In the comments awhile back we were talking about the Cubs possibly going after Justin Upton. GW wrote about Towers postseason press conference in which he identified 3 areas the Dbacks will try to get better at. GW said this: The article also confirms they are trying to make room for Adam Eaton in their starting outfield, leaving Kubel, Gerardo …
Cubs prospect all-stars
Milb.com is doing a series that lists the best prospect at each position. The Cubs were up yesterday. It's a pretty good list, but this was a head-scratcher. Utility — Anthony Rizzo, Iowa (70 games), Chicago (87 games): Despite playing only 70 games for the Triple-A Cubs, Rizzo led the organization with 23 homers and drove in 62 runs while …
Muskat: Top prospect Baez develops in Arizona Fall League
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — At 19, Javier Baez is the second-youngest player in the Arizona Fall League, and he is making a huge jump, competing against players who have been in Double-A or Triple-A. "He's a guy who, mentally, we felt was ready for the Fall League, ready to be pushed like that, ready to be challenged like that," said Jason …
The Worst 20 Cubs Performances in 2012
I already looked at the 20 best, as measured by WPA,so it only seems appropriate to look at the 20 worst. I'll be using WPA again, but it's by no means the only metric you could use to create a similar list. I'll be doing so without any commentary this time and will be breaking it down into pitchers and …
2012 Cubs Catching Defense
One of the things I noticed this season with Welington Castillo was that about any time he had an opportunity to make an error, he did. I'm not being serious of course, but it was pretty bad. Only 6 catchers made more errors than Castillo and he only caught 413.2 innings. It also seemed he allowed a lot of passed …
WAR conversion
Bryan Crosnick calculated the exact way in which we'd put each version of WAR (fWAR, rWAR and WARP) on the same scale. These all use different replacement levels so thanks to his work we can now compare these players using the same replacement level. 2012 fWAR to rWAR Conversion: -0.00094 fWAR/PA 2012 WARP to rWAR Conversion: 0.00046 WARP/PA
The Top 20 Cubs performances in a 2012 game
I was curious which players had the best games in 2012 for this shitty team we follow. I used Win Probability Added (WPA) from Baseball Reference to compile the list. There's no reason to write more of an introduction than that so here they are. 20. Travis Wood, .395 WPA Despite Wood's up and down season, he ended up having …
Another new forum
When the site switched to a responsive theme one of the unintended consequences was that the forum we'd been using most of 2012 was not going to work without significant modifications. While moving to an all new forum was not ideal, it was by far the easiest and it made the most sense. However, this site relies on ad revenue …
Obstructed View Projections Contest Results
Prior to the start of the season we set up an over/under projections contest. It was rather extensive so fewer people than we'd hoped entered the contest. Plus, there aren't all that many people who are dying to have an Obstructed View t-shirt. There just aren't. Really, trust us. It was a long survey. We used 11 position players and …
Astros @ Cubs Game Thread
Game 162 is here and it features the worst two teams in baseball for the third consecutive day. So far the worst team has beaten the only slightly less worse team twice in a row. The Cubs are trying to avoid the embarrassing sweep at the hands of the mighty Astros. To do so, the Cubs are sending out this …