What (or who) could take down the Cubs in 2017?
Dan Szymborski
Special to ESPN.com
ESPN INSIDER
If there were any remaining doubts about the trajectory of the Chicago Cubs, they quelled them by winning the team's first World Series in the lifetime of practically everyone alive today. They didn't grab a crown by squeezing into the playoffs with 85 wins and then running a hot couple of weeks. They manhandled the league, winning 103 games with a roster featuring multiple MVP and Cy Young candidates and made the National League Central a real snoozer of a division race before the summer even started.
Naturally, the team's bandwagon has gotten bigger. They're one of the favorites to be the best team in baseball again in 2017. The Cubs remain my pick, and the ZiPS projections agree, placing the team as the favorite to repeat this season.
But the bandwagon may be going a little too fast, with people sometimes acting as if the Cubs simply cannot be stopped. The fact is, they can, and as strong as they are, the realities of the roster, league structure and how baseball works suggests that Chicago's season is far more likely to end in an elimination loss than with uniforms soaked with bubbly.
Angles in the outfield
The realistic best-case scenario is easy to see. Kyle Schwarber makes a full bounce back from surgery, Jason Heyward regains his pre-2017 form (if not the full promise he showed as a rookie) and the alliterative amalgamation of Jon Jay and Albert Almora in center field provides solid league-average performance.
But a lot can go wrong. Schwarber's power is overwhelming, but anyone who tells you that a player missing almost an entire season with major reconstructive surgery of two knee ligaments doesn't result in at least some uncertainty is probably someone you want to be shopping your magic beans to. Even if Schwarber's bat is everything that's expected, there were questions about his defense in the outfield even before last season. If he's a minus-15 defensive runs saved player out there or something, he's not actually a plus contributor.
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While some recovery from Heyward is reasonable, it's also not something that is preordained, and it's hard to expect a player to retain most of his value simply by being a plus-25-run right fielder forever. It wouldn't be the first time Heyward disappointed, either -- he's a player who peaked offensive (so far) at age 20. Yes, he has been a star, but so was Carlos Baerga.
As for center, the Cubs are overwhelmingly likely to get less performance there. There's no doubt that a re-signed Dexter Fowler would also have trouble matching Fowler's 2016 performance, but Jon Jay is a fourth-outfielder type at this point. And while Almora had a .763 OPS in his brief stint in the majors, he also had a .733 OPS in Triple-A, quite obviously a much easier league.
ZiPS projects the Cubs to have the sixth-best outfield in baseball when all is said and done, but the variance is large, with a 25 percent chance of the outfield simply being below-average overall.
The award letdowns
Take a group of players having dominating seasons at the top of the league. Inevitably, taken as a whole, that set of players will see their performance drop off significantly. Call it regression toward the mean or the Madden Curse or the sophomore slump (if we're talking rookies), but if you take the best players' top performances as some sort of baseline expectation, you're setting yourself up for projection disappointment.
What it comes down to is that, for stars at the top of their game, risks are skewed essentially in one direction: the downside. There are a lot more things that can make Kris Bryant or Kyle Hendricks play worse than improve further. Don't believe me? Believe baseball history. If you look at hitters producing 6-8 FanGraphs WAR in any season, in the following season they average fewer than 5 wins (not counting the guys that retired), a loss of just more than 25 percent of their performance. The same goes for the players in the 4-6 fWAR range. It's an even steeper decline for pitchers because of their more significant injury risk.
In other words, while it won't be the case for all of the players, the Cubs can expect to receive less performance and less of it from their core of stars.
The rotation of depth
Pitchers will break your heart, if given enough time. The Cubs were much luckier than average in the health of their rotation, getting 152 starts out of 162 games from their intended five starters. One reason the depth didn't become an issue for the pitching staff was that the circumstances resulted in them never actually being tested.
