Why Are the Cubs So Very Mediocre?
Things were set up for the North Siders to improve in 2024. Instead, their season is already slipping away.
Before each MLB season, I like to scan through various indicators for teams that seem primed to be better— looking at factors such as the differential between their actual and Pythagorean record (i.e., the record predicted by run differential), second-half improvement, farm system quality, team age, offseason moves, changes to payroll, long-term franchise trajectory and more.
The Chicago Cubs didn’t check off all of those items going into 2024, but they looked promising in enough of them — especially the Pythagorean luck factor — that I called them a “no-brainer pick” to improve on their 83-win showing in 2023, particularly after the team re-signed the resurgent Cody Bellinger to a new contract right before Spring Training.
Oops.
Rather than building off of last year’s success, the North Siders went into Thursday’s action sitting last in the NL Central with a 37-44 record and just an 11 percent chance of making the playoffs. So much for all of those signs that were pointing up for this Cubs team.
The Cubs’ underperformance is made all the more puzzling because they have gotten some of their biggest unknowns from before the season to break in their favor.
For example, one of the huge question marks for Chicago was how 30-year-old Japanese rookie Shota Imanaga would help replace the innings of outgoing pitchers like Marcus Stroman. And pretty much the best-case scenario played out there: Imanaga has been among the NL’s most valuable pitchers — even after being lit up in his last start1 — while also ranking among the league leaders in both fewest walks per 9 innings and highest strikeout-to-walk ratio.
Along with Javier Assad and Jameson Taillon, both of whom are also exceeding expectations, the Cubs’ starting rotation hasn’t been a disaster at all. (This despite the fact that ace Justin Steele hasn’t been quite as dominant, while Kyle Hendricks has struggled badly.) They’ve also been in the middle of the pack injury-wise — far from the kind of terrible injury luck you might associate with a disappointing club — with neutral Pythagorean luck and an offseason that looks even better now by Net WAR/162 added minus subtracted than it was projected to be before the season.2
If I’d known all of that before the season, I would have been even more bullish on Chicago as a contender. So why, despite all of those factors going for them, are the Cubs still so mediocre — if not outright bad? Here are a few of the culprits:
Bellinger wasn’t the savior.
When Bellinger signed with Chicago on a 1-year contract for last season, it was a chance for the ex-MVP to make good on his former potential and bounce back from a couple of bad seasons in L.A. It worked, too — he had 4.3 WAR and was back to hitting for both power and average, even if his defense was no longer stellar and he forgot how to take a walk. But in Year 1 of his new 3 (-ish) year deal,3 Bellinger has slid back toward being Just Another Guy rather than a borderline All-Star. Given that the 28-year-old’s Statcast metrics were more middle-of-the-road than you might have thought even last year, this might just be who Bellinger is now.Neither was the rest of this lineup (nor Craig Counsell).
If Bellinger didn’t return to save the Cubs, nobody else has really stepped into that role, either. Shortstop Dansby Swanson, the second-highest-paid Cub behind Bellinger — in Year 2 of a 7-season, $177,000,000 contract — has seen his WAR/162 fall by at least 1.3 each of the past two years; his defense isn’t what it used to be, either, and his swing is all messed up (his launch angle has fallen from 15.7 percent to 8.8 percent since 2022).
Facing a similar decline have been each of the Cubs’ next three highest-paid hitters — Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki and Nico Hoerner — who are collectively down from 10.8 WAR in 2023 to 6.3 this year. (And the less said about Yan Gomes’ performance before he was DFA-ed earlier this month, the better.) New manager Craig Counsell, hired as the highest-paid manager in baseball history, has had few answers when it comes to coaxing better performances out of this team; meanwhile, his former squad, the rival Brewers, lead the Central with a 48-33 record.They can’t score anymore.
Because their lineup mainstays have almost uniformly disappointed, the Cubs have dipped from No. 6 in MLB in runs per game last year to 20th this year. They’ve gone from scoring 0.30 more RPG than league average (after adjusting for park effects) in 2023 to scoring 0.32 fewer RPG than average in 2024, which would be the 44th time in history that an AL/NL team went from three-tenths of a run per game better than average to three-tenths of a run per game worse in the span of a year.Their defense has fallen off as much as their offense.
What’s really shocking is that offense is arguably not even the biggest area of decline for Chicago in 2024. The Cubs’ defense, which had ranked sixth in MLB in runs saved4 in 2023, is down to 21st this year, with most of their primary players at each position providing less defensive value per 162 team games this year than last:
Multiple positions have seen double-digit declines in defensive runs per 162 from their primary starters, but none have fallen off more than third base under the watch of the talented, frustrating Christopher Morel — a tremendous power hitter who logged time at six different positions (2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, RF) last season but who is barely tracking for positive WAR (0.84 per 162) this year because he’s hitting .204 with some of the league’s worst 3B defense.The bullpen has gotten even worse.
Chicago’s bullpen was already a mixed bag last year, ranking 14th in WAR and 17th in Win Probability Added. Adbert Alzolay was dominant, however, while Julian Merryweather and most of their other main relief arms boasted better ERAs than average. This season, Alzolay and Merryweather have been mostly injured and ineffective — they’ve combined for just 22 innings and -0.4 WAR — as has Mark Leiter Jr., meaning the best options from 2023’s ‘pen have added practically nothing in 2024.
And former Phillies and Astros reliever Hector Neris, coming off an awesome 1.71-ERA season as a setup man in Houston, has been subpar at best (113 ERA-, 140 FIP-). As a result, the Cubs have fallen to 26th in relief WAR and 28th in relief WPA, with the second-most “meltdowns” — bad WPA games — in MLB, ahead of only the ghastly White Sox.
All of those negative qualities have ended up vastly outweighing the positives that should have turned this into another season of ascent in Chicago’s post-World Series rebuild era.
Can these Cubs turn it around? Well, their offense may not be as bad it seems; in addition to having the talent to be better, they rank just 19th in batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and have the Statcast profile of a team that should be producing more than they have been. But it’s harder to argue this defense ought to be better, when 2023’s No. 6 ranking looks like the outlier compared with No. 21 rankings in both 2022 and 2024.
The good news is that Chicago’s schedule — which ranks 14th-hardest to this point by average opponent Elo rating — gets easier from here; their future schedule ranks 23rd-hardest. But that’s all baked into their 3 percent division odds and 11 percent playoff odds already. Unfortunately for Cubs fans and those of us who predicted a successful season at Wrigley Field in 2024, it might already be too late to salvage the potential that looked so promising before the season.
Filed under: Baseball
He had a Game Score of negative-1 in that outing against the Mets, which I didn’t realize was possible.
Beyond just Imanaga, ex-Dodger 1B Michael Busch and rookie pitcher Ben Brown have been much better than expected in their first years in Chicago (even if Brown is currently on the IL).
Bellinger has the ability to opt out in each of the next two offseasons.
Averaging the defensive value metrics at FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference in the manner of JEFFBAGWELL WAR.
With the hype around Craig Counsell last year (and Joe Maddon for years before) does this say something deeper about the true value of MLB managers in modern baseball? A decade or so ago, you used to see people saying that managers were now just conduits for front office strategies. That fell away for a bit with Bruce Bochy and others, but is that thinking more correct than we might want to admit?
Thanks again...for me, that is a powerful insight that I've not heard before. Appreciate the follow-up.