Greatest Cubs Teams Ever?

Wow I was surprised to see that team did that well. I didnt really read all the methodology thoroughly, but they were a good team, also jinxed by the SI cover i believe with the “Hell Freezes Over” kerry wood cover.

i guess they dont take the latroy hawkins factor into account.

Subjectively, I would’ve guessed that either the ‘29 or ‘35 team was the best since the Tinker/Evers/Chance dynasty. They didn’t come out on top in this series of simulations but they had to face the latter teams from that dynasty, which is a problematic comparison because both the game and the resulting statistics had changed so dramatically during the previous 20 years.

The ‘45 team fares very well but that should be discounted because they did so against inferior competition, with many of the real major leaguers being otherwise occupied with that World War thing.

I was surprised that the 69/71 teams didn’t rank that highly, considering the strength of the starting rotations.

I’d argue that the ‘99 edition was the worst Cub team since the 1960s, although ‘81 was ugly too. That team started 32-24 but wound up losing 97 games and treating us all to the spectacle of Andrew Lorraine. That was awful.

They came up with new and creative ways to lose regularly

...in the past, I’ve run simulated seasons (using Strat-O) matching the 2003 and 2004 teams against various good Cub teams from the past. While not as exhaustive as the ones from the article, my results were about the same – the 03 and 04 teams did very well. This happened because the simulator overvalues the enormous strikeout totals posted by those pitching staffs. For example, Matt Clement wouldn’t have rung up 200+ strikeouts if he’d been pitching in a different era but the computer has no way to account for that so he performs much, much better than expected in simulations.

This is interesting! This has endless possibilities. Thank you again for sharing this. :)

Please never bring that train wreck again.

Please.

They weren’t the worse Cub team seen in recent years (like you guys said, remember 80 and 81), but they were the most EXPECTED to be far better.

I still have a bunch of 2006 WGN Cub schedules in the files. Wonder how they’d do on Ebay? I lost a ton of money running to games that year that they never won, so I wouldn’t mind selling pieces of history to recover my losses.

Course if I recovered all I’ve spent on the Cubs in my 47 years, I could retire tommorrow.