Winning in 2023

[Tim]

I'm good with Marquez as a target, but not if they're only adding a single "ace" to the team. So if he's 1A and there's a 1B for the rotation, I'd be fine. But I don't like him as much when he's the only target to bolster the top of the rotation.

[UK]

Let's enjoy the optimism phase of the offseason where we envision bringing back Contreras, signing Rodon and one of the premier position players before we begin talking about 2nd tier.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

That second argument is one I definitely don't see. $15+ million plus a top prospect/s plus the roster spot and role is not a small cost, eats significantly into resources. It's definitely not a cost that should just be handwaved away because the salary is nominally cheaper than any clearly better (and more available) option/s for the role. Definitely even more the case since Marquez is not a simple plug, play, collect the data, and adjust as needed situation

 

Heck, I don't even understand how he's *not* a long term investment from the perspective that he requires: a trade, taking on the contract, significant resources/time with the pitching lab, and will be vying for first the 2024 option to be picked up if not an extension or QO'd FA...That's a ton of work for a supposed light and tight investment! Meanwhile all you're likely asking of a Rodon/Verlander/DeGrom during the life of a FA contract is to throw the curveball and/or changeup more, probably throw fewer (high stress) innings, and a draft pick on the way out (maybe as soon as 3 years for any)

 

 

You're really stretching the rhetoric here. Every player costs a roster spot, player development resources are not a limiting factor, and any QO'd SP will cost a prospect of significance. No one is saying Marquez would be free, he's far too good for that. He also younger than most of the alternatives, requires a much shorter commitment(limiting the risk inherent to every pitcher, especially the 30+ y/o in FA), and is 10+ million dollars in AAV cheaper than the FA who we'd expect to be clearly better. If you want to say "I don't feel the contract risk with Rodon(or your preference) is that great, and it's better to spend more on this and make do with less on the rest on the rest of the roster", that's logical and fine! But we don't have to tie the argument in knots so that we're saying silliness like "actually trading a prospect for a pitcher is a long term commitment because we might pick up his option and he'll take up time with the coaching staff".

[Cubswin11]

Lorenzen is gonna be 31 and has shown no durability/innings and quite frankly just kinda horsefeathering sucks outside he can throw fast. Hard pass. I’m in on Marquez for the right acquisition cost, but the Rockies are probably going to be too dumb to trade him/require a ridiculous trade.

[Cubswin11]

[

Lorenzen is gonna be 31 and has shown no durability/innings and quite frankly just kinda horsefeathering sucks outside he can throw fast. Hard pass. I’m in on Marquez for the right acquisition cost, but the Rockies are probably going to be too dumb to trade him/require a ridiculous trade.

 

Lorenzen or otherwise, if your FA goals include not getting older then you're already looking at FA wrong. You're going to get older by participating in FA, during an active offseason in general, it's a mental hump you're going to have to get over. 31's not even old for a healthy pitcher in the grand scheme, and Lorenzen's got one of the cleaner arms in FA

Of course when you’re looking at adding through FA age is a factor, since that how the system works. Lorenzen has a “clean arm” because he isn’t actually good at pitching so his role(s) have been moved around trying to figure out what he is and replaced by pitchers getting a chance/are better. He is a completely mediocre pitcher and has very little traction of innings/track record of being any sort of a good pitcher. His age absolutely should hurt him at 31 since he hasn’t figured it out yet to be any sort of useful or good pitcher.

[Cubswin11]

He has a “clean arm” because he isn’t good at actually pitching so his role(s) have been moved around trying to figure out what he is. Which is a completely mediocre pitcher and has very little traction of innings/track record of being any sort of a good pitcher. His age absolutely should hurt him at 31 since he hasn’t figured it out yet to be any sort of useful or good pitcher.

 

This is all very dramatic considering his 4.45 FIP (also CSW%, SwStr%, GB%) is better than the supposedly safer Ace in Marquez...despite being Older...It's almost as if there's more to the game of life!

 

I don't even love Lorenzen as a target so much as the Cubs are better situated to handle him failing than they are a Marquez

He hasn’t thrown over 100 innings in like 6 years, there’s a 40-man roster crunch coming and he just doesn’t seem worthwhile of giving a spot to. Thompson/Sampson/Assad/Adbert/Wesneski are already here and likely a few are better and cheaper. Just let them have whatever role you envision Lorenzen is given because he doesn’t move any needles and costs more and is likely worse than multiple ones of those.

