(670 The Score) The Cubs hiring Chili Davis as hitting coach was a mistake, it's now safe to say. It was a failed attempt to improve the Cubs' situational hitting by placing less emphasis on launch angle and more on hitting line drives and cutting down strikeouts in RBI situations.
It worked for a bit until it collapsed in 2018, with their power drying up throughout the lineup and their utter inability to score allowing them to be strangled out of a postseason that lasted all of one game. Davis' coaching was a sore enough subject in multiple players' subsequent exit interviews that he was summarily let go, later replaced by a familiar face in Anthony Iapoce.
President of baseball operations Theo Epstein noted pointedly after last season that "launch angle isn't a fad," stating an obvious fact that only served to question how they ended up committing to Davis in the first place. What's more, there was recent history as a guide that may help explain how the 2019 Cubs are snapping back to scoring in bunches.
Davis was the hitting coach for Boston in 2017, a year the Red Sox slumped to a slash line of .258/.329/.407, and it's that last one -- the slugging component -- that stands out. That team was 20th in MLB in wOBA at .316 and just 23rd in wRC+ with 91. Davis was supplanted by Tim Hyers after that, and the 2018 Red Sox rebounded to .268/.339/.453, leading all of baseball in wOBA at an eye-popping .340 and finishing third in wRC+ with 110, improving their offense by nearly 20 percent. Adding J.D. Martinez can't be overlooked, but the improvements were broadly based.
The Cubs under Davis slashed .258/.333/.410 in 2018, with a second half at anemic rates of .249/.316/.389. They finished 12th in wRC+ at an even 100 and 11th in wOBA at .321. Under the watch of Iapoce and with the reinvigorated involvement of manager Joe Maddon himself, the 2019 Cubs are at .260/.351/.464 -- again, note the slugging -- and are second in MLB with a .347 wOBA and third in wRC+ with 116. Their +51 run differential is the best in the game, and their isolated power is a fifth-best at .204 after falling to a woeful .152 in 2018 that was good for just 22nd.
What's fascinating is that the Cubs seem to now be accomplishing what the stated goal was in hiring Davis but without sacrificing critical power. Maddon's emphasis on using the whole field has them leading MLB with a opposite-field slugging percentage of .696, and their pathetic soft-contact rate of a league third-worst 19.6 percent in 2018 is now a reasonable 16.8 percent that ranks 11th-best.
I'm generally not a believer in large differences between hitting coaches at the big league level, but it's more than fair to wonder about causality beyond correlation with respect to this change, particularly now that we know how unhappy or unsatisfied so many important Cubs were under Davis and a similar improvement when he left his previous team. Hitting science is more advanced than ever at the moment and only getting more complex as data rolls in to inform best practices, but it's still about aligning feeling and information and managing that relationship from game to game and pitch to pitch in the respective minds of multiple players.
And where's Chili Davis now, you ask? He's the hitting coach of the Mets, a team ranked 23rd in isolated power at .149, 22nd in slugging at .395 and 16th in wRC+ at 98.
Credit to the Cubs for recognizing something that wasn't working and moving to shore up their offense by making their hitters more comfortable and prepared to do their jobs. So far, so good.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's Bernstein & McKnight Show in middays. You can follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein.
