ConstableRabbit

He didn't actually go through arbitration thought, right? He accepted a contract the Cubs offered each year.

that's a good comp Yes, I like this analogy. As for the patience of Pace, I think its clear things could be much worse. I guess the McCaskeys just have to be comfortable with Pace's process and thinking that has led to this. The 5 year record is clearly not good, but if you handicap the "building" years and see 2019 as a blip, I doubt they are thinking of a move anytime soon. I'd still pretty much tie Pace and Nagy together. Right now Pace has 2 years left on his contract and Nagy 3. Nagy would have to be really bad next year to move on after year 3, I think, so he'll get a 4th year, barring a 2-14 season or something. So the question then ends up being if Pace can go into his final year/Nagy's 4th year as a potential lame duck GM. Or if things go well in 2020 again (even modest success like 10-6), they may look to extend them both. I don't love these comps as there is some confirmation bias, but I saw this elsewhere and thought it was pretty interesting. If you're viewing Pace/Nagy as the package deal, there is plenty of evidence to support patience (as long as you kind of wave off Pace's Y1-3 record). Outside of these teams below, of recent SB winners you have the Pats dynasty, Denver who won in Y1 of Kubiak after stalling under Fox, Steelers at the end of Cowher/Y2 of Tomlin basically and extension of that dynasty, and Philly winning in Y2 under Pederson (and then a couple repeat SB winners from this list). But clearly a lot of good coaches/dynasties taking some time to meld. Rams 1996 6 – 10 Dick Vermeil becomes HC 1997 5 – 11 1998 4 – 12 1999 13 – 3 (Super Bowl XXXIV Champions) Giants 2003 4 - 12 Tom Coughlin becomes HC 2004 6 – 10 2005 11 – 5 2006 8 – 8 2007 10 – 6 (Super Bowl XLII Champions) Saints 2005 3 - 13 Sean Payton becomes HC 2006 10 – 6 2007 7 – 9 2008 8 – 8 2009 13 – 3 (Super Bowl XLIV Champions) Packers 2006 8 – 8 Mike McCarthy becomes HC 2007 13 – 3 2008 6 – 10 2009 11 – 5 2010 10 – 6 (Super Bowl XLV Champions) Seahawks 2009 5 – 11 Pete Carroll becomes HC 2010 7 – 9 2011 7 – 9 2012 11 – 5 2013 13 – 3 (Super Bowl XLVIII Champions) The tough part for Pace will be threading the needle from the 2018-2020 window he initially set up, to re-opening the window in 2021 without any reset/retool year. What else did all of those teams have? A quarterback!

This isn’t how message boards work man. If you can’t stand someone, there’s a feature so you don’t see their posts available to you. You don’t get to limit who can reply to your posts, if that causes you to not post then that’s 100% up to you. If you want me to participate in this thread then that is exactly how it will work. Otherwise, I will continue discussing it privately (which sucks for posters interested in what I think and have to say on the draft. It's not a small group). Bye then? Although the poster references posts a lot and has some strong opinions, they are a large contributor to this forum, too. There was objectively nothing wrong with the reply above. This may be a good time for some introspection because your take is frankly bizarre.

You guys are so dramatic.

Is this surprising? The Cubs won't be on his network and he's going to have to dedicate a disproportionate amount of time to covering the Sox.

But his wRAA for last year was a lot closer to 2015 than 2016 or 2017. It comes down to whether he will be a top 10 wOBA guy like 2016-2017 or “only” top 30 like in 2015 and 2019.

I would guess when this number is closer to zero than 9 digits. [tweet] [/tweet]These are EBITDA numbers, though. I: Do we know how much the debt servicing costs the Cubs every year? I thought I remembered it being ~$35m annually. T: The Cubs likely pay taxes D: They have depreciating assets but too difficult for me to mentally calc A: Same If you add the above to the total $20-25m Luxury Tax penalties Brett referenced you get closer to breakeven. The Cubs EBITDA was $87m and the White Sox was $76m? That is insane. To me, this implies that either the interest payments on the team's debt is higher than we thought or the non-payroll investments the Cubs put into the team are higher than we thought.

I guess the reason for flipping or pivoting would be the lack of ANY development of pitching to date. I’m sure it was in the plan that by this point they’d have a real internal option or two for a SP role and some bullpen roles. The lack of that may have changed the equation a bit with needing so much pitching next year that he had to go against his core beliefs/how he would ideally prefer to build. With all the pitching holes needing to be filled next year it’s pretty hard to expect to really contend with internal options and the FA options and doing no adds through trade. That’s at least my stab at it as a reason why they’d suddenly pivot off of how they seemingly prefer to build things. My preference would be to just keep KB this year and try and maximize things but I can at least get the sentiment of the other idea here. I also like the idea of replacing Bryant's production at similar contractual cost one year later by signing Betts while also having acquired good, young arms and a good CFer. Betts would be an improvement on Bryant imo. And I love Bryant.

As co-founder and Chairman of the Almora Sucks Club (Cubswin11 is co-founder and President), horsefeathers that noise.

Thinking that Yelich isn’t the best player in the division — as much as it pains me to say it — is irrational.

