If they had played the Phillies next, I'd root for the Cubs to win.
Then, I'd like to see them get beat in the bottom of the 9th in game seven of the World Series, on an error. Or better yet, multiple errors that score several runs, resulting in the biggest bottom of the 9th come-from-behind win in Series history.
If the Rockies win the NLDS, then I'd go for them beating the Cubs in the same manner in the NLCS.
Because the farther they get, and the closer they get to winning it all, the more crushing and devestating the inevitable defeat becomes.
Fuck the Cubs.
__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Yet again, the Cubbies rip out the hearts of their lifelong fans, and stomp on them with impunity.
And the chants go on. "Wait until next year." Major sports' longest dry streak continues unabated.
If we had hung Bartmans in public sacrifice from a light pole in Wrigleyville, then.... perphaps, finally then.... the curse may have been lifted. At least we should tar and feather his naked body and force him to run across the outfield, like a cursed chicken before every game as fans pelt him with empty Bud cans. But NO. All the so-called 'experts' claimed that "it wasn't his fault", that he was a real fan. And yet, here in Chicago, he still walks the streets. And here in Chicago the Cubs are; still cursed.
Perhaps it is not the team that is cursed, but rather venerable Wrigley Field itself. When Bill Veeck, future owner of the mortal enemy Chicago White Sox, planted the ivy in the outfield all those years ago, who knows what type of accursed voodoo he was practicing. In evidence, we do know he sacrificed his leg for this deal with the devil to curse the Cubs for eternity. Perhaps the stadium itself should be burned to the ground by fans, the site salted to prevent any kind of vegetation from ever sprouting there again, and the team moved to Schaumburg while the tarred and feathered Bartmans is forced to never stray outside the charred remains of the site until his end comes. Then, perhaps finally then, the demons could be exorcised and they could win.
But in the end, all of this will not matter. Neither a smoldering Wrigley Field nor a poultry Bartmans would help. Inevitable is right Mark. Because it is written in scripture: "yea, when the small bears from the windy place win the pennant, then ye shall truly know the end is nigh".
It is still one of the most awsome places to see a game as well as enjoy the montage of taverns surrounding Wrigley. They Cubs were great entertainment this year. Right up until post season play when they sucked the big one. I wasn't thrilled as Game 2 cost me $50 but I made $100 when the bested the Brewers so I am still ahead.
__________________ -50# by 4/1/10 2 down 48 to go.
I do hope everyone realizes that the Cubs weren't worthy of anything this season. They got lucky and played in a terrible division in a terrible league.
It wasn't a curse this year, just merely being shitty.
__________________
Quoth David Banner: "Like a pimp"
It's not a beer belly. It's a gas tank for a sex machine.
I have to admit that I know of no other baseball team that inspires such passion as the Cubs. That whole Cubs/Sox division in Chicago runs deep.
__________________ The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same. -- Carlos Castaneda
Good call, Nick. The Cubs would have been a huge underdog against any of the Top 6 teams from the AL. I think the Twins could have won the NL this year and they ended the season under .500.
The D-Backs are pretty bad, though. They've got 2 decent starting pitchers and zero above average batters. The real chokers are the Padres and Mets for not making it into the playoffs in this crappy NL.
Then again, that's why the Cubs fans should be ticked off. This was a really good chance to get to the World Series.
Good call, Nick. The Cubs would have been a huge underdog against any of the Top 6 teams from the AL. I think the Twins could have won the NL this year and they ended the season under .500.
The D-Backs are pretty bad, though. They've got 2 decent starting pitchers and zero above average batters. The real chokers are the Padres and Mets for not making it into the playoffs in this crappy NL.
Then again, that's why the Cubs fans should be ticked off. This was a really good chance to get to the World Series.
The Diamondbacks amaze me. I want to root for them because they're such a statistical anomaly.
Three starters have an OBP under .320
No one has an OBP over .370 (Orlando Hudson excluded because he's out for the season)
They have one great starter, Brandon Webb, but then the other three starter's ERAs are 4.25, 4.93 and 4.30.
Their number three starter struck out 90 in 204 innings. (but he's money in the playoffs)
They finished the season -20 in run differential.
Their leadoff hitter was one of the players under .320. He hit .237 but he smacked 37 homeruns.
Conor Jackson and Mark Reynolds led the team with a 109 OPS+ (Chipper Jones led the league with a 166, while Alex Rodriguez had a 183)
But what Melvin did with the pen is amazing. Of their top five relievers, the highest ERA is 3.27. 3.27!
You can go on and on about this team.
__________________
Quoth David Banner: "Like a pimp"
It's not a beer belly. It's a gas tank for a sex machine.
