Sammy Sofa

I know I'm pretty damn bleak on this team, but Baez and Contreras are two pretty gigantic "other than's." Out of the rest of them named, it seems like a lot of that is just baseball being baseball; most prospects are simply not going to amount to much than being Just Guys. It's frustrating for sure that either Russell or Schwarber, as highly touted as they were, haven't amounted to more, but 2 all stars out of 7 guys is pretty damn good.

The Cubs certainly to be in A crapshoot of some kind at the moment.

Sounds good.

Again, I'm not saying the Cubs, or any other team, is supposed to be stacked at every position; I am frustrated in how I feel like they settled for a mediocre OF at best, and a truly putrid bench. I'm also not expecting them to be perpetually winning almost 100 or more games, but it can't help but be infuriating how they very clearly just settled for (hell, embraced) the inevitable decline of a particular core and did absolutely nothing to try and mitigate it or slow it. As it stands right now, I think they're going to end up being a team that wins 85-88 games, and if they end up winning the division (or the WC) it is likely going to be in part to having to deal some of the few assets they have for short term bench and/or bullpen help. I agree, that's certainly not a bad team at all! And maybe I am just assuming the worst...but it feels like their approach is probably going to be to just let the slide happen no matter how fast it does, maybe sign a fan favorite like Baez to a longer deal, and then look to when they can construct a cheaper team based mostly out of prospects as the next window. Yeah, that's a lot of projection. But there just seems like this really odd sense of urgency in how the owners and the FO have approached the team since the Darvish and Chatwood signings blew up in their faces. IMO, the settled for OF speaks less of the high quality team they've constructed, and more as a warning sign of what they're going to tolerate as the team gets older/worse. I know that's really negative. I just wanted more signs that they were looking to also bolster for the future instead of only hoping for the best right now.

Yes, from a purely baseball standpoint I always want the Cubs to be as good as they can possibly be. From an emotional standpoint, I am very up and down in that regard this year. Talking/complaining/arguing about them from a baseball standpoint helps me try and sometimes ignore that stuff that's making it real hard to keep liking a team I've been a fan of my entire life. But hey, sweet gotcha, broheim.

I'm sorry, we're just not going to see eye to eye on the OF. It stinks for how good this team was supposed to be, and especially in terms of taking advantage of the window of the core of players they have now, and their inaction in the offseason. And Bote is tempered by being a platoon player, a situation they find themselves repeatedly unable to figure out at multiple positions. It's fine if this team is good enough for you. It's not for me. They could have and should have done better. I want the Cubs to be up there with the Yankees and the Astros and the Dodgers. They shouldn't be settling.

Wow. I'm not asking for the Cubs to be worldbeaters at every position, or every OF spot. I think we all ideally want to think of the Cubs as being able to be lumped in with the likes of the Dodgers and the Yankees and Astros (and hell, the Twins). They explicitly stood pat as if they were all but a sure thing to be in that rarefied air again, but it was obvious the ENTIRE OF was a series of question marks at best. The best bet was Schwarber, and even that was, yet again, hinged largely on defensive value that was unlikely to be a consistent thing. How is it unrealistic or unfair to have wanted them to do whatever they could to try and upgrade just ONE of the OF spots to be a better shot of being more than average at best? This feels like it's gotten to the point where I'm basically wishing that the Cubs had 5 good hitters on the team instead of 4, and that's some kind of crazy unreasonable idea. It's been hashed out a ton but Schwarber was one of the best LF'ers in baseball last year regardless of defense. He was top 10 in Dongs, ISO, OBP, SLG, wOBA and tied for 11th in wRC+ and he was top 5-7 in a handful of those stats too. Do we want him to be more, yes, but he was still pretty good last year and made perfect sense to stand pat on him/LF. Like I said, and you even made bold, he was their best bet. That's not an acceptable OF setup to go into the season with. Minus his unsustainable defensive value, his overall value would have taken a big hit on Fangraphs, and his overall value on BR last year is already not that hot. All of that is fine if at least one of the other OF spots is a decent bet to produce, but the Cubs clearly weren't set up for that. Acting like he's some kind of anchor (the good kind) that justifies them ignoring doing ANYTHING to upgrade the OF seems nuts.

Keep it up, Rumpelstiltskin. I'm hardly the only one here talking about how many black holes the Cubs have in the line up.

philosophizer75 is up. weis21 on deck.

Because it's entirely unrealistic to expect any team to 'rise above the pack' at all 8 spots in the field. Wow. I'm not asking for the Cubs to be worldbeaters at every position, or every OF spot. I think we all ideally want to think of the Cubs as being able to be lumped in with the likes of the Dodgers and the Yankees and Astros (and hell, the Twins). They explicitly stood pat as if they were all but a sure thing to be in that rarefied air again, but it was obvious the ENTIRE OF was a series of question marks at best. The best bet was Schwarber, and even that was, yet again, hinged largely on defensive value that was unlikely to be a consistent thing. How is it unrealistic or unfair to have wanted them to do whatever they could to try and upgrade just ONE of the OF spots to be a better shot of being more than average at best? This feels like it's gotten to the point where I'm basically wishing that the Cubs had 5 good hitters on the team instead of 4, and that's some kind of crazy unreasonable idea.

The Cubs are going to be lucky to end up with a combined 4+ fWAR out of their corner OF spots; that's inexcusable after all their BS talk of windows and waves every game/season being important and whatnot. Being comparably bad as X number of other teams isn't some kind of amazing counterargument; it just means the Cubs failed to rise above the pack. Why the hell would anyone look at that as acceptable?

Well, it was basically impossible for them to NOT go into the season with this obvious tire fire of an OF! Look how many other bad OFers are out there!

Damn right.

Shockingly, surrounding 4 good hitters with 4 black holes + the pitcher on pretty much a daily basis sometimes reveals some...hiccups in the team construction.

Quintana is butt again, so whoopedee doo if he or Lester mysteriously ended up on the IL.

Love how that whole thing reads like he's basically shrugging and dying to say, "but what could *I* POSSIBLY do?!? How did it EVER get to this point? I just wish they did what I wanted, mew-mew-mewwwwwwww."

It's lame. "It's fine," yet again, is lame. I don't care how meatball-ish it is; this team is annoyingly lame. Pitch him until Hendricks is back. Odds are Montgomery and Chatwood would just suck at least as much as he could. I'm tired of them coddling their terrible, terrible team-building, and the end results are likely the same either way. Give the kid some experience instead of the zilches who have no futures.

But why not just let him get regular starts? Let him work through it since he actually has, y'know, a future (ideally), and Montgomery and Chatwood are old and trash. And the Cubs arguably should just go to a 6 man rotation since they're packed with eldery and/or injury-prone starters.

Those RISP are just too darn pesky, I guess.

Alright, now I don't feel bad for breaking out the Game Without a Dong-o-Meter earlier.

The start to this inning:

Woof. Montgomery went from cool to turd like THAT.