Cubs Receiving Trade Interest In Second Baseman Nico Hoerner

[Geographyhater8888]

19 minutes ago, BigbadB said:

I don't think this is the worst plan, provided they take that remaining money and maybe even blow through the LT at the trade deadline adding players of significance at positions of need. They will know more about playoffs on August 1st than they do before the season starts. 

If they beef up the rotation and wait out who is performing with the bats, I think they can make it work. I'm not saying it's the best plan, but I can understand that idea. 

 

 

Ideally. In the case you have Mo and Cassie providing 6 combined wins with the other 3 positions players under team control. If they go on spending sprees similar to 2015-16 with the available $ then that’s a plan I can live with. I just wish I had more faith in it happening. 
I still think they need an elite top of the order bat like Tucker. The royals were the last champion without one.

Edited December 13, 2025 by Geographyhater8888

[BigbadB]

9 minutes ago, Geographyhater8888 said:

Ideally. In the case you have Mo and Cassie providing 6 combined wins with the other 3 positions players under team control. If they go on spending sprees similar to 2015-16 with the available $ then that’s a plan I can live with. I just wish I had more faith in it happening. 
I still think they need an elite top of the order bat like Tucker. The royals were the last champion without one.

I would certainly rather see them try to bring back Tucker over signing Bregman. Bregman does absolutely nothing for me. Of course, staying the course until the trade deadline won't be popular since it means they did little in the offseason and there will be no faith they actually do something at the deadline.

[Backtobanks]

34 minutes ago, BigbadB said:

I don't think this is the worst plan, provided they take that remaining money and maybe even blow through the LT at the trade deadline adding players of significance at positions of need. They will know more about playoffs on August 1st than they do before the season starts. 

If they beef up the rotation and wait out who is performing with the bats, I think they can make it work. I'm not saying it's the best plan, but I can understand that idea. 

 

 

Have you forgotten who the owner of this team is?  Do you remember what they did with the money saved by trading Bellinger?

[Geographyhater8888]

11 minutes ago, BigbadB said:

I would certainly rather see them try to bring back Tucker over signing Bregman. Bregman does absolutely nothing for me. Of course, staying the course until the trade deadline won't be popular since it means they did little in the offseason and there will be no faith they actually do something at the deadline.

Instead of playing it by year at the trade deadline where you’ll have to pay a premium with a haul of prospects, just sign someone in free agency. Jed didn’t  like the asking price and the end result was Andrew Kittleridge and useless players. 

[Geographyhater8888]

7 hours ago, Backtobanks said:

Have you forgotten who the owner of this team is?  Do you remember what they did with the money saved by trading Bellinger?

That’s because Busch, PCA, Horton and Shaw contributing at the big league level means cutting payroll will still put them is that 83-90 win ballpark. Doesn’t matter if the payroll is $240 million or $40 million. No need for Marcus stroman, Hendricks, Tauchman or Bellinger which puts them right at the LT.

It’s a redundant topic but too frustrating to ignore.

Edited December 13, 2025 by Geographyhater8888

[BigbadB]

17 minutes ago, Backtobanks said:

Have you forgotten who the owner of this team is?  Do you remember what they did with the money saved by trading Bellinger?

Absolutely haven't forgotten. But I also don't prescribe to the idea that you just throw money at every guy with a pulse until some rando guy goes "okay" (in Disney's Goofy voice) just to appease the fanbase that "something" needs be done now. 

I said from day one that the trade for Tucker was only worth it if they extend him. You don't make that trade as a one and done, IMO. 

You could make Tucker an offer he can't refuse and then trade prospects for Edward Cabrera/similar and stay below the LT line and this team is better than anything they likely do this offseason. Of course, the time to make that offer to Tucker was while you had exclusive negotiating rights. That day is long gone.

 

[chibears55]

3 hours ago, Geographyhater8888 said:

I’m not calling you out specifically. If their goal is this perennial jack of all trades master of none roster building approach then 2-3 fWAR from Cassie and Bellestaros is good enough to fill a need at those positions. They’ll just stay stuck in this perennial 86 win loop without championship ambitions. Is this their plan? 