This year one of the big surprises in MLB is the Arizona Diamondbacks. They had some hard times over the last few years, averaging 94 losses from 2004-6. (OK fine, the 111-loss 2004 really throws everything of whack. But they haven’t been good). Currently, they’re battling the Mets for the best record in the senior circuit.
Many thought they could be this year’s breakout squad. Here at THT, for instance they were the staff’s consensus to take the division. They had a fantastic ace in Brandon Webb, had retained former Mr. Everything Randy Johnson, and had an organization littered with promising young talent.
But even those optimists have been surprised. Sure, they’re winning, but they ain’t going about it in a particularly healthy way. At the moment I write this, they have scored 18 fewer runs than they’ve allowed, 537-553. Hmmm…
OK, let’s go back to Sabermetrics 101. There’s supposed to be some sort of relationship between runs scored and runs allowed. You can use some variation on the old Pythagoras formula to figure out how many wins a team “should” have based on its record. And you know, teams that can’t score as many runs as they give up really shouldn’t be on pace to win 90 games. Differences between Real W/L and Pythag W/L are dismissed as mere chance. Heck, in B-ref’s expanded schedules, the site flatly categorizes any variation as luck.
Yet the D-backs this year have done quite the job mocking sabermetric orthodoxy. Not only have they floated over their ordained record, but they’ve teased people into thinking they’ll regress. After bursting out to a 46-35 start (while getting outscored all the while), they fell apart and dropped 13 of their next 17. “A-ha! Mathematical certainly will not be mocked or long!” Well, accept in this case that is. Since then the D-backs have won 21 of 26. Sure they’ve outscored their opponents in that stretch, but only 140-116. They’re still wildly exceeding expectations.
Speaking as a sample size of one, this is why I love this game. Just when you think you can figure it out with numbers, the ball starts to bounce the other way. Right when you are so sure in yourself and your conclusions, John Mabry starts outperforming Jeremy Giambi.
How the hell are they doing it?
The awesome thing about the D-backs is that when you look closer at the numbers, what’s going on makes sense. Not only is this not luck, but there is a very really shot they can keep on at this pace for the rest of the year.
Added bonus: they’re doing it by flipping around conventional wisdom on how you’re supposed to defy the mathematical gods. The single most agreed-upon way to evade Pythagoras and all his equations is to do extremely well in one-run games. The 1974 Padres for example, won nine more games than they were supposed to. They did it by going 31-16 in one-run games, while going 29-86 (!) in other contests.
Arizona is doing well in one-run games, not doubt about it. But they’re 27-16 record in those affairs is only slightly better than their overall record. It can explain why they’ve won a couple more games than they should have. But dag nabbit, they’ve won 10 more.
But there’s a reversal. The revealing factoid with Arizona isn’t their one-run games, but their record in blowouts. They are 13-22 in those contests, while 58-31 in all other games. OK, now that’s not supposed to happen. When you play like a 106-win team in close games, you’re not supposed to morph into a 102-loss team in the laughers. Better teams are supposed to be the most likely to blow others out and the hardest to get blown out. And it defies logic to say a team that’s won nearly two-thirds of its close games aren’t that good.
Let’s think this through. Another standard explanation for why a team would exceed their Pythagoras mark centers of the bullpen. If a team has a great ‘pen, they’ll exceed because they hold leads. Yeah, that makes sense. And Arizona most certainly has a great ‘pen, but that still doesn’t explain it. The great reliever corps explains records in close games. It sure as hell wouldn’t explain why they stink so badly in blowouts.
The secret
Here’s where you have to flip it all around. The secret does lie with the bullpen, but it’s not with the fantastic core. Or rather, it’s not just with the fantastic core.
Here’s how it works in Arizona. The game begins. If the starter pitches well, then it’s no problem. Wait until late, and let one of their dynamite relievers—Jose Velarde, Tony Pena, Brandon Lyon, and Doug Slaten all have ERAs under 3.00. And Juan Cruz is well above league average as well. Keep in mind they play in one of the game’s great hitters’ parks in a league that averages over 4.5 runs a game. As long as the starter has a quality outing, they’ll win a lot of games.
But what happens when the starter has a bad game? What happens when Micah Owings gets shelled for seven runs in four innings? Or Livian Hernandez receives one of his many poundings? Do you really want to waste one of the big five in such lowly leveraged situations? You might have to just to eat up some innings, but you’re better off going to the mop up men.
And that’s where the secret lies. The D-backs aren’t 10 games over their expected mark because their relievers are so fantastic. They’re ten games over because their bullpen is bipolar. Arizona’s mop-up men stink. I don’t mean they’re below average—mop-up men by definition are below average—but even by the standards of last man on the roster they are terrible. They can turn any deficient into an insurmountable one.
