Rob

How marketable was Zach Davies at the deadline? You are smart enough to know that this game isn't played in certainties. Zach Davies had a range of outcomes from being worth nothing to being worth "x" -- x probably representing a couple prospects that might rank in the back end of our top 30, or maybe a post-hype sleeper guy. Davies had a terrible season and fell on the bad end of his range. You know who had almost the exact same range of possible outcomes? Scott Feldman, who had a great half-season and turned into Jake Arrieta and Pedro Strop. Or Jason Hammel, whose great half-season (alongside Samardzija) helped net us Addison Russell. Or Paul Maholm, who had a mediocre half-season and turned into Arodys Vizcaino who turned into Tommy LaStella. Those guys worked out. Davies didn't work out. Neither did Clayton Richard, Dan Straily, or Chris Volstad, for that matter. The point I'm making is that even smart front offices will miss on these guys. But when you're looking at this group as a whole, we've gotten way more value from these sorts of guys than the money we've put in. So I'm content to let them keep making those gambles. The equation might be different if we had a Triple A roster brimming with bright young SP talent and we need to get them reps at the ML level. But we don't. Somebody needs to pitch the innings, and this is a good gamble -- regardless of whether any individual bet pays off.

Late to the party, but this is exactly the sort of move the Cubs should be making this offseason. He's almost certainly gone at the deadline, but he's a very solid bet to bring something of value back. And if he's performing like he did last year, that value could be sneakily high. I always like these gambles with starting pitching more than position players as a general rule, too. Essentially every team will need more SP heading into the deadline. But there's no guarantees that any contenders would need a 3B or a 2B or whatever other veteran presence you've "hit" on for the season. Or even if a handful of teams need them, there may be a glut of that position available on the market. SP just seem to go for more in general unless some pretty specific situations play out.

It's not "giving up", but it's admitting that you have pushed the idea of a competitive team back another year or two. Considering he only has one year left, 'or two' is not accurate. Or at least it's a different conversation where you can prove out a reasonable extension. In fairness, he strikes me as just the type of guy to take a qualifying offer. If he has a really good 2022 and looks like a decent bet for ~3 wins, I could see the Cubs extending that offer. It's not like they have a lot else to spend the money on right now, and they need to sell some jerseys. And if they do extend that offer, not a lot of teams will be lining up to lose a draft pick to sign a catcher over 30 to an expensive multi-year deal. So the odds he takes the ~19 mil or so would be pretty high. That said, the CBA will probably change how those work anyways.

Hoyer sounds a lot like our old pal Jim Hendry. I'm waiting for the, "compete within the division" quote. I mean, if the owners get the expanded playoffs they want, competing within the division honestly looks more and more like the "right" decision from their perspective.. If only the best teams are making the playoffs, then it makes sense to try to be the best team. But if half the league gets to play postseason baseball, the financial sweet spot is aiming just above the midpoint and hoping your team gets hot at the right time and you can ride that to a world series victory and that sweet, sweet, playoff money.

PTR is grinning from ear to ear while thinking of Schwindel, Madrigal, Hoerner, Wisdom, and Ortega in the daily lineup and Alzolay, Mills, Steele/Thompson in the rotation with a bullpen that has Wick, Heuer, Rodriguez, Morgan, and Maples all at or near the league minimum in salary. Do you really think the Cubs are going to have a payroll under $100 Million next year? Yeah, even when the Cubs were tanking we were still going out and signing mid-tier guys on short deals hoping to score when we flipped them. Paul Maholm and Reed Johnson ended up part of the Arodys Vizcaino deal which led to Tommy La Stella. Scott Feldman brought Arrieta and Strop. Jason Hammel helped bring in Addison Russell. We will be high on the list for mid-tier free agents. Injured or old but want to prove you still have something in the tank? Had a down year in your walk year before FA? We have a solid coaching staff, lots of time, and very low expectations. And if you do well you can get shipped to a contender at the deadline. I expect us to fish heavily from this pond. Bargains can be found.

Also, it goes without saying, but LAD sniping the Padres for Scherzer would be great for us. They’ll feel pressure to match the move. So will the Giants.

I imagine Scherzer is just waiting to see what options he will have to choose from and then picking his team.

Kevin Alcantara is rated on fangraphs as a 50 FV player. Vizcaino is rated as a 45. In our system that would place Alcantara as the 2nd or 3rd best player (approximately even with Preciado) and Vizcaino as somewhere in the 9-12 range. It's a really good return for a couple months of Rizzo, honestly. We got about as much for him as we did for Darvish.

The last time my life just felt good and positive and like disaster wasn't on the horizon was when Rizzo caught the final out in the 2016 World Series. Shortly after, we had Trump. And then climate change started really kicking in. And then a pandemic. Now everywhere I look there are fascists and things are awful and I'm constantly worried about what's coming next. But for that one brief moment in time everything was great and only getting better. I'll always remember him fondly for that. I hope this isn't the end of his time with the Cubs. But if it is, I want nothing but the best for him.

A live look at the Cubs org: Serious question…if the fire was so intense that the flames are literally on the ocean surface, what’s the point of shooting more water at it? It's not water. It's more like the fire-retardant foam that comes out of a fire extinguisher. It's an attempt to starve the fire of oxygen.

