Another week has passed and the Cubs have been playing very well.  Let’s look at team status lines.

The Cubs went 5-1 adding +4 wins.  BAT is almost the same as last week which means they hit almost exactly league average.  A team that plays completely league average ends up with an 81-81 record which won’t get them in the playoffs.  PITCH is up, and UR is up which accounts for the 4 wins they gained last week.  This is two weeks in a row UR has made significant gains which means Cubs’ are fielding much better.   Unearned runs count the same as earned runs when determining who wins a game.  We count them here.  Much of Sabermetrics throws them away.  Here are the top Cubs players.

Again, the top three Cub players are relievers.   The Cubs have a very good relief staff, #4 in MLB.  Only 4 Cubs in top 200 but Rizzo and Bryant are hanging in there.  This isn’t that bad because although the Cubs don’t have a lot of top players right now, that means they don’t have a lot of bottom of the league players either.  Most Cubs are hovering around average.   IMHO that’s better than having players at both ends of the spectrum.  As we showed last week, some of the worst Cubs teams had many players in the top 200 which means they had many more players dragging those teams down to the cellar.   Ultimately by the end of the season perpetually bad players will keep dragging a team under 0.500.

Here are  top 5 MLB relief staffs.

We explained this table last month here.  The Cubs are virtually tied with the Dodgers and Yankees for second place.  Cleveland has Andrew Miller who is pitching lights out this year so far.  Of the top 5 the Cubs still have the highest relief innings pitched.

Perhaps next week we’ll do our All Star picks which might be fairly cruel to the Cubs this year but the numbers are what they are.  The only All Star games that matter are the playoffs and  the World Series.  Don’t feel like doing Blast from the Past this week.  We’ll do MLB leaders in a couple of days.  Until then….