Cubhouse Insider: Season Preview of the Chicago Cubs

2016: 103-58 (W-L), National League Central Division Champions, World Series Champions

Key Losses: Dexter Fowler, Cuban Missile, Jason Hammel, Old Man Ross, Billy Goat

Key Pick Ups: Jon Jay, Wade Davis, WS Commemorative Patches

At the beginning of last season I picked the Cubs to win the 2016 World Series. At the beginning of this season I will pick the Chicago Cubs to win the 2017 World Series. The following preview of the North Siders may happily or regretfully show why.

So the Cubs finally won last year. We know. The hangovers may finally be wearing off and the largest collection of humanity in recent memory may have finally cleared Grant Park. Yabo.

I don’t know what your experience was like encountering the likes of all hell breaking loose with the die-hards and the fair-weathers showing a soft-side for the North Side but mine involved crying roommates waling Go Cubs Go, W flag capes, and a couple Goose Islands dumped/spilled in my direction. Like I said, happily or regretfully.

Pitch:

So set the scene in Wrigleyville. What do we have to work with? For starters, their starters. The starting rotation appears to be a relatively stable staple of Lester, Hendricks, Arrieta, and Lackey. This is a rotation full of some scary good pitchers who have each uniquely hit their own stride at later dates in their careers. I’m not kidding about either. No pitcher in their top 6 is younger than 27 yielding an average age of 30.67 yrs. Some think this could be a problem, as the case has been made that some of the names mentioned above had career numbers last season, aside from Arrieta who walked more and found bats more often. But, the little bears also have a great defense to help out the men on the mound and would need multiple wheels to fall off for this to really become a major issue.

The Cubs managed to have not only the league’s best ERA with Kyle Hendricks but also the second best in Jon Lester at 2.13 and 2.44 respectively. Arrieta posted an ERA above 3, but also managed 18 wins, just 1 behind Lester and please do not forget 2015 when he put up 236 K’s and a 1.77 ERA. That’s nasty. John Lackey is also still good. He still sucks as a person because of the whole cheating on your wife while she has cancer thing, but they don’t pay him for his character.

The interesting part of the pitching rotation comes with the last spot. Maddon seemed convinced earlier in spring training that he could tell two pitchers to try not to suck at the same time in the fifth spot of his rotation, which would be Mike Montgomery and guy-who-looks-like-John-C-Reilly-with-too-much-pork-rind-dust-in-his-beard, Brett Anderson. Anderson only pitched 11 innings last year and Montgomery hasn’t pitched 200 total innings over his MLB career yet, so maybe at some point Maddon will continue to surprise us with unconventional baseball smarts and a hybrid 5 spot will work. Or, maybe he will go with the predicted opening day rotation and use Brett Anderson. Anderson is cause for concern as he has pitched in the league for 8 seasons and made it above 100 innings only thrice, but winning 4 of every 5 games ain’t bad.

When it comes to the bullpen, they can buy-sell-trade their way out of any impending issues. They’re not a small market team. More on this later.

Hit:

Quite possibly one of the biggest reasons for excitement along the ivy isn’t that Andre Dawson is still hiding in there, but that their starting 8 will primarily be so young and so talented and so coming back just like they were. In comparison to the starting pitchers, the field will consist of players averaging 27.3 years of age and 0.125 MVP awards. That is if you count Ben Zobrist for his age and not his WS MVP. Personally, I think Kyle Schwarber should have won the postseason award purely for his ballsy escapade in game 2 of the World Series, which occurred promptly after a huge RBI knock and resulted in the Cookie Schwarbster yelling orders about phallic objects. That was fun.

Aside from such a specific instance, however, Schwarber might have been the game’s greatest secret World Series weapon in history after not playing but two games all season, walking onto the biggest stage of his life, and slashing .412/.500/.471 in 17 AB with gusto. That guy is 235 pounds of talented fun and if all goes as planned in 2017, the Cubs will have him for the full season. The proball Hoosier and Middletown, OH boy will likely be slotted back to LF where he will join the likes of a top prospect in Almora and the shell of what used to be Jason Heyward. Jason Heyward wasn’t worth squat last year (.230/.306/.325) and the Cubs still won everything. If Heyward can be worth diddly squat this year (assuming diddly is a positive attribute) the Cubs could improve without addition. After reworking his swing in the off-season, Maddon predicted his right fielder would have a "pretty good" year. I’m not convinced, but I don’t need to be. The Cubs have one too many position players with Addison Hustle, Javier Baez, and Ben Zobrist all in the mix. The corners are most assuredly locked down by what now seem to be perennial MVP and sexiest man alive candidates in Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo. If somewhere, somehow, something goes screwy and those two can’t immediately fix it with 71 combined HR’s and 211 RBI’s like last season, the Cubs should still have the depth to handle it without having to trade or call up.