Once the Cubs start losing pitchers, their MLB-ready rotation depth is fairly thin. Brett Anderson is a more talented pitcher than Jason Hammel is but Anderson's injury record is a huge question mark in his career line. After being a 175-inning rookie season for the A's in 2009, Anderson has qualified for the ERA title exactly once, in 2015. Mike Montgomery is no sure thing and the options drop off quickly after that. Pierce Johnson? Rob Zastryzny? Alec Mills? Eddie Butler? No matter who it is, things sour quickly after the front four.
Fewer trading chits
To make additions in the middle of the season if they become necessary, the Cubs will have to likely trade more prospects. The team paid heavily for a few months of Aroldis Chapman, sending away blue-chipper Gleyber Torres and Billy McKinney, Rashad Crawford and a solid bullpen depth piece in Adam Warren. Jorge Soler and his upside are gone for Wade Davis to replace the departed Chapman. Almora and Willson Contreras are already expected to contribute, so they're also unlikely to be used as trade bait. The Cubs still have players such as Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease and Ian Happ, but with a possible Jake Arrieta departure on the horizon, they may need to be thinking longer-term trades involving some of these pitchers.
The league is not standing still
While the Cubs have sought to mostly keep the core team intact, the other top teams in the league haven't just been standing still. The Red Sox, Nationals and Dodgers are all projected to win more games in 2017. Chris Sale went to Boston, not Chicago. Adam Eaton went to Washington, not Chicago.
But the team that provides the biggest danger to the Cubs, in ZiPS' eyes, is the Los Angeles Dodgers, and I agree with that. The FanGraphs projections, which mix ZiPS and the Steamer projections of Jared Cross, Dash Davidson and Peter Rosenbloom, already project the Dodgers as a slightly better team than the Cubs, by the slimmest of percentage points.
The Dodgers won "only" 91 games last year, but they won 91 games with an awful lot going wrong for the team. Yasiel Puig was injured and terrible, Howie Kendrick disappointed, Adrian Gonzalez had his worst offensive season since the start of his career and, most importantly, they had more pitching injuries in 2016 than the internet has memes, including cats. Fifteen different pitchers started games for the Dodgers last year and only a single pitcher, NPB import Kenta Maeda, threw enough innings to qualify for the ERA title.
Knowing this, the Dodgers have assembled a significant amount of depth at most positions. The rotation's projected sixth through 10th starters, if forced to be the MLB rotation, actually project to be better than the starting five of five teams in ZiPS. The same goes for their overstocked outfield's second tier. And the team hung on to as many prospects as they could this winter, talking about Chris Sale and Jose Quintana but refusing to pull the trigger when the cost became too high. Which means the Dodgers are still armed to make a huge deal this summer.
Billy Beane was right
No, not in signing Yonder Alonso or John Axford. He was right that the playoffs are absolutely a crapshoot, simply because the best teams in baseball are not that much stronger than the worst teams in baseball, especially compared to similar best vs. worst matchups in sports like football and hockey. Fresno State ain't beating the Clemson Tigers in football, and even in a full series, the Brooklyn Nets would (theoretically, of course) have next to no shot at taking the Golden State Warriors or San Antonio Spurs in a best-of-seven series.
But in baseball, lousy teams beat terrific teams all the time; there have been seasons in recent memory when no team won fewer than 40 percent or more than 60 percent of their games. Take the worst two projected teams in ZiPS in the National League and the worst in the American League (Padres, Phillies, then the A's) and under the current playoff format, the Cubs would still just be a bit better than a coin flip (58 percent) to win all three series.
The teams the Cubs will actually play in the playoffs are going to be much better than that, with the Cubs having an only 1-in-5 shot at getting through, say, the Giants, Dodgers and Red Sox consecutively.
The bottom line
When all is said and done, the ZiPS projections for the Cubs give them an 18 percent chance of winning the World Series, the best probability in baseball. But that also means that there's an 82 percent projected chance of another team hoisting the trophy. And if they don't win the World Series, it's not because the team is full of chokers or lack of heart or any of the other gobbledygook, but simply that baseball is not a sport that can truly be dominated by even a great team. There are no teams of destiny, and the Cubs don't break that rule.
