KingCubsFan

[kyle] As a 21 year old SS, Russell has a 90 wRc. As a 20 year old SS, Castro had a 99 wRC. [/kyle]

I think there's enough there for me, personally, to think he will at least have a career as a competent major league regular. Some might think otherwise. I know Kyle does. He's 24 next Opening Day, and he's having a 0.1 fWAR season despite a .380 or whatever BABIP. He has a long way to go before he proves he belongs in the majors, let alone as a regular. It's not a huge difference, but you're ignoring the data from last year. That does count. That's fair. If you combine then, he's been a bench player or below-average starter. And he's not at an age where there's a ton of projection left. Does he have the potential to break out? Absolutely. But it weird how there's this massive blind spot in the smarter parts of Cubs fandom about how bad he's been this year, and what that means for the *median* projection going forward. With Soler, you have to factor in the limited amount of baseball he played for a few years while he was defecting and then injured. I could see him being a late bloomer.

Kane was #1 in jersey sales last year.

That's just disturbing.

Pretty unbelievable he's up to .270

Then why start Castro? I say bring up Javy for 2B for this series.

Coomer basically stopped talking after the ball got to the wall. I had no idea it was even a possible HR.

Has Maddon explained the rationale for Coghlan hitting third?

Yeah. He's a good bet not to be a black hole at the very least, and that's valuable in itself, especially on a contending team. Yeah and I think it's a reasonable assumption that the FO isn't going to spend major money on a FA CF or give up major assets to acquire one. The alternatives to not bringing Fowler back (and assuming no major FA/trade happens) are kinda scary. With no real internal options that can be impactful we'd be left with some sort of revolving CF poo-poo platter of Szczur and some FA combination of Parra, Venable, Span, De Aza, Davis, you get the point If they believe that Almora's adjustments are for real, I think signing a guy like Venable and bringing back Denorfia is pretty likely for the start of the season. By mid-2016, Almora is either knocking on the door to the majors or he's shown this is a mirage and they're back to looking for a younger guy with multiple years of control.

As soon as they start 1-3.

I think Stanley's has been a Cubs favorite for a while. I think Wood and Dempster brought Eddie Vedder there for Sunday karaoke.

Not in a hurry to get him there. I'd just as soon start him at AA again next year. I don't see him making an impact in 2016, unless he keeps this up for a long period of time. I'd start him in AAA next year. He's been in AA for over a year now, and hopefully this streak is the type of breakthrough the front office has been waiting for. It will be interesting to see how the front office addresses CF in the offseason. If they still think Almora has a future as a starter, a guy like Heyward (who can play multiple positions) makes even more sense.

Considering that Rizzo crushes lefties, I welcome opposing managers bringing in a lefty to face him.

It sucks, but he wasn't really that important. He would have been the third string RB. Plus this may give Ishaq Williams his roster spot back.

If Soler qualified, he'd lead the majors in LD%. I still think he's getting screwed on called strikes (although I don't really have any data to back that up). He should add some loft to his swing, but I think he's going to be fine.

And here comes the double play...

Are we really rolling with 14 pitchers tonight?

I would guess Crawford's 7/140 is a good starting point for him, with maybe an extra and/or a few extra mil a year added due to age. Yeah, that's probably a good starting point. I'd go 7/160-175 for him without hesitation. 8/200 scares me. I wonder if he'd accept something like 5 years for 135-150Mil, and become a FA again at 31. If becoming a FA again after a few years is interesting to him, he'll probably insist on an opt-out after 3-5 years. That's true. I'd be cool with that. Would you put him in RF and trade Soler? Put Soler in left? Try Heyward in CF?

Just imagine if they actually knew Lester was being paid $30 million this year.

Another thing keeping his overall numbers down is his surprisingly terrible numbers against LHP. I'd expect those to increase by the end of the year.

This is reasonable/fair. I think fans are ready to credit Theo for this team because they believe the plan he has been executing is starting to produce results. It's hard not to speculate that things are on the upswing and the team is destined for repeated playoff appearances. Obviously how the future plays out answers the question. Out of curiosity, rather than just say "let's see what the results are to judge Theo," how many playoff appearances do you expect for the Cubs from 2016-2020? I know you could say, I'm not going to guess at numbers, but based on what you'e seen and your overall impression what is your answer? To answer your question, I think 3 out of 5 is a good over/under. I think the upswing thing is the appeal of narrative. We love to explain our sports teams in terms of stories, and the "We were bad, then we were patient, then we got better, then we got great" is an easy story to understand. Getting better, or more importantly getting great, for 2016 and 2017 looks pretty tough to me. Not impossible. It's pretty easy to see how it could happen. All you need is a couple of breakout offensive seasons from our ubertalents and the top half of the pitching staff to stay healthy. But I think the downside is real too: On offense, the only guy who is young enough to make me really sure he'll be noticeably better in 2016 is Russell. The rest are in that iffy range of just barely pre-prime where the median of the curve is not much improvement left at all. For the pitching, I think the question is just how often are you going to get 150+ healthy, productive innings from your top 4? It's not something that's going to happen every year. And we're going to need it to, because there is just stone cold nothing coming up the pipe. The first wave of pitching prospects was supposed to be ready by now, and it's looking like a pretty substantial bust. In the meantime, the Cubs have been one of the most overachieving teams in the league by Pythagorean Wins, and there's two *really* good teams in the division that have pretty good cases to still be pretty good next year. The narrative says the Cubs are betting on the future in 2016. We've seen what betting on the future looks like this year: it's a messy, unpredictable affair. Sometimes it shows up as Kris Bryant playing at a 5-fWAR pace, and sometimes it's thinking you've got the middle infield settled with double redundancy only to have three of your four highly talented young guys become sub-replacement simultaneously. That was a pretty long-winded way to say that baseball is very random. I think we can all agree.

um If that's actually true, it probably has more to do with the fact that Preller thinks Stewart is an idiot as opposed to Preller putting some absurdly high value on Kimbrel.

Have to think it will be in the next week or so.

This. I'd do that in a heartbeat. I get that they might be trying to hold off trading Baez, but I hope the front office isn't delaying this by caring about guys like Underwood.

definitive no, i think Hamels was the only shot at that the talk that the padres want him had me a bit worried i love javy i hope they take castro I defer because I honestly don't know at this point, but who has more trade value-Castro or Baez? Castro doesn't really have trade value at this point.