Rob
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Everything posted by Rob
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It's really hard to have a disastrous short-term contract. Assuming there's nothing crazy hidden in the terms, Jed did well here. I'm happy to have Bellinger back at this price.
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A couple weeks of games is a rounding error if you're looking for a 4-6 year contract. It won't make a huge difference. Meanwhile, a contender could have an injury while ST ramps up.
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Smart baserunning by PCA there.
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It's not a threat. If he makes it that far, things are either going so well for him that we won't mind paying that money. Or things are going so poorly for the Cubs that it won't matter. -
Dodgers have batted around on Musgrove in the first inning. And that's with most of their heavy hitters on the pine today. I'm starting to think they might be a problem.
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A few years back, I seem to recall a story about Boras clients having their own camp for that stuff.
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Maybe. But Boras isn't new to this. He almost certainly told them from the beginning that this will likely drag into spring training. Their expectations have likely been set appropriately.
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We aren't selling blue jeans here. I want them shorter and fatter!
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Here's the thing you aren't getting, even though TT said it very nicely. You are not obligated to respond to every post with some minor tangential comment about Trump or the Ricketts or whatever other right-wing idiocy is being mocked. For decades, people would see those posts, chuckle (or not) and move on without discussing the issue any further. One-off comments aside, the actual discussions here rarely got political. It is your dogged insistence on responding to each and every one of those comments that is making all these discussions turn political. Learn to let the minor stuff slide. Like the rest of us do when we visit our parents at the holidays and they say something racist, but it's meant in a positive way, so we don't ruin the vibe by calling them out on it. Stop ruining the vibe. Be like your kids when (if) they visit you on the holidays.
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Politics has been defined as "who gets what, when, where, and how." Who: You What: Your nuts slit When: Presumably shortly after Peralta or Smith takes an AB Where: That'll probably depend on where you are when they take that AB. How: By auto-nutslitting It's still politics. It's just a very different type of politics. Probably akin to the one that encourages people to vote against their self-interest, albeit a bit different in scale.
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JFC, TT locked this thread down so things would calm down here, and that's how you choose to start things back up? Nutslitting? Who the hell jumps straight to slitting their own nuts?
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People who get upset about minor league deals with spring training invites just confuse me. It's basically zero risk. Of course the odds aren't good they pan out, otherwise they wouldn't be available for essentially nothing. But every once in a blue moon you can fix something and find a contributor. Theres literally no downside. Why the consternation?
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That won't energize the meatballs all that much. Jed's reasoning is pretty simply. A win costs $8M or so in free agency right now. If Counsell is worth a win or two more than what we had (check), then he's a relative bargain compared to spending that money on the roster.
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The best thing about the Len Kasper booths was that he and the play-by-play guy (whether Brenly or JD) always felt like they were good friends. The broadcasts felt like they would if it was two buddies joking around and watching the game together. Like they'd probably head to the bars before/after the game. JD is fine on his own, but he and Boog don't really pass a vibes check together. Likewise, Boog is fine on his own but he doesn't seem to care about the team. These things may make for a more "professional" broadcast, but they're also a less fun. I want Len back.
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Meh, it's the same as it ever was. GM calls Boras about a player. Boras throws out a silly number. GM says "call me when you're serious." Every couple weeks, Jed probably shoots Boras a text asking if anything's changed, and if the player could be interested in a deal in a certain range. Boras holds firm. Repeat until one side starts getting desperate.
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I am on record in this thread as having said I liked Morel, and expect modest improvements. So let's keep it in perspective. Nowhere did I say he won't develop, or that he isn't a fine player as-is. That said, if he doesn't develop any further, he's going to find himself in an awkward position in 3-4 years. He's a good hitter, but not a great one. Once he starts getting expensive, the Cubs aren't going to want to pay him much money to be a DH. But we can cross that bridge when we get there.
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His OPS is slugging-heavy, which is less than ideal. His .821 OPS was roughly equivalent in value to Happ's .791 OPS which was heavier on OBP. I don't want it to sound like I'm bashing Morel. I like him. And I too have dreams of him finding the ability to play adequate defense, making some offensive adjustments, and looking like Adolis Garcia last year. But that's a pretty aggressive wish. More likely than not, he wont develop so well.
