Chicago Cubs: Home is where the wins are
By Bill Felber
The Chicago Cubs are near a record pace for home-road win differential. A look at the most imbalanced home-road teams in the expansion era
The Chicago Cubs defeated Milwaukee 4-1 at Wrigley Field Saturday. Nothing new there; the Cubs nearly always win when they play at the Friendly Confines. Their Saturday victory ran their home record this season to 38-18, a .679 winning percentage.
When the Cubs play away from Wrigley, it is a vastly different story. In their road games, the Cubs are just 21-33 this season, .389 winning percentage. That includes a recent 3-6 road trip to San Francisco, Milwaukee and St. Louis.
At home, the Cubs haven’t lost a series since late May. On the road, they haven’t won a series since mid-May. If they continue at their present home and road paces, the Cubs will finish the 2019 season with 25 more victories at Wrigley than on the road, the second largest home-road win differential since the creation of the 162-game schedule in the early 1960s.
In good times and bad, no Cubs team has had such a decided home-road disparity within the lifetimes of most of the team’s fans. To find the last time a Cubs team finished with as many as a 20-game home-road differential you have to go all the way back to 1953 – Ernie Banks’ rookie season. That year, on their way to a 65-89 overall record, the Cubs went 43-34 at home but just 22-55 on the road, a 21-game difference.
The differential is potentially historic for baseball generally, not merely for the Cubs. Since the 1960s, only 26 teams have compiled a home-road differential of as many as 20 games. Here’s an era-by-era look at those teams.