The Best Individual Cubs Seasons of All-Time, the Giants (and Bryant) Projections, and Other Cubs Bullets

I left the house this morning to do the coffee, writing, gym thing … with The Little Boy’s backpack in my car. D’oh. Forgetful in my old age or just normal parent brain stuff?

•   With the MLB dot com staff in evergreen content mode, you actually do see some interesting things up at Cubs.com right now. Jordan Bastian put together an all-single-season team – i.e., the team of Cubs using the best individual season at each spot. You can actually probably guess most of the players at most of the spots, even if you don’t have the best season for each at the top of your mind (they’re not all as obvious as, for example, Derrek Lee’s 2005 season at first base). You might be surprised to see Fergie Jenkins get the starting pitcher spot over Jake Arrieta’s 2015 campaign, but I can certainly see Bastian’s argument:

Picking the best single-season pitching performance for the Cubs is complicated. Do you go with a modern show of dominance like Jake Arrieta in 2015? He went 22-6 with a 1.77 ERA and took home the NL Cy Young Award. Or, do you reach back to 1885 and go with John Clarkson? All he did was win 53 games with a 1.85 ERA in 623 innings. That’s not a typo. We’ll reach to the middle, where Jenkins had an incredible Cy Young-winning campaign in ’71. Jenkins led MLB with 24 wins, 30 complete games and a 7.1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. The right-hander spun a 2.77 ERA over 325 innings, beginning with a 10-inning masterpiece to beat Bob Gibson on Opening Day. He struck out 263 and walked 37 in 39 starts.

•   It doesn’t register as all that bitter – some disappointment is understandable, given the hype with which he arrived – but I think the New York media is going to be extremely chapped if Clint Frazier succeeds with the Cubs:

Here's our early @nydnsports back page, with Knicks and Nets to come. @yankees @Cubs @mlb @mlbnetwork @apse_sportmedia #clintfrazier https://t.co/jAvwnc7FJp pic.twitter.com/jZahDoOjVG

— Back Page Guy NYDN (@BackPageGuyNYDN) December 9, 2021

•   How the article concludes:

Known for his love of sneakers and bringing personality to his cleats as well as an active social media presence, Frazier rubbed some in the organization steeped in tradition the wrong way. He was also embraced by many fans who liked seeing the personality on display.

That seems to overshadow the fact that in parts of five seasons in the big leagues, Frazier’s proven to be a career .249/.327/.434 hitter in 707 at bats in the majors.

•   Ignoring the fact that even that line is still good for a 105 wRC+, and the fact that he was injured for most of 2021, which was his worst year by far. The guy only just turned 27, and hit .267/.347/.497 (124 wRC+) in 2019-20 when he was getting regular playing time. Because of the injury questions, you cannot presume he’ll just suddenly be that guy with the Cubs, mind you. I’m just saying it’s a little disingenuous to wrap a discussion of Frazier’s time in New York with that slash line as if it tells you everything you need to know.

•   Because of the Giants’ 2021 season, and how absurdly they outpaced their preseason projections, I was definitely more interested in seeing their ZiPS projections than most non-Cubs teams. To be sure, the offseason is not over, but I knew that – a lot like last year – when you look over their roster, it’s just not that impressive. At all. And although there was surely some good luck and overperformance last year in their 107 wins, it wasn’t all mere fortuitous bounces. So how do we square these things? More interestingly for the moment, how the heck does a projection system square it? Well, based on the 2022 ZiPS projections for the Giants … you don’t square it. After all, it’s a data system. And the data system does its thing and once again suggests the Giants are gonna suck in 2022:

2022 ZiPS Projections – San Francisco #Giants are live on @FanGraphs.https://t.co/rGAwc5AiTv#ZiPS22

— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) December 8, 2021

•   Szymborski notes that last year’s ZiPS miss was his worst in 20 years, but that shouldn’t really be taken as a shot when you would’ve been nuts to project last year’s Giants for more than 85 wins. So now, with mostly the same team returning, but without Buster Posey and all a year older, of course the Giants project terribly! That doesn’t mean they actually will be terrible if they’ve truly figured out some secret sauce for (1) getting huge performances out of older offensive players, and (2) coordinating lineups/rotation/in-game decisions in a way that no other team has figured out yet. I’ll be very interested to see what happens next year, and also whether some other team gets in on the action in 2022 and winds up winning 25+ more games than projected, for reasons we’ll be scrambling to try to figure out in September.

•   Kris Bryant’s ZiPS are included in the Giants release, by the way, since he was last with them: .261/.351/.463, 119 OPS+, 3.1 WAR. Good, solid player. But not a guy you’d be sprinting to give $150+ million for his ages 30 through 34 seasons.

•   Among today’s Daily Deals at Amazon is the Eero mesh wi-fi system, which I’m gonna give a big recommendation because we love ours. Easy, reliable, and way better than the single wireless route situation we used to have. It’s kind of amazing to remember how many dead zones we had, how often I had to reset, and all that crap (and that was with a fairly pricey router). This is an #ad but it’s also just true.

•   Random enjoyable moment:

Remember when Tony Campana hit the fastest inside-the-park homer in baseball history (probably)? pic.twitter.com/wlXzN5S8SG

— Bleacher Nation (@BleacherNation) December 9, 2021

•   This is so tough because I feel like each guy did something this year that is basically impossible (but I’d probably go with Ohtani in a very close call):

I love Tom Brady. However, this is a HUGE miss.

Shohei Ohtani, doing things on the field we’ve never seen done before, immensely growing the game internationally, and inserting himself as an icon within game over 1 season, is most deserving and it’s really not close. https://t.co/0QLyT0MIe5

— Max Bain (@mbain_38) December 8, 2021

•   That’s OK, we’re good:

Aaron Rodgers just admitted he was a Cubs fan growing up.

— Cubs Live (@Cubs_Live) December 8, 2021

•   Good trade, indeed. The headline will elicit a chuckle, but Ryne Sandberg does come in for prominent mention early on, and Dallas Green winds up looking like the finesse king:

This was posted in a Sandberg Facebook Group this morning…good trade for the Cubs. pic.twitter.com/1EwljDToDM

— CarolinaCardExchange (@CarolinaCardEx1) December 8, 2021

•   wut:

Report: The Arizona Coyotes May Get Locked Out of Their Arena…No Reallyhttps://t.co/djzz2f0K5E

— Bleacher Nation Blackhawks (@BN_Blackhawks) December 9, 2021