I hope not, but i can see them sticking with their position players to get through the first offseason of the new CBA and possibly a delay in starting the season if they hold out.

 

 

 

[Guest]

22 hours ago, Bertz said:

Yeah I'm on the same page.  I struggle to see a scenario where the return for Hoerner blows my socks off (though devil's advocate, Hoerner's not much worse than Tucker?).  And I need my socks firmly on the other side of the room to not be irate about dealing Hoerner away.

But after this year?  I have little interest in extending Hoerner and I'm reaaaaallllyyyy hoping Jefferson Rojas and/or Cristian Hernandez make it an easy decision (on paper at least) to let him walk.

Why do you have little interest in extending Hoerner?

He's 28, he's solid, and he is the stability that the team needs at this point. And I believe that Rojas/Hernández would be decent choices as well, but him leaving undermines the stability and "Cubs canon*" that I believe is necessary for the next few years--the transition period.

Statistically speaking, Hoerner is highly stable compared to Jefferson/Hernández: his GO/AO is steadily decreasing in a surprisingly linear way, with only a slight increase between 2022-2023. The only thing is that he is wavering in terms of his average, speaking to his streakability on the plate. 

For Hernández, conversely, his explosiveness as measured by the GO/AO is, as expected, less, which explains his unpredictability on the field. (It actually sharply increased from last year to this year with a similar amount of games played.) And Rojas is surprisingly stable, but he played 106 games this year compared to 96 last year, and his GO/AO increased as well.

We need a "transition period"--where the Cubs Canon comes in. I think Hoerner, PCA, and a few others are essential to transition our team to more explosive, focusing on division wins rather than broad outcomes.

 

Edited December 13, 2025 by The Cubs Dude

[Cuzi]

2 minutes ago, The Cubs Dude said:

Why do you have little interest in extending Hoerner?

He's 28, he's solid, and he is the stability that the team needs at this point. And I believe that Rojas/Hernández would be decent choices as well, but him leaving undermines the stability and "Cubs canon*" that I believe is necessary for the next few years--the transition period.

Statistically speaking, Hoerner is highly stable compared to Jefferson/Hernández: his GO/AO is steadily decreasing in a surprisingly linear way, with only a slight increase between 2022-2023:

 

Why you have to edit out the chatgpt link?

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Cuzi said:

Why you have to edit out the chatgpt link?

I used a linear regression--plotting out the GO/AO on a line, but it would not let me insert the image. If you could help me insert the image, that would be great to help me visualize.

Here's the link: https://chatgpt.com/c/693d9441-51f8-8326-aafc-f3553a3ed3a2

And the equation is this: GO/AO=−0.0786×(Season)+159.95

Edited December 13, 2025 by The Cubs Dude

[Derwood]

More advice: No one, and I mean NO ONE here wants posts generated by ChatGTP. NO ONE

[Bertz]

1 hour ago, The Cubs Dude said:

Why do you have little interest in extending Hoerner?

He's 28, he's solid, and he is the stability that the team needs at this point. And I believe that Rojas/Hernández would be decent choices as well, but him leaving undermines the stability and "Cubs canon*" that I believe is necessary for the next few years--the transition period.

Statistically speaking, Hoerner is highly stable compared to Jefferson/Hernández: his GO/AO is steadily decreasing in a surprisingly linear way, with only a slight increase between 2022-2023. The only thing is that he is wavering in terms of his average, speaking to his streakability on the plate. 

For Hernández, conversely, his explosiveness as measured by the GO/AO is, as expected, less, which explains his unpredictability on the field. (It actually sharply increased from last year to this year with a similar amount of games played.) And Rojas is surprisingly stable, but he played 106 games this year compared to 96 last year, and his GO/AO increased as well.

We need a "transition period"--where the Cubs Canon comes in. I think Hoerner, PCA, and a few others are essential to transition our team to more explosive, focusing on division wins rather than broad outcomes.