 

Marquez has been so much more reliable/durable and actually good and is only 27/28 and while I don’t love him as a target if we are paying top dollar, it seems like there could be a buy low/discount opportunity there. Plus he gets out of Coors and a horsefeathers organization that maybe we can fix/tweak a thing or two with a guy who’s been a dependable 2-4 win pitcher most of his career.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

Gonna leave it here because this keeps drifting to false binaries.

 

- The rhetoric seems stretched before I even get there? Younger without being young, cheaper without being cheap, safer without being safe, high performer without the high performance...Marquez is all those as a top trade candidate after 2022

 

- Why *wouldn't* player development resources be a limiting factor? It's a finite resource too! This guy is being brought in to be an ace on a competitive 2023 team despite nothing about his 2022 reading like that. Plug and play should be a part of the deal!

 

- A QO'd SP has the advantage of that prospect being an unnamed, unknown player not in the org, from outside of the first round in a draft they'll still be drafting high, and likely starting in the low minors. In this scenario they're trading one of the two stronger (Kilian and Wicks) upper minors SP prospects + likely more to hope for a Marquez rebound

 

- $10 million in FA gets you what...2021-2022 offseason Andrew Heaney or Wade Miley on the top end? Not to mention that savings is offset by significantly more performance risk: Marquez's EVs are close to 91 MPH, his hard hit rate jumped from 40% to 47% this year, diminished breaking stuff, the flyball% jumped from 29% to nearly 32%

 

- Yep, still not falling for this trap where signing Rodon/Verlander/DeGrom limits their ability to add to the rest of the roster any more than a still expensive and obviously worse choice they have to trade for. This is especially the case since this issue magically disappears when talking about paying a FA SS $30-35+ million

 

- Everything except the 'top performance' strawman is a good thing. Not being 22 does not change the fact that 28 is preferable to 31, Not costing 1 million does not change 15 million being preferable to 25, and a career of being a 3+ win starter is preferable to someone who has never been a good big league starter. It's a marginal comparison and not pass/fail.

 

- We've got Cubs beat writers on the record that the team values the QO pick around 20 million. If you're worked up about the Kilian hypothetical in particular it doesn't have to be him(another reason it's a potentially good match is their OF is a wasteland, for example). There's differences on the margins but 'Marquez costs a prospect' doesn't pass muster when the alternatives being preferred all bear a roundly similar cost via the QO.

 

- These last two points are baffling. Budgets exist and 10 million is very much a non-trivial amount when it comes to roster building. It could be the difference between getting one SP or two, what caliber of RP they can acquire, if and how they upgrade the catcher spot, or various other position player permutations. Paying 10 million more at one spot absolutely limits their ability to make upgrades elsewhere. That's 100% true when it comes to the SS too, in fact the desire to prioritize a position player star is *why* trading for someone like Marquez or generally not pursuing a top of market SP as the top addition is being discussed, they are the tradeoff! It is not the only path or the absolute truth of optimizing the roster, which makes it so strange that the counterpoint being raised is pretending the tradeoffs don't exist.

[CubinNY]

The day after the last game is always a sad day for me. No more Cubs baseball until March. However, with the way the season ended and the progression of the minor leaguers, I'm very hopeful for next year. I hope they land their targeted free agents.

[Derwood]

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[UMFan83]

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Certainly helped that 8 of those 11 games were against the Reds and Pirates

 

Also 3 of those games involved a starter going 4 or less innings with 2+ runs allowed, but only 1 was earned

 

Now that I've horsefeathers on it, that's still a pretty cool stat and one of the reason Cubs fans can be optimistic heading into the offseason

[UMFan83]

The day after the last game is always a sad day for me. No more Cubs baseball until March. However, with the way the season ended and the progression of the minor leaguers, I'm very hopeful for next year. I hope they land their targeted free agents.

 

Also get a bit sad but then I realize that a) I've watched about 30 minutes of Cubs baseball per week since July (basically if I happen to check the score and its an interesting situation or the 9th inning and the Cubs have the lead) and b) we get to watch playoff baseball almost every night for the next month

[Bertz]

Zach Mckinstry racked up 0.9 WAR in 185 PAs this year despite a 79 wRC+. That'd be basically a 3 win player over full playing time. The offensive bar is super low for guys who can play good defense everywhere on the infield.

