The Vexing Inefficiency of Cubs Starting Pitchers, Chavez Brilliance, Community Goodness, and Other Bullets

Jul 25, 2018

Love you all for supporting Make-A-Wish and the BN Blogathon, which is up to 37 straight hours on July 30 and 31 at the Trade Deadline. You can still get three more hours (and fund another wish!), but we’ve got only five days to go!

This, my good and dear friends, is abysmal:

#Cubs starts of 6+ innings
Through first 100 games of season (tonight is game #100)

2015 57
2016 68
2017 51
2018 42

— Christopher Kamka (@ckamka) July 25, 2018

The Cubs have been very fortunate to get so many effective innings (in results) from their up-and-down middle relievers, but I’m not sure you can expect that to last all season. Moreover, it is still a fundamental strain on the later-inning guys, where we’ve already seen significant time lost for Carl Edwards Jr. and Brandon Morrow. God forbid the grind catch up with Pedro Strop and Steve Cishek, or the Cubs’ bullpen would really be toast.

For the most part, the story of the Cubs’ starting rotation isn’t just that they’ve given up a lot of early runs, which has led to earlier departures. It’s also that they’ve been exceptionally inefficient and prone to walks, which have crushed their pitch counts. Consider that it isn’t just Tyler Chatwood whose walk rate has ballooned. Jon Lester’s and Jose Quintana’s walk rates are both up significantly this year. Yu Darvish, when he pitched, also saw a huge spike in his walk rate. Only Mike Montgomery and Kyle Hendricks have kept a relative lid on the walks.

(It doesn’t help that the Cubs are the worst pitch-framing team in baseball, by far, according to BP’s framing runs metric … but that’s a topic big enough to warrant separate discussion.)

Speaking of Hendricks and efficiency, he wasn’t that guy last night, though he also didn’t strike me as wild. The strike zone map, despite how it felt during the game, is pretty unremarkable. That wasn’t a bad zone. Hendricks, though, had a ton of pitches juuuuuust outside the zone.

That can be an intentional strategy to net strikeouts, and certainly Hendricks got a whole lot last night. But it can also lead to deep counts and overall inefficiency. Of course, if the alternative is getting slapped when you come into the zone, then you have to pick your poison. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hendricks barely gave up any hard contact last night.

For his part, though, Hendricks says the focus remains trying to get early bad contact (Cubs.com): “We’re talking about it with the whole staff in here – everybody, even the guys working behind the scenes – and trying to figure out if we’re falling into tendencies, patterns and what to do to get bad contact. We have to do better in the 1-1 count. Just getting outs on three pitches — that has to be the focus. It’s frustrating and a slower process than we hoped.”

Hey, so Jesse Chavez struck out the side last night, and looked great doing it. He’s pitched four pretty much perfect innings with the Cubs so far, and, just for fun, has been worth twice as much WAR with the Cubs (0.2) as in 56.1 innings with the Rangers (0.1).

Chavez also got to make his dancing debut last night, courtesy of Jason Heyward:

J-Hey makes 'em dance. #EverybodyIn pic.twitter.com/Z3MdL95eeE

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) July 25, 2018

Anthony Rizzo keeps on doing good:

Anthony Rizzo is leading an effort to tell the story of families fighting cancer to show that "Cancer Can't Compete." https://t.co/DQ4NhrfEs3
— WGN TV News (@WGNNews) July 24, 2018

And so do the Cubs:

✌️✌️ gives back! pic.twitter.com/O6dvYYsl4k

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) July 24, 2018

What a fun afternoon! #EverybodyIn pic.twitter.com/oPsFbG9tg3

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) July 24, 2018

Amazon has started promoting its back-to-school section, so if you’re a go-getter and already on top of that (God bless you, I am not), you can see all they have to offer here.

written by

Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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