The Cubs played well enough to win. The Diamondbacks played badly enough to let the Cubs win big. Top Play (WPA): Archie Bradley shut down the Cubs through five innings, holding them scoreless on just two hits and two walks. Bradley always has good stuff, and early in Friday’s game, he had good command of it. […]
Category: Articles
Series Preview: Cubs vs. Diamondbacks, June 3-5
Disappointing results? Terrible alternate uniforms? Executives who barge into opposing team’s broadcast booths? The Arizona Diamondbacks have it all (but mostly those three things)! And all of it will be on display starting Friday afternoon, as the Diamondbacks arrive on the North Side to open up a three game series. It will be their only trip to […]
Jorge Soler Might Have Worked Something Out
Jorge Soler ended his 2015 season, which was a mixed bag overall, on a pretty high note with an amazing October that helped carry the Cubs through the NLDS. But since? Things haven’t been so good. First, he became the odd man out in the four-man outfield. Then, when Kyle Schwarber went down with his […]
Game 52 Recap: Cubs 7 Dodgers 2
If you’d known that the Cubs would score 2, 0, and 2, runs in the first three games against the Dodgers, you’d figure they’d be lucky to be battling for a split on a perfect day at Wrigley. (And if you’d known Clayton Kershaw wasn’t going to pitch, well, you should be playing the lottery and not theorizing about baseball minutia.) And […]
Thinking Probabilistically About Sonny Gray, Stephen Piscotty, Kris Bryant, and Kyle Hendricks
In the last 10 days, I’ve run a pair of Twitter polls. In the first, which I ran on May 22, I asked followers who they would rather have, Kris Bryant or Stephen Piscotty. My follower sample will totally skew the results, but: Who would you rather have? — Matthew Trueblood (@MATrueblood) May 22, 2016 […]
Lackey Back To His Old Tricks In New Ways In 2016
Lately, there haven’t been many game days in which Cubs fans wake up and wonder which version of the starting pitcher they’re going to see that evening. The Cubs rotation in 2016 has not just been good, it’s been exceptionally reliable in many ways. But going into the season, the potential for that head-scratcher day […]
Game 51 Recap: Cubs 2 Dodgers 1
Top Play (WPA): Mike Bolsinger held the Cubs hitless the first time through the order, though in very Bolsinger-ian fashion, he did so in a less-than-threatening manner, hitting both Dexter Fowler and Javier Baez with pitches and allowing another walk to Jason Heyward. The Cubs were determined to improve the second time around, and following a Dexter Fowler walk […]
The Unheralded Professor Defies Perception Again and Again
Perception is a powerful thing. It’s a tool we all use every day, without really knowing it or understanding how it guides our path through life. It can help us—when it directs us to an answer we couldn’t quite consciously articulate without it—or it can harm us, when it forbids us from breaking free of our […]
That’s So Cub: The Biggest North Side Moments in this Month of May
Sometimes, you just get bored. Sometimes it happens when you’re forced, by dint of an iron-clad social convention and a pronounced lack of anything else to talk about, to ask about your co-workers’ Memorial Day plans for the umpteenth time, and sometimes it happens when you suddenly find that you’ve written the same piece for your Baseball Site one […]
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 […]