Rob

Nico, Dansby, and Happ all won for their respective positions.

I can certainly squint and see the resemblance. But since this is the internet, I feel compelled to argue. First, "while a six year deal worked out for Lester" is at least an arguable point. I recently read something that suggested his production was worth about $30M less than the salary he received. While that's certainly within the margin of error for these WAR estimates (and particularly so when there's a world series title involved), I think whether he was really worth the contract or not is at least up for debate. I'd lean towards "yes" but that's hardly settled. But more importantly, Lester's contract fulfilled a very specific role that Nola's cannot. Lester's signing was a statement. Signing Lester signaled we were going all-in, and that (plus the development of our young core) made us an interesting destination in 2016 for free agents. Heyward probably would have signed anyway based on the money. But guys like Zobrist, Lackey, and Fowler could have all received millions more elsewhere and opted for here because they thought we represented their best shot at a title. There's no replicating that aspect of that signing. We had held the purse strings tight under the Theo regime prior to Lester's signing. But there's been examples since then. We have signed Swanson, Suzuki, and Taillon. Our payroll is already on the higher end of the league. So there's no statement to be made. And any statement that might be implied is muddied by the treatment of Darvish -- signed to a massive deal and traded shortly thereafter. Unless we're going full Mets with it, and that ain't happening.

Pete Ricketts spent $12 million to become governor for four years. Jameson Taillon cost us $68 million over four years -- so $17 million for this year alone. Politics is a lot cheaper to influence than baseball, sadly enough.

Why would they need to swing the narrative in time for an election year? People don't go thinking "I love seeing the Cubs win, so I'm going to vote for Republican candidates." The Ricketts will be using the extra cash on hand to fund sleazy GOP candidates who get them a great ROI. They get more out of those investments than they do from having a winning team -- especially in this 3 wild card era.

And at this point, he's got a good shot to be. The argument for a guy like Mastrobuoni over PCA was always that the overall value was similar, but PCA had some contractual issues if we brought him up in September. But that damage is done now. If PCA shows he can play and Ross likes him at least as a pinch-runner and defensive replacement, I could very easily see him on the postseason roster.

Also, as I expected, Phils just broke through against Wacha. Harper with a 2 run double into the gap. 3-0 Phils.

I was briefly concerned when I looked at the playoff odds graphs for the wild card slots and saw the Brewers odds going up. Then my dumb self realized why...

Solid burn. But his best stuff involves some semblance of control over where it's going. He might as well be throwing knucklers today.

Watching the Phillies - Padres game right now and Wacha clearly doesn't have his best stuff today. He's been lucky so far, but it's only a matter of time before the Phillies break through against him.

After tomorrow, the Brewers have just one more off day during the season. The Cubs have three. Some of those Brewers players may be feeling pretty gassed heading into our final series.

Well, CB Bucknor gifted us that Pirates win.

On a pitch that looked about eight inches outside. That felt bad to watch...

I believe you're thinking of DVD. John Danks, Edinson Volquez, and Thomas Diamond. But that was a few years before the Hendricks trade. Heck, Diamond was DFAd by the Rangers and the Cubs actually picked him up 2 years before acquiring Hendricks.

Jeimer Candelario was on the 2016 team. He wasn't around much -- it was only for a week around the 4th of July. But he was technically on the team.

Cubs take 2 of 3 despite being outscored for the series, 8-6. But it's about time we had some run differential luck. This team has showed an enormous amount of grit in the last few months. I'm looking forward to seeing what they can do in September and hopefully into October.

To that end, Cubs playoff odds are currently the highest they've been all season, at 65.6% on fangraphs. The Brewers run has us down to a 14.1% chance to take the division, but we are a solid favorite to win a wild card berth at this point.

I know everything has been labeled as a must-win for us for the last month, and it's starting to get old. For the purposes of winning the division, I think it's fair to claim this is an extremely important series. But the Brewer's, contrary to the last week of play, aren't the best team in baseball. I think if we take at least one game off them we can potentially outplay them the rest of the season. If we get swept, our odds sink like a stone. For the wild-card, we've been doing well enough in all our other bajillion must-win series that we can afford to drop a series here and there and still potentially sneak into a playoff spot.

