1977-78 Chicago Cubs GBIP

[BillyF29]

I was doing some fielding research on B-Ref and noticed how much higher the GBIP percentage was for the late 70's Cubs than any other team in the last 40 or so years of baseball. Was their pitching staff that much of a ground ball staff and should their fielder's gaudy numbers been even higher?

[JDD]

Look at the talent they had in the bullpen from 1977 to 1980. They had better pitchers out there than in the rotation. In 1979 alone, they had five pitchers who could or would later play the roll of "closer". Sutter, Tidrow, Caudill, Willie Hernandez and Moore. That's a lot of talent.

I would suspect the manager knew it too. You mentioned the year 1977. They had three relief pitchers throw over one hundred innings. (Sutter, Hernandez, and Paul Reuschel).

And I would suspect that the Cubs were near the league leader in innings pitched by relief pitchers over that span.

If that is the case, I now have a 50-50 shot of those bullpen guys being ground ball pitchers...

Let's get the research war machine up and running. Gentlemen, have at it and post those numbers here.

Moving forward... I can tell you that Bill Caudill was an extreme fall ball pitcher after the year 1979. I have not seen data on him prior to 1980. (I have not looked real hard for it either). Here is my source on Caudill:

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/...d_pitchers.htm

[stevebogus]

Originally Posted by BillyF29

I was doing some fielding research on B-Ref and noticed how much higher the GBIP percentage was for the late 70's Cubs than any other team in the last 40 or so years of baseball. Was their pitching staff that much of a ground ball staff and should their fielder's gaudy numbers been even higher?

Yes those Cubs teams had a bunch of groundball pitchers. Starters Rick Reuschel, Bill Bonham, and Dennis Lamp primarily threw sinkers, Krukow (if I recall correctly) had a pretty good 12 to 6 curveball, Sutter of course introduced the split-finger fastball. I don't remember what all the bullpen guys threw, but their starting pitchers all kept the ball low.

[stevebogus]

I just looked up their team pitching stats for 1977. That season the Cubs staff got 1.63 ground outs for each fly out. Doubleplays count as two, but the team wasn't particularly good at turning the DP. The league average was 1.12 ground outs per fly out, so the Cubs were getting nearly 50% more grounders than the average team.

I don't know exactly how that stacks up historically, but I'd bet it is among the highest ratios of all time.

[JDD]

Originally Posted by stevebogus

I just looked up their team pitching stats for 1977. That season the Cubs staff got 1.63 ground outs for each fly out. Doubleplays count as two, but the team wasn't particularly good at turning the DP. The league average was 1.12 ground outs per fly out, so the Cubs were getting nearly 50% more grounders than the average team.

I don't know exactly how that stacks up historically, but I'd bet it is among the highest ratios of all time.

What is your Source?

[weskelton]

I looked at the data available from Retrosheet. There is definitely some funky scorer bias involved here. It seems like the scorer is probably categorizing balls that are typically FB's with other scorers as LD's.

Here's the breakdown of batted balls seen by the defense for just the outs in 77-78...

         GB    FB   LD   PU  
Cubs   59.3  23.3  9.7  7.7
Others 50.5  38.6  5.5  5.4

If you think that there's any chance that this truly is the effect of just the pitchers, here's the same breakdown for the Cub's offense, which is even whackier...

         GB    FB     LD   PU  
Cubs   48.5  28.4  13.2   9.9

It's also interesting to note that the Cubs appear to be the only team to have recorded batted ball type for a large majority of their hits.

[stevebogus]

Originally Posted by JDD

What is your Source?

Baseball-reference.com is my source. The page is:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/te...pitching.shtml

Scroll down the page a bit and look for Team Pitching Ratios. The column GO/AO is the ratio of groundouts to air outs. This was compiled from retrosheet data, so it should not be an opinion. If a ball was caught in the air for an out it was an air out.

The 1977 Cubs were last in the majors in outfield putouts with just 861, which was 40 fewer than the Dodgers and 138 fewer than the 3rd lowest team. While that might indicate a slow bunch of outfielders it is much more likely that it indicates an extreme groundball pitching staff. The Cubs outfield putouts from that era were:

1971 971 only the Padres and White Sox had fewer
1972 858 last in the majors (strike year)
1973 952 last in the majors
1974 1010 only the Dodgers and Expos had fewer
1975 1026 only the Twins and Giants had fewer
1976 1084 slightly below average
1977 861 last in the majors
1978 946 last in the majors
1979 958 last in the majors
1980 969 last in the majors
1981 668 only the Rangers had fewer (strike year)
1982 1078 middle of the pack

The 1977-1980 Cubs were the opposite of the early 1950s Phillies. The Phils, led by Robin Roberts, had one of the most extreme flyball pitching staffs ever assembled. Cubs management made a regular habit of accumulating groundball pitchers to combat the batter's Paradise that was Wrigley Field. The late 1970s Cubs were led by sinkerballer Rick Reuschel and nearly every pitcher with a significant number of innings was also a groundball pitcher. In 1977 they outdid even themselves.

By the way, in my earlier post I miscalculated the extent to which they exceeded the league average in groundouts. While a 1.63 GO/AO ratio is nearly 50% higher than 1.12 the correct way to figure the difference in groundouts is:

1977 Cubs groundout percentage = 1.63/(1.63+1) = 62% groundouts
1977 NL groundout percentage = 1.12/(1.12+1) = 52.8% groundouts

So the actual difference in groundout percentage is 62/52.8 or a little over 17%.

[JDD]

Thank you for showing the way!