TOOTBLAN: A 2022 Cubs story

If you’ve been watching the 2022 Cubs there are a lot of things to be hopeful about. Nico Hoerner has really taken a step forward at shortstop and is currently one of the top five shortstops in the National League in FanGraphs WAR. Despite both currently being on the IL, Justin Steele and Keegan Thompson have emerged as viable back of the rotation options while pitching a career high in innings. Hayden Wesneski had a debut for the ages yesterday, allowing just two hits across five scoreless innings with eight strikeouts. Christopher Morel has exceeded expectations against big league hitting, while playing multiple defensive positions and just generally providing joy as he literally introduces himself to the league:

But one of the things that needs to change right now is the Cubs absolutely embarrassing tendency to make outs on the basepaths.

It was apparent in April that this team had an aggressive, and sometimes questionable, baserunning philosophy. There have been a handful of us resigned to making running jokes about TOOTBLANs over the course of the 2022 season because sometimes all you can do is lolsob emoji your way through the worst of it. For the uninitiated, TOOTBLAN stands for “Thrown Out On the Basepaths Like A Nincompoop.” It has a long and storied history with the Chicago Cubs as an unofficial stat necessitated by the existence of Ryan Theriot — if you watched the Cubs in 2008 you already know, if you didn’t you can read more about it here.

Even Theriot would be stunned by the TOOTBLAN propensity of the 2022 Cubs.

The best running list of this season’s TOOTBLANs is being compiled by Cubs Twitter user Uncle Jeff, who has tracked a stunning 90 TOOTBLANs as of his last update Friday, September 2 for the Chicago Cubs over the course of the 2022 season:

It’s tough to say if there have only been 90 TOOTBLANs this season, because it’s not an easy stat to cross-check. You know it when you see it and if one happens and Uncle Jeff doesn’t happen to be watching, a single TOOTBLAN or two could be easily missed. That’s because the TOOTBLAN is a compilation of a bunch of different statistical events, plus some things that aren’t really captured in any stat. Yes, it includes runners caught stealing and back picks, but it also includes moments where Franmil Reyes thought he could leg out a double despite being in the 20th percentile of MLB for sprint speed. It includes overrunning a bag and being thrown out like a nincompoop and Willie Harris waving everyone around third base for #reasons.

In order to truly capture the fullness of the Cubs TOOTBLANery one would need to go back to the start of the season and re-watch every game, documenting all of the inconceivably bad baserunning decisions this team has made over the course of 135 games. I wouldn’t wish that punishment on anyone, so we’ll just go with Jeff’s unofficial count of 90.

Ninety TOOTBLANs over the course of 135 games is .67 TOOBLANs per game. That means this team averages more than a TOOTBLAN every other game.

Unfortunately, we cannot compare the above TOOTBLAN/Game metric by teams because as far as I can tell no other team does it enough to inspire unofficial team TOOTBLAN tracking, but there are baserunning stats. So today, I wanted to take a look at some of those leaderboards. In case you were wondering, yes, this lack of baserunning prowess shows up in more traditional metrics too and it’s past time that we take a look at them. Below you’ll see the teams leading the way in terms of the raw number of stolen bases, plus some other stats to put those totals in perspective, per FanGraphs. Let’s just start with the steals. All numbers below are through games of Monday, September 5:

The Cubs rank fourth in steals, which sounds great, but it’s all downhill from there. Successful baserunning is more than just a raw number of steals. It’s also how often you get caught stealing relative to attempts. Re-sorting that table by CS reveals a team that is tied with the Rays for the most times being caught stealing in baseball. However, raw numbers for either of these stats don’t really provide enough context either. What I really wanted to know was how the Cubs stack up in terms of successful steals vs. unsuccessful attempts. That would give us some handle on how efficient the Cubs are at stealing bases.

The easiest way to get to that data is the SB/CS ratio I created at the end, which quite literally takes the number of successful steals divided by the times a team is caught — The Cubs are the 19th worst team in baseball by this metric, well behind baserunning juggernauts like the Dodgers who have 86 SB to only 15 CS, as compared to the Cubs’ 88 SB to 32 CS.

Baserunning also shows up in terms of double plays, so I added a raw count of GDP to this table — you guessed it, the Cubs hit into a lot of them, the third most in baseball, as it turns out. Only the hapless Nationals and Rockies have hit into more GDPs than the Chicago Cubs.

If there is a silver lining to this TOOTBLAN cloud it is that not all Cubs are nincompoops on the basepaths, but for those who are, there needs to be an intervention. Below are all of the Cubs hitters with at least 50 plate appearances this season sorted by BsR, which is the base running component of FanGraphs WAR. It incorporates weighted stolen bases, weighted GDP and Ultimate Base Running for each player. If you want to read more about BsR here, you can, but if you’re not up for math, just think of this like WAR for baserunning. I would like to suggest that everyone in the negative here should be put on a “do not steal second or attempt to take an extra base without explicit instructions otherwise” status until further notice (again, stats are through games of Monday, September 5):

We all know what the 2022 season is — preparation for the future and tryouts for the next great Cubs team, plus a chance for the Cubs to see what they have in the farm system. None of us have any illusions about the competitive realities for this team. But there is very little to be gained by teaching a bunch of 22- to 25-year-old rookies that it’s okay to be reckless on the basepaths because you don’t have enough power bats. The Cubs should tack to a more thoughtful baserunning strategy immediately, not next season, not next series, today. The current state of Cubs outs on the basepaths is embarrassing.