Oh, it's certainly possible. 3 fWAR could happen just as a function of health and a mildly lucky BABIP year. Or maybe there's a couple small tweaks or adjustments that could lead to some more power. But at this point, there's enough data that I think it's more likely that this is simply who he is. Even if he makes those adjustments, he's already 29 and has some health issues -- the adjustments may just offset normal decline. I'm not Kyle. I'm not saying hope is pointless. I'm still a fan of Seiya. I just don't have as much hope for his stardom as I did a year ago.

His numbers this season are incredibly similar to what they were last year in similar playing time. He probably won't continue to play at the level from this recent hot streak. We've got enough data at this point that I don't think he's going to become a star. He puts the ball on the ground too much to do that. But he's a solid contributor earning something near what he's being paid.

Notorious defensively-challenged catcher Mike Piazza had a -37 TZ for his career. Manny Ramirez was at -42 for his career. Just think about that... Bichette was so bad on defense that in just one year he racked up nearly as much negative defensive value as Manny Ramirez did in his entire career. (by TZ, anyways)

The long and short on batting order is that each spot in the lineup gets about 20 PA more than the one following it. So you generally want to stack your better hitters near the front so they have more opportunities. The only real change that made to the collective wisdom was pulling some of those high-contact hitters who couldn't actually hit out of the top 1-2 spots. Guys like Neifi Perez were finally relegated to the bottom of the lineup, where they belonged. But yeah, beyond having top guys in top spots, there isn't much to be done to game the system. So it's quite possible that managerial decisions that make hitters more comfortable are worth more in terms of extracting production from a player than you'd get from truly optimizing lineup order on a day-to-day basis.

TT's opinions always slap. I always feel better about my hot takes when I find out they mirror his own. That said, there's been a lot of debate in the last decade or so about just how much time some of these guys may need to adjust. There was a short period where the true top prospects were coming up pretty young and playing pretty incredibly regardless. We had one of the biggest data points for that in Kris Bryant. Prospects have generally come back down to earth since then and do seem to require more of an adjustment period than was the case for that brief moment in time. But it's a terribly inexact science, and may be worth examining further. That said, about the only production I'm reasonably certain PCA would provide over Mastrobuoni would be on defense. If we had a bunch of butchers in the field, I'd be first in line saying he should get the call. But plugging him in CF as a late-inning replacement and shuffling people around is going to provide a marginal upgrade at best. Odds are good Mastrobuoni would make up that difference with the bat in the short-term. Given their roughly equivalent short-term production, I'd just as soon not call him up yet and force some difficult roster decisions. That said, if he is called up I'd be excited as hell.

Yup. In fact, I'd venture to say that defense is the area that sabermetrics has made the biggest strides in since Moneyball came out. I imagine most people here didn't know that the Cubs used to have agreements with some junior colleges to have exclusive access to their amateur TrackMan data so that they could get a better grasp on amateur fielding analytics before these guys were even in the minors. [MLB changed the rules as of 2020 to make these exclusive arrangements void, and all amateur data is now shared]. Teams are using all of this data to get far, far more accurate insights into players defensive qualities. Reaction time, sprint speed, pathing accuracy, etc... And that data is cross referenced with exit velocity and launch angle and even wind speed. Twenty years ago, our best approximations of defensive quality were something akin to "on average across MLB, most guys would get 'x' number of outs on 'y' opportunities. This player made a few more outs on a similar number of opportunities, so he must be pretty good." The improvements in defensive quantification have been frankly incredible. It's no surprise that smart teams have been able to make some serious headway with all this new information.

There's this misconception that sabermetrics was all about walks and homeruns. That was never the case, but a lot of people who read Moneyball missed the point. Billy Beane was operating on a shoestring budget compared to his peers. The whole schtick about Moneyball was that Beane needed to spend his limited funds very wisely. To that end, he utilized sabermetrics to find qualities that were undervalued by the marketplace at the time. And, at the time, OBP wasn't valued appropriately. So Beane found himself getting bargains on that type of player. Moneyball was just a philosophy to use sabermetrics to find something undervalued and snatch it up. Sabermetrics is still in use by just about every club in baseball today. But sabermetrics is, by its very nature, an evolving field. It's an attempt to understand and quantify a player's contributions on a baseball diamond. More than ever, teams are gathering all sorts of data looking for the next edge. We've moved on from OBP to average exit velocity, pitchers spin rates, and catcher framing metrics. And each team is trying to find undervalued qualities in the marketplace. I don't see that changing any time soon. Sabermetrics is here to stay.

Picking nits, but the site remains NSBB rather than NSB.