Lemme break it down. Here are the numbers on the year for the Big 5 relievers and the remainder:
G IP H R ER HR W K ERA RA ERA+
Big 5 249 250.7 204 93 77 21 94 225 2.76 3.34 167
Dregs 86 106.7 127 91 84 21 51 76 7.09 7.68 65
NL relievers as a whole have an ERA of 4.05 and ERA+ of 107. By any standards their dreg relievers ain’t getting it done.
And now look at their full roster. Their offense, in plain English, stinks. There’s no excuse to be 13th in runs scored when you play in that park. This team depends on its pitchers to keep them in the games, because God knows their offense won’t catch up for them. In general, their pitchers deliver. Even their worst starters and merely league average, and they have the greatest bullpen core this side of Ron Gardenhire. Thus they can dependably win an awful lot of close ones. But when they fall behind badly they have virtually no chance of recovery.
This does confirm one thought on Pythagoras deviation. Others, including myself, have argued that managers have an impact no this differential. You’ve got to give Bob Melvin a lot of credit here. He’s putting the right guys in when it matters and sticking in the bums when it doesn’t. Sure, in this situation the difference between good and bad it’s obvious who are the good’uns and the bad’uns, but there are plenty of times managers have used their relievers improperly. Besides, given how incredibly his core has done, I have to believe he’s done a good job communicating with his hurlers and making sure they’re as comfortable as they can be in their roles, allowing them to thrive at what they do.
In the past I noted that a team should exceed their pythag mark if they have a really consistent offense. (If Team A scores five runs each game while Team B alternates between scoring 10, and zero, A will win more games). This flips that idea around. Having a really inconsistent bullpen where the quality of multiple relievers swings this wildly also will have an impact. Along those lines, all other things being equal a team with a horrible fifth starter should overachieve while a team with stable starting pitching – such as this year’s Cubs or the 2005 Brewers – should win less than they’re projected to.
What it means for Arizona
If Arizona’s going to lessen the difference in the actual and supposed records, it’s more likely it’ll happen by their projected mark rising up to reality rather than reality falling down to Pythagoras. The main engine is their inability to have typically terrible end-of-the-bullpen relievers. The easiest way to improve a team is to have a noticeable hole that needs filling, and this one can be filled with replacement level pitching.
They could also see a drop off from their Fab Five core relievers. My hunch is that’ll happen. Any time that many guys are doing that good, someone’s liable to drop off some. But remember, they’re not the real engine of this.
They should win the division even if they are outscored this year. And the funny thing is, they could do pretty well in the playoffs. There’s no really strong team in the NL this year, and back-end pitching matters far less when you’re only playing 4 games a week. With Brandon Webb and that bullpen, some minimal offensive presence could propel them to their second pennant title.
__________________
Quoth David Banner: "Like a pimp"
It's not a beer belly. It's a gas tank for a sex machine.
wow, way to rub it in :/
I just remember the glory days of The Eck and Dave Stewart. And a young Mark McGwire.
I swear the A's are like the farm team for the Major Leagues, we find all the talent, the other teams pay 'em. (Zito, Mulder, Tejada, McGwire, Giambi[well...], Hudson...)
I have to admit that I know of no other baseball team that inspires such passion as the Cubs. That whole Cubs/Sox division in Chicago runs deep.
Chicago is a sports town. We live and die with our teams (well, except for the Blackhawks and there no-broadcast policy for home games, but that's a different matter). New York is too busy to care for it's myriad of teams, and LA is too full of itself to care about its teams. But Chicago, much like Philly, is a real sport's fans town where people live and die by the teams there. How else can you explain sellout after sellout, season after season, for the Cubs?
I think the White Sox winning the Series helped to heal some of those divisions. I know a lot of lifelong Cubs fans who hate the Sox who were quietly cheering them on once they got to the Series because they realized that might be their only chance to see a World Series champion in Chicago before Jesus (that would be Christ, not Medrano) returns.
My hatred of the Cubs has nothing to do with them letting their fans down, actually that's their only redeeming quality.
Back in 1994 the Rockies were still playing in Mile High, which seated about 77,000 or something, and I was a Cubs fan. I had a ticket to one of the Cubs games and was really excited, but something (I have no recollection of what exactly, I think my wife had something come up and I had to stay with our son, who was about 9 months at the time) prevented me. The Rockies had sold about 60,000 tickets, which at the time was about 20,000 seats more that Wrigley even held. The speculation on the radio on my way home was that the game would be broadcast because of the number of tickets sold, even though it wasn't sold out.
The Cubs, as the visiting team, exercised their right to black out the game because it wasn't an actual sell out. I was crushed. And really, really pissed off.
Ever since then, the only thing I like about the Cubs is their consistent ability to let their fans down. The further they go, the harder the inevitable fall. Hence the wish to see them get beat on an error on the bottom of the 9th of the seventh game of the World Series, just because the fall will be all that much harder.
F the Cubs.
__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin, 1759
F the Cubs
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