Ivy League Cubs

By: Jake Russell

The Cubs first series with the Dodgers is over, and it was a pretty successful one all in all. I mean, you take two out of three to the pretty much consensus World Series favorites, it’s hard to say it wasn’t a success. So, I want to recap the series (and I want to recap all the series we play in the future–I realized I should have done this with the Rangers and Rockies as well).

My one big takeaway from this series is that the Cubs offense is good. They knocked young stud Bobby Miller (who I ranked my 17th best pitcher in baseball for this year) out in the second inning, who had previously dominated the Cardinals in his first start. Miller currently displays a 125 Stuff+ per Eno Sarris’ model on fangraphs, the 4th best mark among all Starting Pitcher’s thus far.

Though they got shut down by Yoshinobu Yamamoto (and even then they still loaded the bases twice against the highest paid pitcher of all time), they bounced back in a nice way on a cold and rainy day against Gavin Stone, scoring 5 against the starter and then 3 against the bullpen (though only 3 were earned as the Dodgers had a multitude of errors). Even then, the Cubs got 4 hits and 3 walks in just 3 innings against the rookie Stone (including 4 100+ mph batted balls).

Beyond just that, for the season, the Cubs as a team have looked great and are among the league leaders in some key offensive stats. They are 5th in total runs scored (and second in runs per game). They have displayed the best walk%, the highest OBP, and are fifth in team wRC+. They also aren’t really striking out–in fact the team K% is under 20% for the season, and even in the Dodgers series where Yamamoto dominated them, they still only struck out 23.9% of the time.

Obviously, they probably won’t sustain the best walk rate in baseball with a K% under 20. That’s just by and large really hard to do. But the Cubs approach at the plate has still been fantastic this year. They are second in chase%, while being 8th in zone-swing%, and those combined are good for the best Zone Swing-Chase% in baseball thus far. Perhaps this has been something stressed by the front office, but it is unequivocally a good thing. Their quality of contact has also been fantastic–third in barrel%, eighth in hard-hit rate, and fourth in average exit velocity. Basically, the Cubs right now are doing everything right on offense.

The pitching also has looked pretty solid. The Cubs are currently 9th in Starting Pitcher ERA-, as Jordan Wicks and Shota Imanaga have looked great (they both pretty much shut down the best offense in baseball). The Dodgers, before Saturday, had scored 5+ runs in each game during the regular season. Imanaga went 4 shutout innings yesterday before the rain delay shortened his start, but he looked fantastic and even struck out Shohei Ohtani.

Wicks struck out 7 in 4.2 innings and gave up just 2 runs. Last week, I wrote about some potential changes that Wicks made. Though his velo was back down to about where it was last year, Wicks still displayed very good IVB on his four-seam (17.8 inches, whereas last week he sat at 18–so well within a margin of error). And the slider was still more of a sweeper–it generated roughly 13.5 inches of glove side movement on average, roughly 3 inches more than last season, and this week threw 5 sliders with 15+ inches of horizontal movement.

The last thing I want to touch on is Kyle Hendricks, because it seems that Cubs fans are pretty negative on him right now. Yeah, Hendricks has had a bit of a rough go of it to start the year. I hope he can pick it up soon, but I’m not ready to be worried yet. He is getting about 3 inches more run on all 3 of his fastball, sinker, and changeup. This could be a small sample size thing, but it’s something to monitor.

MVP of the series: Michael Busch

In his revenge series against his former team, Busch was a huge contributor to the team, hitting his first homer in a Cubs uniform on Friday and helping the Cubs to a win then, and on Sunday sealing the deal in the first inning with a three-run double that proved to be the only runs the Cubs needed all day. Hopefully, we’ll get more of this Michael Busch to come!

Picture Credit: Matt Marton, USA TODAY