Dan Szymborski
Special to ESPN.com
ESPN INSIDER
If there were any remaining doubts about the trajectory of the Chicago Cubs, they quelled them by winning the team's first World Series in the lifetime of practically everyone alive today. They didn't grab a crown by squeezing into the playoffs with 85 wins and then running a hot couple of weeks. They manhandled the league, winning 103 games with a roster featuring multiple MVP and Cy Young candidates and made the National League Central a real snoozer of a division race before the summer even started.
Naturally, the team's bandwagon has gotten bigger. They're one of the favorites to be the best team in baseball again in 2017. The Cubs remain my pick, and the ZiPS projections agree, placing the team as the favorite to repeat this season.
But the bandwagon may be going a little too fast, with people sometimes acting as if the Cubs simply cannot be stopped. The fact is, they can, and as strong as they are, the realities of the roster, league structure and how baseball works suggests that Chicago's season is far more likely to end in an elimination loss than with uniforms soaked with bubbly.
Angles in the outfield
The realistic best-case scenario is easy to see. Kyle Schwarber makes a full bounce back from surgery, Jason Heyward regains his pre-2017 form (if not the full promise he showed as a rookie) and the alliterative amalgamation of Jon Jay and Albert Almora in center field provides solid league-average performance.
But a lot can go wrong. Schwarber's power is overwhelming, but anyone who tells you that a player missing almost an entire season with major reconstructive surgery of two knee ligaments doesn't result in at least some uncertainty is probably someone you want to be shopping your magic beans to. Even if Schwarber's bat is everything that's expected, there were questions about his defense in the outfield even before last season. If he's a minus-15 defensive runs saved player out there or something, he's not actually a plus contributor.
<offer style="box-sizing: border-box;"></offer>
While some recovery from Heyward is reasonable, it's also not something that is preordained, and it's hard to expect a player to retain most of his value simply by being a plus-25-run right fielder forever. It wouldn't be the first time Heyward disappointed, either -- he's a player who peaked offensive (so far) at age 20. Yes, he has been a star, but so was Carlos Baerga.
As for center, the Cubs are overwhelmingly likely to get less performance there. There's no doubt that a re-signed Dexter Fowler would also have trouble matching Fowler's 2016 performance, but Jon Jay is a fourth-outfielder type at this point. And while Almora had a .763 OPS in his brief stint in the majors, he also had a .733 OPS in Triple-A, quite obviously a much easier league.
ZiPS projects the Cubs to have the sixth-best outfield in baseball when all is said and done, but the variance is large, with a 25 percent chance of the outfield simply being below-average overall.
The award letdowns
Take a group of players having dominating seasons at the top of the league. Inevitably, taken as a whole, that set of players will see their performance drop off significantly. Call it regression toward the mean or the Madden Curse or the sophomore slump (if we're talking rookies), but if you take the best players' top performances as some sort of baseline expectation, you're setting yourself up for projection disappointment.
What it comes down to is that, for stars at the top of their game, risks are skewed essentially in one direction: the downside. There are a lot more things that can make Kris Bryant or Kyle Hendricks play worse than improve further. Don't believe me? Believe baseball history. If you look at hitters producing 6-8 FanGraphs WAR in any season, in the following season they average fewer than 5 wins (not counting the guys that retired), a loss of just more than 25 percent of their performance. The same goes for the players in the 4-6 fWAR range. It's an even steeper decline for pitchers because of their more significant injury risk.
In other words, while it won't be the case for all of the players, the Cubs can expect to receive less performance and less of it from their core of stars.
The rotation of depth
Pitchers will break your heart, if given enough time. The Cubs were much luckier than average in the health of their rotation, getting 152 starts out of 162 games from their intended five starters. One reason the depth didn't become an issue for the pitching staff was that the circumstances resulted in them never actually being tested.
