March 11, 2007
Projecting the Cubs
Bleed Cubbie Blue put together community projections for the Cubs. The projections for the hitters look pretty good, so I ran them through the Lineup Analysis tool with a likely Piniella lineup. This isn't the best according to that calculation, but it does score over half a run better per game than last year's team. It also shows the difficulty of going from worst to first. The increase in offense with the above lineup takes them to 79 wins. That's 13 above last year's total, but ten above their Pythagorean projection for 2006. They still need to bring the their runs allowed down by an equal amount if they want to have a definite shot at the playoffs. People don't think it will take that many wins to capture the NL Central, but you never know.
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