Sammy Sofa

This line of thinking makes less and less sense every day that this debacle drags on. How does leaking the idea that there is potentially a rift between the FO and ownership help them, or "throw other teams off the scent?" Everyone else, apparently: "Wow, if Bryce Harper leads to the vaunted Cubs front office and their horrible owners embarrassingly proxy slap-fighting via lame sports media leaks, he must be too toxic to sign! Better stay away!" Drunken Theo: "YOINK."

Second chance? Wouldn't this be more like a fourth or fifth chance, at least?

Now that is truly fantasy sports.

UPDATE: Trevor Bauer clearly got his ass slapped by his bosses over going after a teenager for days via Twitter; unleashes hilariously and patently untrue apology....TO THE WORLD: [tweet] [/tweet]

This is, for sure, by far the most money they have ever started a season at. I suppose it's possible they could add a MadBum for $12 million, but that might be stretching it. They might be in a total go for it mode, though. I can't tell if this means if they have the vaunted payroll or if the Cubs do.

IT IS DEFINITELY TWO THINGS.

I keep thinking it's gotta be the TV projections somehow not being what they were wanting.

Is his foot is now the greatest soccer flopper ever?

First we had: Then we had: Now we have this: https://youtu.be/otzkMzkE214 Hey, at least the guys driving the cart had a good time!

[tweet] [/tweet]

Wasn't it basically variations of that during the tank years? Blaming the debt or the plans for renovation/construction or how the city won't kick in...

And I seethe over the prospective idea of the FO being shy about trading away their guys to dump these big contracts. If you could, hypothetically, shed yourself of Heyward's money by shipping off Schwarber and Happ with him, then horsefeathering do it. If getting a team to eat Chatwood's bum deal means giving them your best pitching prospect, THEN horsefeathering DO IT. If the end result of having to overpay for a salary dump trade means you can sign Harper or Machado, THEN horsefeathering DO IT ALREADY.

The only real arguments I can think of against this are: 1) Something changed with how much payroll the Ricketts were willing to give Theo between the time he signed Yu and now. If we don't sign him, I believe it's because Theo is in the doghouse for his recent bad signings (Yu, Hey, Chatwood) and is being tasked to fix one or multiple before being allowed to hand Harper 400 mil. Does it make sense that this would be something that changed between re-signing Hamels and now? No, but it's the best thing I can come up with That's along the lines of what I'm thinking, too. And it just makes me hate the Ricketts even more. If they can't see the difference before overpaying for those guys and paying big for someone like Harper (or Machado)...[expletive], do they suck.

Personally, I'm not bemoaning the neighborhood as if some great old part of Chicago was lost; it was horsefeathers then and it's horsefeathers now. It just basically moved sideways to a type of shitty with a glossy coat of paint that makes everything more expensive.

Basically there at least used to be SOME owners who seemed to view owning a sports team as a gigantic ego-stroke for which they were willing to forgo at least some of the strict expectations of things like quarterly reports and huge profit margins. Not that that they were maniacs willing to always run things for a loss, but they stood out in contrast from the cheap owners. Now it feels like everyone is trying to be a cheap owner; yeah, it's a sliding scale of how cheap they are, but man, the bouts of horsefeathers YOU spending were terrifying and exciting, and something that I long yearned for the Cubs to be, and this FA class seems like it's custom-made for that kind of spending, yet nobody is stepping up. It sucks. The business of baseball sucks right now.

Yeah, and it sucks. Nobody is realistically expecting a sports owner to run at a loss and just spend whatever without any consideration to the return...but the flipside of that is that it's absolute horse horsefeathers that one of the most profitable teams, with things like already obscene ticket prices, goes out of its way to cry poor (IMO past the point of the usual negotiation wankery), as if they're struggling to turn ANY kind of profit. It's garbage to have to swallow that they can't figure out how to sign a generational talent because of a "woe is me; excuse me as I dab my eyes with these crisp c-notes" narrative because of horsefeathers they decided to dump their money into that's only tangentially related to the team (ie-all of the Wrigleyville stuff outside of renovating the ballpark and creating a non-joke FO setup), and because the city wasn't suckered into footing the bill for as much of it as possible. The BS they spouted before was that all of this would result in more money for the team, but now the exact opposite is happening....meanwhile the ticket prices will continue to rise, the neighborhood will continue to become more and more of a horsefeathers ass, generic, Buffalo Wild Wings-style bacchanal, and whatever godforsaken TV deal setup they end up with will likely cost fans a ridiculous amount and be a gigantic pain in the ass. Woo- horsefeathering -hoo.

Ah, yes; Chicago's under-policed mini-Bourbon Street with the wonky crime stats to not scare away the suburban bros and bro-ettes and their precious, precious dollars. So deliciously and impressively revitalized now that there's a hotel, too.

Stay classy, homie.

Pretty simple question: do you think that at this point that the Cubs are likely to sign Harper for the 2019 season? Me, I shifted into the acceptance stage of figuring it's not going to happen, and I would be pretty damn surprised at this point if it did.

How are they not helping themselves by trying to wait out these players and agents to see if they can (relatively) lowball their contract demands? The only thing gained for management if they jump on those players now is, obviously, locking up those players before someone else can...but they'd have to pay more to do that, and, again, it's clear that every single team is trying to outdo the next in how to pay FA's as little as possible, regardless of the talent-level.

Pretty crafty way to duck out of all holiday obligations.

Given how every single team is shamelessly trying to pay as little as possible, I think you're vastly overstating how unusual it is for none of these guys to be signed as of 1/8.

Besides the very obvious, "management sucks?"

Well there's your problem. Oh, but this is the kind of rando internet crazy I love precisely because it makes absolutely no sense. Like, who looks at this goober and decides, "yup, THIS guy is the inspirational figure I aspire to be?" I seriously think he could get his own cult going if he wasn't such a complete idiot.