Amazing and Awful Early Season Trends for the Cubs

After a four-game series against the Rockies in Colorado you would expect the Cubs’ offense to be near the top of the league in several offensive categories and guess what you’re right. The Cubs are only nine games into the 2022 season, but we can already see some amazing trends and some awful ones that might remain the rest of the year.

Let’s start with the basics. Here is where the Cubs as a team rank in traditional stats so far in 2022.

Batting Average: 1st – .281
On Base Percentage: 1st – .364
Slugging Percentage: 4th – .447
On Base + Slugging: 1st – .811
Home Runs: 18th – 8
Doubles: T-1st: 18
Runs: 11th – 44

Again, some of those numbers got a boost thanks to four games at Coors Field, especially the doubles as we saw more than a handful of them this past weekend. But how about that league-leading batting average that’s also led to a league-best OBP. We are all fully aware that this group of hitters makes a lot more contact than what fans have been used to, but this current Cubs squad is also a lot more patient.

How about a team that’s striking out less than 20% of the time? The Cubs currently rank 7th in MLB with a 19.6% strikeout percentage to go along with the seventh-best walk percentage at 10.9%. These aren’t the Cubs from 2015-21 anymore.

Up and down the lineup you’ll see guys making tons of contact, leading to the Cubs ranking 4th overall in contact percentage at 78.9%. Not only are they making more contact than in previous seasons, but this offense is also less likely to swing at outside pitches. Heading into Monday’s series-opener against the Rays, the Cubs rank 8th in outside swing percentage, only swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone 28.1% of the time. On the flip side, the Cubs are 5th in MLB swinging at pitches in the strike zone, making contact on 86.9% of the times they go after pitches in the strike zone.

Pretty good, pretty good, but how hard are the Cubs actually hitting the ball?

Again, here’s another positive early-season trend. The Cubs have a 35.7% hard-hit hate, which puts them at 6th in MLB and they’re average exit velocity of 89.9mph tracked by Statcast is 9th in baseball.

But as the saying goes, not all contact is good contact.

Unfortunately, here is where the awful trends begin. The Cubs hit the ball a lot, but the majority of the time it’s straight into the ground.

Through nine games, the Cubs have the highest ground ball percentage at 51.1%, leading to 14 double plays, four more than any other team. And yes, that will happen when you have a bunch of base runners on all the time, but it doesn’t take away from the fact the Cubs hit way too many ground balls.

To be fair, early in the season, especially in Chicago when the weather is still terrible, you don’t mind the ground balls over fly balls because the conditions aren’t ideal for hitting home runs. However, the fly ball rate is certainly something to keep an eye on going forward, as the Cubs currently rank second to last in MLB with a 29.1% fly ball rate and they’re only 18th, hitting line drives 19.8% of the time.

There are a lot of things to love about the offense early on, but all the ground balls and double plays are already getting really annoying too.