The 2012 Cubs were not very good at playing baseball: they finished the season with an awful 61-101 record. To be fair, Theo Epstein didn’t have much talent on the roster, and in amid the losing, that can have its own set of unintended benefits. Take speedy centerfielder Tony Campana, for example. It seemed like […]
Author: Carlos Portocarrero
Stuck in the Middle With Dan Vogelbach: Three Ideas Out of Left Field
My daughter has 32 stuffed animals on her bed. If I were to take 5 of them and throw them in the trash when she wasn’t looking, she’d never notice. She plays with the same two all the time (a cat and a bunny), while the rest simply take up space and no doubt feel […]
The Cubs’ Luck So Far This Season: It’s Complicated
At the end of the 2015 season, I decided to take a crack at quantifying how lucky the 2015 Cubs had been. The season had been a pleasantly unexpected surprise, and I had a hunch that luck had played a role. After all, the team had so many close, thrilling games that ended in their […]
How is Willson Contreras’ Development Going?
Back in February, I wrote a piece asking a question that may seem silly today: will Willson Contreras ever play a game for the Chicago Cubs? At the time, the answer was relatively clear: the number-2 prospect in the organization seemed to be the heir apparent behind the plate after breaking out and winning the batting title […]
The Rest of the Way: The Pitchers
Last week, I took a little liberty with statistical definitions and imagined what each member of the Cubs offense would slash the rest of the way if, at the end of the season, they were to hit their PECOTA projections and career averages. What did we learn from that exercise? For one, despite the name […]
The Great Regression: The Offense
So, last night’s results aside, the Cubs offense has finally struggled. I say finally because we all knew the blistering pace they were on was going to come to an end at some point—no team can keep up that kind of production over 162 games, and this team is no different. Their recent struggles are a […]
Jorge Soler Has Already Made History, Now What?
When I was a kid growing up in Guatemala, I collected baseball cards. I had too many of them, so I had to come up with a system to decide which cards made it into a book I kept, and which ones sat stacked in a drawer, alone and unloved. If a player was “good,” […]
Series Preview: Washington Nationals, May 5-8
The 2016 Chicago Cubs are essentially the 2015 Washington Nationals. The 2016 Nationals are finally playing the way everyone expected the 2015 Nationals to play: well. The 2016 Cubs were hoping to avoid the fate of the 2015 Nationals. Confused yet? All you need to know is that the 2016 Chicago Cubs are what the 2015 Nationals […]
How Good Could Kyle Hendricks Be?
About a year ago, my wife became pregnant with our second child, and decided she wanted to start drinking only decaf coffee. So we bought one of those fancy Keurig machines to replace our plain old coffee pot. By this point I had fine tuned that cheap, plasticky pot to brew the perfect cup of […]
Game 14 Recap: Cubs 2 Cardinals 1
Top Play (WPA): The Cubs just couldn’t crack Jaime Garcia tonight. He had his changeup working and when he kept it down in the zone (or in the dirt), Cubs hitters just couldn’t do anything with it. But in the 4th inning after a Jorge Soler walk, Ben Zobrist and Miguel Montero strung together a couple […]