 

A lot to unpack here but two things broadly

Re: your main question about Hoerner, he's a great well rounded player and quietly a star.  Additionally, most research says that these kinds of players tend to age more gracefully than TTO-heavy types already on the wrong end of the defensive spectrum.  HOWEVER, given that Nico even here at his peak is basically a league average hitter, I'm not super interested in paying him $25M a year.  I suspect that "aging gracefully" in his sense will mean being a solid major leaguer until he's like 38.  I think the margins between him being the impact guy he is right now and being more of a premium utility player are pretty thin.  Think like an Elvis Andrus or Andrelton Simmons type of trajectory.

As for the rest.  This post is REALLY not going to help with the AI allegations.  Off the bat, notice how most of the quoted text above has a white background?  That means you copy/pasted from somewhere else and didn't write it here.  Not totally damning in isolation, but given that it came with a ham fisted regression line that you were comfortable admitting came from Chat GPT along with everything else from the past few days there's certainly an implication. 

Beyond that, AO/GO is a *weird* stat to form an argument around.  I honestly don't think I've seen it used to reference a major leaguer since before you were born.  Humans who actually analyze baseball use groundball rate.  AO/GO's only utility is that it's available in situations where we have not always historically had groundball rate available such as spring training or the low minor leauges.  Also, beyond the weirdness of using AO/GO for any sort of analysis when much better and much more common alternatives are easily available, it's certainly not an indication of "explosiveness."  Very broadly flyballs are good and groundballs are bad, but there is no athletic component to it at all.  I would expect a person who actually watches baseball to clearly understand that, while an algorithm probablistically linking words together probably wouldn't catch it.

Last thing: Stop asking ChatGPT to do math for you.  Even beyond a broad "stop using AI" point, ChatGPT specifically is the worst of the commonly used models at math (god I hate that I have to know this stuff for work now).

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Bertz said:

A lot to unpack here but two things broadly

Re: your main question about Hoerner, he's a great well rounded player and quietly a star.  Additionally, most research says that these kinds of players tend to age more gracefully than TTO-heavy types already on the wrong end of the defensive spectrum.  HOWEVER, given that Nico even here at his peak is basically a league average hitter, I'm not super interested in paying him $25M a year.  I suspect that "aging gracefully" in his sense will mean being a solid major leaguer until he's like 38.  I think the margins between him being the impact guy he is right now and being more of a premium utility player are pretty thin.  Think like an Elvis Andrus or Andrelton Simmons type of trajectory.

As for the rest.  This post is REALLY not going to help with the AI allegations.  Off the bat, notice how most of the quoted text above has a white background?  That means you copy/pasted from somewhere else and didn't write it here.  Not totally damning in isolation, but given that it came with a ham fisted regression line that you were comfortable admitting came from Chat GPT along with everything else from the past few days there's certainly an implication. 

Beyond that, AO/GO is a *weird* stat to form an argument around.  I honestly don't think I've seen it used to reference a major leaguer since before you were born.  Humans who actually analyze baseball use groundball rate.  AO/GO's only utility is that it's available in situations where we have not always historically had groundball rate available such as spring training or the low minor leauges.  Also, beyond the weirdness of using AO/GO for any sort of analysis when much better and much more common alternatives are easily available, it's certainly not an indication of "explosiveness."  Very broadly flyballs are good and groundballs are bad, but there is no athletic component to it at all.  I would expect a person who actually watches baseball to clearly understand that, while an algorithm probablistically linking words together probably wouldn't catch it.

Last thing: Stop asking ChatGPT to do math for you.  Even beyond a broad "stop using AI" point, ChatGPT specifically is the worst of the commonly used models at math (god I hate that I have to know this stuff for work now).

Thank you for the comments.

I didn't copy and paste--I don't recall using anything copied and pasted beyond the á I used for Hernández. As you would say, "probablistically," I just used it as a metric based on how wavering a player was, or their streakiness. 

So do I have to draw the line myself? I think analysts analyze the regression lines and don't necessarily have to create them. I double-checked every point and only wanted to paste the image.

[Guest]

Just now, The Cubs Dude said:

Thank you for the comments.

I didn't copy and paste--I don't recall using anything copied and pasted beyond the á I used for Hernández. As you would say, "probablistically," I just used it as a metric based on how wavering a player was, or their streakiness. 

