Cub prospects in the news

[Hairyducked Idiot]

I'm pretty sure you're having difficulty comprehending the nature of the particular exercise we're going through here.

 

I tried to warn you.

[sneakypower]

i'm having difficulty comprehending the point of it; it's about as useful as looking at the lottery balls after they're drawn

[Hairyducked Idiot]

i'm having difficulty comprehending the point of it; it's about as useful as looking at the lottery balls after they're drawn

 

Is it not our front office's job to be more right about the future of baseball players than their 29 competitors?

 

But I do agree, it's mostly useless. I wish people would stop asking for it.

[Guest]

Didn't the Cubs offer more for Puid than the Dodgers?

 

That was reported once somewhere, but I don't know if it's actually true or not.

 

It's not. The closest offer was $10 million less than the Dodgers'.

[XZero771679666304]

i defy you to find one solitary reputable opinion/source who thought at the time Puig was the better bet than Soler

 

The Dodgers

 

I don't think you can infer that from the simple fact that the Dodgers signed him.

 

And this treatment of the Puig situation (by some) as being one where the Cubs goofed by missing on some clear cut stud is bordering on the ridiculous.

I hope you realize I'm not doing that.

 

CT's challenge was:

Seriously I'd love to hear the list of free agents the last two years that would have radically improved this team.

 

I created a list of them. I then shortened it and pointed out that investments we made in other players could have been swapped to guys on the list I created with very little payroll impact. Not once did I say the front office should have been prescient enough to sign Puig instead of Soler - just that it would have answered CT's challenge.

 

I see what you're doing now. But at the same time, it's a pointless exercise.

[davell]

I want to know more(even though we never will) about the debt structure. Does it hinder us with longterm deals? Is it a total commitment thing or is it a year to year thing? Can we sign Annibal Sanchez for one year and 20 mill and still have more money to spend than if we signed him to a 5/80 deal at 16 per? If it has more to do with total debt, it makes it that much harder to see us signing multiple longterm contracts currently for big money until this other crap plays out......

[sneakypower]

i'm having difficulty comprehending the point of it; it's about as useful as looking at the lottery balls after they're drawn

 

Is it not our front office's job to be more right about the future of baseball players than their 29 competitors?

in every situation? i wouldn't say that's a very realistic expectation

[Hairyducked Idiot]

I want to know more(even though we never will) about the debt structure. Does it hinder us with longterm deals? Is it a total commitment thing or is it a year to year thing? Can we sign Annibal Sanchez for one year and 20 mill and still have more money to spend than if we signed him to a 5/80 deal at 16 per? If it has more to do with total debt, it makes it that much harder to see us signing multiple longterm contracts currently for big money until this other crap plays out......

 

The way I understood it, the two highlights are:

 

1) Cubs cannot pay anything more than interest on the debt for 10 year

2) They cannot run at a cash-flow loss in any given business year, including the interest payments on the debt

 

The combination of the two somehow saves the Tribune a bunch in capital gains taxes.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

in every situation? i wouldn't say that's a very realistic expectation

 

Nobody's expecting them to be right every time. But when they aren't, it gets thrown into the pile of data points. I don't expect anyone to OBP .500, but when they make an out, it still goes onto their record.

[davell]

Didn't the Cubs offer more for Puid than the Dodgers?

 

That was reported once somewhere, but I don't know if it's actually true or not.

 

It's not. The closest offer was $10 million less than the Dodgers'.

Actually, I think no team other than the Dodgers offered more than 10 mill for him, according to Keith Law.

[Guest]

Soler had alrwady agreed to our deal prior to the Dodgers new ownership had taken over. Honestly, thats why I think we got him.

 

I think so too.

 

Different owner and Puig was the last guy on the market. They couldn't afford to miss out and get the next one like they could with Jorge.

 

Yep. Their first and only chance to make a big splash in this market. One really shouldn't take Puig's final contract as a sign of what the Dodgers actually assessed Puig's true value at.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Actually, I think no team other than the Dodgers offered more than 10 mill for him, according to Keith Law.

 

So Law talked to the other teams ("We didn't even want him that much!") and some other reporters talked to the agent ("He had offers even bigger than this one!").

[sneakypower]

didn't we already do this dance before when Kyle said Brandon League must obviously be worth $23M (!) because the Dodgers said he was?

