The 2016 Chicago Cubs and their Most Similar Team

The 2016 Chicago Cubs dominated baseball in convincing fashion, winning 103 games and the World Series, not to mention the hearts and minds of an entire nation. The team thrashed its competition so thoroughly, some compared the Cubs to the 1927 and 1939 Yankees. Others used defensive metrics to compare them to the 2001 Mariners and 1914 Chi-Feds. Still others felt they were most similar to the 1949 Red Sox, 1951 Yankees, 1913 Athletics, 1999 Braves, and 1906 Giants.

I wanted to take a deeper look. Inspired by Bill James’ Similarity Scores for players, I used a variety of stats to see how similar the 2016 Cubs were to other teams’ seasons throughout history. This gets us beyond which teams are similarly good and answers how each team achieved its results.

I began with the same basic concept as James: Start with 1,000 points of similarity between teams, then deduct points for differences in key stats. The higher the score between two teams, the more similar they are.

Using data from FanGraphs, I compared each team-season since 1886 based on the following stats:

• Offense
  • Runs scored
  • Singles
  • Doubles
  • Triples
  • Home Runs
  • Walks
  • Strikeouts
  • Stolen Bases
• Pitching/Defense
  • Runs Allowed
  • Hits Allowed
  • Home Runs Allowed
  • Walks Allowed
  • Strikeouts Achieved
  • Complete Games
  • Shutouts

I then diverged from the concept in one important way: Instead of comparing teams’ raw stats to each other, I compared teams based on how much they deviated from league average that year. This is the same concept used in stats like wRC+ and WAR. This method allows for more accurate comparisons across time, because it normalizes changes in how the game was played among each of its eras.

For example, consider the following scenario (which I made up, but which illustrates my point):

• The 2008 Red Sox offense compiled 5 percent more walks than the average major league team in 2008
• The 1963 Yankees offense compiled 20 percent fewer walks than the average major league team in 1963

The similarity score between these teams would be 975:

1. Assign a value of 105 to the 2008 Red Sox
2. Assign a value of 80 to the 1963 Yankees
3. Compute the difference, which is 25
4. Compute 1,000 – 25, which is 975
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for other stats

As shown above, I subtracted one point for each point of relative difference, except for complete games. Because these totals differ so wildly among eras, for this stat I subtracted one point of similarity per two points of difference.

This method certainly can be improved, but this initial attempt produced reasonable results–and some surprising ones. For when it came to the 2016 Chicago Cubs, no team was more similar to them than the 2012 Tampa Bay Rays.

What? Those Rays finished 90-72, third in the AL East. That doesn’t sound dominant. How can they be at all similar to the 2016 Cubs?

The following table shows their raw stats:

Similarities exist. The teams’ offenses struck out a similar number of times and hit the same number of triples. Their pitching staffs allowed a similar number of runs.

But large differences appear. The Rays scored 111 fewer runs, hit 43 fewer doubles and 24 fewer home runs, and allowed over 100 more hits than the Cubs. In addition, hitters struck out more often in 2016 than they did in 2012. So it’s unfair to compare the teams based on their raw stats alone.

When you normalize each team’s stats to its competition that year, true similarities emerge:

The smaller scale helps you see that except for complete games relative to average, the teams performed similarly against their competition. For example, when accounting for changes in the how the game is played, don’t think of the 2012 Rays as hitting 24 fewer home runs–think of them as hitting the exact same number of home runs, relative to their competition, the 2016 Cubs did.

The similarity score between these teams is 836. Including the 2012 Rays, the ten most similar teams to the 2016 Cubs are:

Teams that perform like the Cubs do, relative to their competition, typically win their division (or league, in the pre-division era). Some real powerhouses, and even a few World Series champions, make this list. The average winning percentage of this group is .589, or between 95-96 wins in today’s game.

But this isn’t news. Good teams win games and sometimes championships, yes. But what is news is that the similarities between the 2016 World Champion Chicago Cubs and the 2012 third-place Tampa Bay Rays go deeper than Ben Zobrist. Each team out-hit and out-pitched its competition to a similar degree. It’s small consolation to those Rays but another sign that baseball can be cruel and unfair at times. For the Cubs’ part, all they care about is that they won a championship. And they can take heart knowing they did so in a manner similar to other great teams.