Evaluating the Cubs likely lineup

In Projections by dmick8999 Comments

It's hard to believe that February is here, which means pitchers and catchers will be reporting to Mesa in a couple weeks. The position players won't be far behind. It's particularly hard to believe because the Cubs didn't have an active offseason. Not once have I actually looked forward to watching Cubs baseball. I have looked forward to watching baseball, but not baseball played by Chicago. I'll watch though. Maybe I'll even get excited for Cubs baseballa and the new and improved Cubs Way by the time spring training games begin.

The first thing we need to do is come up with a lineup. We will look at at the optimized lineup, but there's little chance any manager in baseball is going to use that lineup. The first thing we need to do is come up with a realistic lineup. We also need to consider off days and/or platoons. The Cubs starters at this point are Geovany Soto, Bryan LaHair, Darwin Barney, Ian Stewart, Starlin Castro, Alfonso Soriano, Marlon Byrd and David DeJesus.

Vs. Righties

  1. David DeJesus
  2. Darwin Barney (shouldn't be the number 2 hitter, but probably will be)
  3. Starlin Castro
  4. Bryan LaHair
  5. Geovany Soto
  6. Marlon Byrd
  7. Ian Stewart
  8. Alfonso Soriano

Vs Lefties

  1. Darwin Barney
  2. Starlin Castro
  3. Geovany Soto
  4. Alfonso Soriano
  5. Marlon Byrd
  6. Bryan LaHair
  7. Ian Stewart
  8. David DeJesus

That's good enough for me and probably not too unlike the lineups we'll see this year with a couple exceptions: off days and platoons. It's very possible we see David DeJesus platooned in RF. It's even more likely we'll see some type of lineup that gets Jeff Baker in there vs lefties. I wouldn't be too surprised to see Soriano lose playing time vs righties to Dave Sappelt, Tony Campana or eventually Brett Jackson (Byrd shifting to LF).

Calculating split projections is rather easy. The Book gave us the information necessary to do so and Berselius created a spreadsheet a couple years that accomplished it in a simple manner. CAIRO uses that took to provide splits projections. You can check out the Cubs splits projections here.

We'll eventually calculate BaseRuns in another post, but we'll start with simple wRC to get an estimate of runs scored.

Vs. R wOBA wRC   Vs. L wOBA wRC
David DeJesus 0.345 54   Darwin Barney 0.311 21
Darwin Barney 0.292 35   Starlin Castro 0.351 28
Starlin Castro 0.326 47   Geovany Soto 0.359 29
Bryan LaHair 0.343 53   Alfonso Soriano 0.341 26
Geovany Soto 0.329 48   Marlon Byrd 0.333 25
Marlon Byrd 0.318 44   Bryan LaHair 0.311 21
Ian Stewart 0.321 45   Ian Stewart 0.321 23
Alfonso Soriano 0.321 45   David DeJesus 0.306 20
Pitcher 0.175 -1   Pitcher 0.175 -1
Total   370   Total   191

I used 400 PA for each player vs righties and 200 vs lefties. PItchers were given a total of 200 PA. That's a total of 561 runs scored, but there are approximately 1000 plate appearances remaining. We can bump the 561 up to 650. We're not looking for precise numbers yet. We couldn't get those with wRC anyway. This is just a simple estimate.

It's in line with the latest CAIRO projected standings too.

Vs. Righties

DeJesus is the best hitter the Cubs have when a right-handed pitcher is on the mound. I'm hoping he leads off against them. I'm also hoping he gets a lot of days off vs lefties. Barney shouldn't even be playing vs righties and probably  not even vs lefties, but I've heard Theo, Hoyer and Sveum talk about him as if he's the starter. There's even the possibility that he may lead off, which would be scary. Welcome to 2003-2006.

Castro could hit anywhere from leadoff to 6th against righties and I expect he'll hit in a lot of different spots. The same is likely true of Soriano, Byrd, Stewart and Soto.

Vs. Lefties

Soto and Castro are the two best hitters the Cubs have vs lefties. If Castro begins to develop more power I'd like him hitting 2nd, but if his power remains what it's been I think he'd be a good leadoff candidate vs lefties. There's a big drop off after those two. Soriano is at .341 and Byrd is above average at .333, but the rest are below average.

In year's past the Cubs had a lineup that could destroy lefties, but that's not true this year. They're a little better vs lefties than righties, but not much better. The Cubs have added some left handed bats that the team lacked in previous years so their strength vs lefties is somewhat diminished. They have improved against righties though.

Tomorrow we'll look at BaseRuns and get a more accurate runs scored projection.

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Comments

  6. Berselius

    I’ll probably be proven wrong, but I’d like to think that the Thoyer Era would be the end of the likes of Darwin Barney and other banjo-hitting infielders batting second with this team (at least against RHP).

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  8. mb21

    @ Berselius:
    I’d like to think so too, but Sveum did say that Barney was a candidate to not just hit 2nd, but actually lead off.

