The Chicago Cubs are continuing to dominate their opponents. Could they be marching towards a record set by an all-time great team that has stood for 77 years?
Since long before Opening Day of the 2016 Major League Baseball season, the Chicago Cubs were pegged as a team that could do special things, and as the season got underway, they did not disappoint. A team that won 97 games and made a trip to the National League Championship Series the year before came crashing out of the gates, and talk of curses being broken became much more than just wishful thinking.
Entering play on Thursday, the Cubs are 44-20 in 2016, and hold a commanding nine-game lead in the National League’s Central Division. Their four-game lead for top overall spot in the NL is all the more impressive for the way the victories are coming.
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Through 64 games, Chicago has scored 344 runs, or roughly 5.4 per night, which is unsurprising when you dive into their offensive stats. As a team, the Cubs rank sixth in the NL in batting average, first in on-base percentage, fifth in slugging percentage, and third in OPS.
This despite the struggles of Jason Heyward, Anthony Rizzo, and Addison Russell, the season-long loss of Kyle Schwarber, and numerous other injuries that have kept the bus between the team’s AAA affiliate in Des Moines and Wrigley Field in seemingly constant motion.
Ben Zobrist and Dexter Fowler, however, are having career years, and Kris Bryant has picked up right where he left off during his 2015 NL Rookie of the Year Season. Zobrist is slashing .319/.427/.495 and leading the team in OPS, OPS+, and bWAR, while Fowler has added a .292/.397/.489 slash line of his own, and Bryant leads the team with 15 home runs.
But a team doesn’t flirt with run differential history on the strength of its bats alone, and as dominant as the Cubs have been offensively, their pitching has been even better. As a staff, Chicago’s mound corps leads the league with a 2.64 earned run average, a half a run better than their closest competition, and has yielded the fewest hits, runs, earned runs, and home runs.
The five-man starting rotation of Jake Arrieta, Jon Lester, John Lackey, Kyle Hendricks, and Jason Hamel has not missed a start thus far in 2016, and each has been just as stingy as the next. The quintet has a collective 2.33 ERA.
What this all amounts to is a team that has allowed just 185 runs, making for an eye-popping run differential of 159, or 2.5 runs per game. The all-time record was set in 1939 by the New York Yankees, who scored 979 runs and allowed 568, a differential of 411 for the season, or 2.7 runs per game, en route to a World Series sweep of the Cincinnati Reds.
Chicago has a long summer ahead of it, with 98 games still to be played, and this being baseball, anything can happen. But few teams have ever been in a position to do what the Cubs have the potential to do this season, not just in terms of the franchise’s first world championship since 1908, but in its utter domination of its opponents.
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The ‘39 Yankees had Joe DiMaggio, Bill Dickey, Joe Gordon, Red Ruffing, and Lefty Gomez, Hall of Famers all. Should the Cubs continue at their breakneck pace this season, records could fall and they could find themselves mentioned in the same breath as one of baseball’s all-time greatest teams.