In hindsight, it’s hard to believe Kyle Schwarber was on the bench for any portion of the 2015 postseason. As it is, all he did once in the lineup was bash his way to a 1.308 OPS, and casually become the Cubs’ all-time postseason home run leader by blasting five over the nine playoff games the Cubs […]
Tag: Kyle Schwarber
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 […]
Schwarber and Soler’s Contact Issues are Different, the Same
Well. The Cubs have had quite a busy few days, when it comes to the outfield, and we now know that Kyle Schwarber, Jason Heyward, Jorge Soler, and Dexter Fowler are going to spend the bulk of the time roaming the outfield grass at Wrigley Field. But we’re also left with a lot of questions […]
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. […]
After Fowler’s Return, Making Time for Jorge Soler
Perhaps my inclination to root for the underdog, the outsider, is a large part of why I’m a Cubs fan in the first place. It probably also explains why, after working through the stages of processing Thursday’s Cubs roster moves (disbelief, confusion, surprise, joy), one of the first things I thought about was what this […]
Kyle Schwarber: Baserunner Extraordinaire
Do you ever have those surreal moments when you find yourself somewhere strange, and the series of events it took to get you to that place seem unfathomable? My day job involves extensive international travel that takes me to some of the farthest regions of the earth, so this happens to me regularly: Where am I? How […]
Miggy the Mentor
We are good. That’s the first thing that many Cubs fans learned about Miguel Montero, who was traded from the Arizona Diamondbacks to the Cubs in December of 2014. Montero, now somewhat famously, rushed to Twitter that day to let everyone know how excited he was to be with the young squad of blossoming hitters. […]
Kyle Schwarber, Catcher
There’s a certain joy in baseball players that make the game look easy, but for me, nothing tops a player who is obviously putting all of their available effort into performing at their highest possible level on the field. Kyle Schwarber is the archetypal example of that type, and like many of those players, he […]
The Still-Exciting BP 101: Exploiting Loopholes… Again?
Pierce Johnson is, by all accounts, a pretty good pitcher. Last year, Baseball Prospectus ranked him as the 83rd best prospect in baseball. He was also the only pitcher the Cubs placed on that list (they had a total of seven players make the list in 2015). And while that certainly means something (and I’m […]
Life at the Margins in the Cubs’ Outfield
The Cubs, it appears, are done with their major offseason moves. That’s not a bad thing—lord knows they’ve done enough already—but it does mean that the present period, running roughly between the end of Cubs Convention and the beginning of Spring Training, lacks a certain something when it comes to news. Namely, news. But that doesn’t mean that […]