Game 5 — Must Win For Cubs — Lots of Graphs — Will They Start Hitting?

tldr: Cubs need to keep hit their differential close to zero and need to target 9 hits to win Game 5.

Hi folks — Harry Doyle here with a look at game 5.

Last night was a major bummer for the Cubs. As I talked about in the game 4 analysis, Kluber was going to be hard to beat (he is a machine on the Vaughn rating) and if Lackey were to lose his control bad things would happen. Both things did happen. In addition the Indians started hitting again.

I have been so focused on pitching analysis (performance to pressure) I have not spent much time on batting (after all the Harry Doyle method is all about run prevention). However, since both the Cubs and the Indians have been batting so poorly, I decided to take a closer look at batting as tonights pitching match up favors hitters more so than last night.

Note: I previously did analysis on Lester for game 1 and Bauer for game 2. However, I do summarize them both again at the end of this post.

Let’s talk batting. Here is a 14 day moving average for the Indians and Cubs batting averages over their last 150 games — including post season and the World Series. It’s a race to the bottom.

Let’s drill into the last 14 games. Ugh. Gross. You can see just how lucky the Indians were to make it through the ALCS (low of .150 BA — actually worse if not smoothed out).

Note: You can build these yourself by plowing through this document and hacking on BigQuery and Datalab. Thanks to my friends at Sportradar for the help.

And you can see the downward decent of the Cubs. Not good.

This got me thinking more about the psychological impact of batting so poorly when the pressure matters, especially for the Cubs. Since the Cubs just crushed their opponents during the regular season I decided to look at run their run production more closely. After all, runs mainly come from hits.

The graph below shows that the Cubs won by an average of about 4.5 runs per game and they lost games by an average of just under 4 runs. This concerns me, mainly because it is an indication that they don’t perform well when the games are close.

Let’s look at batting averages for the Cubs by win/loss split (see below). No surprise here. The Cubs bat better when they win; however, there are two things that concern me — both in the LOSS category. One is the max/min spread and two is the delta between win and loss means, which is almost .07. When they are down they are down.

So what does this look like in terms of hits per game? For wind — the data is a bit skewed, but the Cubs target around comfortable with 10 hits per game for a win and get into the danger zone (loss) at around 6.25 hits.

So if the Cubs need ~10 hits to win a game — how have they performed over the first 4 games in the World Series?

Hits <= 7 are losses. Their game 2 win was driven by 9 hits and a score differential of 4.

The Cubs won game 2 with 6 hits off of Bauer over 3.2 innings.

However, in game 1 the Indians got 6 hits (including a home run) in 5.2 innings off of Lester and then went on to get 4 more hits off of the Cubs pen for the win.

Net-net the Cubs need to target 9 hits and keep the hit differential close to 0 if they are going to be competitive in game 5. To get there — they are going to need to rattle Bauer and drive more at bats. He gave up 2 walks in game 2. If the Cubs can get 4 walks out of Bauer that would be very valuable. If they can crank out a home run — even better.

One more thing. Here is Bauer and Lester mapped over their respective control to pressure scores for all games (REG/POST/WS). Lester is the better pitcher. If Bauer has a top game, it could be a sad night for the Cubs. If both pitchers bring their typical games and the Cubs get their bats going (per above) they have a good chance at winning game 5.

Note: the Indians got 6 hits (including a home run) in 5.2 innings off of Lester in game 1 and then went on to get 4 more hits off of the Cubs pen for the win.