Everything is magnified in the postseason, baseball’s ordinary little things—the hustle on a groundball to first, a perfect route in the outfield—are blown up to carry extra weight. Here, then, is one little thing worth paying attention to: The Cubs’ baserunning.
The easiest number to pull out here is the scariest one. With 70 outs on the basepaths this season, Chicago was the worst team in baseball here, well above the major league average of 53. That’s certainly not good, but it’s also just one small piece of information about the team’s running game. Baseball-Reference tracks outs on the bases as a category totally separate from caught stealing, meaning that it includes guys trying to take the extra base or advance on a fly ball (or a wild pitch, or passed ball, or so on), but it doesn’t measure steal attempts.