There is the potential that Julianna got one of the two rings in the divorce decree, and is selling it merely for spite. Or maybe Ben did something in his time with the Cubs and it blew up his marriage, so he's trying to win her back by getting rid of all vestiges of his time with the Cubs. Nobody knows. All we can do is speculate, and that's pretty useless.

Maples was a big spin rate improver. As a marginal guy, I’m guessing he keeps using til he gets popped.

Du-rag isn’t inherently derogatory. As many have noted, it’s a very common thing worn by African-American men. It’s the way that Brenly felt compelled to point out an old great like Tom Seaver wouldn’t have ever worn one that made the comment racist. It was a pointed comment on how the game has changed, and implied not for the better. Fwiw, I don’t think it was meant to be racist. But it was insensitive. So the sensitivity training feels appropriate here.

Well, I was disappointed when they didn't bring him back. He was 27, and had just come off his 2nd season better than any Chris Coghlan ever had. A 27 year old leaving a terrible team seems like a perfect candidate for improvement. At least to me. Castellanos had his best season in 2018, where he put up 2.9 fWAR. He was great at the plate (129 wRC+), but a butcher in the field (-12.3 UZR). Coghlan's best year was 2015. He put up a 113 wRC+ that year and was a net positive in the field. So he tallied up 3.1 fWAR. You can quibble on the numbers. Baseball-reference may like Castellanos more because they use different defensive figures. But at the time of signing his contract, he was known as a straight-up butcher in the field. It was almost like watching late-career Jermaine Dye out there. Or Gary Sheffield and his esoteric routes. Has he gotten better? Sure. Was it a guarantee? Absolutely not.

I'm not broken-hearted over Castellanos. He mashed with us, but there was nothing to suggest he'd really turned a corner and was about to establish himself as a great ballplayer. His absolute best seasons looked no better than the stuff Chris Coghlan did for us a few years prior, and nobody was beating up the front office over not giving Coghlan a massive contract. There's a lot of valid criticisms of this front office, but passing on Castellanos isn't one of them. That contract looked bad from jump street. That said, trading Darvish sucked. But it would have almost been better had we just committed to the fire sale. Now, we're stuck in an awkward no-mans land where we can't sell our valuable assets because we're in it. And we aren't good enough to justify using long-term assets to push all-in.

Some of them may be real, but they’re all jokes.

Tbf I don’t think they’re trying to change him or consider him a project so much as he’s cheap, healthy, and likely was better than most 5th starters on opening day rosters I’m really looking forward to him being bounced, don’t think there was ever any expectations that Trevor Williams was going to lock down a rotation spot all year His ERA the prior 2 years was 6.18 and 5.38. They had to have seen something they thought they could fix to get him back to 2018 performance when he was actually pretty damn good. There had to have been better pitching options out there for relatively cheap but I'm too lazy to go back and see. But I feel like coming off of his performances the previous 2 years he seems like a guy that would have signed a minor league deal with an invite to ML camp not a major league deal for $2.5m Tyler Chatwood got 3M this year.

Tweet has been deleted.

I’m still used to saying this about guys who didn’t get a ring with us, but Kris did. So he has to stay forever.

I vote we call them Gombers.

I'm sure teams will be lined up to give a "solid return" for a 33 year old reliever who hasn't pitched well since 2018 and is earning $16 million. Do you know how baseball works? Yeah, I don't see his contact as being untradable or anything of the sort. 33 is still relatively young in the grand scheme of things, and we can eat money if we need to. We are also talking about one of the legendary closers in baseball even with his struggles on our team. If he is looking like he has regained his past dominance, teams will be lining up out the door asking for him. Granted, these trades are harder than they used to be because he actually has to be pitching well. He can't just luck into a good ERA and get that level of interest. The underlying metrics have to match up, his velocity needs to be appropriate, etc... But yeah, if he's pitching well he's extremely tradable.

but how will that change the IP? I'm over the age of fifty, so I'm not really the right person to give advice on this. That said, I don't understand the question. I have a Roku that's plugged into the TV. MLB.tv is one of the streaming choices. I log in using my MLB.tv credentials (username and password). I watch the games on the TV. Omar mentioned that he also got NordVPN to change his IP address. In short, if you're in what MLB has determined to be a "local market" you'll be blacked out of watching games for that team on MLB.tv. So if you live in Chicago, no Cubs games or White Sox games. But you can watch everybody else as long as they aren't playing the Cubs or White Sox. If you live in Florida, no Marlins or Rays games but you can watch Cubs and White Sox games, etc... Some places the local restrictions make sense -- some they do not. I believe Iowa was blacked out for six different teams, for instance. People use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to convince MLB that you're really watching the game from some location other than where you're actually watching it. Essentially, it reroutes your internet traffic through a server of your choice. If you use a server in Brazil or Luxembourg or wherever, MLB thinks you live overseas and have no local market teams -- so you can watch all the games without any blackouts whatsoever. So people living in Chicago can use that to watch Cubs games. Trying to get a streaming service to work with a VPN can be a bit of a pain.

but how will that change the IP? Will try casting it. Cannot connect it, usually am doing work on my laptop. I remember there being an issue with chromecast and MLB.tv a while back. It wouldn't work if I'd try it from the main window they'd opened. But if I copied the link to my own new tab, I was 100% fine. Not sure if that's still a loop that needs jumping through, but it's worth keeping in mind.

You're welcome.

Maybe just poor circulation? I'm guessing the dude has ice-cold hands.