These Cubs and Nats squared off over the weekend, starting this series as division leaders who had both won five of their past six games. At 20-6 (Cubs) and 19-8 (Nats) both teams were off to franchise-best starts in the live ball era. After four games, the Cub juggernaut rolls on, leaving the Nationals to lick their wounds.
More on this series after the jump.
In the opener, Ben Zobrist delivered four RBI in a 5-2 triumph as Kyle Henricks took the win with six scoreless innings. Hendricks finished the game with a nifty 1.000 season WHIP. His 1.137 WHIP for his first two seasons is second best by a Cub in the live ball era in 250+ IP, just a hair more than Mark Prior‘s 1.125 mark. Joe Ross was the tough luck loser for Washington, allowing just two runs in 6.2 IP, his fourth 6 IP start of the season allowing two earned runs or less. In the first 21 games of his career (only 18 of them starts), Ross has compiled eleven such games, tied with Stephen Strasburg for the fourth highest such total by an Expo or National.
In game two, Zobrist delivered four more RBI as the Cubs prevailed 8-6. It was the first such back-to-back in Zobrist’s career, and the first since 1913 for a Cub second baseman. Washington starter Max Scherzer allowed four home runs (two by Zobrist), tied for the most of his career.
In game three, Washington actually led the game 4-2 after batting in the top of the sixth. But, the bullpen couldn’t hold the lead for Nats starter Gio Gonzalez, as Cub shortstop Addison Russell delivered a two-out two-RBI single for the go ahead runs in the 8th inning of an 8-5 win. The pitching decisions went to the Cubs’ Adam Warren and Nats’ Sammy Solis, both of whom also carded a blown save for their efforts. Bryce Harper failed to record an official AB in four trips to the plate, drawing three walks for the second time in the series; Joe Maddon evidently was not going to let Washington’s superstar beat his team.
Jake Arrieta took the mound for the home side in the finale; after a 24-game streak of quality starts, Arrieta lasted only five innings for the second time in three outings, but kept alive his streak of 27 starts of 5+ IP allowing 3 ER or less, tied with Bob Gibson and fellow Cub Mike Morgan for the 4th longest run since 1913. Washington again held a late lead and again gave it up as, after a Jason Heyward sacrifice bunt in the 7th, Kris Bryant greeted Yusmeiro Petit with a two-run single to knot the game at 3-3. The Nats got their leadoff man aboard in the 9th but, instead of sacrificing him to second, Daniel Murphy followed with a GIDP, setting the stage for Javier Baez‘s 13th inning walk-off homer for a 4-3 win. For the game, Washington left an astounding 21 men on base, including 8 in the four extra frames in which the Nats twice left the bases loaded. For the second game in a row, Chicago didn’t let Bryce Harper hit, walking him six times and plunking him once; it’s the first searchable instance of a player having consecutive four PA games without an AB. For the series, Harper walked 13 times in 19 PA as Chicago consistently preferred to face Ryan Zimmerman, a strategy that worked beautifully as the Z-Man scuffled with a 2 for 19. Washington may be wise to instead have another left-handed batter hit behind Harper (Daniel Murphy, presumably); with the righty Zimmerman following Harper, the enticement to walk the Nats slugger to face a weaker hitter and (usually) get a platoon advantage in the bargain is like dessert with whipped cream and a cherry on top.
Not sure where to put this, but an interesting article on best MLB teams of all time (per 538)–link is below.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-best-mlb-teams-of-all-time-according-to-elo/?ex_cid=538twitter
The stat that convinced me the 1939 Yankees were the best team ever? They went 24-0 in games decided by seven or more runs. The 1937-39 Yanks were 70-8 in such games. Ay caramba.
Being a Padres fan pretty much always sucks, but we can console ourselves with the thought that our best team, the 1998 team, defeated the Astros’ and Braves’ best teams to reach the World Series. Of course, that Padres team used exceptionally poor judgment in choosing the fourth-best team ever as its Series opponent. [*sigh*] Many of us still think back to Mark Langston’s 2-2 pitch to Tino Martinez and dream of what might have been.
That ’39 team is fascinating. Six starters between 21 and 28 starts, and two more with 11 each. I wasn’t expecting that, especially in that era. Eight hitters with double figures in HR, but none over 30 (Joe D)
Total payroll: $309K
And imagine if the Yankees had a healthy Lou Gehrig on that team. That team was so good that Frank Crosetti scored 109 runs with a .315 OBP. Only one other player has scored more runs with a lower OBP.
Examining this list is interesting for what it assumes, i.e., that a statistical formula overrides all other things in determining how good a team is. Only to me there’s no way that the 1948 Yankees were better than Boudreau’s Cleveland team that year, just for an instance, but I can’t even find the ’48 Indians on the chart and the Yanks are at #61.
1955: The Dodgers are listed at 111, even though they mopped up the NL. The Yankees, who come in at #87, struggled for parts of the season and barely won the pennant, then lost the series to the Bums.
We’ve discussed sometime or other here how the 1954 Indians were grossly overrated and the Giants, who swept the Series that year, were really the better team. This rating puts the Tribe at #24, Mays and Co. at 146.
