Author: dmick89

Random facts

Jose Bautista has more home runs than all these Cubs players combined: Geovany Soto, Koyie Hill, Jeff Baker, Darwin Barney, Blake DeWitt, Starlin Castro, Aramis Ramirez, Tony Campana, Reed Jonson, Kosuke Fukudome, Tyler Colvin, and Marlon Byrd. Bautista has 18 and those players have combined for 15.

The following players have combined for one more walk than Jose Bautista has: Darwin Barney, Starlin Castr, Alfonso Soriano, Tyler Colvin, Marlon Byrd, Koyie Hill, Jeff Baker, Reed Johnson, Blake DeWitt, and all the pitchers on the Cubs.

Ryan Braun has as many stolen bases as the Cubs (10).

Jose Reyes has nearly twice as many steals as the Cubs. Reyes, Michael Bourn, Jacoby Ellsbury, Drew Stubbs, Elvis Andrus, Ian Desmond, Coco Crisp, Matt Kemp, Erick Aybar, Sam Fuld, Ichiro Suzuki, Jose Tabata, Carlos Gomez, and Will Venebale, along with Ryan Braun, have as many or more stolen bases than the Cubs do.

9 players have more intentional walks than the entire Cubs team does. Another 7 have the same number.

Only the Giants have swung at as many pitches outside the zone as the Cubs have.

The Dodgers have swung at 47.2% of the pitches they’ve seen. That’s the second highest percentage. The Cubs have swung at 48.2%. The Yankees and Indians have swung at only 42.8%.

No team has hit fewer balls in the air than the Cubs.

That is all.

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Garza ——–> MRI on elbow

The only starting pitcher the Cubs have had this year that’s been any good is now going to miss his scheduled start on Sunday and visit a doctor. He’ll have an MRI and knowing the Cubs luck will probably be out for the next 19 years.

BOSTON – Believe it or not, the Cubs’ starting pitching went from worst to even worse than that today with the news that Matt Garza’s been scratched from Sunday’s start because of “tightness’’ in his pitching elbow.

Garza, a 15-game winner for Tampa Bay a year ago, is scheduled to be examined by team doctor Stephen Gryzlo on Monday, and likely will also have an MRI then.

“It sounds like it’s not something serious,’’ manager Mike Quade said. “It sounds like he makes his next start. And we have the off day [Monday] to work with. We can give him an extra day if we need. So it’s literally day-to-day.’’

The bottom line is the Cubs have no way of knowing how serious this will become or how long it will sideline one of the top strikeout pitchers in the majors, at least until Monday.

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Cubs Baserunning

Baseball Prospectus has their sortable statistics available for 2011 now. The first thing I checked out was the Cubs baserunning numbers since they’ve sucked at baserunning for several years. So far they rank 21st in baseball in EqBRR (Equivalent Baserunning Runs) and are -1.0. They did rank 14th last year, but 28th the year before that.

Darwin Barney has been the best on the team at 1.9 EqBRR. Starlin Castro is next at 1.3 and Geovany Soto is suprisingly 3rd at 1.0. Tony Campana has only been on base a few times and he’s been worth 0.6 EqBRR already.

At the bottom is Aramis Ramirez who has cost the Cubs -3.9 runs already. Fukudome is second worst at -1.7 and Reed Johnson is 3rd worst at -0.9.

Adding these in to the rWAR figures, we now see that Darwin Barney and Marlon Byrd have each been worth 0.8 rWAR. That only trails Kosuke Fukudome’s 1.1 rWAR (baserunning included). Geovany Soto is the only other position player with more than .5 rWAR (baserunning adjusted). Soto has .6. Aramis Ramirez’s .4 rWAR drops to 0 if we add in baserunning.

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Cashner to see Dr. Yocum about shoulder

I haven’t found an official report, but journalists have said this is so on twitter and twitter never lies.

Search Cashner on Twitter

Has anybody ever seen Dr. Yocum and gotten good news?

UPDATE: Bruce Levine has it up on ESPN.

