Chicago Cubs: Projecting the team’s top performers in 60-game season

Here are some projections for the Chicago Cubs ahead of the 60-game slate.

Since its inception, baseball has always been about numbers and statistics. In recent years, sabermetrics have become more and more ubiquitous and omnipresent around the game – especially in the Chicago Cubs organization, which, of course, boasts one of the more forward-thinking front offices in baseball.

Exit velocity, WAR, xOBP, wRC+, wOBA… what do some of these letters and their corresponding numbers even mean? Heck, current and former pitchers even debate (or cuss at each other) the merits of those numbers on Twitter nowadays (I’m looking at you Trevor Bauer and Curt Schilling).

There are even more nuanced numbers and stats for pitchers now as well – dealing with spin rates, revolutions, movement, velocity – and each team has their own lab to cypher all the data. However, despite all these newfangled numbers and percentages that more statistically-driven fans salivate over, the old school mainstays are still here to stay.

Unfortunately, those (sometimes antiquated) numbers and statistics won’t have the same meaning over the course of 60 games as they have over 162. In other words, fans are going to have to get very good at using 37 percent of the “regular numbers.” So, to whet your appetite for projections and statistics, here are those projected numbers and stats over the course of a 60-game schedule.