Why the 2024 Chicago Cubs stink

This is for all the Chicago Cubs fans who can’t figure out why their team is below .500 in the NL Central.

The reason is simple: the Cubs don’t play the game of baseball very well.

That’s not to say the Cubs don’t have talented players…at least in theory. Cody Bellinger, Seiya Suzuki, Christopher Morel, Dansby Swanson, Ian Happ, Justin Steele, Shōta Imanaga and Javier Assad ought to comprise the core of a division challenger.

The problem is that core has not yet shown either the ability or, frankly, the desire to play the inside game of baseball – that is, the winning game – to a rudimentary level. The Cubs, in short, are bad at fundamentals.

The most fundamental of fundamentals – taking advantage of runners who are already in scoring position with fewer than two out – proves the point. The game’s best teams are particularly adept at moving those runners along and/or driving them home.

Yet that is probably what the Cubs do worst of all.

Between May 6 and June 8, the Cubs were 12-21, a sorry .364 winning percentage. Their collective performance in the basic art of taking advantage of easy scoring opportunities during that stretch goes a long way toward explaining why.

Over that 33-game stretch, Cubs hitters came to bat 124 times with a runner or runners in scoring position and fewer than two out. These were their collective numbers in those situations.

Batting average: .225

Strikeout rate: .242

Walk rate: .032

Unproductive out rate: .556

Productive out rate: .185

And strangely, the more optimal the situation for Chicago hitters, the worse they often flailed. Here are the same numbers for the 41 occasions during that stretch when Cub batters came up with a runner or runners in scoring position and nobody out:

Batting average: .150

Strikeout rate: .244

Walk rate: .024

Unproductive out rate: .537

Productive out rate: .293

The FanGraphs Run Expectancy chart is probably the most respected projector of how many runs a team ought to score in every base-out situation. In the situations where Cub hitters came to the plate with a runner or runners in scoring position and fewer than two out between May 6 and June 8, FanGraphs projects that the Cubs ought to have scored 90.5 runs. They actually scored just 72, making the Cubs offense 20 percentage points less efficient in those critical situations than the average MLB offense.

And it wasn’t one or two players who failed in those fundamentally vital situations; Chicago’s problems were top-to-bottom. Here are a few of the individual performances.

Cody Bellinger came up 16 times with runners in scoring position and fewer than two out. He delivered just three hits – all of them singles – and of his 13 outs, only three advanced a runner.

Ian Happ batted 15 times with runners in scoring position and fewer than two out. He produced just three singles, and of his12 outs, only three advanced a runner.

Christopher Morel had 17 opportunities to hit with runners in scoring position and less than two out. He did have five hits (two of them home runs), but his other 12 at bats included four strikeouts and two double plays.

Seiya Suzuki – who was injured for part of the stretch in question – batted 10 times in those situations. His two hits were offset by four strikeouts and only one runner advanced.

Dansby Swanson had nine such at bats, producing two hits, three strikeouts, a double play and only one runner successfully advanced.

The Cubs’ fundamental problem appears to be impatience. In only four of those 125 opportunistic plate appearances did a Cub hitter wait out a base on balls; Miguel Amaya did so three times and Mike Tauchman once.

But for most of the Cubs, the data suggests that when they got a pitcher in trouble, they pressed too hard for the kill shot, in the process increasing their own vulnerability. Only twice in those 124 opportunistic situations – Morel in the sixth inning May 29 and again in the sixth inning June 1 – did a Cub actually homer.

The team-wide numbers in advantageous situations – that .225 average, the 24 percent whiff rate, the .556 unproductive out rate and the run production that lags 20 points behind expected levels – strongly suggest that if Chicago doesn’t turn its offensive approach in a more fundamental level, this team will continue to disappoint all summer.

The White Sox are on pace to have the worst offense in a half century. (calltothepen.com)