The Cubs turned to their bullpen early last night.
As in, before the game.
When scheduled starter Drew Smyly was placed on the bereavement list (our continued condolences to him and his, by the way—don’t mean to keep shouting, “Someone close to Drew Smyly died!” but it keeps being relevant), the Cubs were left starting pitcher-less, turning to Scott Effross to begin the game and Keegan Thompson to then handle the next few innings. The weather was nasty—rainy, windy, damp from all the precipitation earlier in the day—but the game went nine whole innings.
What if it hadn’t, though? And what if Smyly had not suffered loss earlier in the day? What if the Cubs had seen the forecast, said, “This game might not go nine,” and altered their pitching approach, planning for a shorter game in which arms like Effross and Thompson could throw the first five innings like they were the last five? Better yet, what if they hadn’t had to seek out this forecast? What if they had someone on-hand to warn them of this days in advance?
This is an odd hypothetical, and its specificity belies the marginality of benefit this whole idea might provide. But at the same time, there’s an advantage to be had, right? Possibly a cost-effective one, especially when considering how postseason weather compares to the bulk of regular season weather in this particular sport.
The impact of weather in baseball is not limited to precipitation shortening or delaying or postponing games. Wind is—especially at Wrigley Field—famously a factor in how the ball travels, as are heat and humidity. There’s long been speculation that domes affect the flight of knuckleballs. Baseball fields have always been oriented to account for the setting sun (this is, after a few steps, where we get the term “southpaw”). Baseball is not played in a vacuum, and while nothing is, baseball and football take place in deviously not-static environments. Deviously not-static environments that matter. Ask a Notre Dame football fan about Brian Kelly’s biggest single-game failures and weather (Michigan, 2019; NC State, 2016) will quickly come up. (Ask about his biggest failures overall and weather will come up even more quickly, but that gets us talking about death again and goodness, why are we having to acknowledge death so frequently in these notes today?) Could professional strategic guidance help coaches, managers, and front offices gain an advantage?
Absolutely, the answer is yes. In terms of cost-effectiveness, it’s more questionable. Meteorological guidance concerning how to order a rotation at the beginning of the season, in the postseason, or after the All-Star break to maximize the value of groundball, strikeout, and fly ball pitchers could easily gain a team a win or two. Meteorological guidance in the offseason about the likelihood of hurricane conditions on different days at different stadiums in the ACC could alter preparation enough to theoretically be the difference between a bowl berth and an empty postseason for a college football program. Meteorological guidance about the consistency of playoff snow in the NFL could help shape a conference championship-winning gameplan. There are more. Baseball grip. Kicking considerations. The level of brightness for day games involving players with blue eyes. There are near-countless advantages to be gained through being tuned in to the weather more deeply than via day-to-day forecasts. The question is whether they make financial sense.
The best way to check this is to see if somebody is already doing it, and a quick Google search is inconclusive. The Twins have long had a gameday meteorologist at Target Field, but it’s unclear what that role entails and it’s hard to believe it involves assisting with the longer-term strategic guidance we’re envisioning here. Beyond that, little comes up, and while that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, it’s also very believable that it’s happening. For as much as baseball is associated with data and statistics, it took an infamously long time for the industry to realize taking walks was a valuable skill.
Is the cost too high, then? Maybe it is. Maybe meteorologists make too much money, or ones that would be of value make too much money, for this to make fiscal sense for professional franchises and college athletic departments. At the same time, though, baseball teams will gladly pay an extra million dollars for a marginally more competent relief pitcher. Colleges with meteorology departments have an easy tie-in to, in some cases, not just strong meteorologists but cutting-edge meteorological research. And the labor supply for just about any position in sports-adjacent industries is massive, with talent willing to take an enormous pay cut to be involved with something as fun as sports (this is why I write for this blog instead of using the same skillset to apply for jobs at hedge funds).
Maybe I’m missing something obvious. But maybe someone else is.
The Cubs’ Kyle Hendricks Problem
On the topic of that Cubs game, they lost it. The White Sox put pressure on them early, the White Sox sacrificed an out for a run (which got me salivating, since I thought it might come back to bite Tony La Russa), the Cubs generated chances but could never break through. Disappointing result ahead of a tough matchup again tonight, with Kyle Hendricks opposing Lucas Giolito.
Yesterday, we looked at our best impression of the Cubs’ hitters’ true performance so far, using something we called xwRC+ (by the way, xwRC+ almost definitely actually exists—we probably just reverse-engineered it, or convergent-evolutioned it; didn’t mean to take too much credit for such an obvious thing). Today, we’re going to look at Cubs’ pitchers, and we don’t need to make up any stats, because we already have xERA.
We’ve looked before at whether xERA or FIP is a more predictive variable, and they come out comparably, meaning it’s probably best to evaluate pitchers using a mix of both. That analysis was done comparing full seasons of work, though, limiting us to data comparisons between large sample sizes. We aren’t going to run the analysis here, but it’s hard to see any explanation for why FIP would be better over small samples than xERA, since they’re of comparable value over large samples and the idea of Statcast statistics is that they take luck out of the equation with immediacy.
