Article: Thinking About Six Months From Now as the Present

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Cubs continue their pursuits of stars and high-caliber, high-certainty answers in various areas of the roster. That exercise remains important. Maybe, though, we're all letting the time dilation inherent to baseball fandom exaggerate that importance for us.

Image courtesy of © MATTIE NERETIN / USA TODAY NETWORK

Being a sports fan is a funny thing. There's a season, and there's an offseason, and while plenty happens during the offseason, they don't call it the "low season," as opposed to the "high season". No. Baseball is a binary condition. It's either being played, or it isn't. (Plainly, it's not that simple, either, because there are winter leagues and developmental leagues, but you get what I'm saying. Except insofar as they affect a team's talent level and readiness, things that happen during the offseason don't count.) Yet, we fans are alive all winter. We watch and root in the offseason about as ardently as we do during the season.

That can create a strange sensation--a tension between our lived reality and the baseball reality. For instance, because there are several months and a few important developmental hurdles to clear before the Cubs' farm system (one of the best in the game, by general acclaim) can deliver much value for the 2024 roster, the strong tendency for Cubs fans is to discount and even dismiss that value. It's so far away as to feel unreal, in addition to feeling (in a much more deserved way) uncertain.

In reality (baseball reality), though, the time when Pete Crow-Armstrong will make a major contribution to the Cubs is right around the corner. Ditto for Ben Brown and Owen Caissie. Cade Horton, James Triantos, Kevin Alcantara, and Matt Shaw are not far behind. While a few might have more immediate (in the real-world concept of time) value as trade chips this winter, and while others will inevitably struggle or even outright fail, it's perfectly rational to expect that at least two or three people from that group will be worth more than one win above replacement for the 2024 Cubs.

Here, now, in a December darkened by the nine-mile shadow of Shohei Ohtani, those contributions feel far away. Move yourself forward in time, though, to July 4, 2024. Nearly seven months have elapsed, but only three of them were full of baseball games that count in the standings--and those only make up about half of the total schedule. It's very possible--we shouldn't say 50 percent, but it's north of 10 percent--that if the Cubs hold onto Caissie and Horton this winter, one of them will have already been in the big leagues and providing a much-needed spark or reinforcement for a month by then.

The offseason means the Statcast cameras and the turnstiles are turned off, but not that the players are. The Cubs have worked hard to create an environment of year-round player development and improvement. Between winter work and spring training, there are plenty of ways that guys like Triantos and Shaw can gain ground on the league they want to join and in which they want to have success, before the clock of the season itself starts ticking again at the end of March.

I mention all of this merely as a reminder that the Cubs' farm system, though it lacks a surefire star or the obviously MLB-ready talent of some of the other upper-echelon systems in baseball at the moment, does not lack short-term impact potential. That doesn't mean Cubs fans shouldn't want or expect big moves from the front office. Those are still needed. That need is blunted and softened, though, by the fact that Horton might step into the middle of the rotation by Memorial Day. It's made less glaring by the fact that even if Crow-Armstrong stumbles in spring or in the early going of the season, the team has not only veteran Mike Tauchman to whom to turn, but Alexander Canario and Alcántara looming as alternatives to plug in as stopgaps.

We baseball fans didn't always have such an overeager, anxious relationship with the hot stove season. It feels fairly new, a product of modern technology and the way the world consumes not only news but entertainment, sometimes commingling them until they're unfortunately indistinguishable. Then again, the game also didn't used to have quite as great a lag between the continuous clock of a living organism and the stop-start clock of a seasonal enterprise, either.

That's because player development used to take longer, and be more fraught with error. Some rules changes have made those processes more efficient, and obviously, technology and better comprehension of the human body have improved instruction and training. The contraction of the minor leagues has also forced the acceleration of top prospects' progress, to some extent. Great young talents spend less time in the minor leagues than they used to. If Shaw debuts with the 2024 Cubs, he won't really be seen as ahead of schedule. He'll merely be a collegiate pick who panned out.

Don't overlook the value of the Cubs' depth or their commitment to the farm system. It shouldn't neutralize your desire for them to sign Ohtani, or to make a valuable veteran addition to the starting rotation, or to try to find a stronger middle of the batting order. It's just that the fruits of the franchise's labor to build up that young talent might come sooner than it feels, right now.

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[Bertz]

This is one of the reasons I'm pretty okay with a host of 1 year deals.  If Owen Caissie is slugging .600 at Iowa and Brandon Belt has a .600 OPS in MLB, you give it a month or so but you can probably swap them out in early/mid May.  If Matt Shaw is OPSing 1.000 at Iowa and Matt Chapman is OPSing .600 in MLB, the team's going to give it til at least the ASB before they do anything drastic. 

On the pitching side, while I won't go as far as to say the durability questions around a guy like Glasnow are more feature than bug, I will say that you'd much much much rather have 100-150 stellar innings rather than 180 solid innings.  This is very much a Pizza by Alfredo vs. Alfredo's Pizza Cafe situation.

Last thing, and this is very much on a horizon longer than 6 months, but the ugly side to the "yay all our good prospects are in the upper minors" coin is that all our good prospects are in the upper minors.  Myrtle Beach looks like it's going to be pretty weak next year.  So I think the need to strengthen that weaker portion of the organizational talent pipeline  gives Jed even more reason than normal to hold draft picks and not pay the tax for a Qualifying Offer FA.  I'd pretty much have it as Ohtani or bust on that front?

[Jason Ross]

16 minutes ago, Bertz said:

This is one of the reasons I'm pretty okay with a host of 1 year deals.  If Owen Caissie is slugging .600 at Iowa and Brandon Belt has a .600 OPS in MLB, you give it a month or so but you can probably swap them out in early/mid May.  If Matt Shaw is OPSing 1.000 at Iowa and Matt Chapman is OPSing .600 in MLB, the team's going to give it til at least the ASB before they do anything drastic. 

On the pitching side, while I won't go as far as to say the durability questions around a guy like Glasnow are more feature than bug, I will say that you'd much much much rather have 100-150 stellar innings rather than 180 solid innings.  This is very much a Pizza by Alfredo vs. Alfredo's Pizza Cafe situation.

Last thing, and this is very much on a horizon longer than 6 months, but the ugly side to the "yay all our good prospects are in the upper minors" coin is that all our good prospects are in the upper minors.  Myrtle Beach looks like it's going to be pretty weak next year.  So I think the need to strengthen that weaker portion of the organizational talent pipeline  gives Jed even more reason than normal to hold draft picks and not pay the tax for a Qualifying Offer FA.  I'd pretty much have it as Ohtani or bust on that front?

If there's at least  a positive for looking forward to Myrtle, is that there are some upside young players who could break out there. Someone like Zyhir Hope, or any of these fun IFA kids, maybe McGuire figures out some control...I think Myrtle Beach is going to be fun for someone I just don't know who it is yet. There's a really interesting crew of young players who will probably make their way into Myrtle at some point.