 

That said I posted about this a few weeks ago but I think there's a bit more in the bat. Despite the low BABIP Statcast doesn't think he was especially unlucky on balls in play. Where he probably has been unlucky though is in his K numbers. Here are his percentile ranks in several categories among guys who got 150 PAs (these are all set so 100th percentile is most, not necessarily best)

 

BB rate - 60th

K rate - 81st

Out of zone swing rate - 47th

In zone swing rate - 32nd

Out of zone contact rate - 69th

In zone contact rate - 78th

% of Pitches in Zone - 41st

 

None of that indicates a guy who should be running a 28% strikeout rate. He's got good contact rates, is average at chasing out of the zone, and maybe a little passive but not egregiously so. This is a guy who should have a ~20% K rate, which would likely bring that wRC+ up to vaguely average.

 

Stepping back, there's probably only room on next year's roster for one of Mckinstry or Madrigal, and even as a guy who's not a Madrigal hater I feel pretty strongly that Mckinstry should clearly be the guy. They're probably comparable value players in the abstract, but even if Madrigal is little better he is a horrendous fit on this current roster. A RHH who is intractably tied to 2B is just the squarest peg you could possibly think of right now. I think one of the moves that Jed needs to make this winter is a sort of reverse Vizcaino for La Stella trade.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

If you want to go bigger with spend on SP1 for the offseason, Madrigal would be a decent starting point in a challenge trade for a cheaper/more aspirational SP2.

 

That said, I'd be a little careful with how much we extrapolate the small sample size defense with McKinstry. He has a decent reputation, but at a glance it looks like his 7 games at SS are doing some heavy lifting in that 0.9 fWAR. He did generally get better as he got regular at bats and shook off the rust from not facing live pitching for a month, but I'm still skeptical that he showed more than Madrigal did. The profile fits the roster better, certainly, but there's a lot of flexible pieces already which means the occasional square peg can be worked around in the name of having the best talent/output on the roster.

[We Got The Whole 9]

Hitting a bunch of balls in the air with an AEV of 86 mph is probably not the greatest idea

[Derwood]

Not that it means much, but he MURDERED that homer yesterday

[Cubswin11]

Yeah count me in on liking McKinstry over Madrigal for the roster next year. Since I agree there’s only room for one and McKinstry‘s versatility and LHH is likely better for the roster (assuming they really go try and compete and add a RHH SS). Madrigal sucks too but will probably go hit some empty .315 batting average wherever he is sent to. But McKinstry is the guy to keep with what we have to work with, imo.

[CubinNY]

 

Serious question. Does it really make that much sense financially to target a big ticket SS when they have arguably a top 5 SS already? I’d kind of like them to try to pry away Devers from Boston with some prospects add a big bat corner OF and load up on pitching.

 

I know I’m probably wrong in my thinking, but they need power.

[Tim]

use Madrigal in the trade for Marquez. He'd hit .350 in Coors.

[UMFan83]

https://theathletic.com/3662490/2022/10/06/chicago-cubs-rebuild-front-office/?source=user_shared_article

 

If you have the athletic, really long sourced article talking about basically everything that’s gone on behind the scenes over the last couple of years and what the FO is focusing on. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there and I recommend taking some time to read

[Bertz]

 

Really good rundown from Bryan Smith. I'd quibble with his choices at the end (I'd keep Mckinstry and Wick instead of Marquez and Uelmen) but the decisions definitely aren't clear cut on several of these guys.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

I for one am comfortable being very clear that you cannot roster Marquez. I get that the stuff is undeniable, but he hasn't pitched in 3 years and hasn't pitched above High A. The 1% chance of closer ceiling is not one you can afford this offseason.

[pitchcs]

I agree about Marquez, but Rowan Wick was awful.

[CubinNY]

I for one am comfortable being very clear that you cannot roster Marquez. I get that the stuff is undeniable, but he hasn't pitched in 3 years and hasn't pitched above High A. The 1% chance of closer ceiling is not one you can afford this offseason.

I don't think a team is going to be able to stash him away on a big-league roster either.

[Outshined_One]

I for one am comfortable being very clear that you cannot roster Marquez. I get that the stuff is undeniable, but he hasn't pitched in 3 years and hasn't pitched above High A. The 1% chance of closer ceiling is not one you can afford this offseason.

 

This situation is giving me a very distinct Angel Guzman vibe right now.

[UMFan83]

Anyone watch Jed's presser? Do you feel better worse or the same about the Cubs competing in 2023? Here are Brett's notes from the PC:

 

https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2022/10/10/live-jed-hoyers-2022-end-of-season-cubs-press-conference/