Chicago Cubs right-handed pitcher Andrew Cashner will fly to Los Angeles on Monday to consult Dr. Lewis Yocum about his right shoulder.

An MRI on Tuesday revealed a recurrence of the rotator cuff strain that put him on the disabled list on April 8.

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2011 MLB Draft: Links

The 2011 MLB Draft begins on June 6th and ends on June 8th. The Cubs pick 9th this year. There are all kinds of names floating around as potential Cubs picks, but if we’ve learned anything with Wilken drafting it’s that he’ll take someone no one has ever heard of. I don’t even think Wilken has heard of some of them. Still, the Cubs have the potential to take a very good player in what is probably the deepest draft in history. There’s no Strasburg or Harper, but it’s a exceptionally deep.

Keith Law’s latest mock draft has the Cubs selecting Bubba Starling.

My MLB Draft agrees tha the Cubs will take Starling.

Starling is one of the best players in the draft. He also has a committment to Nebraska as a QB. Here’s an extensive scouting report on Starling and many videos as well.

Diamondscape Scouting has the Cubs taking Jed Bradley.

Jim Callis’s mock draft on Baseball America also has the Cubs selecting Bubba Starling.

9. CUBS: Starling has the highest ceiling in the draft, but he also comes with some risk and a high price tag (he has a football scholarship to play quarterback at Nebraska), so he might fall a little further than expected. Chicago isn’t afraid of risk or price tag, not if it means getting a five-tool center fielder. The Cubs have been checking out the same pitchers as everyone else, may like Meyer more than most clubs and also would consider Lindor.

I’ll post more in the days to come. If you have something to add about the draft, please do so on Unobstructed Views.

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An interview worth reading

Those who like stats are familiar with CHONE, which was the best projection system around. It was created by Sean Smith who is better known as Rally (rallymonkey5). Halos Heaven did an interview with him that I enjoyed reading so I figured I’d link to it here. My favorite is quoted below.

What happens when you take a player who isn’t that good at playing baseball but has a reputation as a great chemistry guy, and try to turn around a bad team with him? Worst case is you lose a lot of games and the chemistry still sucks. The hopelessness of the situation frustrates the player, who might have been a good chemistry guy as a role player on a better team, and now he’s part of the problem.

H/T to Tango

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It’s never too early to look ahead to next year

A few years ago I wouldn’t have considered writing something about looking ahead. The Cubs had the pieces in place to contend for as long as they were willing to supplement the roster when it was needed. Following the 2009 season the Cubs refused to do that and what they basically agreed to do at that time was a much longer rebuild than necessary. First of all, a rebuild wasn’t necessary at that time as long as they added to the roster. When they chose not to, the Cubs chose to rebuild in a different way. They decided to let contracts expire while also maintaining an inferior farm system. This results in the Cubs having to continue to put large amounts of money into their MLB roster if they want to contend.

This team needed a lot of things to go right for them to contend. I think this is something for once that all the fans agreed on. They lacked the talent that the teams above them had and trying to jump over 3 superior teams is much harder than getting lucky and jumping one team. The Cubs have just dug themselves an early hole by playing worse than expected.

The odds of coming back at this point are pretty slim. In fact, the Cubs have a 1.7% chance of winning the division at this point and a 0.4% chance of winning the Wild Card. So maybe it’s time to look ahead. (Update: after last night’s win, the odds are up to 2.7%)

The Cubs only have 6 guaranteed contracts on the books after this season, but those 6 plus other guaranteed payments will cost them $73.6 million. Alfonso Soriano and Carlos Zambrano each make $18 million. Zambrano will be in the final year of his contract next year so don’t be too surprised to see the Cubs actively shop him this winter. Ryan Demspter returns for $14 million, Carlos Marmol gets $7 million, Marlon Byrd $6.5, Sean Marshall $3.1 and the Cubs owe Carlos Pena $5 million of his $10 million 2011 contract next season. The Cubs will also have a $2 million buyout on Aramis Ramirez.

