Playing Hard [Hit] Ball
The Chicago Cubs offense is weird, but the weird has worked out relatively well so far this season.
The Chicago Cubs are scoring a lot of runs despite hitting a league average 29.9 percent hard contact rate, and while residing in the bottom third of the MLB in batting average on balls in play (BABIP).
That combination of factors working successfully in conjunction with each other seems preposterous. But, this is the 2017 Chicago Cubs we are talking about, and reality has generally defied logic so far with this squad.
The Cubs 5.05 runs per game checks in at №. 7 in the MLB and, up to this point, exceeds their run rate from a season ago (4.93 runs per game in 2016). Certainly, all the walks the Cubs have generated has helped boost the roster’s run-scoring capabilities. Through 43 games, the Cubs have averaged 4.16 walks per game which ranks second in the MLB and tops their MLB-leading 3.92 walk average from a season ago.
However, consistently inducing hard contact has been an area where they have struggled. The balls aren’t flying off the bats right now, as evidenced by the collective .414 slugging percentage which is 15th-best in the MLB.
Is the Cubs inability to consistently square up pitches for hard contact a real cause for concern? Here are some of the Cubs player’s individual hard contact percentages this season.
The second table contextualizes the first, illustrating that most of the Cubs hitters are around MLB average at generating hard contact off the bat. It therefore shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Cubs collective hard contact percentage on batted balls is a tenth of a point below league average (.300).
The lower hard contact percentage has unsurprisingly yielded a low BABIP. The Cubs are a team that has found ways to score runs despite a .288 BABIP which ranks 20th in the MLB.
Obviously, BABIP doesn’t correlate indiscriminately with offensive success. However, running through the list of the teams with the best collective BABIP thus far, eight of the ten have records north of .500. Hard contact is a huge factor in determining BABIP, because generally hard hit balls have a better shot of dropping in for hits.
Two other factors also determine BABIP: opposing defenses and luck.
At this point in the season, every team is within two percentage points in terms of team fielding percentage. Therefore, it seems unlikely that defensive variation between opponents has contributed to the Cubs BABIP. Additionally, luck has actually been on the Cubs side this season. Cubs opponents commit the second-most errors per game when playing the Cubs. Although very minor statistically, this would likely help the Cubs BABIP rather than hurt it.
All of these factors make the Cubs run scoring production this season a bit of an anomaly. Theoretically, the offense will begin squaring up more balls, improving the team BABIP and slugging percentage which will likely increase the production of this potent offense. We have actually seen these deviations towards the statistical norms over the last week.
In the last seven days, the Cubs have scored 45 runs in six games (7.5 runs per game), while seeing increases in their hard contact percentage, BABIP, and slugging percentages.
Last season, the Cubs had a .302 BABIP, a 30.8 percent hard contact rate, and a .429 slugging percentage while fielding a relatively similar roster. The numbers in all these categories are lower so far this season compared to last.
However, there is still something positive to take away from all of this. The Cubs have survived low hard contact rates, a bad BABIP, high strikeout numbers, average slugging, and the fourth-hardest strength of schedule up to this point and still emerged from the carnage with a record above .500.
When the Cubs begin ascending towards statistical means, which seems inevitable with the talent compiled on this roster, they will start winning games and take control of this division. A larger sample size of games generally evens things out, and some of the statistics that were below average through the first 40+ games of this new season should return to normal.
Therefore, there is no need to panic, even though it’s the end of May. The Cubs have played poor baseball for most of the season and still find themselves north of the .500 mark. That is a win.
Statistics don’t factor in the Chicago Cubs win against the San Francisco Giants on May 24. I used the Windows “Snip Tool” to grab screenshots of charts from FanGraphs.com. All the media in this article comes from this site.
Paul Steeno spent 11 years pretending he was good at running. After hanging up the track spikes and officially becoming an elite hobby jogger, he decided to do something that he was actually good at: like writing about the Cubs. He is also a perpetually frustrated Chicago Bulls fan. This one time he got super lucky and ran 3:52 in the 1500-meter run.
