Does Cody Bellinger’s Return Save the Cubs’ 2024 Potential?
Does Cody Bellinger’s Return Save the Cubs’ 2024 Potential?
Chicago had been one of the most underrated teams of 2023, but will that matter for 2024?
With ESPN reporting on Sunday that the Chicago Cubs had re-signed centerfielder Cody Bellinger to a three-year, $80 million contract, one of 2024’s most intriguing MLB teams just got even more fascinating.
After a few years of uncharacteristic struggles for the former MVP, Bellinger bounced back to basically be the Cubs’ co-best player in 2023. (By Wins Above Replacement, he was tied with SP Justin Steele for third on the team, trailing 2B Nico Hoerner and SS Dansby Swanson, but all of those guys were sandwiched between 4.3 and 4.8 WAR.) He hit .307 with 26 home runs and a 133 OPS+, played solid defense, and was honored with the NL’s Comeback Player of the Year award when the season was over.
Bellinger’s performance helped Chicago play like one of the NL Central’s best teams on paper for most of the year. The Cubs easily had the division’s best run differential (+96), which by the Pythagorean formula would have predicted a 90-72 record for the team with neutral luck. But a subpar record in close games left them in the thick of the playoff race with a couple of weeks left to play. And despite FanGraphs giving them 92% odds to make the postseason in early September, Chicago went 5-12 over its final 17 games to miss the final wild card spot by a single game.
(We can’t really blame Bellinger for this — while his September OPS was lower than his season mark as a whole, and was particularly down during the final collapse, he still hit 23% better than the league average in the season’s final month.)
Despite falling apart at the end, the Cubs’ overall season numbers were relatively strong. A team’s Pythagorean Record is a good indicator of how it will do in the future, and teams who underperform in Pythagorean luck — only two teams were unluckier than the Cubs in 2023 — tend to improve the following season. Which made it surprising that, when I looked at early 2024 MLB projections a couple of weeks ago, Chicago was only forecasted to win 82.6 games in 2024, second-best in the NL Central and 14th-best in baseball. (For comparison, their run differential was 10th-best a year ago.)
Some of that might have come down to the offseason, particularly since I ran those numbers when Bellinger was still floating out in the free-agent pool. Now that he is back, the only impact player (1.0+ WAR) from the 2023 Cubs who isn’t returning in 2024 is SP Marcus Stroman (2.1 WAR) — a loss that might be offset by the addition of Japanese lefty Shota Imanaga, who had a 2.66 ERA in 24 games for the Yokohama Bay Stars last season.
The point is, Chicago’s offseason exodus wasn’t on the same order of, say, the Padres (who lost their best hitter, best starting pitcher, best reliever and more).
But the Cubs are still looking like they might not be projected for more than 83-84 wins in 2024. Granting that some of these may not have Bellinger’s return baked in yet, here is the updated composite forecast for 2024, according to a variety of predictors and oddsmakers:
Maybe that just makes the Cubs a good “over” pick if you’re betting those before the season. And maybe it also means the Cubs will be just good enough to win the Central this time around — they are the slim favorites in this latest update, which says a lot about the division as well.
But I think they’re going to be a really interesting team to watch. Among the good teams that were unlucky last year and figure to be contenders again in 2024 — again, sorry Padres — the Cubs seem like a no-brainer pick to improve on last year’s 83-79 record, especially now that one of their best players is returning. But if that logic is sound, it hasn’t quite made its way into the projection systems… yet.
Filed under: Baseball