Matt Garza, Koyie Hill, Blake DeWitt and Geovany Soto will all be arbitration eligible. Randy Wells may be eligible, as well. Garza will be 3rd year eligible while Soto is eligible for the 2nd time. Koyie Hill will almost certainly be released, but I’ve been saying that for seemingly 25 years now. DeWitt and Wells would be first time eligible.

We can probably estimate that Garza will get about $8-10 million in arbitration and Soto will probably get a raise to about $5 million. DeWitt’s salary would be under $1 million and Wells could see a bump to about $3 million. That’s a total of roughly $91 million committed to 10 players.

This makes it important that the Cubs continue to get production from league minimum players like Starlin Castro, Darwin Barney and at least one of Tyler Colvin and Brett Jackson. As well as finding someone to fill out the rotation.

If the Cubs filled out their roster with league minimum guys that would be an additionaly $6.2 million. Add in the 15 guys on the 40-man roster, but not on the active roster and that’s another $1 million. The minimum payroll for the 2012 Cubs at the moment is $98-100 million. The Cubs payroll in 2011 dropped from the mid 140s to $134 million. There’s been no sign that payroll will increase and despite saying it wouldn’t decrease, it has. Let’s say the Cubs have $30-35 million to spend.

That’s a pretty good chunk of change and can help fill some holes, which the Cubs will have plenty of. Before we know how much money the Cubs need to spend to be a contender next season, we need to figure out what their talent level is, which takes some guess work since we don’t know how the rest of this season will play out.

The average player will get about .5 WAR worse per full season after the age of 27 or 28 while the player under that age will increase by .5 WAR. It changes based on skill set, but we’re going to use that beecause we understand projecting talent level a year out comes with even greater unreliability than projecting them right now. We’re not looking for perfection. We’re looking for a ballpark figure in wins to work with. Using +/- .5 WAR is good enough for what we’re doing. We’ll use the updated ZiPS projections, which are available on Fangraphs.

Doing this, we see that Geovany Soto is expected to be the best position player at 2.7 WAR. I have him projected to get 500 plate appearances next season and that’s probably too many. In 2008 Soto came to the plate just over 560 times, but in 2009 and 2010 he’s failed to come up even 400 times. He’s found himself on the DL the last couple years and is currently rehabbing in Arizona. Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols are available this offseason, but if the Cubs don’t get one of them, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Soto moved to 1st base in an effort to keep him healthy.

Matt Garza projects to be worth 3.1 WAR with Zambrnao next at 2.8 and Marmol at 2.7. For those interested, Castro is projected to be worth 2.3 WAR next season. The Cubs currently under contract or team control have a projection of about 70.2 wins for 2012. They have holes at 1st base and 3rd base. I put Tyler Colvin in RF, but we can consider the Cubs have at least one outfield hole as well. Two to three if they consider Colvin and Soriano to be next to useless.

Soto is currently the starting catcher and I’ve used Welington Castillo as the back-up. I have Darwin Barney at 2nd with Blake DeWitt getting some playing time there as well. Castro is at SS of course and the outfield is Soriano, Byrd and Colvin. There’s also a hole in the rotation after the top four of Garza, Zambrano, Dempster and Wells.

The Cubs have about $30-35 million to spend if they keep payroll the same and need at least 5 wins to consider themselves contenders. They do have some young players making league minimum that can help out significantly. In a few days we’ll take a look at that and maybe some ways the Cubs can spend money to get the team above 85 wins. Signing Albert Pujols would obviously be a big help, but if he gets $25 million per year or more, it doesn’t leave the Cubs with a whole lot of money to spend elsewhere. If Pujols only makes the Cubs an 80-win team, do you really want to spend that kind of money on him? 2012 obviously wouldn’t be the only year he’d be extremely valuable, but as much as I’d like to see Pujols in a Cubs uniform, I’m just not sure it’s the best way the team can spend money. If the Cubs can expect some quality production from guys making league minimum it might be. We’ll try to figure that out in a few days.

