Chicago Cubs: Where does the 2016 team rank among recent champions?

MLB.com ranked the 2016 Chicago Cubs as the third-best World Series championship squad in the last 25 years. Let’s contextualize the numbers a little bit to see if they made the correct decision.

Credit to MLB.com for continuing to churn out entertaining content in a mostly dead news cycle as far as baseball is concerned and for giving Chicago Cubs fans something to brag about.

Recently, they posted an article where two of their writers were ranking the World Series champions in the last 25 years best to worst. Obviously, the Cubs 2016 World Series team was in contention; you know that team that produced the best moments in Cubs history and some of the best players the team has seen this decade and probably in franchise history as well.

This was done draft style, with one writer picking first and then the next writer getting the next pick and so on. There was no concrete guidelines given for how these teams were evaluated, it was subjectively what that writer thought.

The Chicago Cubs performed really well, getting picked third behind just the 1998 New York Yankees and the 2018 Boston Red Sox.

Here’s what Mike Petriello noted on the Cubs:

I just realized how difficult it’s going to be to separate out various Yankee and Red Sox teams, and I’m not quite ready to forgive the 2017 Astros yet. No such problem exists with those curse-breaking ‘16 Cubs, who had merely one of the greatest run prevention units of the entire live ball era. I mean, they won 103 regular-season games, had the NL MVP (Kris Bryant), the first and second runners-up in Cy Young voting (Jon Lester and Kyle Hendricks, respectively) and decided that, future be damned, we’re trading Gleyber Torres to go get Aroldis Chapman. And it worked! (Despite Rajai Davis’ best efforts.) I don’t believe in magic, but I do believe in the “Kyle Schwarber is an all-time superhero for coming back from that knee injury to rake in October” story. This was a great team, and this was also a great team, if you get my meaning.

Let’s contextualize the Chicago Cubs’ 2016 season and see if it is indeed one of the very best among all the World Series champions in the last 25 years.

Chicago Cubs: How did their regular season compare to other champions?

Besides a hiccup smack dab in the middle of the season when they lost nine of 10 games, the Chicago Cubs dominated the 2016 regular season.

They shot out to a 35-15 record through the first two months of the season, and finished the campaign with an MLB-best 103 wins, eight games clear of the Washington Nationals and the Texas Rangers who both finished with 95 victories.

Here’s how the Cubs regular season stacks up to some of the other World Series winners in the last 25 years:

• 1998 Yankees: 114 wins
• 2018 Red Sox: 108 wins
• 2009 Yankees and 2016 Cubs: 103 wins
• 2017 Astros: 101 wins

The Cubs are right up there among teams that dominated the regular season and then went on to win the World Series.

Chicago Cubs: Dominating the stat sheets all year

The way the Cubs stacked up against other squads in key statistical categories in the regular season unsurprisingly reflects why they had 103 wins.

Chicago had a double-take inducing +270 run differential in 2016, which was almost 100 runs clear of the second-best club, the Boston Red Sox (+176).

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Offensively, the Cubs were third in the game in runs, first in offensive wins above replacement and third in wOBA. From Dexter Fowler at the top to the Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez grinder in the middle to getting a combined 45 home runs and 218 RBI from the seventh, eighth and ninth spot there were no breaks in this lineup.

Defensively is where this team shined though compiling a whopping 107 defensive runs saved which cleared the next best club, the Houston Astros, by 30 runs (the Cubs’ 107 defensive runs saved was fourth most of all-time according to FanGraphs).

Certainly helping out the fielders was a starting pitching unit that didn’t give up much hard contact. The five mainstay starters Jake Arrieta, Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks, John Lackey and Jason Hammel had a combined 2.96 ERA which led MLB. It’s also the second-best ERA for an entire regular season for a starting pitching staff in the last 25 years (first was the 2011 Phillies who had guys like Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt and a much younger Cole Hamels on it).

Joe Maddon’s relief corps wasn’t quite as good as their counterparts in the starting rotation, but they still were top 10 in MLB during the regular season in combined ERA.