Once the Cubs start losing pitchers, their MLB-ready rotation depth is fairly thin. Brett Anderson is a more talented pitcher than Jason Hammel is but Anderson's injury record is a huge question mark in his career line. After being a 175-inning rookie season for the A's in 2009, Anderson has qualified for the ERA title exactly once, in 2015. Mike Montgomery is no sure thing and the options drop off quickly after that. Pierce Johnson? Rob Zastryzny? Alec Mills? Eddie Butler? No matter who it is, things sour quickly after the front four.
Fewer trading chits
To make additions in the middle of the season if they become necessary, the Cubs will have to likely trade more prospects. The team paid heavily for a few months of Aroldis Chapman, sending away blue-chipper Gleyber Torres and Billy McKinney, Rashad Crawford and a solid bullpen depth piece in Adam Warren. Jorge Soler and his upside are gone for Wade Davis to replace the departed Chapman. Almora and Willson Contreras are already expected to contribute, so they're also unlikely to be used as trade bait. The Cubs still have players such as Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease and Ian Happ, but with a possible Jake Arrieta departure on the horizon, they may need to be thinking longer-term trades involving some of these pitchers.
The league is not standing still
While the Cubs have sought to mostly keep the core team intact, the other top teams in the league haven't just been standing still. The Red Sox, Nationals and Dodgers are all projected to win more games in 2017. Chris Sale went to Boston, not Chicago. Adam Eaton went to Washington, not Chicago.
But the team that provides the biggest danger to the Cubs, in ZiPS' eyes, is the Los Angeles Dodgers, and I agree with that. The FanGraphs projections, which mix ZiPS and the Steamer projections of Jared Cross, Dash Davidson and Peter Rosenbloom, already project the Dodgers as a slightly better team than the Cubs, by the slimmest of percentage points.
The Dodgers won "only" 91 games last year, but they won 91 games with an awful lot going wrong for the team. Yasiel Puig was injured and terrible, Howie Kendrick disappointed, Adrian Gonzalez had his worst offensive season since the start of his career and, most importantly, they had more pitching injuries in 2016 than the internet has memes, including cats. Fifteen different pitchers started games for the Dodgers last year and only a single pitcher, NPB import Kenta Maeda, threw enough innings to qualify for the ERA title.
Knowing this, the Dodgers have assembled a significant amount of depth at most positions. The rotation's projected sixth through 10th starters, if forced to be the MLB rotation, actually project to be better than the starting five of five teams in ZiPS. The same goes for their overstocked outfield's second tier. And the team hung on to as many prospects as they could this winter, talking about Chris Sale and Jose Quintana but refusing to pull the trigger when the cost became too high. Which means the Dodgers are still armed to make a huge deal this summer.
Billy Beane was right
No, not in signing Yonder Alonso or John Axford. He was right that the playoffs are absolutely a crapshoot, simply because the best teams in baseball are not that much stronger than the worst teams in baseball, especially compared to similar best vs. worst matchups in sports like football and hockey. Fresno State ain't beating the Clemson Tigers in football, and even in a full series, the Brooklyn Nets would (theoretically, of course) have next to no shot at taking the Golden State Warriors or San Antonio Spurs in a best-of-seven series.
But in baseball, lousy teams beat terrific teams all the time; there have been seasons in recent memory when no team won fewer than 40 percent or more than 60 percent of their games. Take the worst two projected teams in ZiPS in the National League and the worst in the American League (Padres, Phillies, then the A's) and under the current playoff format, the Cubs would still just be a bit better than a coin flip (58 percent) to win all three series.
The teams the Cubs will actually play in the playoffs are going to be much better than that, with the Cubs having an only 1-in-5 shot at getting through, say, the Giants, Dodgers and Red Sox consecutively.
The bottom line
When all is said and done, the ZiPS projections for the Cubs give them an 18 percent chance of winning the World Series, the best probability in baseball. But that also means that there's an 82 percent projected chance of another team hoisting the trophy. And if they don't win the World Series, it's not because the team is full of chokers or lack of heart or any of the other gobbledygook, but simply that baseball is not a sport that can truly be dominated by even a great team. There are no teams of destiny, and the Cubs don't break that rule.
