Cubs in the rearview

[MillerPark]

Cubs in the rearview:

 

Objects may be closer than they appear

[Jopal78]

The Cubs success since early June can be traced to the fact that their hitters 1-6 all batted well over .300 in June

 

Soriano: .336 in June, career .305 hitter

Fontenot .397 in June

Lee: .320 in June, career .280 hitter

Ramierez: .375 in June, career .281 hitter

DeRosa .337 in June, career .285 hitter

 

Floyd .292 in June, career .279 hitter

 

IF the Brewers 1-5 hitter would all hit .320 or better for a month they probably would rack up the wins lick nobody's business. Then figure if an aging vet like Jenkins got hot for a month like Floyd the sky would really be the limit.

 

The bottom line is that the Cubs will come back to earth because there is no way their first five hitters continue to mash the ball the way they did in June.

[BrewCrewRising]

Quote:

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The Cubs success since early June can be traced to the fact that their hitters 1-6 all batted well over .300 in June

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Ah! This is the kind of rationlization-narcotic I was looking for!

 

But according to baseball-reference.com Soriano is a career .282 hitter. His OBP the last year and a half have been beyond his career norms however.

 

Now if we could just combine that ju-ju with the predictions from another thread predicting the pitching would come back down to earth too.

[hawing]

I didn't have the heart to ask yesterday, but are the cub message boards rejoicing over Bill's injury?

[rluzinski]

The Cub's offense had a .776 OPS in June an averaged 4.75 runs a game. There's no reason to think they can't keep that pace up. Their pitchers averaged a 3.83 ERA in June, however. I'd be more suspicious of that.

 

The Brewers offense, on the other hand, had a .855 OPS and averaged 6 runs a game in June. They won't be able to keep that up.

[sgtcluels]

Not to much Hawing. More of a "How much will it hurt us?". Aka Hall hasn't been all that great.

 

WHen is lee going to ride the pine for his suspension?

[Fatter than Joey]

The bottom line is that the Cubs will come back to earth because there is no way their first five hitters continue to mash the ball the way they did in June.

 

Russ beat me to it -- I don't think the Cubs are going to regress at all offensively -- as Russ astutely points out the Brewers production in June is way more unsustainable than the Cubs. If anything -- I think it is more likely that the Cubs will have a month of .800+ OPS than they will to have one less than .776.

 

As the season winds down, it is important to look at the other side of the "small sample" coin. While we all know that you can't use small samples to project historical-sized (large) groups of data, you cannot use historical (large) data to project what is going to happen in small samples. As we get closer and closer to the end of the year, expecting regressions in 1-2 months worth of data, based on historical data, just will not hold a lot of water.

 

Lee, Soriano, Ramirez, etc. are great MLB talents offensively. I certainly would not bet against these types in a pennant race.

 

Plus I see a lot of Pinella bashing on this site -- outside of his debacle in TB, he has been a very successful manager and has been in plenty of pennant races. I think Pinella could very well keep this Cubs team in the race until the end of the year.