Cubs Lead ESPN April All-Stars Team with Three Players

The Chicago Cubs have a major league best 19-6 record and have been winning games with stifling pitching and relentless at-bats. So it’s no surprise to see three Cubs’ players topping the ESPN April All-Stars team. Actually, it would be a surprise if they weren’t there.

• Anthony Rizzo was selected at first base. He led all first basemen with 1.0 fWAR and that’s in spite of his .218 AVG and .161 BABIP (FanGraphs). He also had 24 RBIs which was 7 more than the next closest player and he was first in home runs with eight.

• Dexter Fowler is likely the league MVP for the month of April. His numbers are outright gaudy. All this after he was overlooked in the free agent market this off season even though he put in an incredible amount of work to get ready for this year (read more about that here). He led all center fielders in multiple statistics including fWar (1.7), AVG (.347), and OBP (.474).

• Jake Arrieta has been completely dominant so far this year. He was tied for first with five wins in April, third in ERA (1.00) behind Jason Hammel, no less, and had a no-hitter on top of it all. Some wondered if Jake could come close to repeating his shut-down performance over the second half of 2015 and, so far, he’s been as good and maybe even better. Scary.