Midseason:

There are plenty of more reasons why you could like the Cubs to win again in 2017. Many of which are obviously repeats of last season. One big factor which could once again play in is at the end of July when the Cubs will be buyers. If they need a piece to the puzzle anywhere along the line they are still stacked with prospects and have nowhere to put them at the major league level. With as much as the Reds have recently traded for young talent, the Cubs are ranked only one spot behind them in some farm system rankings (only slightly depressing). Much like how Theo Epstein Rent-a-Playered Aroldis Chapman, they can make any middling to suffering team in the league drool and beg with tantalizing offers come July. Ian Happ would not likely be one of the players traded from the Cubs’ farm system after a great spring showing. He will start the season in the minors and possibly save the Cubs some money like how they treated the ascension of Kris Bryant.

This is also the reason they let Fowler walk free to STL and the pre-pubescent tradition of the Cardinals and Cubs taking each other’s ex-girlfriends to prom has continued as the Cubs quickly snagged the likes of Jon Jay.

The Cubs and the Sox (no, the good sox) both enter the year at 9/2 odds of adding a ring so don’t be surprised if the Cubbies already have a commanding lead on the Central come mid-summer.

Perspective:

The following are some statistics and summarizations to give us all some perspective about the Cubs going into the 2017 season.

No one has repeated as champs since 2000.

The last time the Cubs bought a player from the Royals, it worked. (Zobrist) (This year: Wade Davis from Jorge Soler trade)

The World Series parade in Chicago was the seventh largest gathering of humans in history.

108 years.

The Cubs are bidding to become the first National League team to win back-to-back titles since the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds.

From 2010-2014 the Reds went 60-28 vs the Cubs, which was their best winning percentage against any team in the league (.682). In 2015 and 2016 that record was 10-28 (.263) the worst against anyone in the division.

Lester thinks the youngins on the team are "cocky" and "naïve enough" to repeat.

66.7% of college-aged Cardinals fans in St. Louis would still be willing to hook up with a Cubs fan while 85.7% of Cubs fans of the same crowd would be willing to hook up with a Cardinals fan. What causes these differences? You decide. (Note: answers differed when the topic changed to hockey)

Last Part, Historical Comparison:

The Cubs run differential last year was +270, which was the best in the league … by a lot. The next closest was Boston at +176. The last team to repeat as champions was the New York Yankees in 1998, 1999, and 2000. In ’98, the Yankees posted a run differential of +309, even better than the historically impressive 2016 Cubs. In ’99 the number shrunk to +169 and in ’00 again to +57.

The question is: how could the Yankees keep winning the World Series even when they stopped stone-cold dominating teams and had an average run differential?

Is it because they developed a beautiful, Steinbrennered, finessed, well-oiled, clean-cut culture of winning in Yankee baseball? … No. That’s stupid. That is what I thought initially, but upon further examination, the pitching starts to stand out.

Yankees pitching 1998: #1 in ERA, CG, SHO, H, R, ER, HR, BB.

Yankees pitching 1999: #1 in SV, HR

#2 in ERA, IP, H, R, ER

#3 in SO, SHO

Yankees pitching 2000: #6 in ERA, SHO, BB

#5 in ER, HR, CG

#4 in SO, R

#3 in H

Cubs pitching in 2016: #1 in ERA, SHO, H, R, ER

#2 in CG, IP

#3 SO

The Yankees simply stopped blowing teams out as much and won tighter games, but the underlying cause of their continuous success was their pitching, which the Cubs of today seem to be emulating.

My last scary stat of the day: Those Yankees had statistically overachieving records in each of those championship seasons. The Cubs in 2016 … (gulp) … underachieved by 4 wins.

Hope you enjoyed. Play ball.