Welcome to the Theometer!

Today, we unveil TCARS’ newest feature: the Theometer. What is a Theometer, you might ask…

In short, the Theometer (pronounced The-aam-eter, much like “speedometer”) is device used to measure the progress of the Cubs under new President of Baseball Operations, Theo Epstein. The Theometer will track the Cubs’ progress throughout this season and future seasons, as Theo attempts to take his ball club to the World Series. Since both Kevin and I began this blog because of our in-depth discussions about the future of the Cubs under Theo, we only thought it was appropriate to track the Cubs’ progress. Since both Kevin and I are Aerospace Engineers, we don’t understand anything that’s not in the form of numbers, binary code, Matlab plots, or schematics. So, what we’ve done is combine our two favorite things: engineering and the Cubs. We’ve created an engineering-like gauge by which we plan to measure the Cubs.

While it is called the “Theometer”, it is not only a judgement of front office moves (it could just as well be called the Cubometer, but that just doesn’t roll of the tongue as well). It combines both front office moves and on-the-field performances to come up with an overall “status” on how close the Cubs are to achieving the World Series goal. For example, Jeff Samardzija’s emergence as a starter in spring training coupled with his strong performances in his first two outings would give the Theometer a boost, as would a midseason trade for top, big league ready prospects. On the other hand, a horrible front office move (a 5 year contract extension for Alfonso Soriano, for example) or a Starlin Castro month-long slump would give the Theometer a downward path.

How do the Rocket Scientists at TCARS calculate the Theometer? Well, first off, we’ve been using NASA supercomputers to crunch the numbers. On a very basic level, these computers are first taking the square root of Cubs win totals over the past five years, adding that to the integral of each player’s RBIs, dividing that by the root mean square speed of Jeff Samardzija’s fastball, combining that with the vorticity of Carlos Marmol’s slider and the vector field of the wind circulating above Wrigley….

Kidding, there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to how we plan to move the needle on the Theometer. How Kevin and I move the Theometer will be completely based on our opinions on the Cubs’ play and front office moves. These will be opinions of how good we think the Cubs are, and as such, if we think the Cubs are a .500 club, that doesn’t mean that they’ll actually win 81 games. More or less, this is mine and Kevin’s way of evaluating the Theo and the Cubs for all of our readers.

So, without further ado, here is the first iteration of the Theometer:

As you’ll see, we currently rate the Cubs at 18%, right around the “Hendry’s Cubs” description. When we say “Hendry’s Cubs” what we mean is that the Cubs are a team lacking a direction. With only just over a week into the new front office’s first season with the team, we’re not really sure in what direction the Cubs are headed. We know that they’re getting younger and that there will be more emphasis on developing talent from the inside, but we’re just not sure of what a Cubs team that contends will look like in 3 or 4 years. Realistically, by the end of the year we’d like to see the Cubs around the 50% mark. The Cubs will be an extremely successful organization if they can get all the way to having a team with the pieces to win 81 games in just one season.

That’s the Theometer. Look for updates to it in the coming weeks, and hopefully we won’t see the Cubs slip too far into the red…