[davell]

Its going to be extremely hard(maybe impossible) to win a high dollar posting bid without losing money in a calendar year, since the money all goes at once. Unless we literally do nothing else that offseason.

[Guest]

didn't we already do this dance before when Kyle said Brandon League must obviously be worth $23M (!) because the Dodgers said he was?

 

Ethier is surely worth his contract too.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

didn't we already do this dance before when Kyle said Brandon League must obviously be worth $23M (!) because the Dodgers said he was?

 

If the front office can't be expected to be right every time, I don't know why I should be held to a higher standard.

[XZero771679666304]

Well, they're one of 29 other teams who apparently didn't think as much of Puig. I can live with that.

 

29 other teams thought less of Soler than we did. Do you regret that?

 

No, but no one is going to take the right gamble 100% of the time, and it's foolishness to expect so. A the time Puig had many more question marks than Soler did, and the Dodgers had more info on him than anyone. I just can't get to the point where I can point at the FO and say they screwed up badly with regard to Puig. Misses happen, they happen all the time, and they happen to the best of them.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

No, but no one is going to take the right gamble 100% of the time, and it's foolishness to expect so. A the time Puig had many more question marks than Soler did, and the Dodgers had more info on him than anyone. I just can't get to the point where I can point at the FO and say they screwed up badly with regard to Puig. Misses happen, they happen all the time, and they happen to the best of them.

 

"It was a miss and misses happen" is a lot more reasonable than "how could they have been expected to think differently than the consensus?"

[XZero771679666304]

No, but no one is going to take the right gamble 100% of the time, and it's foolishness to expect so. A the time Puig had many more question marks than Soler did, and the Dodgers had more info on him than anyone. I just can't get to the point where I can point at the FO and say they screwed up badly with regard to Puig. Misses happen, they happen all the time, and they happen to the best of them.

 

"It was a miss and misses happen" is a lot more reasonable than "how could they have been expected to think differently than the consensus?"

 

I didn't say that. The point of mentioning the "29 other teams" was meant to illustrate that there were other great front offices that missed, too.

 

And obviously the Cubs thought differently than much of the consensus, just not as differently as the Dodgers.

[Tangled Up in Plaid]

@ProfessorParks 41m

 

Jose Reyes-light is fair. RT @ChicagoChiGuy @ProfessorParks Is Jose Reyes a fair comp for Arismendy Alcantara? #Cubs

 

And just to annoy jersey:

 

@ProfessorParks 24m

 

I was thinking Martin Kove or Jesus, but sure. RT @EliGieryna @ProfessorParks Is Babe Ruth and/or Zeus a fair comp for Kris Bryant?

[imb]

didn't we already do this dance before when Kyle said Brandon League must obviously be worth $23M (!) because the Dodgers said he was?

 

If the front office can't be expected to be right every time, I don't know why I should be held to a higher standard.

 

how silly. so what was the point of this exercise again

[Hairyducked Idiot]

how silly. so what was the point of this exercise again

 

There never was one.

[Guest]

how silly. so what was the point of this exercise again

I blame CT

[Guest]

You can blame me, I brought it up. My point was that the over the top irritation that the Front Office is a bunch of dolts who are playing Baseball Mogul and ignoring the MLB team is silly. Maybe more to the point, if you take the financial resources they have to work with as a given(you don't have to agree, but that argument has flimsy relevance to judging Hoyer/Epstein), then the only way you can really come up with a team that's going to be competitive significantly earlier is to jump through a ton of hoops. That doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate them in light of those outcomes, it simply means the "START TRYING IDIOTS" rhetoric is dumb in light of a solution with such a narrow path to a better outcome.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

You can blame me, I brought it up. My point was that the over the top irritation that the Front Office is a bunch of dolts who are playing Baseball Mogul and ignoring the MLB team is silly. Maybe more to the point, if you take the financial resources they have to work with as a given(you don't have to agree, but that argument has flimsy relevance to judging Hoyer/Epstein), then the only way you can really come up with a team that's going to be competitive significantly earlier is to jump through a ton of hoops. That doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate them in light of those outcomes, it simply means the "START TRYING IDIOTS" rhetoric is dumb in light of a solution with such a narrow path to a better outcome.

 

I think all-in-all, they've done an above-average job with the resources they've been given. I don't think they are the golden gods of baseball that they get painted as sometimes, but I'm not unhappy with their end at the moment.