So, xERA’s for all Cubs pitchers of note, with innings pitched in the parentheses:
- David Robertson: 1.71 (10.0)
- Scott Effross: 1.96 (11.1)
- Chris Martin: 1.96 (8.0)
- Keegan Thompson: 2.09 (20.1)
- Rowan Wick: 2.55 (7.1)
- Mychal Givens: 2.61 (8.2)
- Daniel Norris: 3.27 (6.0)
- Drew Smyly: 3.29 (19.1)
- Michael Rucker: 3.41 (10.0)
- Justin Steele: 3.73 (18.0)
- Marcus Stroman: 4.58 (26.1)
- Mark Leiter: 5.48 (10.1)
- Kyle Hendricks: 5.73 (24.2)
- Ethan Roberts: 8.39 (7.2)
Takeaways:
First, THAT BULLPEN! Six guys with xERA’s under 2.70. Unreal. It’s early, but the bullpen is such a weapon for the Cubs, making their early 2-5 record in one-run games surprising and even more encouraging when looking forward. Conventional wisdom can be wrong, but conventional wisdom says teams with good bullpens win close games (the Cubs are 3-3 in two-run games, for those wondering like I was).
Second, that rotation. Ugh. Some of this is in comparison to the bullpen, but of the real starting pitchers so far, only Smyly has an xERA better than the median rotation ERA across baseball (side note: Reds starters have an 8.13 ERA so far, God is smiting Cincinnati). Steele’s is solid, Stroman’s would be adequate for a fourth starter, Hendricks’s is terrible. The Cubs need starting pitching, and they might get it (Wade Miley and Alec Mills will hopefully be back this month, though Adbert Alzolay probably won’t be a full-on starter again until 2023). But the rotation is a problem, and it tells a lot of the story that the Cubs are 26th in starting pitching WPA (Win Probability Added—the actual impact of what happened on the field, distilled), 3rd in relief pitching WPA, and 16th in hitting WPA. The hitting is ok. The bullpen work is incredible. The starting pitching is tragically bad, even with Steele and Smyly overperforming expectations so far.
Which brings us to tonight’s starter, Kyle Hendricks.
We love Kyle Hendricks. We do, and we always will. But he is bad right now. Has a few good moments, yes, but he is bad, and he has been bad for over a year. Something is not working. He’s walking batters at an unprecedented clip, he’s giving up home runs at an unprecedented clip, I’m sure he knows all this and is working on things but the possibility is there that this does not correct, and that Hendricks is simply not the pitcher he was from 2014 through 2020 anymore. 37 starts is a large sample, and over his last 37 starts his FIP is around replacement-level, with a worse-than-replacement-level xERA. Hopefully he figures it out, and he’s not really blocking anybody better right now from taking those innings, but if the Cubs somehow get into a contending spot and he’s still pitching like this, he needs to be on the shortest of leashes. In fact, if the Cubs somehow get into a contending spot and he’s still pitching like this, the Cubs should seriously consider utilizing some bullpen games overall, because even a Rucker-Norris piggyback would be more effective than Hendricks is right now.
In other Cubs news, Willson Contreras is day-to-day with an undisclosed injury. Hopefully very minor.
Iowa State Did Not Land Grant Basile
The former Wright State big man is headed to Virginia Tech. This was a little disappointing, especially since other possible Iowa State targets (A.J. Green, specifically) are guards, and ISU needs bigs right now, but we knew enough to not be hoping too highly on Basile.
Elsewhere in the portal, Isaac Likekele is headed to Ohio State, and Towson guard Cam Holden, likely an EvanMiya five-star when he’s up on the site, is a late entrant to the portal. Holden may be graduating from Towson, but it appears (I could be wrong on this, but this is how some college basketball reporters more knowledgeable than me are reporting it) that the grad transfer immediate eligibility wouldn’t apply to him, since he already used the NCAA’s one-time transfer immediate eligibility to come to Towson. Also, when we say he’s a late entrant, we mean he entered too late to even use the conventional one-time waiver. Weird situation in a number of ways.
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Viewing schedule today/tonight (second screen in italics, waiting for White Sox/Cubs to end before turning on Giants/Dodgers):
- 1:10 PM EDT: Padres @ Guardians Game 1, Clevinger vs. Plesac (Regional TV)
- 3:37 PM EDT: Rays @ Athletics, Kluber vs. Montas (Regional TV)
- 7:00 PM EDT: Bruins @ Hurricanes (ESPN)
- 7:40 PM EDT: White Sox @ Cubs, Giolito vs. Hendricks (Regional TV)
- 10:00 PM EDT: Mavericks @ Suns
- 10:10 PM EDT: Giants @ Dodgers, Wood vs. Gonsolin (Regional TV)
