Position: Manager 2015 Stats: 97-65; Best Onesie Party Ever Some people don’t like to give managers credit for anything a baseball team accomplishes during the season. It’s the players, the argument goes, that step onto the field and determine whether a team wins or loses on any given day. The manager simply decides who plays where […]
Tag: 2015 Offseason
A 10¢ Bullpen for a $20 Job; and It Might Be Enough
Over the last few days, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Cubs’ bullpen. It’s not something I do regularly, I assure you. It’s just that it seems to me—and maybe, in a few minutes, it’ll seem to you as well—as if the bullpen’s current construction is something that feels hard to think through […]
On Eve of 2016, Weakness Is a Relative Term for Cubs
A few days after the 2015 season ended—while I could still smell beer and peanuts on my jacket—Sahadev Sharma and I collaborated on a series of articles for this site. You can find them here and here. In those articles, we laid out the weaknesses of the 2015 club as we saw them, and identified […]
Cubs Player Profile: Pedro Strop
Position: Relief Pitcher 2015 Stats: 68 IP, 2.67 DRA, 2.91 ERA, 30.0 K%, 10.7 BB%, 1.6 WARP Year In Review: Nobody seems to take it too seriously, but the Cubs actually had an excellent bullpen in 2015—their 3.38 ‘pen ERA was fourth in the National League, behind the Cardinals, Pirates, and Giants—and Strop was a major contributor to […]
Cubs Player Profile: Carl Edwards, Jr.
Position: Relief Pitcher 2015 Stats: 4 2/3 IP, 6.24 DRA, 3.86 ERA 21.1 K%, 15.8 BB% Year in Review: When it comes to Carl Edwards, Jr. and the 2015 season that he just had, stats are sort of beside the point. Oh, he threw 4 2/3 innings of regular-season ball? That’s interesting. I’ll leave it to you to draw whatever you […]
Creating Depth and Versatility, Cubs Build on Strong Present
The question of how to improve a youthful, 97-win, NLCS-reaching baseball team has been the driving force behind our work here at BP Wrigleyville this offseason, and we’ve generally tackled it in terms of identifiable weaknesses of the 2015 Cubs: contact hitting, outfield defense, and starting pitching beyond their two aces. But the 2015 Cubs […]
Cubs Player Profile: Neil Ramirez
Position: RP, Disabled List 2015 Stats: 14 IP, 3.21 ERA, 4.09 DRA, 25 K%, 10 BB% Have you heard the phrase “under-promise and over-deliver?” It comes to mind what I think of Neil Ramirez and his career so far with the Cubs. He came over as the PTBNL in the Matt Garza trade, which usually […]
Red Rivalry Renewed as Cubs, Cardinals Battle On
Growing into my baseball fandom, I learned early about the joy of rivalries. The most notable, of course, is the epitome of sports rivalries: that of the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Maybe that’s a bit of a bold statement that stems from naiveté; baseball is, after all, the only sport which I hang onto […]
Cubs Player Profile: Kyle Schwarber
Kyle Schwarber Position: That’s a good question. Probably outfield. 2015 Stats: 69 G, 273 PA, .246/.355/.487, .307 TAv, 1.9 WARP Year in Review: Kyle Schwarber impressed the Cubs’ brass from the moment they first met him, in February of 2014. That month, Schwarber’s Indiana Hoosiers traveled to Arizona for a series of springtime games against Washington, Utah, and Oregon […]
Cubs Player Profile: Kyle Hendricks
2015 Stats 32 G, 180.0 IP, 3.95 ERA, 3.87 DRA, 22.6 K%, 5.8 BB% Year in Review “If broadcasters are right about the keys to pitching success—get ahead of hitters, change speeds, avoid walks—Hendricks is destined to be a booth favorite. The Dartmouth product doesn’t have great stuff but he commands it well, varying his […]