6/26 does anyone care we are playing tonight? Cubs (Butler) @ WSH (Gonzalez) 6:05 CT CSN/MLBN

After they won the Series, I thought I wouldn't be as nervous during situations like that. Nope.

 

yeah, but that's good. it means the world series didn't make cubs baseball. the season after the blackhawks won their first cup, i found it really hard to be invested. i haven't really felt that way about the cubs at all.

i've been in wake me up when the playoffs come mode all year

that doesn't mean 100% not invested in the reg season but it has made it really hard for any of this to bother me all that much

 

yeah, but that's good. it means the world series didn't make cubs baseball. the season after the blackhawks won their first cup, i found it really hard to be invested. i haven't really felt that way about the cubs at all.

 

i've been in wake me up when the playoffs come mode all year

 

that doesn't mean 100% not invested in the reg season but it has made it really hard for any of this to bother me all that much

 

I can't get in wake me up when the playoffs come mode when they've been in second places for most of the season but it is hard for me to get too angry about the season since I live out of market now and haven't been able to watch in a damn month.

i just have no concern whatsoever that they won't win this division so that is basically irrelevant to me

once it became obvious that they wouldn't win 110 games or something this year, i cared even less.

it's like ok fine, go win 92 or something and wake me up for the nlds

i remember about the time theo got hired and those first couple tank years, there were a lot of posters here saying they just didn't think they liked baseball anymore

i thought they were insane

Dude couldn't be more bored by a post-WS Cubs team; thinks people who didn't like following garbage baseball were insane.

 

Someone gave that robot donkey brains.

it's not that i'm bored

i just am not bothered by them playing .500 baseball because i am extremely confident that they'll end up winning the division and because they won the horsefeathering world series

i still enjoy the good but am nowhere near as frustrated by the bad as i have been in years past

i said it a few weeks ago but basically the insane range of emotions from the playoff run seems to have numbed me a bit to the regular season

i remember about the time theo got hired and those first couple tank years, there were a lot of posters here saying they just didn't think they liked baseball anymore

 

i thought they were insane

 

I was in a weird spot where I loved the process they were going through of building a perennial winner from the ground up, but I didn't enjoy actually watching them play baseball. I'd sit at work and click around Fangraphs pretty much daily, check the minor league posts religiously, see how all the contracts lined up on Cots, etc....but then I'd get home from work and have absolutely no interest in watching like...Chris Volstad or something. I understood the process, but the byproduct was in no way appealing to me.

 

Part of that was probably just my personality...every sports game I got I always gravitated towards picking the worst team to start a franchise with and seeing how quickly I could turn it around, and so it was cool to watch it happen in real life. But I was also the guy who would simulate months at a time to get to the trade deadline/free agency/etc.

yeah, that was basically me too...except i didn't love the process they were going through. following the minors like crazy was the one thing that kept me following the team on a daily basis, but i was never pro tank. of course, they pulled it off at a level beyond anything anyone could've expected or imagined. i knew theo was good and for years he was who i wished was our GM when he was in boston, but even with that being the case, i didn't think he could do something like this and hit on draft picks at the rate they did.

that said, i never questioned if i actually liked baseball anymore. i knew that when it got good again i'd be beyond all in. kind of a crazy thought to me that people with thousands of posts on this board could question whether they actually liked baseball/the cubs (rather than the obvious fact that they just didn't like that the cubs were awful.)

i think i'm on team david here. i'm pretty "meh" overall while still enjoying and following each game. if they were like 10 games below .500 then i'd be really annoyed but they keep bouncing around .500 and i'm pretty damn sure they are going to go on a run and win the division and finish ten over .500.

 

duke seems to think so and he's a whole lot smarter than me and so i'll defer to him along with david, too

ten over .500?

if i thought that i'd prob be a lot more bothered, lol

i think i'm on team david here. i'm pretty "meh" overall while still enjoying and following each game. if they were like 10 games below .500 then i'd be really annoyed but they keep bouncing around .500 and i'm pretty damn sure they are going to go on a run and win the division and finish ten over .500.

 

duke seems to think so and he's a whole lot smarter than me and so i'll defer to him along with david, too

 

ten over .500?

 

if i thought that i'd prob be a lot more bothered, lol

*tries to agree with david*

 

*david immediately disagrees w/ me*

i mean 10 over .500 is 86-76. that is not something i'd be OK with at the end of the year. i'm not even positive it beats milwaukee (probably but not for sure).

The Cubs have to play at an 89 win pace the rest of the year to get to 86 wins. That, give or take a couple wins, should be the expectation, Fangraphs says they'll get to 88. It's also very likely to win the division, Fangraphs doesn't have anyone else getting above 80(St. Louis at 80, Milwaukee at 78)

I have little doubt that they'll win 90+

And FG has them winning 89 now (and Milwaukee 79 - but i think they're better than that and than their projections)

But yeah projections are safe by definition. I'm obviously not being safe.

btw BP's 3rd order winning percentage has them at .550 for 41.2-33.8, as crappily as it looks like they've played.

I don't know, they're going to have to play so much better to show me they are capable of playing at a pace that gets them to 90+. If the pitching continues as it has the past week or so maybe I'll get there.

not only do i expect that, i wouldn't even be shocked if they went on a run that got them to 95+. they absolutely are capable of it, this is almost entirely the same roster that won 200 games in 2 seasons, if not better in some ways (and i anticipate adding a good starting pitcher too), and the division is far worse than it was.

guess i'm the only crazy one for whom the needle hasn't moved much as far as the projection and perception of this roster's talent as a result of a couple months of .500ish ball.

btw, they've been playing at about a 95 win pace in june...(kind of crazy to think that that that's what 14-10 projects out to, but yeah).