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Cubs Minor League Progress

mb21 recently had a blog post about fangraphs Cubs top 10 prospects. As the season has progressed, I’ve become increasingly interested in the farm and less with the ML club. I wanted to give updates and some subjective analysis to those who don’t know much about the farm, but are interested enough to read an overview of their seasons so far. I’ll do my own “top 10” with some notes about players I don’t consider part of the top 10.

Note: after the top 2 prospects, every single prospect and their respective position in the top 10 is very debatable.

1. Brett Jackson (OF) AA Tennessee Smokies – mb did a pretty good write up on him. He has been walking to the tune of a 17.3% walk rate, stealing bases efficiently (85% success rate), playing solid defense, and hitting for some power (.223 ISO). Basically doing it all before he jammed his pinky finger while getting picked off of 2B recently. Make no doubt about it, unless he completely falls off, he will be in CF for Cubs no later than July 31st.

2. Trey McNutt (RHP) AA Tennessee Smokies – When not battling blisters, McNutt has been just as effective as last year except at a higher level. So far, he has a 2.29 ERA and 2.44 FIP. He’s not striking out as many batters this year, but that may have to do with the blisters. He’s yet to give up a HR in 19+ innings. I assume he’ll receive some kind of Josh Beckett treatment to stop the blisters eventually. Hopefully it won’t take away too many starts this year.

3. Austin Kirk (LHP) A Peoria Chiefs – Kirk was a 3rd round pick in the 2009 draft out of high school. This year he broke camp with Peoria. Since then, he’s been lights out. FIP doesn’t like him (3.06) but his ERA is a mere 1.80 thanks to a 0.86 WHIP and .207 BABIP. He has a mid-90s fastball with above average secondary pitches. He is supposedly a great character kid. He’ll be in Daytona sometime in June.

UPDATE (5/18): Kirk pitched 5.1 innings, 1 hit, 0 R, 0 BB, 3 Ks

4. Ryan Flaherty (IF/OF) AA Tennessee Smokies – See the trend at AA? If you get a chance, I would go see them play. Flaherty is hitting with all kinds of power this year. His slash: .299/.364/.575. 9 doubles, 1 triple, and 8 HRs gives him a .273 ISO. That will likely regress as the season goes on.  However, it’s not out of the realm of possibility he maintains a .230+ ISO. He has Derosa-like versatility as he’s played 6 positions already for Tennessee. He’s cooled a bit since May, but if he can even have a .800 OPS at the ML-level he would be extremely valuable next year.

5. Robert Whitenack (RHP) AA Tennessee Smokies – Whitenack started at A+ Daytona and just owned hitters. He had 11 K 0 BB game at Daytona. At Daytona he had a laughable 25:1 K to BB ratio. He was promoted at the end of April. He’s been solid at AA so far. His walks are up and Ks are down likely because of the increase in talent. The biggest reason I have him here is because his sinker has apparently become plus-plus. He’s 6’5” and his sinker has heavy sink at 89-93 mph. He ditched his knuckle-curve that was supposedly his best pitch coming out of high school (graded 80 on 80-20 scale). It’s always nice to have groundball pitchers in the minors. He’s a little old, but he’s made large strides and AZ Phil called he would perform like this in ST.

UPDATE (5/18): Whitenack threw 7 innings, 3 hits, 2 BB, 0 R, 5 K.

6. Jae-Hoon Ha (OF) AA Tennessee Smokies – Ha just got promoted to AA where he’s playing CF while Brett Jackson in on the DL. He’ll remain at AA when Jackson gets back. At Daytona, Ha hit for a ton of power and good average. His patience needs work to say the least (heard that before). He walked 7 times in 160 plate appearances at Daytona (4.4% BB%). His slash of .311/.344/.523 keeps his OPS at good levels. Like many in the Cubs system, if he doesn’t hit for a high average he’s not good. He plays all the OF spots. His power potential is uncertain as I’ve heard anywhere from 15-30+ HRs.

7. Matt Szczur (CF) A Peoria Chiefs – Szczur was a two sport athlete at Villanova (football and baseball). He led the Villanova football team to a DI-AA title in 2009. At Peoria this year, he’s hit .320/.398/.369. He’s got great patience and steals bases very efficiently (90% success). I have a hard time believing his ISO will stay sub-.050. He’ll never be a power hitter, but I don’t think his bat will be like Theriot or Juan Pierre either. Oh yeah, he’s pretty good in CF.

