Cerami: Cubs Finalizing Edward Cabrera Trade

[Rcal10]

58 minutes ago, squally1313 said:

I mean, did he get Cabrera now for a lot cheaper than Caissie/Wiggins 6 months ago? Yes. Did we lose game five of the NLDS and have Colin Rea be the losing pitcher because we had literally no other options? Also yes. 

Did we score a single run in game 5, so could only win if we pitched a shutout? Yes! Is the chance of a different pitcher pitching a shutout worth losing Wiggins? No! 

[squally1313]

13 minutes ago, Rcal10 said:

Did we score a single run in game 5, so could only win if we pitched a shutout? Yes! Is the chance of a different pitcher pitching a shutout worth losing Wiggins? No! 

I mean, our starting pitching was hanging on by a thread going down the stretch and into the playoffs. I used that particular example to make a point, fair rebuttal on your end, nitpick that the rest of the pitchers gave up 1 run total so that's not necessarily a loss. But Shota in game 2 (and then very much not trusted again) is another example.

We got to keep Wiggins for some unknown future value, and we missed out on 2-3 months of Cabrera (43 innings, 3.92 ERA) in a playoff year that ended in the NLDS. Plus whatever Hernandez and the other prospect might turn out to be. That's absolutely a tradeoff with positives and negatives. I like the trade, but I would have been fine with the original version back in July too. 

[ILMindState]

Yeah I'm not giving up Wiggins for 1 extra win and an invitation to get smoked by the Dodgers

[squally1313]

8 minutes ago, ILMindState said:

Yeah I'm not giving up Wiggins for 1 extra win and an invitation to get smoked by the Dodgers

Well the Dodgers are going to be there for the foreseeable future so maybe we should have kept the Caissie window open and not traded for Cabrera?

[CubUgly]

39 minutes ago, Rcal10 said:

Did we score a single run in game 5, so could only win if we pitched a shutout? Yes! Is the chance of a different pitcher pitching a shutout worth losing Wiggins? No! 

Good point, we lost game 5 because of the offense, not the pitching.  But we did start Boyd on short rest game 1.  Could another pitcher have made a difference ther?  Absolutely. 

[squally1313]

Like, I don't want to get bogged down in specifics. We passed on making the 2025 team better and got a better deal on the guy who we didn't get to use for three months. 

You can buy the 2025 model the second it hits the dealership, or you can wait until someone else puts 10,000 miles on it and then buy it for $10k less. You saved some money, but you also went without a car for a while. There's trade offs. 

[Geographyhater8888]

It came down to Horton being injured a week before the playoffs. 

[Bull]

2 hours ago, chibears55 said:

True, and that why having both Rea and Assad in the pen could be very helpful with not only being available to spot start but also eat up innings if they need to pull these starters early. 

Steele return will allow them to give the rotation an extra day off and the possibility of going to a 6 man.

Having a kid like Wiggins waiting in the wing is always a plus.

A poster mentioned above about concerns with health for the playoffs, if they get that far and theres no serious setbacks with any of these starters throughout the season, having 9 starters ( Steele Rea Assad Wiggins) on the team will go a long way with keeping them fresh and allow them to skip starts here and there especially in September if they're way ahead in the standings.

I think this is an important piece to the pitching puzzle. 

With so many of this team's very good pitchers having questionable health, having Rea, Assad and one of Wicks/Brown available out of the bullpen for a full time through the order keeps everyone fresh, allowing starters like with injury/workload concerns to just go twice through the order. The bullpen is suddenly very crowded. 

[ILMindState]

8 minutes ago, squally1313 said:

Well the Dodgers are going to be there for the foreseeable future so maybe we should have kept the Caissie window open and not traded for Cabrera?

Even if you added Cabrera to last years team they still wouldn't have had the depth to get through 2 7 game series. Tucker was hurt, the whole pitching staff was taxed. Cabrera could have given the bullpen less innings but he pitched the most innings in his career last year too so who knows how many innings he could have given you. I don't think they win it even if they had Cabrera last year. 

