As you may have heard, the Cubs have not won many games on the road this season.
Which is especially notable tonight, as they start a ten-game stretch as the visiting team, playing in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh while they try to at least maintain, and preferably build on, what’s currently a three-game lead in the NL Central (ideally, they’d be challenging that four-game gap between them and the Braves for home-field advantage in the NLDS, but that’s a secondary goal, and if they don’t figure out this road-game thing it’ll be beyond their reach).
The Cubs, in total, have won 62 and lost 52 on the year, which comes out to a .544 win percentage (in baseball, win percentage is conventionally expressed as a three-digit decimal rather than a percentage, making its name rather disingenuous, but here we are). That’s the ninth-best record in the MLB, and as was alluded to in an earlier parenthetical, third-best in the NL. At home, the Cubs are much better. 41 wins, 19 losses, for a home win percentage of .683 that’s fourth-best in the MLB (second-best in the NL).
So far, so good. Nothing too notable, though that home win percentage is a lot better than their overall win percentage, which leads into its counterweight: on the road, the Cubs are 21-33, with a win percentage of .389 that’s the sixth-worst in baseball (second-worst in the NL). The gap between the Cubs’ winning percentages at home and on the road is the largest in baseball by a wide margin (they’re at .294, the next-closest is the Rangers at .211). It’s an eye-popping disparity, justifiably receiving attention.
You may have also heard that the Cubs have a positive run differential on the road, which is odd, because a .389 team should not have a positive run differential. It’s true, though. The Cubs have, on the aggregate, scored four more runs as the visitors than they’ve allowed. Still, comparing their run differential at home to that on the road, with both adjusted on a per-game basis, they outscore opponents by 1.18 more runs at home than they do as the guest. That figure is the second-highest in the league, behind only the Dodgers, and while the Dodgers, like the Cubs, struggle mightily on the road compared to at home (.201 gap between home/road win percentage, compared to the Cubs’ .294), they’re so good that their away run differential per game is still sixth-best in the MLB. Not exactly something that should be termed a “struggle.”
Summing up what we’ve covered so far: The Cubs are much better at home than on the road, and while they might be better on the road were they getting wins at the rate their run differential implies they should, even the run differential gap confirms the pattern.
So what’s going on?
It’s not the offense.
The Cubs score 5.03 runs/game at home. They score 4.96 runs/game on the road. Not a big difference. Well within the margin where the Cubs might even be better offensively on the road, if Wrigley Field happens to have just been a difficult place to score runs so far this year because of wind and weather.
Since it’s not the offense, it must be the pitching, and oh boy, is it ever.
The Cubs allow only 3.78 runs/game at home. They allow 4.89 on the road. While the offense scores about 1% fewer runs on the road compared to at home, the pitching staff allows 29% more scoring on the road.
It gets worse.
I broke the Cubs’ pitching staff up into starters and relievers, including Adbert Alzolay and Alec Mills with the starters, and labeling everyone else as a reliever (thus taking data from Tyler Chatwood’s spot starts and including it with relief appearances to avoid unnecessary complexity).
The starters are certainly not as good on the road. A 3.46 ERA at Wrigley, a 4.38 ERA everywhere else. A lot of this can be tied to Kyle Hendricks, who’s allowed 13 more earned runs away from home in ten fewer innings. But Cole Hamels, Jon Lester, and José Quintana all also have poorer ERA’s on the road than at home, as does Adbert Alzolay, whose innings pitched might not be significant but made his presence felt on the team’s ERA splits by allowing seven earned in Pittsburgh a while back.
That 4.38 ERA isn’t very good. But take away Alzolay’s Pittsburgh start and it’s 4.20, better than the overall ERA’s of 21 MLB pitching staffs.
The real problem is the bullpen, which is probably helping drive that odd run differential (I don’t have numbers on this, but losing close games and having a bad bullpen at least make sense together).
At home, the Cubs actually have very good bullpen results, with a 3.18 ERA. For context, Cleveland has the best bullpen in baseball this year by ERA, and their overall number is 3.22.
But on the road…
A 5.30 ERA.
And if you read this site a lot, you know I like FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching), which is measured on the same scale as ERA but is more predictive of a pitcher’s (or a group of pitchers’) future performance.
The Cubs’ relievers’ road FIP is 5.28.
At home, it’s 4.03, which points partially to the fact that the Cubs’ relievers have been getting lucky at home.
But that’s still a big gap.
The starting pitching’s struggles away from Wrigley are also a problem, of course, but far from the main driver of the disparity (for more context, the starters’ home FIP is 3.92 and their road FIP is 4.23, suggesting luck is playing a non-zero role in their ERA discrepancy). The main problem has been the bullpen. But when digging in deeper, that problem starts looking smaller.
Among Cubs relievers, the eight largest negative home/road ERA gaps belong to Craig Kimbrel, Mike Montgomery, Carl Edwards Jr., Dillon Maples, Derek Holland, Brandon Kintzler, Randy Rosario, and Brad Brach (i.e., these eight guys have gotten the worst results on the road, compared to their results at Wrigley).
Holland has thrown fewer than three innings both at home and on the road, so he isn’t very responsible and should be removed from the list. Maples only threw one and two thirds innings at Wrigley and is in Des Moines, so he can’t really be blamed for the problem either and he isn’t a concern going forward anyway. That leaves six names, of which four are no longer employed by the Cubs. The two that remain, Kimbrel and Kintzler, are both injured right now.
In other words, the players most responsible for the Cubs’ prior road struggles are not with the Cubs for this particular road trip. If you take those six pitchers away (but include Holland and Maples, for what they’re worth), the Cubs’ total road ERA, including both starters and relievers, is 4.22. Not amazing, but not bad. Again, better than the overall ERA’s of 21 teams.
It’s difficult to pin much blame on those six players. All of them have compiled those numbers across small samples sizes. There’s little reason to believe any of them are actually worse on the road than at home. But overall, there was reason to believe that the Cubs’ bullpen was bad on the road, and that impression changes when looking at only the current pitching staff (if you’re curious, the combined road ERA of the 13 pitchers traveling with the Cubs to Cincinnati is only 4.06).
The Cubs have, as an organization, been bad away from Wrigley Field.
But these 25 players have been pretty good.
All data comes from FanGraphs, and is current through games of Wednesday, August 7th.