So do I have to draw the line myself? I think analysts analyze the regression lines and don't necessarily have to create them. I double-checked every point and only wanted to paste the image.

And you can use an AI checker like ZeroGPT or GPTZero (I prefer the former).

[Hot Sauce]

3 minutes ago, The Cubs Dude said:

Thank you for the comments.

I didn't copy and paste--I don't recall using anything copied and pasted beyond the á I used for Hernández. As you would say, "probablistically," I just used it as a metric based on how wavering a player was, or their streakiness. 

So do I have to draw the line myself? I think analysts analyze the regression lines and don't necessarily have to create them. I double-checked every point and only wanted to paste the image.

If you want to use Spanish diacritics and you have a MacBook you can hold the letter down and the diacritics menu will pop up. If you type Báez, just hold down on the "a" key. I'm a stickler for using the correct spelling of names because my own is so frequently misspelled or misprounced, so I will use that frequently.

 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Hot Sauce said:

If you want to use Spanish diacritics and you have a MacBook you can hold the letter down and the diacritics menu will pop up. If you type Báez, just hold down on the "a" key. I'm a stickler for using the correct spelling of names because my own is so frequently misspelled or misprounced, so I will use that frequently.

 

Unfortunately, I do not have a MacBook--I have a Windows, and I tend to copy and paste the letters. Hence @Bertz's AI allegations. (He probably just hates me, but whatever.)

And previously, when I had sarcastically inserted a paragraph from ChatGPT, there was no yellow font. (Nor does Gemini do the same thing.) If @Bertz knew that, maybe he would forgive me.

Yes, Báez is a name that involves that--same for Acuña. I speak Spanish and French, so when I go on Spanish or French forums, I typically avoid words that involve accent letters beyond the two most common ones in each respective language. Otherwise, I'll copy another poster's accent letters. It really is annoying that these Windows don't do anything to solve this problem.

 

[Derwood]

20 minutes ago, The Cubs Dude said:

And you can use an AI checker like ZeroGPT or GPTZero (I prefer the former).

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Derwood said:

I never said I idolized it, but I did enjoy the first paragraph of the article I could read before I was blocked behind a paywall.

In baseball, you obviously have to compile a list of regressive models for stats. That's what analysts do. And with ChatGPT, I make sure that every data point seems correct and I do apply the regressive model to my calculator in order to confirm; I just hate plotting every point and I cannot transpose the pictures from my calculator to the screen.

But thanks for helping, at least.

[PackLandVA]

1 hour ago, Hot Sauce said:

I'm a stickler for using the correct spelling of names because my own is so frequently misspelled or misprounced, so I will use that frequently.

 

People have problems with spelling and/or saying "Sauce"? 

[Derwood]

Just saw that the Giants are 'interested' 

[KCCub]

31 minutes ago, Derwood said:

Just saw that the Giants are 'interested' 

 

 

[Bertz]

Slusser is the best at Giants stuff so it's definitely worth keeping an eye on

Can't really think of anything the Giants could offer that would make it worthwhile though.  Bryce Eldridge is awesome but another LHH bat at 1B/COF/DH would be silly.  They also have a lot of young pitching at varying levels of quality, but unless I'm missing someone it's all Brown/Wicks types that are "promising...BUT" and not someone we'd jusy roll out Opening Day and hope for a Horton-esque trajectory.

So like if we were selling and just moving Nico for value yeah I can envision a deal, but there's no win-win deal to be had a la what we did with Houston last winter.

[Tryptamine]

Unless Eldridge is coming back they can get bent. I'll figure out the rest once he's on the roster.

[Post Count Padder]

I have to assume this is due diligence and nothing of substance actually is happening here. Giants want a 2B, call up Hoyer and see what it would take. The end.

[Cuzi]

I can see a world where they would prefer to move Hoerner, slide Shaw over to 2nd, and sign a 3B.

I really don't get the feeling they intend to offer Hoerner an extension. By moving him and getting a decent haul in return and signing a 3B like Bregman or Okamoto, you hope to have the infield pretty well set in stone for 4 years until Swanson is out. Thats probably pretty enticing to a team looking at a while horsefeathers ton of turnover for 2027.