[Bull]

36 minutes ago, squally1313 said:

I mean, our starting pitching was hanging on by a thread going down the stretch and into the playoffs. I used that particular example to make a point, fair rebuttal on your end, nitpick that the rest of the pitchers gave up 1 run total so that's not necessarily a loss. But Shota in game 2 (and then very much not trusted again) is another example.

We got to keep Wiggins for some unknown future value, and we missed out on 2-3 months of Cabrera (43 innings, 3.92 ERA) in a playoff year that ended in the NLDS. Plus whatever Hernandez and the other prospect might turn out to be. That's absolutely a tradeoff with positives and negatives. I like the trade, but I would have been fine with the original version back in July too. 

All year. Colin Rea made more starts than any pitcher on the team besides Boyd. 

[Bull]

18 minutes ago, Geographyhater8888 said:

It came down to Horton being injured a week before the playoffs. 

I'm convinced Boyd and Shota were pitching hurt too. I wouldn't be surprised if Boyd starts the season on the IL. 

[Gjfificifjdej]

Selling the farm at the deadline once we saw how bad the offence was without a healthy Tucker would’ve been wildly bad asset management 

[squally1313]

1 minute ago, ILMindState said:

Even if you added Cabrera to last years team they still wouldn't have had the depth to get through 2 7 game series. Tucker was hurt, the whole pitching staff was taxed. Cabrera could have given the bullpen less innings but he pitched the most innings in his career last year too so who knows how many innings he could have given you. I don't think they win it even if they had Cabrera last year. 

This is the level of detail I didn't want to get into. We didn't know how everyone else was going to progress or regress or get hurt on July 31. And saying we wouldn't have had the depth is an easy cop out. Who knows. Maybe the offense would have woken up. Or maybe they're going to go cold again this October and this trade now is dumb. Give yourself the best chance. 

We knew we had a playoff team at the deadline. We were at 97.1%. We didn't choose to make it meaningfully better. Retroactively calling the Dodgers some unbeatable buzzsaw (we were a half game better than they were on July 30th) and saying we knew the wheels would come off is a bad way of looking at it. 

[Rcal10]

3 minutes ago, Bull said:

I'm convinced Boyd and Shota were pitching hurt too. I wouldn't be surprised if Boyd starts the season on the IL. 

That is an interesting take on Boyd. Isn’t he on the US World team? If he is injured why would he agree to that?

[squally1313]

2 minutes ago, Gjfificifjdej said:

Selling the farm at the deadline once we saw how bad the offence was without a healthy Tucker would’ve been wildly bad asset management 

The Cubs had the 5th best wRC and third most offensive fWAR in July.

Edit: And we're talking about literally one guy at this point.

Edited January 8 by squally1313

[ILMindState]

5 minutes ago, Bull said:

I'm convinced Boyd and Shota were pitching hurt too. I wouldn't be surprised if Boyd starts the season on the IL. 

If Boyd was hurt you would have heard about it by now. I think he was just tired, it was the most innings he had pitched in years and he was pitching on short rest. Shota was definitely pitching hurt and I think Palencia was too.

[Rcal10]

Just now, squally1313 said:

This is the level of detail I didn't want to get into. We didn't know how everyone else was going to progress or regress or get hurt on July 31. And saying we wouldn't have had the depth is an easy cop out. Who knows. Maybe the offense would have woken up. Or maybe they're going to go cold again this October and this trade now is dumb. Give yourself the best chance. 

We knew we had a playoff team at the deadline. We were at 97.1%. We didn't choose to make it meaningfully better. Retroactively calling the Dodgers some unbeatable buzzsaw (we were a half game better than they were on July 30th) and saying we knew the wheels would come off is a bad way of looking at it. 

Here is the thing about this idea of adding a significant pitcher. Who did add one? Doesn’t lack of pitchers moving tell us the asks were outrageous? You can say now you would have been fine with Cassie and Wiggins going for Cabrera or even Shaw and Horton for Gore, but at the time people wouldn’t have been happy. And even now, people wouldn’t be happy. It wasn’t just the Cubs who passed on a playoff starting pitcher at the deadline. Everyone passed. 

