A few years ago, I decided to prank my wife for her birthday. She’d been complaining about how bad her camera was (a previous gift from yours truly—and most definitely not a prank) and she wanted something that took better pictures. Which meant—hint, hint—a new camera. So her birthday rolled around and she opens her card […]
Category: Articles
Would Hitting Daniel Murphy Have Helped the Cubs?
Daniel Murphy has been one of the biggest stories of the postseason, and all he had to do is beat the odds and crank out seven home runs in his first nine playoff games. That sounds like some stat that you might hear about the likes of Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, or David Ortiz. Daniel Murphy? […]
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 […]
When the Game Gives
As the season that read like a storybook wound down one well-executed Metropolitan pitch at a time, measures of an emotion I never expected to experience bubbled to the surface: guilt. Guilt borne because the deciding game of the most important series in 12 years had lulled me to sleep as the eighth inning began. As […]
Cubs Player Profile: Jon Lester
2015 Stats 205.0 IP, 3.34 ERA, 3.89 DRA, 25.0% K%, 5.7 BB% Year in Review On the morning of May 6th, the Chicago Cubs were not reeling, but they were in a funk. They were losers of four consecutive games, including the first two of a four-game set in St. Louis. It was just the first […]
Game “All of Them” Recap: Cubs 101 Opponents 70
We’re now almost a week past the sad end to the Cubs’ 2015 season, and it’s now a bit easier to look back on the year with a clear head. And what a season it was. I thought it might be fun to roll out one final Wrigleyville “game” recap, using the format we have all year, but now celebrating the season […]
The Beer List: Our Favorite Pieces from 2015
This is The Beer List. It’s an opportunity, once every two weeks or so, for the staff here at BP Wrigleyville to get together (virtually, of course) and respond briefly to one small, usually quite open-ended, question. Despite the strenuous efforts of certain members of the writing crew to make it so, it has nothing […]
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, […]
Cubs Enter Critical Offseason with Greatness on the Horizon
The Cubs are entering the most important offseason of the Theo Epstein era, perhaps—for this organization—the most important offseason of all time. While last winter was no doubt crucial—and the Cubs’ brass passed that test with flying colors in their acquisition of Jon Lester, Miguel Montero, and Dexter Fowler (among others)—this time around the front office will […]
Rubbing Mud: The Rizzo Post-Mortem ($)
This piece, by BP Wrigleyville’s Matt Trueblood, originally appeared on the Baseball Prospectus main site, where it was available exclusively to BP subscribers. We’ve posted a sneak preview here. If you had to put your finger on a single reason why the Cubs were swept by the Mets in the NLCS this week (and more […]