8. Josh Vitters (3B) AA Tennessee Smokies – So, basically Vitters has sucked so far. But I’m not ready to give up on him although he’s giving plenty of reasons. He’s still not walking. He’s not hitting for enough power to offset that. Slash: .236/.281/.409. It’s looking more and more that he’s not going to be an everyday player at 3B. His defense has never been good (although reports have him at average this year compared to bad in years past). His bat was supposed to make up for that. His Ks are way down (7.1%). And his BABIP is a low .221. He’s either extremely unlucky or making weak contact. He’ll be better than he is currently, but the future doesn’t look bright. Then consider the fact that I’ve never heard praises about his work ethic. He seems to be trying to get by on talent alone.

9. Chris Carpenter (RHP) AAA Iowa Cubs – Carpenter has been in the pen fulltime since the end of the I-Cubs season. As a starter his fastball was mid-90s. In the pen, he’s been clocked at 100+. However, he’s had his trouble with walks which led to 2 bad outings in relief so far (boosted his ERA up to 6.41). I normally don’t like to put relief pitchers in the top 10 unless they are future closers/set-up men. His stuff makes me believe he can be a set-up/closer. He’s also very close to being in the majors.

10. D.J. LeMahieu (2B/3B) AA Tennessee Smokies – D.J. has split time almost evenly between 2B and 3B. He has seen a jump in his OPS (.882) because of his increase in AVG (.354)  and ISO (.143 – thanks to 12 doubles). BA called him the best hitting prospect in the Cubs organization (quite debatable IMO). D.J. attended “Camp Colvin” so they may explain the increased ISO. He only hit 2 HRs last year and has 2 this year. There are scouts who think his lack of quickness limits him to 3B and not 2B. He will have to keep up his current ISO for his bat to play there (especially if Barney and Castro are still here when he comes up).

Other notables:

Hayden Simpson (RHP) A Peoria Chiefs – As mb explained, his velocity is down likely due to his 20 lb weight loss from mono. If his fastball doesn’t get back up to 92-93 he’s not going to have much of a ceiling. He does have 4 average to above average pitches, but with none that stand out he is looking to prove that Wilken got a 3rd round talent in the 1st.

Reggie Golden (COF) EXST – Golden has the most raw power in the system. He came out as a high schooler last year, but got hurt in rookie ball. I expected BIG things from him this year. Unfortunately he showed up to spring training fat and out of shape, hence why he’s at extended spring training. He’ll likely be in Boise when their season starts.

Jay Jackson (RHP) AAA Iowa Cubs – Jay Jackson has 2 strong outings in AAA after recovering from an injury he received in spring training. But since then, he’s pitched very poorly. 26 ER in 16.2 IP. It’d be nice for him to bounce back so Doug Davis and Casey Coleman don’t pitch anymore. Jay spent a whole season at AAA last year so he should be ready, but he clearly has to figure something out.

Rafael Dolis (RHP) AA Tennesee Smokies – Dolis started the season as a starter. The Cubs scrapped that idea after 4 starts. Kind of disappointing to me because he wasn’t terrible. He’s now in relief where he’s been for awhile.

Evan Crawford (CF) A+ Daytona – Before the season, he looked to have a ceiling of 5th OF to be used as a defensive replacement and pinch runner. So far this year he’s hit everything in sight. He is a speedster and steals bases successfully 85% of the time. He was received in the Mike Fontenot trade. He’s only walking 5.5% of the time so with his speed you’d like to see that increase. He actually has an acceptable ISO for his career because of his ability to stretch out 2B and 3B. With the Giants last year he slugged 12 2B and 12 3B. His current slash: .348/.419/.470. Most likely he’s a defensive replacement and pinch runner.

