My apologies, but Off the Lake is going to be very, very short today as The Barking Crow is running very, very behind. We’ll catch up on the Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, and even the Sky next week.
In the meantime…
Are the Cubs Learning How to Win?
We’re working on this theory, and I think others are as well, which says that Major League Baseball is entering a post-analytics era. It’s not that analytics are going to vanish from the game. We’re not luddites (on this front, anyway). It’s that the marginal return of each successive analytical leap is going to diminish to the point where the leaps stop making much of a difference, leading franchises to rediscover less tangible concepts like chemistry and mindset in their search for those life-changing extra wins. Watching the Cubs bat with men on base the last seven years, you’d be forgiven for wondering if we’re well into this post-analytics era already.
If this theory is true, or perhaps even if it’s not, it’s possible that it’s possible to “know how to win.” It’s possible that it’s possible to generate rallies mentally, or at least to make them more probable than analytical conventional wisdom would suggest.
Is this something that happened for the Cubs on Wednesday? Or did a lot of grounders and line drives simply sneak through? We don’t know the answer. But we also wouldn’t trust anyone who says certainly that they know it themselves.
Games this weekend:
- Friday, 5:45 PM CDT: Cubs at Washington (Marquee)
- Saturday, 3:05 PM CDT: Cubs at Washington (Marquee/MLB Network)
- Sunday, 12:35 PM CDT: Cubs at Washington (Marquee)
Shōta Imanaga gets the ball tonight against breakout National starter Jake Irvin. Javier Assad gets the ball tomorrow against breakout National starter and former Cubs farmhand DJ Herz. Jameson Taillon gets the ball on Sunday against breakout National starter Mitchell Parker. I’m not kidding. The Nationals’ young arms have pretty much all shown flashes of brilliance this year.
Craig Counsell said just now that Jordan Wicks might get inserted into the rotation this weekend, implying Assad or Taillon could be pushed back. He said it would depend how the weekend goes. One would think this means Kyle Hendricks might exit the rotation, and that the Cubs will take on the risk of rushing Wicks back if Hendricks has a chance? Regardless, the Braves and Brewers keep doing a lot of winning themselves, so the Cubs might need another sweep to keep a shred of playoff hope alive. The NL Central angle once again appears to be cut off. Wild Card or bust again.
How Are the White Sox *This* Bad?
As the White Sox continue to achieve history, a note that even their post-deadline roster, per FanGraphs’s projections, has the talent of a 66-win team. They are on pace to win 37 games. Sometimes the scale of this underperformance gets lost. We expected them to be really, really bad. They have been almost twice that miserable.
This, of course, only emboldens us about those mindset theories. Maybe analytics will simply turn its attention to psychology soon, or to the value of every hour spent trying to convince Jerry Reinsdorf to sell his baseball team.
Games:
- Friday, 7:10 PM CDT: White Sox vs. New York Mets (NBC Sports Chicago)
- Saturday, 6:10 PM CDT: White Sox vs. New York Mets (NBC Sports Chicago)
- Sunday, 1:10 PM CDT: White Sox vs. New York Mets (NBC Sports Chicago)
I, for one, appreciate the symbolism of the Mets coming to town to pass that 1962 torch. Jonathan Cannon goes tonight. Davis Martin goes tomorrow. Garrett Crochet goes on Sunday. Maybe I’ve been following the White Sox too closely, but that all doesn’t sound that bad.