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Earlier in this thread, you said your favorite thing about the Ricketts was their support of Trump. And now you're going to pretend we're all persecuting you and making unfair assumptions because you never actually said you voted for him. This, while you sling out insults like calling people "libtards." Even if politics magically disappeared from this board overnight, nobody would be interested in holding actual discussions about baseball with you. And that's because your whole shtick is so disingenuous that we all know that any spirited baseball debate with you is going to be a horsefeathers chore where you'll refuse to engage with anything in an honest manner. You'll never admit to being wrong, you'll just dig in further, lie, and move goalposts until people get tired of responding. You aren't liked. You aren't respected. Your opinions (both baseball and otherwise) are disregarded immediately. Congratulations on your miserable life. Please go enjoy it elsewhere.
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Morel doesn't have much plate discipline and has major swing-and-miss issues. Some guys, like PCA, have a weakness. In his case, it's high heaters. And if you can get PCA to make whatever adjustments are necessary such that he can reliably get to high heaters without sacrificing his coverage of the rest of the zone, then he could cut the strikeout rate pretty significantly. But Morel's contact issues aren't quite as isolated like that. It's all across the zone, and on all types of pitches. He's a bit better against fastballs, so maybe you can make some improvement by getting him to wait back a bit on the breaking stuff, but that'll exacerbate the fastball issue such that it's probably a breakeven thing overall. So nobody is expecting anything more than modest improvements from Morel.
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I'm convinced this is a modern day Jonathan Swift. "If I have to listen to you talking about you and your kids being hungry, then you're gonna have to listen to me as I make A Modest Proposal."
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Chapman is criminally underrated here. Each of them came up in 2017. Bellinger has played 875 games, Chapman has played 868. So it's fair to compare them 1-1. Bellinger has been worth 21.6 fWAR in that time. Chapman has been worth 27.4. Thus far in their careers, Chapman has been the better overall player, and it's not all that close. I'll grant that there are other considerations such as age, skillset, and our current organizational depth that might make Bellinger a more attractive target for the Cubs if the contracts are roughly equal. But Chapman is a hell of a player. We'd be lucky to get him. If Morel can play 3B, I'd be thrilled. I was banging the drum for that earlier in the season. But if he plays it like he's done every other position thus far, he might not hold a glove after spring training. Penciling him in for the lion's share of playing time seems absurd until we've seen him show some defensive improvement.
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I don't agree with any of this. Morel is currently something like our 4th or 5th best option at 3B because his defense is abysmal. Counsell may be giving him an opportunity to work his way up that depth chart by improving his defense, but by no means is it "[his] spot to lose." And it's a pretty frequent occurrence to have teams pushing "we're happy with the roster we've got" articles precisely to try to gain leverage in free agent or trade negotiations. This isn't particularly telling at all. I'm sure Hoyer is still in touch with Boras, and is keeping tabs on Chapman. I doubt it goes anywhere, but I'm sure Hoyer would love to swoop in if the value gets where he wants it.
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Pretty much zero chance he takes a one year deal. There is, however, a very good chance he takes a deal with a lower total guarantee than he'd like, but with early opt-outs. He could take something like 8/$140M and know he'd have an opportunity to cash in for more if he shows last year wasn't a fluke.
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Better yet, we should all be making these silly bait comments and banning the people that can't resist responding to them with right-wing buffoonery. But the bait comments should be funnier. B2B's sucked. Also, I should get a pony.
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That's been the case for a long, long time. Boras doesn't make his money by selling his players to the Presidents and GMs. Rather, he's famous for his end-runs around those guys to talk straight to the owners. With a direct line to George Steinbrenner, did it really matter what Cashman said? Likewise, he called individually on Ilitch, Moreno, etc... Got all of them to sign some bad deals. It's just how he operates. You can be sure Boras is trying to approach the Ricketts individually and not really focusing directly on Jed.
