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Cubs leadoff hitters through the years By JohnW53 on Feb 7, 2021, 4:51am CST + It's possible to win a title without having a high-average leadoff man. The Cubs proved it in 2020, winning the Central Division despite ranking last of all 30 Major League teams in batting average for players who started games at the top of the batting order. The Cubs' .211 average was 4 points behind that of the second-worst Reds, 6 behind the No. 28 Brewers and 10 behind the co-No. 26 Pirates and Rangers. All 25 other teams had an average of at least .230 by their leadoff man. The Marlins ranked 21s...

February 7, 2021 Garrett Richards has an uncanny ability to spin a baseball. Per Statcast, the 32-year-old right-hander — recently signed to a free-agent contract by the Boston Red Sox — was 99th percentile in curveball spin last year, while his four-seam spin ranked in the 97th percentile. Moreover, the most-effective weapon in his arsenal, a 2,746-RPM slider, was topped only by Sergio Romo’s 2,913 RPMs among hurlers who threw the pitch at least 200 times. Richards’s least-effective offering in 2020 was a two-seamer that’s hard to put a positive spin on. The erstwhile San Diego Pad...

14 Cubs form chain that spans 145 seasons By JohnW53 on Dec 20, 2020, 7:35am CST 1 Some years ago, an enterprising baseball historian figured out how to make a chain of just 9 players that spanned the history of Major League Baseball. It began with Harry Wright of the 1869 Cincinnati Reds, the first professional team. In his final season, another player was a rookie, and it that player's final season, a third player was a rookie, and so on to the current season. (I hunted for the story online but could not find it.) I wondered how few players it would take to do something similar...

Cubs 'played' by 'wire' to aid war bond sales By JohnW53 on Dec 19, 2020, 3:10am CST + Over the years, Major League baseball teams have raised significant amounts of money for charities and war relief -- and not always by playing exhibition games. In 1919, the Cubs took part in a one-of-a-kind effort to raise funds with which to buy Liberty Bonds, issued by the U.S. government to help pay debts that had piled up during World War I. ... The government sold $17 billion of bonds in a series of 5 drives. The bonds for the first drive, offered with an interest rate of 3.5 percent at ma...

Merkle's 'boner' . . . as a Cub By JohnW53 on Dec 18, 2020, 6:28am CST + Nearly a century after he played his final game, many baseball fans still know the name of Fred Merkle. As a 19-year-old rookie, he was on first base with 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of a crucial game late in the 1908 season between the host Giants and the Cubs, who were neck-and-neck for first place in the National League. When the next batter smacked a clean single, a runner from third dashed home, scoring the tie-breaking run, as thousands of fans swarmed the field. Merkle, wary of the fans, d...