BruisedCrew

There’s the break of the season.

Enjoy the game tonight.

Wrong again. You couldn’t even quote me correctly.

Please read my post a little more carefully. The words “would be” are important in making it clear that this is something that probably “would” happen IF the Cubs win the division, not something that I said “will happen”. Neither I nor edfunderburk said that we are assuming that the Cubs are winning the division.

What would make it worse is that, unless the Brewers really collapse, the Cubs would be clinching the division at AFF, probably with about half of the crowd cheering them on. I’m kind of glad I will be in Europe that weekend.

Now 6-1 in the ninth. Still waiting for evidence that the Cubs pitching isn’t going to hold up.

Honestly, I think looking at underlying metrics in the context of a single game takes the fun out of the game. Getting hits in the right spots and making defensive plays in the right spots are a significant part of the game.

Maybe I’m in the minority but I still think the division race is coming down to the final weekend. If the teams are tied or within one game of each other it will be a best of 3 to win the division, I REALLY don’t want to see the Brewers play the Cubs in the wild card playoff round.

Not so much fun when they show why it doesn’t matter when you can advance another runner to third on the play and then drive him in.

Not the time to hand them a free base runner. Can’t blame the umpires for that one either.

Vintage Hendricks outing against the Brewers. 5 IP, no ER.

I completely agree that it’s in line to point it out. But it can be done in an objective and not insulting way. For example, I think “Actually the Brewers are 25th in MLB in FB%…” is less snarky than “but hey, too geared to hit fly balls”.

I would point out that there are a lot of very good, very loyal Brewers and baseball fans that don’t live and die with the alphabet soup of advanced stats that some other fans do. That doesn’t make them (or maybe I should say us) unintelligent or inferior fans. Maybe a simple response pointing out what you think is a relevant stat would serve the purpose. By the way, in the case of the fly ball percentage stat, is that a percentage of all at bats or just at bats that produce a ball put in play?

Hyperbole aside, Hendricks has had more than his share of low run outings against the Brewers, especially at Wrigley Field. Brewers hitters are going to need the patience to lay off the outside crap he throws and be willing to take the outside pitches in the strike zone to right field instead of trying to pull them (Willy Adames please note). If the wind is like it is here it might be blowing more out to right instead of in like it did last night. Woodruff is going to have to avoid the walks and keep the ball in the park because run support might be hard to come by.

The matchup I don’t like is Hendricks vs the Brewers hitters. I’ve seen him baffle the Brewers enough times to be concerned about him, especially if he doesn’t have to worry about gopher balls.

Though they’re a lot easier once you win 9. 😀 I had a bad feeling about this game when I saw a feature on the local news talking about the Brewers being 3 wins away from triggering free burgers from George Webb. Not liking the matchup tomorrow with Hendriks, who tends to shut down the Brewers at Wrigley anyway, pitching with the wind blowing in.

I’ve often seen comments to the effect that Counsell is clueless with respect to reverse splits. So, what do you do in the situation in which the pitcher has reverse splits (at least for this season if not his career) and one of your hitters has “normal” splits? For example, should Counsell ignore that Turang has had trouble hitting LHP and put him in against Steele, or should he play a RH hitter who has had much more success against LHP? Same for playing Frelick or Tellez. Or do you try to slice things deeper and try to see how some of the hitters have done against other pitchers with reverse splits, at which point you might have trouble having a significant sample size. I suspect that Counsell does not have a complete inability to comprehend reverse splits. I just think there’s more to it than completely letting the opposing starting pitcher’s splits dictate your lineup. My guess is that Turang will be in the lineup tonight if only because of his defense, and that Santana will be in if he’s available. BTW, I wonder if some LHP SP might have reverse splits because opponents only use their best LH hitters against them.

I brought it here because the discussion about schedule strength seems more relevant to this thread than a specific game thread, and has been raised here several times in the past.

That was my original point. When you watch games on TV you can see that it’s the same all over and singling out Wrigley is silly. There are much more aggravating things to criticize Cubs fans for.

With those tight lines up against the bricks Levering probably couldn’t see it land and had to wait for the call.

Why? When you spend the weekend with people around you getting excited at virtually every ball hit in the air, I have a hard time criticizing Cubs fans for doing the same thing.

