Top Play (WPA): Bachelorette frontrunner Reigning Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant is five home runs away from his 2015 total of 26, following an impressive three-dinger night in Cincinnati. His first—a solo shot in the third—put the Cubs up 3-2 (+.119). His second, however, was the game’s lynchpin: with Jake Arrieta and Jason Heyward on […]
Tag: Kris Bryant
Game 66 Recap: Cubs 4 Pirates 3
It’s possible that, after tonight, the Pirates front office is planning a secession from the NL Central. They were swept by the Cardinals last weekend and are staring the possibility of another in division sweep in this one. They’ve been almost entirely helpless against the Cubs this year, and currently sit closer to last place […]
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 […]
Kris Bryant: The Unluckiest Cub
I realize that it’s rather déclassé to refer to Kris Bryant as unlucky. The man is a millionaire, a model, a professional baseball player, and—this is, perhaps, the most infuriating part—by all accounts an extraordinarily humble and well-adjusted young man. In other words, he falls into the category of persons whom you’d least like to run […]
The Surprisingly Rich History Between the Cubs and the Rockies
The Rockies and Cubs have a knack for playing odd, exciting, and/or marathon games against one another. That’s the premise here. Please don’t seek an analytical bent here; there is none. I suspect that phenomenon is mostly meaningless, the expected compound produced when one combines extreme, unusual run environments, persistent organizational failures in the area […]
Choosing and Developing Young Players: The Mental Side of the Game
In a piece for the main site last week, I mused about how a relatively new test used by the NFL might serve as a blueprint for psychological testing in baseball. Many teams already test prospects before drafting them, but each test is different, making the process as a whole a little bit all over the map. If Major […]
Harnessing the Power: Kris Bryant’s Next Level
In the summer of 1998, the baseball world was captivated by a steroid-assisted home run race, and six-year-old Kris Bryant was in his second season of serious training with his dad. A student at the Ted Williams school of hitting since age five, he was already swinging for the little league fences with the advice, “hit the ball […]
Ranking Russell over Bryant: A Year Later, Does It Hold Up?
It isn’t always easy to remember that just 10 short months ago Kris Bryant and Addison Russell had yet to debut in the major leagues. The joy and surreal nature of the 2015 season left indelible memories that we won’t soon forget, but it also served to firmly establish each of these young men as fixtures on […]
Avoiding a Sophomore Slump for Kris Bryant
It’s quietly one of the greater fears fans have: that a standout rookie will be unable to maintain performance in the years after their debut season, and will instead falter, and fade slowly off the radar. Or, worse yet, crash mightily into oblivion. The dreaded tales of the Sophomore Slump are both plentiful and terrifying. Those stories are generally built around the notion that, once players have […]
Can the 2016 Cubs Survive a Serious Injury to a Starter?
The Cubs had a very good 2015, and many experts are saying they’ve had an even better offseason so far (if that’s even possible). When people who know baseball agree that a 97-win team has “won” the offseason, you have to feel pretty good about the state of said team going forward. That is, until […]