Pirates (Skenes, 0-0, 6.75 ERA) vs. Cubs (Hendricks, 0-3, 10.04 ERA) 1:20 CDT

[Rex Buckingham]

The scoreboard doesn't lie, but his overall performance wasn't awful. Lots of soft hits, but of course some truly terrible pitches too, especially the Triolo dong

[Stratos]

The gap between Skenes and Hendricks is wider than a whale's hoo-ha.

Props to Morel for continuing to play banged up with no chance to rest with guys like Swanson, Nico, Happ also being out.  Maybe he gets a day or 2 off if we get healthier.

Having 8 relievers on the IL is....interesting.  All these forearm injuries....are they all going bowling after the games or something???

[UMFan83]

Over the last 30 games, the Pirates have scored more than 5 runs in a game 3 times.  I'm sure you know where this is going but 2 of those 3 games were against the Cubs over the last week.

Granted the other time was against the Brewers also this week so maybe their bats are breaking out of their horrific slump but damn guys.

[Soul]

19 hours ago, squally1313 said:

Jed hoyer didn’t do anything this offseason! Please ignore this historically successful starting pitcher and also our really good starting center fielder that he doesn’t get credit for for whatever reason because he…already had the good idea of signing him last year. Also don’t worry about that first baseman who gets paid the league minimum (for two more years after this!) and carried our team offensively for a week and has a 123 OPS+ this year (rizzo for his cubs career: 130). None of that counts. He should have found really good hitters to accept bench roles and then found an extra $60m to spend on bullpen guys, but only the ones who have pitched well this year. 
 

outside shota (again, no one gets credit for signing him) literally every key player besides morel has had injury problems. We’ve been facing a brutal run of starting pitching (hat tip @UMFan83). We’re playing at an 88 win pace, 4 wins above last year. Things could be worse. 

Pretty early to put any stock into what pace a team is playing at.  Shall we also start tracking % chance of making the playoffs now too?

We sat around while the top FAs came off the board.  They signed Counsell and then did very little. Everyone knows what happened come on.

[squally1313]

3 minutes ago, Soul said:

Pretty early to put any stock into what pace a team is playing at.  Shall we also start tracking % chance of making the playoffs now too?

We sat around while the top FAs came off the board.  They signed Counsell and then did very little. Everyone knows what happened come on.

I don’t understand what the first part means. This incredibly flawed team everyone is complaining about, if they continue playing the same way they’ve played, would win 88 games. Are we just ignoring YTD performance and going off vibes instead? ‘Well they’ll probably collapse down the road for reasons, so throw out the first 30% of the season’. 
 

We weren’t getting Ohtani. And even if you think he would have considered the cubs, that’s not a Jed problem.  Who else do you mean by ‘top free agents’? We signed the top starting pitcher. Bellinger is pretty good, though he’s been hurt (Jed’s fault). Been better than Chapman, which is who I wanted, so I was (so far) wrong there. I’m not sure what you would really go back and retroactively do here to overcome 15 injuries in the first 45 games. 

[Soul]

1 minute ago, squally1313 said:

I don’t understand what the first part means. This incredibly flawed team everyone is complaining about, if they continue playing the same way they’ve played, would win 88 games. Are we just ignoring YTD performance and going off vibes instead? ‘Well they’ll probably collapse down the road for reasons, so throw out the first 30% of the season’. 
 

We weren’t getting Ohtani. And even if you think he would have considered the cubs, that’s not a Jed problem.  Who else do you mean by ‘top free agents’? We signed the top starting pitcher. Bellinger is pretty good, though he’s been hurt (Jed’s fault). Been better than Chapman, which is who I wanted, so I was (so far) wrong there. I’m not sure what you would really go back and retroactively do here to overcome 15 injuries in the first 45 games. 

It just doesn’t have any meaning to talk about 88 wins based on performance in May.  It’s May.  Teams go on to much better things and much worse things after May.

Some comments: Weren’t going to get Ohtani - while that was happening he was certainly among the possible acquisitions.  People weren’t saying Ohtani isn’t going anywhere else at the time.  Otherwise he would have just signed with LA day 1.  Chapman’s been bad.  Ok?  He was certainly a possible FA acquisition that apparently Jed didn’t consider.  Who knows what he would have done here or if he will continue to be bad?  Is that Jed’s fault?  I don’t know, we all talked about ownership not giving him the dollars to work with.  Probably true.  I’m not saying Jed’s terrible inherently just that he didn’t make the moves for whatever reason.  Imanaga - obviously awesome pickup.  Bellinger: if you were white knuckles on that, hats off to you.  I was.