You can look at the thread yourself to see the details, but I first responded to a poster who said that, after looking at the Cubs schedule, they would be surprised if the race stays close and that the Cubs would pretty much have to sweep the 6 games against the Brewers and get some additional help to stay close. Although the word "significant" wasn't used, that comment pretty clearly indicates they think the Cubs schedule is significantly harder. My response expressing my differing opinion stated that I don't think the Cubs schedule is any harder than the Brewers schedule. I got two responses, one telling me that the Cubs schedule is "objectively tougher" and another that the Cubs schedule is "harder". Though they didn't use the word "significant" I wouldn't expect someone to respond that way unless they thought the difference in schedule difficulty was significant.

I heard plenty of them at AFF at the games I attended on Saturday and Sunday. I don't think that reaction is exclusive to Wrigley fans or necessarily worse than at other places.

There was some exchange at the end of the game thread yesterday about whether the Cubs have a more difficult remaining schedule than the Brewers. I got some pushback on my opinion that the Cubs schedule isn't any harder than the Brewers schedule and I'm going to elaborate on that opinion here. One response I got declared that the Cubs' schedule is harder because their opponents have an aggregate winning percentage of .506 vs .485 for the Brewers' opponents. I think these numbers support my point more than refute it. The Brewers and Cubs both have 10 series and 32 games remaining. In 32 games a team with a winning percentage of .506 would expect to pick up 16.192 wins, while a team with a .485 winning percentage would have 15.52 wins. So, by this measure alone, the Brewers schedule "advantage" would be about a half a game. To illustrate how insignificant this difference is, the Brewers current winning percentage is .562 and the Cubs percentage is .531. That difference of .031 percentage points is slightly higher than the .021 points difference between the Cubs and Brewers opponents. Would you really argue objectively that a team that had to play the Cubs this week has an "easier" schedule than one playing the Brewers because of that difference in winning percentage? The other problem with using season to date winning percentages to project future schedule difficulty is that the teams that play in September may be different or peforming significantly better or worse than the teams that played the first 5 months. It has already been mentioned that the Braves might not be as imposing the last week of the season (when the Cubs play them) as they have been for most of the season. They might be resting players, shortening outings for their pitchers, or playing with less motivation than they did before they locked up one of the playoff byes. As for teams currently fighting for wild card spots, they might have dropped out of contention before the Cubs or Brewers play them. And those teams have not necessarily been more difficult to beat than ones who are out of contention. To illustrate this, just look at the records of NL teams since the All Star break. In the 40 or so games each team has played since the break, 5 of the 6 best records belong to the Dodgers, Cubs, Brewers, Braves, and Phillies, not coincidentally the top 5 teams in the playoff race. The outlier with a record of 25-16 (virtually the same as the Brewers 24-15) is the Nationals, who would be considered a relatively easy opponent based on their overall record. All other NL teams have records under .500 since the break, including the Mets (18-23), Cardinals (18-23), Padres (18-23), and Pirates (17-24), whose records are very similar to, if not better than, the playoff contenders. The post break records of those contenders: Giants (18-22), Reds (18-23), DBacks (17-23), Marlins (13-26). When you put all of this uncertainty together, I conclude that the Brewers schedule advantage over the Cubs falls somewhere between nonexistent and insignificant. Their real advantage comes entirely from the 4 game lead they currently hold, plus the one game edge in the season series against the Cubs. This highlights all the more how pivotal the current series is. The Cubs can significantly improve their position just by winning 2 out of 3, much less winning all 3. BTW, Fangraphs projects the Brewers to go 17-15 in their last 32 games, and the Cubs to go 16-16. This suggests that the projections do not detect a significant schedule advantage for the Brewers.

A nice weekend of seeing two Brewers wins. Those big innings are fun, though the walks today by both teams made for a pretty ugly game. Anyway, I don’t agree with this comment. I don’t think the Cubs remaining schedule is any harder than the Brewers’ and we’ve seen how often things don’t go as expected. Ask the Rangers how quickly things can change in one week. If the Cubs can win 2 out of 3 in each of their two series that would give them the tiebreaker. And they’d only have to pick up 2 additional games in their other 8 series. I’m still expecting the division to be decided in that final series.