Monday, March 21, 2016

Team Offense, Chicago Cubs

The 2016 series on team offense continues with the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs finished sixteenth in the majors and sixth in the National League in 2015 with 4.25 runs scored per game. That was also the major league average.

Once again I am using a combination of RotoChamp and USA Today as a source of default lineups. I’m going with the RotoChamp lineup, since they bat Jason Heyward second, and that’s where he batted lately. That Joe Maddon lineup is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. For the pitchers, I used the actual batting stats the Cubs pitchers posted in 2015. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.76
Probable lineup: 4.70
Worst lineup: 4.18
Regressed lineup: 4.34

Both the optimum and default lineups are the highest scoring so far in the National League. The nice thing for the Cubs is that there is plenty of upside here, due to Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, and Kyle Schwarber all being young and improving.

This lineup might be Earl Weaver‘s dream. Six of the eight position players project to post potent OBPs, and the other two are okay. No matter where one is batting, there are likely to be plenty of base runners to bring home. I gave Maddon a bit of a bonus with the LAT by batting the pitcher eighth. The Cubs like to employ that strategy.

The default lineup comes very close to the scoring level of the optimum lineup, despite only agreeing on the seventh and eighth slots. That’s due to the consistency of talent throughout this order, another reason this is going to be a tough lineup to get out. Cubs fans are optimistic, and deservedly so.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

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Previous posts in this series:



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