    Lou mostly ran out solid lineups. Quade was OK. Baker was terrible. Hard to know with Sveum, but based on what he said it’s not looking good.

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  9. Berselius

    Jim Tressel ———> Akron

    [img]http://www.mytinyphone.com/uploads/users/jonnybravo/386922.gif[/img]

    Apparently it’s a non-athletic, vaguely defined administrative job.

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  10. Berselius

    mb21 wrote:

    @ Berselius:
    I’d like to think so too, but Sveum did say that Barney was a candidate to not just hit 2nd, but actually lead off.
    Lou mostly ran out solid lineups. Quade was OK. Baker was terrible. Hard to know with Sveum, but based on what he said it’s not looking good.

    I’m just going to pretend that Sveum left out “against lefties”, which makes it slightly better

    /fan denial

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  11. Xoomwaffle

    Berselius wrote:

    Jim Tressel ———> Akron

    Apparently it’s a non-athletic, vaguely defined administrative job.

    Don’t know if it means anything, but one of Bobby Bowden’s sons is the new coach at Akron.

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  13. Rice Cube

    Berselius wrote:

    mb21 wrote:

    @ Berselius:
    I’d like to think so too, but Sveum did say that Barney was a candidate to not just hit 2nd, but actually lead off.
    Lou mostly ran out solid lineups. Quade was OK. Baker was terrible. Hard to know with Sveum, but based on what he said it’s not looking good.

    I’m just going to pretend that Sveum left out “against lefties”, which makes it slightly better

    /fan denial

    Might be something he was coached to say to appease the Cubs fans who are just in love with Darwin Barney.

    There’s also the possibility that the front office mandates that Barney never hits above a certain spot in the lineup (a la Billy Beane, but maybe not as aggressive)

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  22. WaLi

    I’m one of the 5% using ie 7 (dying laughing) I blame work… although I do use IE at home as well. Does that make me a bad person?

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  23. Aisle424

    mb21 wrote:

    @ GBTS:
    It’s only $389.99 for a limited time.

    That is an insult to our best customers who paid $500 before we re-launched on WP.

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  26. Suburban kid

    I’m guessing the browsers I use (Lynx at home, Mosaic at work) are too recent to be showing up in the stats.

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  28. WaLi

    @ Suburban kid:
    1) I’m not really sure what the benefit would be. IE doesn’t really bother me. In what ways are the other browsers better?
    B) IT @ Work stops all installs unless they do it themselves.

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  30. WaLi

    @ mb21:
    The last time I used netscape was on an iMac at a library like 10+ years ago (dying laughing)

    [img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/IMac_Bondi_Blue.jpg/220px-IMac_Bondi_Blue.jpg[/img]

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  31. WaLi

    mb21 wrote:

    @ Xoomwaffle:
    No, there’s no way to accomplish that with WordPress.

    mb, it seems that if I leave my computer for some time (>60 minutes?) there will be new comments listed. Maybe there is a way to reduce this timer down to 10 minutes so there is somewhat of an auto-refresh?

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  33. josh

    @ WaLi:
    I like adblock for Firefox or Chrome. I hate ads.

    It seems like, in my experience, that IE is more vulnerable to adware and popups. Maybe I’m just biased because I’m just used to Firefox. I’ve been using Chrome at home lately.

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  41. WaLi

    @ GBTS:
    (dying laughing) this is true.

    [img]http://www.crazyabouttv.com/Images/dinosaurs.jpg[/img]

    I just don’t see the reason to switch. I use the internet to download .nzb files and come to this site and occasionally stream NHL Gamecenter (and soon to be MLB). That’s about it.

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  43. mb21

    WaLi wrote:

    mb21 wrote:
    @ Xoomwaffle:
    No, there’s no way to accomplish that with WordPress.
    mb, it seems that if I leave my computer for some time (>60 minutes?) there will be new comments listed. Maybe there is a way to reduce this timer down to 10 minutes so there is somewhat of an auto-refresh?

    I’ve noticed this too and just thought I must have refreshed the page at some point. I have no idea how I could find that. Anybody have any ideas?

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  44. mb21

    Eddie wrote:

    That’s a perfectly cromulent offense.

    Yeah, it’s about 4 runs per game, which is pretty damn bad. If offense is higher in 2012 the Cubs will probably score more than that, but relative to the rest of the league they’re still going to be near the bottom in runs scored.

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  47. Rice Cube

    mb21 wrote:

    WaLi wrote:

    mb21 wrote:
    @ Xoomwaffle:
    No, there’s no way to accomplish that with WordPress.
    mb, it seems that if I leave my computer for some time (>60 minutes?) there will be new comments listed. Maybe there is a way to reduce this timer down to 10 minutes so there is somewhat of an auto-refresh?

    I’ve noticed this too and just thought I must have refreshed the page at some point. I have no idea how I could find that. Anybody have any ideas?

