Over a month ago, I looked at the relatively awful stats the Cubs had around leaving runners on base and hitting with runners in scoring position.
Well, things really did not get any better in May. In fact, things have gotten much worse. That’s the bad news. But the underlying cause of the trend of being unable to bring runners home is even worse. In March and April, it was just bad situational hitting. In May, it was really just bad hitting overall.
For the month of May, the Cubs hit only .188 with runners in scoring position and had a 72 wRC+. Only the Detroit Tigers, who have fallen off the face of the Earth in the AL Central at 16 games below .500 have been worse, with a .182 average with RISP and 56 wRC+.
But If we look at the rest of the Cubs offensive stats in May, they are awful. A .660 OPS was 27th in MLB and 91 wRC+ was tied for 21st.
As far as runners left on base, which directly correlates with RISP, things are also bad. I was unable to find a number specifically for May, but if we look at the season total, the Cubs lead MLB with 488 runners left on base, 28 more than the Pirates, who are in 2nd.
There is an interesting stat called “Clutch” which attempts to measure the difference between how players do in high leverage situations versus how they would do in neutral situations. According to Fangraphs, this stat really only measures past performance, and is not predictive. Unless you believe that some teams or players truly do better in high leverage situations.
The Cubs had a very bad score in March/April at -1.21, tied for 26th in MLB. But the score in May was 0.38, which was 8th. And this is actually a very bad thing. The reason for the higher relative score in May is that overall, the Cubs’ offense was much better in lower leverage spots in March and April, versus May where the offense has been very bad in all situations.
It should come as no surprise that the team leading the clutch score by a very wide margin for the season is the Milwaukee Brewers.
So what does this mean? My takeaway is that despite seeing a drop in performance with RISP and continuing to leave a high number of players on base, that is not the reason for the poor team record in May. Ultimately, the offense has just been much worse, regressing to not only how badly they had been doing with runners in scoring position in March/April, but actually going below that performance.
One of my big concerns going into this season was that with the mediocre starting pitching, if the team went into a multi-player slump, it could lead to a long losing streak, which is exactly what happened. Certainly, the injuries to the rotation have been a big reason for this, and there should be a small bit of respite coming up, with the schedule being a bit easier against the dregs of the NL West. Plus, Matthew Boyd and Edward Cabrera will be coming back from injury. But neither has been great this season.
Unless the offense gets back to where they were hitting in March and April, plus they start doing better in high leverage situations, I don’t think this team will be seeing the postseason.
Cubs in 7 
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