I see largely the same ball club.  I guess I was expecting a team that would post mid 90’s wins especially when they came out of the gate with Counsell.  I didn’t think there was much question that we didn’t match that signing with player improvements.  I mean we sat for months over the winter as players came off the board.  That happened.

[squally1313]

4 minutes ago, Soul said:

It just doesn’t have any meaning to talk about 88 wins based on performance in May.  It’s May.  Teams go on to much better things and much worse things after May.

Some comments: Weren’t going to get Ohtani - while that was happening he was certainly among the possible acquisitions.  People weren’t saying Ohtani isn’t going anywhere else at the time.  Otherwise he would have just signed with LA day 1.  Chapman’s been bad.  Ok?  He was certainly a possible FA acquisition that apparently Jed didn’t consider.  Who knows what he would have done here or if he will continue to be bad?  Is that Jed’s fault?  I don’t know, we all talked about ownership not giving him the dollars to work with.  Probably true.  I’m not saying Jed’s terrible inherently just that he didn’t make the moves for whatever reason.  Imanaga - obviously awesome pickup.  Bellinger: if you were white knuckles on that, hats off to you.  I was.

I see largely the same ball club.  I guess I was expecting a team that would post mid 90’s wins especially when they came out of the gate with Counsell.  I didn’t think there was much question that we didn’t match that signing with player improvements.  I mean we sat for months over the winter as players came off the board.  That happened.

I use 88 win pace because I think there’s a disconnect in how people view 88-74 (generally pretty good) and 25-21 (eh, essentially .500) when in reality it’s winning games just as often. 
 

we won 83 or 84 games last year, can’t remember, and our best hitter was a free agent. Expecting mid 90s in general for any team is going to lead to mostly disappointment, doing it for a team that was Actually Bad in 2022 and surprisingly slightly above average in 2023 is going to lead to even worse results. If you don’t think we’re an 88 win team, that’s just a vibes based thing because if anything you’d look at the health issues we’ve faced, none of them season ending, and assume just from regression to the mean we’d get better from how we’ve currently played. 
 

I wanted Chapman over bellinger. That’s been wrong so far. I still don’t know how you could write the offseason realistically, even with the benefit of 6 weeks of performance. 

[Rcal10]

To me, the only free agent the Cubs could have gotten would have been JD Martinez. But that would have to happen only if they knew Morel could play 3rd base. And they didn’t know that. I guess they could have let Hendricks walk and signed Lugo. But that is a statement with hindsight. They just as easily could have signed Giolito, or traded for Bieber. And then people would have been complaining about that move. As for pen arms, I know a lot of people love to mention the pen, most of the guys people wanted in the off season suck this year. Sure, with hindsight anyone can pick a few. But really if the Cubs  pen was healthy they would be fine. Suggesting they could have gotten Ohtani is just not living in reality. They weren’t getting him. Yamamoto got 12 years. That wasn’t going to happen either, and really the Cubs got the best FA pitcher for a cheap price.  Maybe at the time I had issues with the off season, but really Jed did a good job. And this is a team that should win be able to win in the high end of 80 wins this year. 87 to 89. Maybe if they get healthy and/ir add in at the deadline they can get to 99. They are fine. 

[Andy]

There are fair quarrels to make with Jed but complaining about us not signing impact players in the offseason when he signed the literal best pitcher in baseball so far and also signed our current best hitter this offseason seems very strange.

[Rcal10]

26 minutes ago, Andy said:

There are fair quarrels to make with Jed but complaining about us not signing impact players in the offseason when he signed the literal best pitcher in baseball so far and also signed our current best hitter this offseason seems very strange.

What fair quarrels? Keep in mind the budget. But what did most of us want that he didn’t do and that is now proven to be a mistake? Most pen arms guys wanted, suck. Sure, with hindsight we can find a few. With hindsight it would have been better to sign Lugo instead of keeping Hendricks. As I said, if they knew Morel could handle third I would have loved JD. I am sure someone could put together a perfect off season using hindsight. But all things considered he did improve an 83 win team this year without giving away the future. And IMO this is an upper 80’s win team. Good enough for the division or at least the playoffs. Right now they are going through a bad time. A slump. Baseball is like that. No one goes 6-4 every 10 games  on their was to 97 wins.