Chicago Cubs: Will Dexter Fowler’s Return Propel Team Back to Winning Ways?
By Jason Burke
The Chicago Cubs got a breath of good news on Monday, as center fielder Dexter Fowler is set to return from his hamstring injury by the end of the week after a handful of rehab games with Triple-A Iowa.
The Chicago Cubs have been playing shorthanded all season long, missing one of their biggest young thumpers in the middle of the lineup in Kyle Schwarber. They came out of the gates rolling, leading many to anoint the Cubs as the eventual World Series Champions. Chicago has had Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo leading the offensive charge for the Northsiders all season, and even with them in the lineup, the Cubs have been struggling mightily of late. Since about June 19 in fact–the day that Fowler missed the first of his 26 games to date on the disabled list.
In those 26 games , the Cubs are 10-16 (.384), which is still a better winning percentage than the Braves, Rays, Reds and Twins have on the season, but not quite up to the .696 standard that the team had set for itself with Fowler in the lineup. With Fowler out of the lineup, the team has been dethroned atop the baseball landscape by the San Francisco Giants, who have been facing numerous injuries of their own around the diamond.
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Fowler has a WAR of 2.7 this season (per FanGraphs), ranking him 10th among all outfielders, despite playing in just 64 games this season. If you extrapolate his 2.7 WAR over the course of 90 games, which is the average number of games played among those ahead of him, he would have a 3.79 WAR, slotting him 4th in baseball, ahead of Mookie Betts, and behind just Mike Trout, Kris Bryant and Ian Desmond. All of this production from a player that it took until the end of February to find a home for on the free agent market.
So why have the Cubs struggled without Fowler? The team’s depth chart has been all out of whack for starters. With Fowler gone from center, everyone has to change positions to compensate, and somewhere along the line you’re going to feel the ramifications, whether that’s from having Tommy La Stella at third while Kris Bryant mans left field, or losing Ben Zobrist at second to fill one of the corner outfield spots. This could lead to the Cubs pitchers, who have been struggling during this stretch, to pitch differently than they had been when they were more successful at the beginning of the season.
Fowler on the disabled list left the Cubs without their center fielder and their leadoff hitter. In the leadoff spot, Fowler has the second-best batting average on the team at .288, behind Addison Russell who went 2-for-3. In 57 at-bats while playing center, Jason Heyward holds a slight edge in batting average (.333 to .291) and on-base percentage (.406 to .397), but Albert Almora Jr. has been getting a lot more playing time, and is batting .192 this month with an OPS of .538, which is so bad that the FanGraphs Sabermetrics library stops at .570, which is deemed “awful.” In terms of wRC+, there is a huge drop-off from Fowler’s 139 to Almora’s 85.
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While the loss of Dexter Fowler may not look like a big one to the outside world, he could arguably be the engine that keeps the Cubs World Series train a runnin’. The big question now will be whether or not he will produce at that same level after a hamstring injury, and whether his .360 BABIP is a sign of impending regression towards the mean in the second half.