Why the Chicago Cubs Won’t Win 100 Games in 2017

The history of teams with 100 or more wins over the last 40 years suggests that the Chicago Cubs will not improve upon their 103 wins last season.

The Chicago Cubs were undeniably the best team in baseball last year. They won 103 games, eight more than any other team, and there’s reason to think they should have won more. Using the Bill James Pythagorean expectation formula, which uses a team’s runs scored and runs allowed to determine what their expected record would be, the Cubs were a 110-win team.

Given their success last year, is it reasonable to believe they’ll regress to the low-to-mid 90s in wins, as is expected from Baseball Prospectus PECOTA and the FanGraphs Depth Charts? The history of 100-win teams says that it is.

From 1975 to 2015, there were 40 teams that won 100 or more games in a season. This list includes four teams that won 100 or more games in the season before a strike year (1980 and 1993). For these four teams, I took their strike-year record and pro-rated it to 162 games. As a group, these 40 teams averaged 103 wins in their 100-plus win season and 95 wins in the following season. The results in the season after they won 100 or more games is shown below:

34 had a worse record—they went from an average of 103 wins to an average of 92 wins.
4 teams had the same record—these teams had an average of 101 wins both years.
2 teams had a better record—they went from an average of 101.5 wins to an average of 104.5 wins.

There it is, in the flesh—regression to the mean: 85 percent of teams who won 100 or more games got worse, 10 percent had the same record and 5 percent improved.

The breakdown for the number of wins in the year after the 100-plus win season looks like this:

11 teams had 100 or more wins (27.5 percent)
17 teams had between 90 and 99 wins (42.5 percent)
10 teams had between 81 and 89 wins (25.0 percent)
2 teams had fewer than 81 wins (5.0 percent)

The good news is that 70 percent of these teams won 90 or more games the year after they won 100-plus and 27.5 percent won 100 or more games again. Only two teams finished under .500. One was the 1985 St. Louis Cardinals, who went from 101 wins to 79 wins. The other was the 1993 San Francisco Giants. They won 103 games in 1993, then went 55-60 in the strike-shortened 1994 season, which gets pro-rated to 77 wins in a 162-game season.

It’s important to remember that everything has to come together for a team to win 100 games. Their players have to be healthy and productive on both offense and defense. They need to be consistent and avoid any long losing streaks. And many times, they’ll get unexpected good production from surprising sources.

The list of teams with 100-plus win seasons over the last 40 years is interesting. Four franchises have more than half of these 100-plus win seasons. The New York Yankees have eight 100-win seasons, the Atlanta Braves have six such seasons, and the St. Louis Cardinals and Oakland Athletics each have four 100-plus win seasons.

Of the Yankees’ eight 100-win teams, two were able to win 100 or more games the following season. The Yankees won 100 games in back-to-back seasons in 1977 and ’78. Their 100^th win in 1978 was the infamous Bucky “expletive” Dent one-game playoff against the Boston Red Sox.

The Yankees also had a great run of seasons in the early part of this millennium. From 2002 to 2004, they won 103, 101 and 101 games, then followed it up with a 95-win season.

The late-90s Atlanta Braves also had multiple 100-win seasons. From 1997 to 2003, the Braves won 101, 106, 103, 95, 88, 101, 101 and 96 games. Amazingly, they only made it to the World Series once during this stretch and they were swept in that series (1999, to the Yankees).

History suggests the Cubs won’t improve upon their 103 wins last year. Teams that do very well one season generally regress back to the pack, just as teams that do very poorly are more likely to get better. Let’s take a look at the Cubs and see how likely they are to improve upon their 103-win season.

The Starting Lineup

C Willson Contreras (25 years old)

1B Anthony Rizzo (27 years old)

2B Ben Zobrist (36 years old)

3B Kris Bryant (25 years old)

SS Addison Russell (23 years old)

LF Kyle Schwarber (24 years old)

CF Jon Jay (32 years old)

RF Jason Heyward (27 years old)

INF Javier Baez (24 years old)

OF Albert Almora (23 years old)

The main thing the Cubs have going for them is the youth of their starting lineup. Most of their players are either in their peak years or pre-peak. The Cubs will have two lineup spots with players past their prime—Ben Zobrist and Jon Jay. Jay is likely to be a platoon player and will split time with the 23-year-old Albert Almora. Also, Zobrist will get a full season of at-bats while playing multiple positions, which will allow the 24-year-old Javier Baez to get significant playing time.

All of these young position players should help the Cubs keep the offense firing on all cylinders. Regression to the mean works both ways, so while they may get worse seasons from guys like Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo, they should also get a better season at the plate from Jason Heyward, who was awful last year.

The Starting Rotation

SP Jon Lester (33 years old)

SP Jake Arrieta (31 years old)

SP Kyle Hendricks (27 years old)

SP John Lackey (38 years old)

SP Mike Montgomery (27 years old)

SP Brett Anderson (29 years old)

On the other hand, the pitching staff is not young. Three key pitchers in the rotation are over 30, including the 38-year-old John Lackey. Kyle Hendricks and Mike Montgomery are in their prime years and Brett Anderson is only 29, but he’s coming off a season in which he pitched just 11 1/3 innings because of injuries. In his eight years in the big leagues, he has just two seasons with 175 or more innings.

The starting rotation is where the Cubs could have trouble. Kyle Hendricks is unlikely to have a 2.13 ERA again and there were only three starting pitchers in the major leagues last year who were 38 years old or older, as Lackey will be. In fact, over the last five years there have been just 14 pitcher seasons in which a pitcher 38 or older pitched 150 or more innings. Knuckleballer R.A. Dickey accounted for four of those seasons and the ageless Bartolo Colon had five of them.

The Bullpen

RP Wade Davis (31 years old)

RP Koji Uehara (42 years old)

RP Hector Rondon (29 years old)

RP Carl Edwards, Jr. (25 years old)

RP Pedro Strop (32 years old)

RP Justin Grimm (28 years old)

The back-end of the Cubs bullpen will rely on 31-year-old Wade Davis, who is coming off a season in which he pitched just 43 1/3 innings, and 42-year-old Koji Uehara. Uehara is not likely to be a workhorse in the setup role. He’s pitched 40 and 47 innings the last two years.

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The Cubs are a good team, there’s no doubt about that. They have enough talent on the roster to win 100 or more games again this year, but history says the odds are against them.

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