The 2016 Cubs Are Already a Success

After a few months of mostly meaningless regular-season baseball, the Cubs begin their pursuit of a World Series title tonight. This is the best team the Cubs have had in a very long time, and 108 years since their last championship, Cubs fans are understandably excited about the possibility this roster provides. After spending most of their lives waiting until next year, this really could be the year they’ve been waiting for.

Unfortunately, it feels like this Cubs team will be defined by these next three weeks of baseball. The team is so good that they’ve created their own heightened expectations, and with the best roster in baseball, anything short of ending the World Series drought will be seen as a failure. But the unfortunate reality of postseason baseball is that the Cubs are far more likely to fail than they are to succeed.

Right now, our playoff odds estimate that the Cubs have about an 18% chance of winning the World Series. Relative to the other teams in the playoffs, that’s pretty high, but overall, it still makes it a pretty unlikely outcome. If we were to reframe the Cubs chances of winning it all, we could say that they’re something close to the odds that Jon Lester would get on base in any given at-bat this year.

This is just the reality of postseason baseball. Even one of the best teams we’ve seen in some time is only a little bit better than the other good teams, as the spread in talent between rosters in baseball is much smaller than in other sports. This isn’t the NBA or the NFL, where the best team just dwarfs their competitors. Even in roster construction, baseball really is a game of inches; you get little advantages here and there that add up to more wins over a long season, but at the end of the day, most everyone is still pretty evenly matched.

And that is compounded by the fact that home-field advantage in baseball has a significantly smaller effect than it does in other sports, so the Cubs reward for winning the most games in the regular season is that they get one extra game out of five where their advantage is akin to something like four percentage points. The Cubs also get to face the Wild Card team, who had to use their ace to earn the right to play them, but I’d imagine the Cubs don’t feel all that lucky to have to run through Johnny Cueto and Madison Bumgarner to advance to the NLCS. In leagues like the NBA, where the pool of playoff teams is much larger, the high-seed/low-seed first round often feels like a formality, but in baseball, every single round is something close to a coin-flip.

That makes every playoff baseball game more interesting and more tense, but it also makes the postseason a pretty lousy way to judge the success of a baseball team in a given year. In reality, what happens over the next three weeks will change how history talks about the 2016 Cubs, but it shouldn’t do much to impact how we view the success of this team. The 2016 Cubs have already proven to be one of the best Cubs teams in history.

They won 103 games, and that was with sequencing working against them: BaseRuns expected them to win 107. Their +252 run differential was more than 100 runs better than the next best NL team. They were third in MLB in runs scored and first in runs allowed, a balanced domination that is rare indeed in this day and age where most teams are trying to win every year. They won their division by 17.5 games, and basically had the title locked up by May.

The regular season, the 162-game grind that tests both the top and bottom end of a roster, is pretty good at weeding out good teams and bad teams. Those six months are the real test of team quality, and the Cubs aced that test. But because we like our sports champions to be determined by tournaments, the 2016 Cubs’ legacy will likely be determined by whether or not they can play slightly better than .500 ball for three weeks in October.

From a league perspective, crowning a champion with a postseason tournament ensures that there will be plenty of interest in the sport all year long. If MLB had the same setup as the English Premier League, we’d have all lost interest in the championship race a while ago, as the Cubs would have had it mostly locked up by August. Postseason tournaments are exciting, dramatic, and fantastic entertainment for the fans.

But as a way to determine a team’s enduring legacy, and judge their season as a success or failure? The playoffs suck at that. They weren’t designed to highlight real differences between teams, or reward the best teams for their accomplishments. And yet, we still judge a team’s season based on what happens during three weeks in October.

For Cubs fans who have been waiting a lifetime for a World Series title, and because I like it when great teams are rewarded for being great, I’m rooting for the Cubs to win it all this year. I hope the best team really does win, and that Wrigleyville gets to throw the kind of party it hasn’t seen in over 100 years. But if it doesn’t happen — and it probably won’t, unfortunately — then I hope the 2016 Cubs are remembered for what they really were: an historically great baseball team, one of the best Cubs teams ever, and a success regardless of what happened in October.