How The Cubs Won The NL Wild-Card Game

According to win probability added, the Pirates were one of the clutchest hitting teams in the National League during the regular season. Yup.

The Chicago Cubs are on the brink of making the divisional series, carrying a 4-0 lead into the eighth inning. Pretty good for a franchise widely known as exceptionally futile in the postseason. That’s what happens when you don’t win a World Series in more than 100 years. More advanced statistics back up the idea that the Cubs are especially unsuccessful. There’s a strong correlation between a franchise’s lifetime win-loss percentage and its number of World Series wins. By that correlation, the Cubs register as a significant outlier, having compiled a .512 winning percentage (sixth-best in MLB history) in their 140-plus years of existence, but only a couple of World Series wins. Naively, we would have expected the Cubs to have won something like 20 championships, based on their strong win percentage.

If Pittsburgh can’t get any runs across the plate against the Cubs, they’ll probably look back ruefully at this game in mid-September. That’s when rookie third baseman Jung Ho Kang tore his MCL and was lost for the remainder of the season. According to OPS+, Kang was Pittsburgh’s second-best hitter (behind Andrew McCutchen) during the regular season.