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Kris Bryant’s Playoff Retrospective: Power And Baserunning

It’s a testament to how entertaining and excellent Javy Baez and Jon Lester were during the 2016 NLDS and NLCS that they not only were able to overcome the initial sluggish postseason starts by Anthony Rizzo and Addison Russell, but were also able to nearly completely overshadow Kris Bryant’s solid postseason performance up to that […]

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Tales of a Baserunning Ballclub: Cubs Running Wild

Late in Sunday’s 13-inning affair, overshadowed by Javy Baez’s walk-off fireworks, the Nationals’ defense succeeded in throwing out Jason Heyward at home plate. Michael Taylor corralled the ball perfectly on one hop in right-center field and fired a throw to the cutoff man; the cutoff man, Danny Espinosa, flung the ball to catcher Wilson Ramos, […]

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Weird in 2015, Cubs Expected to Stay That Way in 2016

Last year, at another site, I noted that the Cubs were, by one measure, extremely weird. In that article, I looked at eight team measures—strikeout rate, walk rate, home run rate (for pitchers and for batters), baserunning ability, and defensive ability—which are roughly united in that they all can be defining characteristics of a given team. […]