A few weeks ago, John Perrotto mentioned - in an oddly casual way - that there were some grumblings around baseball that the Cubs were stealing signs at Wrigley via the manual scoreboard in center field. Presumably there were two reasons for this: (1) the Cubs were playing extremely well at home and (2) the Cubs have a manual scoreboard in center field, facilitating the alleged theft. (Goat Riders of the Apocalypse made fun of the idea a few weeks ago, around the same time when I first read Perrotto's column. It's noteworthy that when I Googled "2008 Cubs stealing signs," most of the hits were Cubs blogs or message boards laughing about it, and no one actually accusing the Cubs of doing it. There was one top ten hit saying "Cards accuse Cubs of stealing signs," but it dated to 2002.)
At 34-10, the Cubs do indeed have baseball's best home record, and they combine that with a not-exactly-gaudy 20-26 road mark. But as noted before in this space, this isn't exactly all that unusual this year. Milwaukee (29-14/21-26), Boston (33-10/21-29), Tampa Bay (36-14/19-20), the White Sox (32-13/20-24) and Minnesota (32-18/18-22) all have comparable discrepancies, and that's just among teams with 50 wins or more. Are all these teams cheating at home? Surely the Cubs' mark isn't such an outlier that they're the only ones worthy of speculation. (Why not Boston, even worse on the road than the Cubs and basically exactly as good at home?)
There is, of course, the team hitting - the Cubs go .311/.391/.502 at home and .257/.331/.395 on the road. That's 54 points of average and 60 of OBP. But their home BABIP is also 41 points higher (.347 to .306); add in the home runs that the Cubs hit at Wrigley that might just be long flies elsewhere (the Cubs as a team average a home run per 27.4 PAs at Wrigley, and just one every 46.9 PAs away from it), and that accounts for much of the difference in average and OBP - a few more homers and plain ol' good luck.
Furthermore, again, this is not a problem unique to the Cubs, even if they are on the extreme end. The White Sox lose 99 points of OPS on the road; Milwaukee's road OBP is .317 (though their home OBP is a mere .332); Boston's road OBP drops 33 points from their home. The .500 Orioles hit 30 points better at Camden Yards. The Braves, baseball's ugliest road team, give up 38 points of BA and 40 points of OBP when they leave Turner Field.
(Fact: the Cubs' road OBP of .331, supposedly so lousy and proof that they're cheating at home, is seven points higher than the season OBP of Milwaukee, a supposedly dangerous offensive team. It's .003 behind the season OBP of Philadelphia, the #2 run-scoring team in the NL.)
But apparently it's not even just hitting where the Cubs are supposedly cheating. Out of nowhere - Perrotto's article is the only other place I can recall seeing a reference to the idea prior to Googling it for this post - Christina Kahrl dropped this little nugget into her analysis of the Harden trade:
If you really want to depress yourself, A's fans, sign up for the suggestion that the Cubs are cheating in their home park, and look at Gallager's [sic] road performance, where opposing hitters have pasted him at a .271/.341/.472 clip.
Uh, what? Even if you sign up for the idea that the Cubs hitters are getting the signs, how would Cubs pitchers be able to cheat at home in a way undetectable by umpires or opposing teams? (Even if something like overwatering the infield were being done - which I don't think I would even classify as cheating - doesn't that help the opposing team just as much?)
In addition, such an accusation isn't even borne out by the statistics. People have pointed to Ryan Dempster's record, but that owes mostly to his hitters' road woes; if you remove the aberrational 8-run disaster against the White Sox on June 27 from his road record, Dempster's road ERA is 2.55 - his home ERA is 2.58. His road WHIP is higher... by about one hit (or walk) every nine innings. His 0-3 road form owes as much to bad luck as anything - there were at least three games where he pitched well enough to win, only to see the bullpen blow the lead (most recently in his last start, July 2 in San Francisco, where he turned a 5-2 lead over to Marmol only for Carlos to serve a meatball to Ray Durham), and another game where he allowed five unearned runs thanks to errors by Fontenot and DeRosa.
Examining the rest of the rotation, Ted Lilly has actually pitched better, or at least more effectively, on the road (4.07 road ERA to a 4.92 home ERA) thanks to his home-run allowing tendencies, although he does have more strikeouts at home. Marquis' road ERA is nearly three runs lower than his home ERA. (Maybe he and Dempster should platoon.) Zambrano's ERA is a bit worse on the road but the sample size is such that the difference is negligible. Gallagher pitched worse on the road, but on the other hand he's a 22-year-old kid. Maybe the Cubs get a slightly more favorable strike zone at home, but a lot of teams with loud fans probably do, and anyway it hasn't made much difference to how many runs they give up. (Besides, that isn't the Cubs cheating, it's the umpires either cheating or just being inept and easily swayed by a raucous crowd.)
The Cubs as a staff give up .44 more runs per game on the road, but how tenuous is that figure? Well, it drops to .31 more runs per game if you take out Dempster's 2.1-inning, 8 ER debacle. Pull out the 9-0 abomination at Cincinnati on May 7 (when Lieber gave up 4 HR in one inning) and it's down to .18, which it seems to me is barely anything. How much of the "proof" for the claims of cheating at home is based on a little home BABIP luck from the hitters and two bad road starts out of 46?
In other words, I've had enough of this. Either give me some proof, or some statistics that can legitimately support the idea, or please, please, shut the hell up. Cubs fans have waited too long to have a season like this tainted by hearsay and conjecture, as the gleeful rumormongers grasp at any straws in sight. Isn't it bad enough that every single Cubs postseason appearance is going to be accompanied by video of Steve Bartman, a goat, a black cat, and every other terrible thing from the last 99 years on an infinite loop? Do you really have to try this hard to ruin the season for us before we even hit the All-Star break?
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