Kyler Burke (LHP) EXST – You may know Burke as the former 1st round pick of the Padres. He has a great 2009, but fell off the map last year. In the OF he had the best arm in the system. He was both a pitcher and OF in high school and some scouts had him higher as pitcher. After Burke’s flop last year (.607 OPS in 567 PA) the Cubs have convinced him to try pitching. Keep an eye on him when Boise’s season starts. He’s still only 22, throws very hard, and is skilled with his secondary pitches according to AZ Phil.

The Cubs minor league system has gotten off to a fast start. If this keeps up we’re probably top 12-15 in the MLB. Now just imagine if the Cubs still had HJ Lee, Brandon Guyer, and Chris Archer still. We’d probably be top 10.

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Are the Cubs out of it?

The Cubs sit 6 games behind the Reds after last night’s loss. I’ll even admit that I didn’t think the Cubs would fall this far behind this quickly. With the Cubs easy schedule early on I expected them to actually look like a contender and then fall back when the schedule became tougher. Instead of that, the Cubs fell behind early playing less than average teams and have continued to fall since.

We knew going in that this wasn’t an especially good team. The projections had the Cubs winning between 77 and 80 games. It was the worst the Cubs had been entering the season since at least 2002. Based on attendance, that information was something the fans already knew about. You didn’t need to see a projection to recognize the lack of talent on this roster. Each team from 2003 through 2010 was projected to win more games than they were this year. I think all but the 2003 team was expected to win at least 5 more games than this one. The 2006 team was projected to win about 85 games by PECOTA. That just goes to show how much error there is in a projection, but even that team had a shot entering the season.

It’s even possible the 2002 team was projected to win more, but I don’t know and I’m not going to run the numbers right now. It is something I may do later on because I had a feeling back in December and January that this was the worst team the Cubs sent out on Opening Day in over a decade. I’m pretty sure the 2000 team was horrible, but the 2001 team contended and I can easily see following year’s team being projected to win more than this group.

The question right now isn’t whether or not this is the worst they’ve been in a decade, but whether or not they are out of it. Let me start by saying that no team is out of at this point. There are 120 or more games left to be played so there’s plenty of time for any team to come back at this point. It’s obviously harder for some teams, but even for the really bad teams there’s so much that is random in this game that even a bad team can play really well. That’s just baseball.

If we were to assume that each team plays up to their projected records the rest of the way, the Cubs have a lot of ground to make up. They were projected to finish 5 to 6 games behind the Reds, but are already 6 out. Here is how the NL Central would play out if all the teams played to their projected winning percentage.

Central W L PCT Proj Pct. Proj-W Tot-W GB
Reds 24 17 .585 .528 63.9 87.9 —
Cardinals 23 19 .548 .514 61.7 84.7 3.2
Brewers 20 21 .488 .513 62.1 82.1 5.8
Cubs 17 22 .436 .493 60.6 77.6 10.3
Pirates 18 23 .439 .433 52.4 70.4 17.4
Astros 15 26 .366 .407 49.2 64.2 23.6

The Brewers have underperformed so far, which is obviously good for the Cubs since they were projected to finish ahead of them. However, the Cardinals have played better than expected and the Reds have played significantly better than expected. This now leaves the Cubs more than 10 games behind the Reds at the end of the season because they’re already so far behind.

If the Cubs were to catch the Reds at 88 wins, the Cubs would have to play .585 baseball the rest of the season. This means they’d have to go 72-51 the rest of the way to get to 89 wins. .585 is 94.8 wins per 162 game schedule. The Cubs would have to be nearly as good as they were in 2008 in order to catch the Reds if the Reds play up to expectations.

Let’s say the Reds fall down quite a bit and the Cubs just have to get to 85 wins at which point they’d pass the Cardinals. That means the Cubs would have to play .553 ball the rest of the way, which is the equivalent of an 89 to 90 win club over 162 games.

The Cubs aren’t out of it yet, but it’s highly unlikely they’ll find themselves in contention. They’ve dug themselves a pretty big hole while the top team in the division has played better than expected. That’s the opposite of what the Cubs needed to happen this season.

Continue reading “Are the Cubs out of it?”