I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks pondering various moves the Cubs might make this offseason—here, here, and here, for example—but realized today that (a) I haven’t yet taken a look at the Cubs’ roster composition, and (b) that that might be a worthwhile endeavor, and give me another way […]
Author: Rian Watt
Daniel Murphy: Potential Offseason Target
Let’s get this out of the way right at the top: putting aside his value as a free agent, Daniel Murphy is already a target (of rather the wrong sort) for Chicago Cubs fans. His offensive exploits for the Mets during the National League Championship Series—a four-game sweep of Chicago, in which he went deep in […]
Cubs Look for Runs in the Outfield, Try Not to Lose Any
Imagine you’re in charge of a health intervention, and you have the choice of two programs to implement over a population of 600 people. If you implement Program A, there’s a 100 percent chance that you’ll save 200 lives, but a zero percent chance that you’ll save the other 400. If you implement Program B, on […]
Moving Kyle Schwarber’s Defense from Controversy to Conversation
I don’t court controversy. I don’t even flirt with it when I see it at the bar. Controversy is single for a reason, and bad news for anyone trying to build a positive reputation as an analyst in baseball or any other field. And yet, despite all my safeguards and precautions, controversy found me at Wrigley […]
Theo Epstein, Language, and the Shape of the Cubs’ Offseason
For a long time, I thought I’d be a lawyer. I liked the lifestyle—or, at least, my adolescent vision of it—and I reveled in the verbal back-and-forth I saw practiced by the profession’s televised representatives. But most of all, I liked the command of language the law seemed to require. To learn to say exactly what needed to be said, […]
Gracious in Victory, Mets See Bright Future in Chicago
It’s easy to be gracious when you’ve won, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be. Let me tell you this: if the sight of Yoenis Cespedes tonight made you mad—bedecked, as he was, in goggles and a “National League Champions” t-shirt with outs still to record on the field—let it go. The Cubs […]
BP Unfiltered: We Got Kyle Schwarber to Say “Man Parts”
This piece, by BP Wrigleyville’s Rian Watt, originally ran as part of “BP Unfiltered”, Baseball Prospectus’s less-than-serious home for small or light-hearted pieces that maybe aren’t as analytical as their usual content. We thought you’d enjoy it here. This all happened an hour ago, roughly two hours before the first pitch of a critical NLCS […]
Playoff Prospectus: NLCS Game Four Preview
This piece, by BP Wrigleyville’s Rian Watt, is the Cubs-specific portion of a longer LCS preview jointly written with Matt Trueblood. We’ve posted Rian’s section by itself here; if you’d like to bone up on your ALCS knowledge, head over to the full piece here. We hope you enjoy. The Cubs will take the field in Chicago […]
NLCS Game Three Recap: Slipping Away
All year long, Cubs’ leadership has preached a simple mantra to their young players: “Do simple better.” That mantra won the Northsiders the NLDS in Game Two’s critical second inning. It kept them close in the first two games of this long-awaited NLCS. And it led to countless moments in which the team was able to take advantage of more careless opponents and […]
When Hendricks Made the Change
Kyle Hendricks was steaming. Sixty feet six inches away in the California sun, his catcher was shaking him off, calling for the changeup again and again in the face of Hendricks’ obvious frustration. Hendricks knew he couldn’t throw one, knew he didn’t have one. But the catcher was insistent, and the lanky right-hander finally rocked and […]