Rob

Should I just pm you my address or something? Because I'm not backing off the "Bellinger got lucky, and signing him to a big contract would be a mistake" position.

Yes and no. Lugo has managed to put up 2.0 fWAR out of the pen before. If he can pull off a season like that every year, $15M is fair regardless of whether he's utilized as a starter or a pen arm. That said, putting up approximately 2fWAR per year as a reliever is a heck of a difficult task. Last year, only four pitchers managed to do so. Tanner Scott, Felix Bautista, David Bednar, and Matt Brash. That said, if we lower the threshold to 1.7 fWAR, there's another 7 names. Earning his pay would certainly be easier as a starter. But it's not impossible as a reliever.

Yeah, I actually like that a fair amount. Converted back to the rotation last year and put up 2.8 fWAR in roughly 150 innings. Might be able to squeeze a bit more out of him next year. If he's a starter, this is probably a steal. But there's a real chance he ends up back in the pen. It's probably about fair, but I like it nonetheless.

Respectfully, Bellinger last year would have fit this description perfectly last year. Retread coming off some terrible years and looking for a one year pillow contract while he tries to rebuild some value. Bargain bin shopping isn't all bad.

Yes. That's actually mentioned multiple times in the post you quoted, and has been discussed in the thread since then. As I pointed out, Zack Greinke spent the whole of the 2006 (IIRC) season away from the Royals due to severe anxiety. It's not necessarily the end of a career. But as a shrink, I wouldn't mind your take.

Consistency, perhaps? For the sake of argument, let's take a curveball for example. A lot of guys have it as their third or fourth pitch, so it's not used all that often. As such, I've seen that there can be quite a variable degree of break to them. A curveball in the first inning might be a lot tighter than a loopier one thrown a few innings later. Time spent in the pitch lab could be spent focusing on that pitch. Learning to do it the same way each and every time. So you can more predictably estimate how far one will drop one into the zone, even if you aren't able to place it quite as precisely as you'd like.

Zack Greinke absconded from the Royals for a year. It's quite possible that Meadows' career is over. But it's hardly a foregone conclusion. If he thinks he's up to it, I think he's worth gambling on.

The Cubs should sign Austin Meadows. Picked 9th overall in the 2013 draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates, Meadows (along with Tyler Glasnow) was traded to the Tampa Bay Rays for Chris Archer in 2018. He was considered a top prospect at the time, and would go on to put up a .291/.364/.558 line in 2019 during his first full year in the majors. He put up 4.5 fWAR that season. In 2020, he tested positive for COVID and missed a significant chunk of the shortened season, limping to a .205/.296/.371 line. 2021 saw him bounce back a little bit, to a .234/.315/.458 line in 142 games. He accrued 1.6 fWAR in the process. On April 4, 2022, Meadows was shipped off to the Tigers for Issac Paredes. He would once again be infected with COVID and dealt with vertigo issues. Shortly after rejoining the team, he injured his achilles and missed the rest of the season -- partially due to mental health issues. 2023 saw him missing time again with anxiety issues. He only played 6 games last year. Given how much time he's missed, it's hard to get a read on him as a player. But he's still just 28 years old. He's left-handed. He's got power and puts the ball in the air. He could be a really good change of scenery candidate. Pick him up on the cheap. Counsell likes to mix-and-match a lot, so he'd probably pick up a fair amount of time at LF/RF/DH and get good matchups when doing so. If he was capable of playing CF, I'd liken this move to last year's Bellinger pickup. But while he's played there a bit in the past, he'd probably be stretched pretty thin doing so. That said, Wrigley has an easier CF than most ballparks. Still, he strikes me as a worthwhile change of scenery gambit.

Even there, I'd rather trade for a post-hype guy like MacKenzie Gore. Maybe you can make a couple tweaks and turn him into the next Jake Arrieta. And if that doesn't work out, you can always then convert a guy like that into a bullpen role where the fastball + slider should play up and make them darn near as effective as Hunter Harvey anyway.