[ILMindState]

11 minutes ago, squally1313 said:

This is the level of detail I didn't want to get into. We didn't know how everyone else was going to progress or regress or get hurt on July 31. And saying we wouldn't have had the depth is an easy cop out. Who knows. Maybe the offense would have woken up. Or maybe they're going to go cold again this October and this trade now is dumb. Give yourself the best chance. 

We knew we had a playoff team at the deadline. We were at 97.1%. We didn't choose to make it meaningfully better. Retroactively calling the Dodgers some unbeatable buzzsaw (we were a half game better than they were on July 30th) and saying we knew the wheels would come off is a bad way of looking at it. 

I wouldn't trade Wiggins on July 31st or January 8th. I think Caissie and Wiggins is a massive overpay anyway you look at it. If the price was Rojas instead of Hernandez? Yeah that would have hurt a little more but I wouldn't have hated it. 

Edited January 8 by ILMindState

[Rcal10]

4 minutes ago, ILMindState said:

I wouldn't trade Wiggins on July 31st or January 8th. I think Caissie and Wiggins is a massive overpay anyway you look at it.

Absolutely. 

[Geographyhater8888]

This team may or not have been a Cabrera away from getting smoked by the dodgers. Horton might’ve been enough though. They still struggled to scores runs off of a wounded brewers pitching staff consisting of Freddy Peralta and 3 bullpen games. 

[squally1313]

7 minutes ago, Rcal10 said:

Here is the thing about this idea of adding a significant pitcher. Who did add one? Doesn’t lack of pitchers moving tell us the asks were outrageous? You can say now you would have been fine with Cassie and Wiggins going for Cabrera or even Shaw and Horton for Gore, but at the time people wouldn’t have been happy. And even now, people wouldn’t be happy. It wasn’t just the Cubs who passed on a playoff starting pitcher at the deadline. Everyone passed. 

But that's moving the goalposts. The Blue Jays got 40 regular season innings from Bieber, another 18 in the playoffs, and then he resigned with them. Did any other contending team have the rotation problems that we were staring down? You can't say 'even now, people wouldn't be happy' when we don't know how that would have played out (and we'll never know). People seem pretty pumped by Cabrera being on the team now. Is Wiggins going to somehow get his walk rate under 4 BB/9 as he moves up the levels of competition?

[mul21]

26 minutes ago, Bull said:

I'm convinced Boyd and Shota were pitching hurt too. I wouldn't be surprised if Boyd starts the season on the IL. 

Doing this on 67 pitches certainly doesn't seem like a guy who was pitching hurt to me.  A little gassed, sure, but not injured in any way.

[Bull]

4 minutes ago, mul21 said:

Doing this on 67 pitches certainly doesn't seem like a guy who was pitching hurt to me.  A little gassed, sure, but not injured in any way.

Yeah my memory may be a little off. I just remember thinking that something was not at all right with both of them. 

[thawv]

5 hours ago, Rcal10 said:

I don’t think they can sign Bichette and have enough money to make any moves necessary at the TDL without maybe trading Rea now. They also have Wicks, Brown and Assad as depth so they might be able to do that. However, going over by $6M or so, if they do need to add at the TDL shouldn’t be a big deal. They can get back under the following year pretty easily.  Bichette would be my first choice as well. 

With Cabrera's arb number included, they have about 33 million to spend.  I'd guess that Bo is about 27 AAV.  I can't think of any expensive deadline moves in the last 6 seasons.  Just small inexpensive moves.  And 2/3 of the players contract is already going to be paid for.  I think they can sign Bo without a concern about needing money for deadline moves.  Even if they trade for let's say Fairbanks it would only cost a little over 4 million. 

[CubinNY]

1 hour ago, squally1313 said:

Well the Dodgers are going to be there for the foreseeable future so maybe we should have kept the Caissie window open and not traded for Cabrera?

I mean why even try?