[EXhoosier10]

1)If a team loses 120 games, that means they're losing about 75% of their games. Anything less than +300 in that case is terrible value. Similar thing here with the cubs, they're gonna lose a 100-108 games this year. Anything less than +200 is terrible value in my view because they will lose at least 65% of their road games and probably even more than that



2)I understand that Vogelsong's advanced stats are not as good as Samardja, but did you not consider the terrible defense, relief work and offense of the cubs? Hell the cubs starting pitching was excellent in this series and they still got swept in 4 games. You just can't base a play on starting pitching alone IMO


3)The cubs stats against righties and lefties on the road is brutal though. I understand they have decent stats at home against RHP but they have been just awful against righties on the road and especially in this 10 game losing streak


4)I know you said you don't care about the 10 game losing streak, but do you not pay any attention to things like momentum and confidence? Teams on losing streaks tend to play with a big lack of confidence which is how you get nasty losing streaks like this

In response to your assertions:
1) you're assuming that the cubs have an equal chance to win every ball game. To counterpoint that, do you believe that the Cubs will have the same record if they play 100 games against the Astros as they would if they played 100 games against the Cardinals? Another situation would be do the Cubs have an equal chance to win with Garza/Dempster pitching as they do with Volstad/Travis Wood/etc? There are clearly better situations than others for teams to win, which is why a line is set according to who is pitching in each game.

2) What defensive metrics are you using to compare the teams? UZR says the Cubs are better than the Giants defensively. If you want to use standard stats, Giants actually have the worst fielding% in the entire MLB. Defensive efficiency is definitely in the giants favor. Efficiency and errors definitely have flaws in them, so I'd say UZR is the far better choice to measure defensive performance; and that says that you are wrong again.

3) Have you adjusted for ballparks? Wrigley has historically been a hitters park (although didn't play like that last year and has been average so far this year). It shouldn't be surprising that the Cubs hit better at home than they do on the road. With regards to vs. R & vs. L, you're breaking an already smallish sample into an even smaller sample size, and basing your decision on a smaller subset with a lot more variance. You're better off using their season to date vs. Lefties than breaking it up to season to date vs lefties on the road.

4) After sweeping the padres, i'm sure they were not lacking momentum or confidence coming into this series. They have played 18 games since this 10 (now 11) game road losing streak started. I don't think players let games that occurred 3 weeks ago effect them mentally.