It was either make that post, or study for my international criminal law final. Seemed an easy choice to me. But the bizarre roid rant was basically an excuse to chat about that Pujols conspiracy theory. Even without it, Donaldson looks like a slight upgrade over Wisdom. (Side note: I'm thinking today's argument instead of studying will be to sign Austin Meadows, but I'm still thinking through that one.)

Bellinger's .370 wOBA was the 13th highest among qualified hitters in baseball last year. The guys ahead of him were pretty much all current or former MVP candidates -- Ohtani, Acuna, Seager, Betts, Olson, Freeman, etc.... (though Marcell Ozuna was also there, weirdly enough). Meanwhile, you have seemingly taken great umbrage at my labeling of Bellinger's .370 wOBA last year as "lucky." Well, I've got news for you. If you're saying Bellinger wasn't lucky -- that his true talent level actually puts him in the top dozen or so hitters in baseball while being a plus defensive center fielder, then you're also saying he's going to be in that MVP discussion pretty much by default. Also, as 17 Seconds pointed out, others have said that.

Max EV is a single data point. One. It's not totally useless, but there is a whole season's worth of data to look at that says that Bellinger has not, in fact, returned to MVP caliber form as a hitter. Rather, he's a plus defensive center fielder who is maybe, just maybe, slightly above average offensively. That's valuable, absolutely. But he's a lot closer to being Kevin Kiermaier than he is to being a perennial MVP candidate. So why would we want to pay him like one?

You're cherry picking. xBA is a component of xwOBA, which also includes his power and walk rate. So sure, having a higher than normal batting average might be expected. But that doesn't make him a good hitter. And while his max EV went slightly up last year, his average exit velocity was the absolute lowest of his career. It ranked in the 22nd percentile. That's not a power "rebound." His barrel and hard hit rates were also the lowest of his career. Put more simply, his xwOBA was .327. His actual wOBA was .370. Now, I put a little bit of stock in his adjusted two-strike approach. But it's not worth .043 points of wOBA. He was lucky last year, plain and simple.

I'll be honest -- I simply don't trust Bellinger's production going forward. I don't want any part of a massive contract for him. We've all seen this discussion before, but the underlying metrics are not pretty. His xwOBA was merely in the 53rd percentile last year. Overall rank of 121 out of 258. He was right behind Jake Fraley and Luke Raley. He looked like a league average hitter who got lucky. Now, I understand some people think it's not luck -- that maybe it's at least partially attributable to his two-strike approach. But that's not really a testable hypothesis on a single season's timeframe. And even if you believe it's true -- how much of a difference can that make, truly? It's probably not enough to take a league average guy to near MVP caliber when healthy. And it's not like we can look to his recent past to allay our concerns. His recent past showed him being abysmal with the bat. Last year I was one of the chief defenders of signing him. There was enough in his profile that I thought he warranted a look on a cheap one year deal to see if he could pull it together. And he has -- at least partially. But this year I look at him and see the warts. I think he's going to be paid ~$80M or so more than he's worth. We're best off letting him walk and collecting the QO pick.

Bellinger was less valuable last year than both Dansby and Nico.

How many young kids out there are going to be confused by all this contract business, do some research on it, and develop a budding interest in economics? I gotta imagine it's more than one...

I mean, there's a reason we celebrate Bobby Bonilla day every year. That was an early example of a pretty extreme deferral. And Scherzer's big contract with the Nationals deferred about half his pay. This is the biggest deferral ever, no doubt. But as TT said, this isn't really a "loophole" in the CBT. He basically took a 10 year / $460 million dollar contract. And he also agreed to loan the Dodgers $440 million with no payments until 2034, and those payments will run until 2043. Over the course of that $440 million dollar loan, they'll pay him back in the amount of $680 million.

Manfred always has the "best interests of baseball" clause. But he's unlikely to utilize it here.

