Alexa look this shit up
Well I’ll be damned
The Cubs truly are 1st to win the World Series in the baseball reference playoff machine.
That’s a staggering development worth clarifying as I just spent this morning preparing people for the worst. Specifically, we talked a lot on today’s Monday Morning Cubs Show about last year’s start compared to 2025. We were 19-12 through the first month with a lot of momentum that completely fell apart by the end of May.
So what’s different this year?
For starters the strength of schedule is insane, and the Cubs have posted the league’s most runs and best offense against it. So that favors well into the calculations, along with some of the pitchers that failed to beat the Cubs:
- Zac Gallen twice
- Corbin Burnes
- Nathan Eovaldi
- Tyler Glasnow
- Roki Sasaki
These are bonafide game 1 and 2 starters and the Cubs are 6-0 in those games.
Another thing is the collective win percentage.
Cubs opponents are on pace for a collective 105-win season with a .642 clip. That’s an insane amount of good baseball to play against and we’d be lucky for the Cubs to be 11-13 much less 14-10. Even then you could still forecast a division championship or playoff appearance on the strength of playing lesser competition. You’d have to overanalyze the bad performance to rationalize a good May but that would still be extremely reasonable given everything we’ve seen.
Instead we don’t have to stretch it. The reality is the Cubs have grossly outperformed their schedule and expectations and that’s exactly why baseball reference is giving them a near 1-in-5 chance at this point to be WS champions.
And then one step further – the Pythagorean W/L is 16-8 and I love Pythagorean W/L. So does baseball reference.
Essentially it’s a measure of Runs Scored vs. Runs Allowed to predict your typical W-L record. And historically it’s pretty accurate of identifying teams that are under/over performing. Like the Reds in 2023… they had a dogshit Pythagorean W/L because they were giving up more runs than they scored. But even so, they had a good W-L record in that time because sometimes you lose games by 6 runs and sometimes you win them by 1. Over time, the Reds had won more games but the run differential was trash enough for experts to identify an imbalance via Pythagorean W/L.
The Cubs are the opposite here. The Pythagorean says we should be 16-8 vs. 14-10 which is a good thing for the Cubs. Usually you correct yourself towards the benchmark over time which would mean the 2025 Cubs picking up another couple good-luck wins like games 1 and 2 against the Diamondbacks.
Game 1 we gave up 10 runs in the top of the 8th and still won.
Game 2 Ben Brown threw just 4 innings walking 4 guys on 100 pitches and we still won
Some more good luck would be 2-0 in Justin Steele starts that have been missed. We’re also lucky to be decent without an MLB 3rd baseman or more than 3 trustworthy bullpen arms.
We’re lucky Carson Kelly is smashing more homers than strikeouts. We’re lucky Kyle Tucker got traded from the Astros. We’re lucky Ryan Pressly got traded from the Astros. And Michael Busch looks awesome and PCA is rapidly getting better.
There’s a bunch of stuff going our way right now and even then the experts say it’s still 2-games behind where we should be. So for all of these reasons we feel very good and that’s enough to understand Baseball Reference buying the hype.
For now though it’s just good to not be in the basement. It feels good to have momentum and a solid core and a friendly May schedule as we get into the meat and potatoes.
So enjoy all that shit including the projections and when you get some time, please check out the Monday Morning Cubs Show. It’s an appropriate leveler coming out of the most difficult April I can ever remember and that’s a good thing for everyone.
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