubs play a team, get a dozen or so hits, but fail to score a single run because the hits didn’t come in the right order? And how many times have you seen an opposing team (usually, it seems, the Cardinals) string together two walks and a seeing-eye single into their only run of the game? In short, luck—usually described in this context as ‘sequencing’, or how hits are sequenced together into runs—has a lot to do with how many runs a team scores, and how many runs a team scores has a great deal to do with how many wins they rack up.

With this in mind, Baseball Prospectus reports three categories (we call them ‘orders’) of adjusted winning percentages, each with an increasing degree of abstraction. The first order, creatively named ‘1st Order Winning Percentage’, applies a pythagorean model to the number of runs a team has actually scored and allowed to estimate how many games that team should have won, had their runs been distributed normally across their games played. That model was first conceptualized by Bill James, later refined by a number of people at BP (read more about that here), and does a pretty darn good job of predicting future team performance.

But more abstraction is possible. We’ve just talked about how runs aren’t always a good predictor of wins; well, runs aren’t always a good predictor of underlying offensive talent, either. As we’ve discussed, there seem to be teams that get more bang for their buck on hits, consistently driving in runners when they need to and in general capitalizing on their opportunities. That’s where 2nd order winning percentage comes in. This statistic uses a team’s underlying run components—hits, runs,walks, and the like—to predict how many runs the team should have scored, given normal sequencing, and then plugs that number into the model from the 1st order equation to arrive at a result. Abstraction!

But the rabbit hole extends ever further. 2nd order winning percentage assumes that a team is playing against an average team, with average pitching and defense, which of course they are not: they’re playing against a very specific set of teams. So 3rd order winning perentage adjusts the run components used in the 2nd order equation to account for the quality of a team’s opponent’s pitching and defense, then plugs the whole shebang into the 1st order equation to get a result. And with that we have, at least for BP, a final level of abstraction, and are the closest we’ll get to estimating team’s true talent level without driving ourselves absolutely crazy. So, how do the Cubs stack up? At the All-Star break this year, their various winning percentages look like this:

Cubs Winning Percentages, All-Star Break 2015

That shows you a picture of a team that’s probably underperforming it’s true talent level a little bit, although actually outperforming its runs allowed and scored, and which has been the victim of more than a little bad luck. How does that compare to Cubs teams of previous years? Well, let’s take a look back at the years between now and 2003, a period which cover the last three Cubs playoff teams. And let’s focus on 3rd order winning percentage alone, which is the closest we can get to true talent level.

Cubs 3rd Order and Actual Win Pct, All-Star Break

What should stand out for you, first, is that the Cubs have had a lot of underperforming teams over the years. That’s not typical: the Cardinals, for example, often overperform their projected winning percentages. Many theories have been put forward for this uniquely Chicago phenomenon: it could be the plethora of day games wearing Cubs players down, it could be the relatively poor facilities at Wrigley (until next year), it could be an organizational philosophy which mutes clutch hitting, or it could just be a century’s worth of bad luck. Whatever the case, the fact is that the Cubs, both routinely and presently, underperform their true talent level.

But, about that true talent level: the second thing that should stand out to you is that, at .568, the 2015 Cubs have the highest 3rd order winning percentage of any Cubs team since 2008, and the third-highest since 2003. It’s based on this observation that I’m willing to claim that we’re currently watching the most talented Cubs team since the division-winning 2008 squad, and based on this observation that you can go forward confident that this young squad, still with an approximately 70 percent chance of making the playoffs, has more left in the tank as they head into the second half of this transformational season on the North Side of Chicago.

Lead photo courtesy of Caylor Arnold-USA TODAY Sports