Right around there so as not to make a significant difference. Does it really matter if it's 4.9 vs 5.1 fWAR? No one inside MLB teams and a modern FO cares about that small a difference. They always predict within a range or have projections showing a range. Yeah. This thread would be better having options like 3-4 fWAR, 4-5, 5-6, etc. All this is thread asking is if KB will be healthy or not to get to ~650+ PAs. With all of that said, you think that if he's healthy, he gets above. Do you think he gets above?

For reference 2015: 6.1 in 650 PAs 2016: 7.9 in 699 PAs 2017: 6.7 in 665 PAs 2018: 2.3 in 457 PAs 2019: 4.8 in 634 PAs

There's no need to shut down the section, but if the Cubs FO is considering doing something that you think is completely stupid and baffling, chances are that you don't have all of the facts, not that the FO is dumb. The list of reasons why the Cubs would consider trading Bryant isn't limited to "they want to save money" -- they could think his best years are behind him.

I changed it for you and I agree. It's damn hard running a team and making these decisions, but I trust Theo (for the most part). I don't trust the scouts and people under him making the right decisions, but I guess they're rectifying that by changing personnel pretty heavily throughout the organization. The majority of fans would make terrible decisions and trades and draft picks, but I'm sure a very small quantity of fans would actually do pretty well if given the chance. This is true for all walks of life and not just sports. I have a friend that just got into the candle making business and created a small company and sold $1400 worth of custom made candles in a single day. They're high quality and look really nice. I had no idea he had a passion for making high-quality candles, but good for him. I knew he was a fan of candles, but I never thought he would start a business selling them... This kid is in Med School also, which I find hilarious. I don't know where he finds the time lol. I'm assuming that you aren't comparing someone's ability to pull off a modest direct to consumer side hustle to someone casually able to run an MLB front office. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that absolutely no one who posts on NSBB could run the Cubs, let alone better than the current FO. If anyone reading this has the chops, for the love of God, log off and get into baseball.

I heard Cubs did something similar when they met with Shogo, they gave him a printout of the Cubs Wikipedia page wrapped in a leftover t-shirt from a giveaway from last season. Do you remember what the Cubs did for Lester?

The farm giveth, and the farm taketh away. The system bottoming out for a while there really killed their ability to dump bad contracts since you often have to sweeten the pot to do so. Now that they do actually have some decent/interesting prospects again, the perfect storm of the Cubs having no money and Theo being King of the Prospect Hoarders has them terrified to move anyone who could be cheap and useful. The King of Prospect Hoarders who executed two of the biggest prospect-driven trades of the last few years? That’s constantly brought up?

It's not even worth discussing. It's a completely useless data point (as CR points out above), and it certainly adds nothing to determining whether he is underpaid. Then stop referencing it. He's underpaid. He's underpaid... by design. He signed a deal hoping that he'd become good enough to be underpaid in 2020. He preferred to take guaranteed money up front vs. taking a risk of waiting it out. It's not some wrong that has to be righted by overpaying him for his age-32 season and beyond.

It's really weird to discuss whether someone is overpaid or underpaid, and then reference a dollar value number that isn't rooted in the realities of the real world market. Fangraphs also lists 921 players with zero or negative salary values -- it's just not a good proxy for real salaries.

Rizzo never has, and never will, be worth 33 million a year in the real world. 16.5m is good value for a 4 WAR 1B, but not a severe underpayment. Abreu just got $16.67m a year after two years putting up 3.1 WAR combined. Did you think that was a good deal? Look, I love Rizzo. We all love Rizzo. When he signed his 7/$41m deal, he had about a full season of MLB PAs under his belt, good for about 1.0 fWAR. The Cubs hoped he'd become a star and they'd have more financial flexibility, and Rizzo got paid a lot more than he was making. There should 100% not be a conversation about an extension until this deal is close to being done.

Especially when he told a porn star that he was a big fan of hers. What does it all mean?!?

[dir=rtl][/dir] How are you enjoying the moto e5 supra?

Lol Brett. He’s valuable but not some game changer. Not. “Woah” acquisition.

Starlin Castro? He signed a 7/60 extension in 2012. 2013-2019 he was worth 10.9 WAR, not great but only cost $8.5 per year and he also had a 3.2, 2.3 and 1.9 win years. So you got a few decent years. I know — not a disaster but you could have paid him a lot less. For the record I’m not opposed to extensions.

Nah, they're incredibly overrated. On average, fans especially but even teams fall victim to optimism bias when projecting out young players. Athletes fall apart at a way higher rate than we are comfortable baking into our projections. Having them under non-guaranteed team control >>>> owing them guaranteed deals. When have they really blown up on teams outside of like the Votto/Giancarlo massive ones? The ones more in the Rizzo, Yelich, Suarez, Quintana, Trout’s first one, and Bogaerts, Albies and Acuna are well on their way all seem to have worked out I’m trying to think of other ones an really can’t. And a lot of those you aren’t talking that much guaranteed money at risk of blowing up. Starlin Castro?

I don't see Theo picking Cotton, like his mother did and his brother did and his sister did. And his daddy died young. His dad may be able to help with Cole though.