Team Offense, Chicago Cubs

The series on team offense continues with the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs finished twenty eighth in the majors and 14 in the National League in 2012 with 3.78 runs scored per game.

The CBSSports.com projected lineup that Dale Sveum may use is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. For the pitchers, the team’s 2012 results were used. That information produces the following results:

Best lineup: 4.16
Probable lineup: 3.96
Worst lineup: 3.86
Regressed lineup: 4.10

Sveum nails the top of the lineup. In fact, the seventh best lineup has David DeJesus, Starlin Castro, Anthony Rizzo, and Alfonso Soriano 1-2-3-4. That said, the improvement in the Cubs scoring is more likely to come from the maturation of Anthony Rizzo and Starlin Castro than from tweaks in the batting order. Castro hit a plateau in 2012, falling back a bit in BA and OBP. It looks like it is well within the natural variation in seasons all players experience, although it may be the league figuring out his weaknesses as well. It would be nice to see Starlin take his game to the next level this year, although he’s still two seasons away from the start of the peak of his career.

Rizzo is the same seasonal age, so he two has time to mature. Both hit very well this spring. The upside for the Cubs is that they turn into Rickey Henderson and Don Mattingly. In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how the Cubs fill in the team around these two stars.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

Previous posts in the series:

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March 27, 2013

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