Alright, how's this for a lightning rod idea? The Cubs should sign Josh Donaldson. The bad news -- he just turned 38. He's coming off a .152/.249/.418 slash line in 51 games. And he's a notorious clubhouse cancer. The good news -- that terrible slash line came with a .115 BABIP, so there's definitely a fair amount of bad luck involved, and thus reason to hope for a bounceback. He still takes walks and hits the ball pretty darn hard. And he's still an above-average defender at the hot corner. In 2021 and 2022 he put up 3.0 and 1.7 fWAR in about 130 games. He's basically Patrick Wisdom, if Wisdom could actually field the ball. Also, he's said 2024 is definitely his last year. And I recently read a Pujols conspiracy that basically said that MLB only tests their players twice during a year. Once at the beginning of the season, and then once more at some point during the season. If you get tested early in the season, you can hop on PEDs for the rest of the season as long as you don't care about getting popped during offseason testing. And since he's retiring, he shouldn't care about that. Donaldson seems like the exact sort of horsefeathers to do this if it's true.

Agreed. I'm trying very hard not to study today, and being left to spitball about things I know won't happen isn't even a fun distraction.

It's unlikely. But it's not impossible. If he was going to a juggernaut of a team -- LAD or ATL or wherever -- I could totally see him waiving the NTC. He also grew up in Pennsylvania, so I could see him going lateral to a team like the Phillies. That said, I don't see any obvious fits. And speculating on three-team proposals gets way out there.

Honestly? There's no way to answer that question definitively. From a marketing and merchandising perspective, so long as he stays relevant, it's possible that Ohtani pays for himself without even considering his on-field contributions. He may well create a generation of Dodgers fans, and set up a pipeline for future Japanese talent. Not to mention all the jerseys he'll sell. While on-field value is easier to calculate, it's still tough. I haven't looked it up in a while, but not too long ago people were using roughly $8-9M as the value of a win on the free agent market. Taking the conservative number there, he'd need to be worth ~ 8.75 wins per season to be "worth" $70M per season. But that's not what he's actually being paid. So we need a better idea of what the net present value of his contract is to figure that out. If he's really only making $50M per season, he'd only need to be worth ~6.25 wins at $8M per win. Or as few as 5 wins if we end up at $10M per win on the market. But even that isn't accurate -- as teams have largely tried to stop paying the below-average players the full value of their contributions. Instead, they're trying to concentrate wins on the roster -- a guy like Trout was considered to be worth more money just because it's hard to get that many wins in a single roster spot. Well, Ohtani is poster child for consolidating a bunch of production into a single roster spot. He basically creates a whole bench spot by being both the DH and a member of the starting rotation. So even if the market says $8M a win or whatever, being able to consolidate that much production into a single roster spot may be worth $12M or $15M. So long story short -- we will never be able to accurately say whether he's been "worth" the contract or not unless we see something approaching either 99th percentile or 1st percentile outcomes here.

No worries. You're newer here. You'll adjust to the vibe. My apologies as well -- I'm sure I didn't respond as kindly as I should have. If memory serves, the positional adjustment from CF to 1B is on the order of 15 runs. So if we have the choice of running a Bellinger type out there as an average CF or 1B, we gain approximately 1.5 wins by making him a CF. It's probably a bit more in this case, as defensive statistics generally paint him as a better CF than a 1B -- though that could change with more reps. I'm just not sure how we improve the team at this point. We need to add some position players, but the free agent cupboard is pretty bare. Bellinger is solid, but he's going to be priced like a good defensive CF. And we've already got one of those in PCA. So if we sign Bellinger, we need to either shuffle people around into different positions (hence the Happ to 1B idea), or trade PCA. Chapman is probably a decent upgrade at 3B, but the price scares me given some of the underlying metrics. I said coming into this offseason that we probably needed to add about 8 fWAR for me to feel good about the offseason. Normally that's not a big problem when a team has such glaring holes as we do. But the FA market just doesn't line up with our needs this year, and the trade block isn't much better.

Or the generally rude and dismissive responses in general. This isn't a Facebook comments section.