What I really want to get at is this: I think it might be interesting for HHS contributors to list their own top tens with reasons not base on statistical formulae. The comments here by Mike L, Kahuna, and Richard are to me far more revealing than ELO ratings in favor of the 1939 Yankees. My own opinion is that for overall talent up and down the lineup, plus individual peak performance in a season, yeah, the ’39 Yanks are the team that leaps to mind. And the ’06 Cubs are right there with them. I have no quibble going down the ELO ratings in a general sense, in fact, until #s 8 and 9, the war years Cardinals. I can’t agree at all here, simply because, even in 1942, the league was weakened too much for an accurate assessment.
At any rate, I hope some others will argue against parts of this numerical abstraction. We need to shake the dust off our quiescence and have some controversy.
Bill James once said something to the effect of ‘a new statistic which always surprises you is probably garbage, and one which never surprises you is worthless.’ So I’d be wary of any ‘numerical abstraction’ which didn’t fit at least some of my presuppositions re: the greatest teams ever. Like you said, the ’39 Yanks are a perfectly cromulent pick, as are the ’06 Cubs, the ’27 Yanks and the ’98 Yanks. The ’09 Pirates don’t come up all that often, but they were 110-42 and won a competitive WS over the young Cobb’s Tigers.
I have no philosophical objection with a team that didn’t win the WS ranking ahead of a team that did – the 95 Indians rank far ahead of the 95 Braves, which I think is as it should be, since they were the much more dominant team on paper. But I agree that it’s something that should be taken into account – as always, the raw numbers tend to need a bit of massaging, but it’s interesting to see how the data looks before it’s been adjusted.
To be honest, that’s one of the things that I love about baseball, how unpredictable playoff success can be. As I believe I’ve noted before, the Indians team that got the closest to winning a WS in my lifetime, the 1997 team, was probably the worst Indians team that Cleveland fielded in the period from 1994 to 2001. And yet they were one inning away from winning it all.
100% agreed on the war years, though – that’s an obvious deficiency of a purely numerical model which doesn’t have a way to ‘put a finger on the scale’ when need be. The wartime Cardinals are getting a boost from playing in a depleted league, and though they were great teams, they don’t realistically belong in the Top 10.
Oh, and the 1948 Indians are at #97, right above the 1921 Indians at #98 and just below Cleveland’s other championship squad, the 1920 Tribe at #89.
NSB – ELO is a weird thing. Team’s carryover a large portion of their rating from the year before. And since the Yankees were clearly better than the Indians in 1947, that’s how they also end up ahead of them in 1948. I’m not sure what the rationale is behind carrying over what a team did the year before.
Read footnote 2 at the end of the article cited by Mike L in comment #1.
Okay I read the footnote and I´m more puzzled then before. The footnote seems to be saying that the rankings don´t use prior seasons. But then how do the ´48 Yankees rank above the ´48 Indians? The Indians won more games, had a larger margin of victory, and won the WS (the text indicates that postseason play is used in the rankings)? The only advantage I can see that the Yankees had is that they won the season series against the Indians 12-10. But that certainly doesn’t seem to be enough to overcome the Indians’ other advantages.
David P–I think if you take into account the 1949 Indians start to the season (note, there’s a rolling 40 games from one season to the next) you might find part of the explanation. They were 19-21, while the 1949 Yankees were 28-12
Here’s footnote 2: “Elo ratings are carried over from season to season, which means that most of a team’s rating at the start of a season is based on its previous season. This is useful when trying to estimate a team’s quality early on, but for assessing individual seasons, it unfairly dings teams that rose to greatness after a terrible year. For our season calculations, “average” and “peak” Elo calculations start at game 40”.
I would think that the last 40 games of the 1947 are the ones that impact the 1948 ratings. The Indians were 20-18 with 2 ties and the Yankees were 23-17 giving the Yankees a small edge. And what about the 1948 Red Sox who finished in 2nd place between the Indians and the Yankees. The Sox’s ratings were significantly lower than the other 2 teams, and they finished the last 40 games of 1947 at 20-19 with 1 tie.
Regardless of its overall utility, it’s an interesting “deep dive” data set – they’ve got ELO’s after every game for every franchise in NL, AL, AA and NA history.
Both the highest and lowest ever, not surprisingly, are from the 19th century. Lowest was the 1899 Cleveland Spiders after their final game (an ELO of 1333), highest was the 1875 Boston Braves/Red Stockings after their 3rd to last game of the season (1658, after their 70th win of the season brought them to 70-7 – they’d finish with one more loss and one more win to easily win the league with a 71-8 mark).
Before Wednesday, May 11, the last time the Cubs were swept in a home doubleheader at a point in the season when they were over .500 was on September 30, 2009, against the Pirates.
Doug:
Just a follow-up: seventeen days after your post the Cubs are 31-14, meaning that they have gone 7-8 since the watershed. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, has gone 10-4, closing a once large gap in the division standings.
A hot start I remember from my boyhood that resembles the Cubs’ of 2016 was that of the Dodgers in 1955. They were 25-4, lost four games in a row, then went 19-5 before they finally matched the Cubs current loss total, 14.
The Cubs are fine. They just completed what is arguably their toughest road trip of the season while the Pirates had a 10-game homestand playing Atlanta, Colorado, and Arizona. Chicago has already beaten the Pirates 5 out of 6 and are 4-2 against the Cards. They’re about to close out the Phillies in the first game of a 10-game homestand of their own:
3 games vs PHI
4 games vs LAD (they’ll miss Kershaw)
3 games vs ARI
They then play 3 at PHI and 3 at ATL before their schedule toughens up a bit. If someone is going to hunt down the Cubs I don’t think it will be in the next couple of weeks.