What's the real risk in re-signing Cody Bellinger?
Only the Cubs could whinge this much about paying their best player


Get more from Andy Dolan in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
Cubs fans are freaking out that their favorite team might not re-sign the best player they had last season, (no, not Mike Tauchman—he’s back), Cody Bellinger. The concern is that last year’s Cubs team, while finishing third in the National League with 8191 runs were not what you would call a “good offense.” They scored 802 runs in 29 games against the A’s, Pirates and Reds and only 17 runs in the other 133 games.
Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I’m too lazy to check. Let’s just go with it.
You know what? Let’s look it up after all.
OK, in those 26 games against the A’s, Reds and Pirates the Cubs scored 225 runs, that’s an average of 8.7 runs per game against those three teams. They scored 594 runs against the rest of the league, an average of 4.5 runs per game.
Averaging 4.5 runs per game would have ranked them eighth, one run ahead of that noted juggernaut offense in Milwaukee and nearly two tenths of a run below league average.
I know this is a flawed analogy, because if you took the equivalent runs out of Atlanta’s total it would go way down, too. Right? Let’s see let’s use the two division opponents they scored the most against, the Mets (96) and Miami (96), and the A’s (7). That comes to 199. Take that out of the Barves total and they would have scored 748 runs, which would have been 4.8 per game and they’d have ranked fifth. a little less than two tenths of a run behind the Cubs. But three tenths ahead of the Cubs if you took out the Cubs runs against the A’s, Pissburgh and Cincinnati.
So what does any of this prove? Nothing, really, other than the Cubs offense wasn’t actually great last year and if you take Cody Bellinger out of it and don’t replace him it’s going to be significantly worse.
Thankfully, JP Morosi has great news for Cubs fans.