I predict the Cubs win

One of my favorite quotes, from Damon Runyon, sums up why I think most sports-related prognostication is silly.  Runyon said, “Remember, the race is not always to the swiftest, nor the battle to the strongest, but that’s the way to bet.”

You want to predict who will win the NBA championship? At the start of this season, saying anything other than Warriors or Cavaliers would have been either stupid or partisan fandom.  Who will win March Madness? Sure, you can choose a “Cinderella,” but the two teams playing in the championship game are both #1 seeds.  The winner of next year’s Super Bowl will probably not be the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and I’d be willing to put some money on that.

So, who will win the 2017 World Series?  Excuse me if I go for the obvious and answer that it will be the Chicago Cubs. In any year, the winner of last year’s championship is usually the favored team, even if repeating championships is rare (in 90 years only one National League team has managed to repeat, the 1975-76 Big Red Machine).  But this year is different, in that the Cubs should be favored for reasons other than shear inertia.

The Cubs underperformed last year. Yes, they won 103 games, which is very impressive.  However, they performed like a team that should have won 110, which is one of the four or five greatest performances ever.  The discrepancy is based on a new-fangled stat called clusterluck, which looks at how a team’s statistics translated to wins in previous years.  Say a team gets 9 hits in a game; how many runs would you expect them to score?  If all the hits were in one inning, then six or seven, maybe 8.  If the hits were spread out one per inning, the answer is zero.  Looking back over how teams grouped their hits in the past 130 years of baseball we can say that given how the Cubs hot, they should have won an additional 7 games, but they were unlucky.

Add to this that manager Joe Maddon might have deflated those stats (in a good way, not like Tom Brady) by easing up as his team clinched the NL Central Division and locked up home field advantage in the playoffs.  The Cubs started off incredibly hot, then cooled off in the second half of the season.  Maybe if they, like the 2016 Warriors, wanted to set the record for most wins they would have, but at what price for the post season?

Then there is the fact that the team’s offense is powered by incredibly young players on their way up.  The Cubs position players were the 5^th youngest in the league, most under 27 years old.  This means that unlike older players with diminishing skills, their hitting prowess will only improve.  In the case of Kris Bryant, that should terrify National League pitchers.

The only every-day player the Cubs lost was their lead-off hitter, Dexter Fowler, who departed to the hated Cardinals.  On the other hand, they lost Kyle Schwarber early in April and didn’t get him back until the World Series, so barring another injury he’ll be there for the entire season.  They lost Alroldis Chapman, but he was only there for part of the season.  Thanks to Maddon’s over-use in the post-season Chapman nearly blew Game 7 of the Series, and closers are overrated anyway.

The one source of concern is the starting rotation, which is not a collection of youngsters like the offense and have been atypically free of injury the last two years.  Maybe they are overdue for some elbow trouble, but these days what staff isn’t one Tommy John injury away from just missing the post-season?

When some talking heads on ESPN were making predictions the other day, the first one picked the Cubs.  The second one said, “Well, yeah, they should be good, but they could have injuries so I’m picking the Dodgers.”  First off, why is he assuming the Dodgers will be more free of injuries than the Cubs?  What if Clayton Kershaw goes down for the entire season and not just a couple of months like last season?  Any team can be laid low by injuries, and if anything, the Cubs’ relative youth puts the odds in the Cubs’ favor, not another team’s.

Add to all this the genius of Joe Maddon, who did a masterful job of riding the front runners last year and is the perfect manager to keep the Cubs from complacency.

This is not to say the Cubs are a lock; FiveThirtyEight has them the favorite to win the World Series at only 14%.  The post-season is notoriously fickle, and as great as the Cubs were last year, they dodged a couple of close calls in October.  But anyone predicting any team other than the Cubs winning the 2017 World Series is whistling in a graveyard.

If all goes as expected, the Cubs should handily win the NY Central again and make a strong run to repeat.  108 years ago, the Cubs won back-to-back titles, then had a century long dry spell.  If you want to put some money on the 2017 World Series, the Cubs are the way to bet.