    I just figured it had something to do with my own browser settings, but I know pages like Yahoo’s box scores have auto-refreshes built in so you’d probably have to go into a live game-center, find that line in its source code and see if that same line of code exists in your WordPress style sheet. It seems sporadic at best…I leave this page open as a tab while I do other things and sometimes don’t come back for two or three hours, sometimes it shows new comments from the last point I checked but other times it’s the same.

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  48. mb21

    @ Rice Cube:
    I’ve noticed that too. I usually have about 40 tabs open in my browser and sometimes I’ll notice this site has refreshed and other times it hasn’t. I just assumed I must have refreshed the page at some point.

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  49. WaLi

    @ mb21:
    I canceled cable which let me justify subscribing to Astraweb for $11/month. Not sure how much I like the service, I tend to have a lot (10%?) of failed downloads. I use nzbmatrix to search and Sabnzbd to download.

    I’m kind of new to the whole thing though so I’m not sure if I’m doing it right (dying laughing)

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  55. Rice Cube

    http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/02/02/the-dh-has-tainted-hitting-records-really/

    I liked this comment:

    What a great idea, let’s start adding asterisks whenever a player had an unfair advantage, like the DH. So for instance we’ll get the top 10 in career HRs to look like:

    1. Barry Bonds* (DH/Steroids)
    2. Hank Aaron (Amphetamines)
    3. Babe Ruth* (Segregation)
    4. Willie Mays* (Amphetamines)
    5. Ken Griffey* (DH/Steroids)
    6. Alex Rodriguez* (DH/Steroids)
    7. Sammy Sosa* (DH/Steroids)
    8. Jim Thome* (DH/Steroids)
    9. Frank Robinson* (Amphetamines)
    10. Mark McGwire* (DH/Steroids)

    Hmm, that’s not so fun anymore =

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  57. WaLi

    mb21 wrote:

    @ WaLi:
    10% failed downloads? I’ve had some corrupted files before, but nowhere near 10%.

    Yeah. I’ve been trying to download the LotR trilogy and I keep getting not enough repair blocks error or unable to join parts or something like that. The not enough repair blocks one is common. Maybe it’s not 10%, but it seems to happen often enough to make me want to switch from astraweb.

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  60. cubsfan4life

    @ mb21:

    True, So the best way is to keep two tabs open. One with Auto-Refresh on (Either with a plugin or using an external auto refresh page as I posted above) and the other without and use them for different purposes.

    You need to use AJAX to refresh the comments dynamically at regular intervals if you do not want to refresh the entire page every n seconds (there by accidentally losing any comments typed in the text area).

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  61. Mish

    [img]http://nbchardballtalk.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/espn-poll.jpg[/img]

    Cubs belong in the “other” category too (dying laughing)

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  63. cubsfan4life

    @ mb21:

    Yes, that’s basically what we need to do.

    1. Auto refresh the entire comments sub-section. This is simple to implement. However this is a bandwidth hog as you are fetching *all* the comments with every trip to the server.

    2. Store the time stamp for the last comment somewhere on the page and periodically ping the server to see if there are any more comments posted after that time stamp. If there are any new comments the server would return those comments and your AJAX JS would simply append the new comments to the list. This way there is not a huge traffic going on between the end-user and the server.

    If you want to implement (1) as indicated on the site, you need to first create a new page that just contains the comments. Eg:

    comments.html

    blah blah

    You need to include all those ‘script’ tags in that example to the ‘head’ section of your page/template.

    So ..

    $(document).ready(function() {
    $.ajaxSetup({ cache: false }); // This part addresses an IE bug. without it, IE will only load the first number and will never refresh
    setInterval(function() {
    $(‘#comments’).load(‘[replace this with path to your comments.html file]’);
    }, 3000); // the “3000” here refers to the time to refresh the div. it is in milliseconds.
    });

    ….

    ………..

    …………

    This is all you need to do

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  69. Berselius

    WaLi wrote:

    Rice Cube wrote:
    Very interesting graphic about WAR distribution:
    http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2012/2/2/2766665/the-distribution-of-position-player-war-by-team-2002-2011
    Cubs have a lot of averageness.
    Who the fuck did the Cubs have >7 WAR? I can’t find anyone per baseball reference –> Player Value Batting

    I would have guessed Sosa, but looks like no. Also, holy shit, Moises Alou had a 6.1 fWAR season in 2004

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  71. Berselius

    Adolfo had a 7.0 fWAR year in 2007, though a big part of that was his crazy UZR that year due to teams running on him.

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  90. cubsfan4life

    @ mb21:
    If I remember correctly the old site implemented option (2) from my post up above. I think it only fetched comments newer than the last fetched comment.

    I don’t know the specifics behind how this blog works. Do you pretty much have access to the server? Or do you only work at the page level (kind of like blogspot etc) on an Admin panel?

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  91. mb21

    @ cubsfan4life:
    It’s a WordPress blog. I believe I have access to the server. We have a VPS account. I’ve never done anything with the server specifically other than creating databases and using the cPanel. WordPress is just one thing that’s installed on the server. There’s also a survey, poll and chat database installed.

    Yeah, the Joomla site only fetched new comments when one clicked the refresh button.

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