Sammy Sofa

Happ and Schwarber are valuable players; I take issue with them being tossed out like they're proof that it's ludicrous to expect this FO to have someone running the farm who could, apparently inexplicably, both have an eye for offensive talent and could just barely competently handle the pitching development side of things. Like, "how dare you want to see someone other than the mastermind that found Schwarber and Ian Happ" is a tad much. I think the crux of this discussion is that you are arguing despite giving no indication that you understand what a draft on balance *should* net you. A draft that nets a team an everyday player or mid-rotation starter and one bench/pen guy is a solid success. That'll earn you a B grade. That is how hard this stuff is. I assume the Astros are a team you have in mind when you think the team ought to have done better? Go look at their 2013 draft. The best player they got out of that draft was Tony Kemp, and that's a draft where they had the #1 overall pick. This stuff is HARD. McLeod's worst drafts are either 2012 (Almora, Bote, Underwood) or 2015 (Happ and a few guys who still might be relievers). This org has problems. Lots of them. Amateur talent acquisition is like third from the bottom after Javy Baez and Yu Darvish's twitter account. Enough with the "oh, you just don't get it, man" horse horsefeathers; I'm not going out on a limb by being critical of how badly their pitching development has gone. It's opinions like yours that are flying in the wind of the overwhelming consensus that the Cubs botched this side of things, and for a prolonged period. You keep trying to make it sound like I'm being unreasonable wanting their pitching development to be better than TERRIBLE, which is ridiculous. This org doesn't live and die by Jason McLeod, and this FO should be smart enough to figure out how to develop players under someone else's watch, or if they can't stand parting with him then put this critical part of things under the care of someone else. They can't afford for things to just be maybe looking up at this point; having laid a damn goose egg with the pitching is going to make it more likely that the window smashes shut.

Happ and Schwarber are valuable players; I take issue with them being tossed out like they're proof that it's ludicrous to expect this FO to have someone running the farm who could, apparently inexplicably, both have an eye for offensive talent and could just barely competently handle the pitching development side of things. Like, "how dare you want to see someone other than the mastermind that found Schwarber and Ian Happ" is a tad much. I mean everyone who’s on the other side of this has admitted they’ve lacked at the pitching side but also explained how their failings were also the more probable outcome when trying to develop pitching (especially SPs). The Happ/Schwarber stuff is just proving they are good at what they are good at and they picked a plan to go and were relatively successful with it. You can’t name names who would’ve been better outcomes than them if we picked different dudes over them. Ultimately I think the stance of some of us that your whole issue with or expedition of the FO is rather unrealistic when looking at the circumstances and around the league. When there’s a whopping 1 team (Dodgers) who you could say are actually pulling off what you want the FO to do. I’m 100% on board with you that what you want is how things should be run and should be the goal of every team to work that way. I just think in reality it’s not how things actually run and turn out the vast majority of the time given so many variables. Well, sure we can; there's the Astros, too. Except they did the whole, "horsefeathers drafting pitchers; we'll get them other ways," much better. The FO has a bumpy track record with acquiring pitchers beyond just their time with the Cubs, so that was an inherent added risk to the choice they made, and now pitching-wise they're kinda with their backs to wall. Yes, obviously, nobody is disputing how it paid off in 2016, but now it's been an ongoing issue that have to deal with the effects of immediately, and that just further exacerbates how iffy they are with signing/trading for pitching. It's not unreasonable to want them to be just even a little better at handling the pitching development than how terrible they have been for years.

Of the Top 10 picks in Happ's draft, 6 of them either haven't made MLB or have provided negative bWAR in a brief amount of time. 5 for Schwarber's Top 10. That's the baseline, not whether the player was an especially good major leaguer. That's a little bit of an oversimplification, looking at Happ's draft. Yes, for where the Cubs were at the time it made sense to prioritize a more polished bat. But in those 6 you have Brendan Rogers and Kyle Tucker, both of which are much more valuable than Ian Happ. Happ and Schwarber are valuable players; I take issue with them being tossed out like they're proof that it's ludicrous to expect this FO to have someone running the farm who could, apparently inexplicably, both have an eye for offensive talent and could just barely competently handle the pitching development side of things. Like, "how dare you want to see someone other than the mastermind that found Schwarber and Ian Happ" is a tad much.

They’ve combined for 13.9 WAR, one is 25 and one is 26 going in to this season. Man I think you gotta recheck your expectations on draft/prospect outcomes. The idea that they should be feathers in his cap is hinged on the end of last year, and you know it. And it would be great if that turns out to be the case long term, but come on; Happ especially is based on the tiniest of sample sizes. Both of these guys are still question marks to varying degrees right now.

Also: hoisting up Ian Happ like he's this amazing slam dunk argument in favor of McLeod being granted perpetual farm system Grand Poobah status is certainly something. And, horsefeathers, let's face it, Schwarber, too.

Nah, you nailed it pretty well. I really can't imagine someone so passionately going to bat for Jason horsefeathering McLeod, but here we are. This FO does weird things to people, man.

I gave the Bears the hilariously low bar of seasons where they won more than half their games, and the Bears have a whopping 18 (probably; someone check my counting skills). The Lions appear to have 13. Now's the time for that chunky fresh horsefeathers comparison analogy to come back into play. If the Bears can luck into winning a damn SB, then, god help us, so can the Lions, and then ALL BETS ARE OFF.

I think you don't know anything about football. The Bears have not been good. They have not been anywhere near as bad as the Browns. Cleveland has been an utter disaster with no glimmers of hope. They've had one 10 win season since 1994. They've had double digit losses in 14 seasons in the 2000s. The Bears and Cowboys each have 6 seasons with 10 or more wins in the 2000s. The Bears have 7 double digit loss seasons to the Cowboys 6 during that time. The Bears and Cowboys are much more similar than the Bears and Browns. The difference is everybody (including you) thinks the Cowboys have been and will be great while everybody knows the Bears are blah. I don't think the Cowboys are great right now; this started because I was looking at the damn Bears over half a century. I was marveling at how they are, as you said, are really only known as a "blah" team at worst when the sum total of their efforts in the Modern Era or whatever the horsefeathers we want to call it is overwhelmingly garbage a la the Jets or the Browns. The Cowboys, by contrast, understandably have a legacy based on actually being a good team for a ton of the same era we're looking at. Sure, if you want to argue they're overrated now because of their performance over the last 20 years, go nuts; I certainly won't disagree because the Cowboys are a bunch of obnoxious dildos run by creepy old folks home sex toy found under a hospital bed come to life. But they at least have a legacy somewhere that makes it clear why people would have the idea of, "hey, the Cowboys have been a pretty damn good team." The Bears, quite obviously, do not. They have been bad far, far, far more often than not for basically the entire time football has existed as the entity we know it as today, yet people wouldn't even blink if someone acted like there's this titanic gulf between the Bears and, say, another team right in their own division in the Lions. There, IMO, is not. The Bears should have more of legacy as a Very Bad Football Team because that is basically the only legacy they actually have.

Man, I swear literally every team gets accused of having too easy a schedule and/or division. By almost any window you want to break it down by they've been better than the Bears, so I just find it funny when a Bears fans thinks the Bears are closer to a team like the Cowboys than, say, the horsefeathering Browns.

hat they put their big draft picks' focus on hitting doesn't excuse or justify completely biffing every single opportunity to develop a pitcher via the draft or signing simply because they won the WS, because it's effectively acting like if they invested even just an iota more of whatever the horsefeathers in to developing some pitching then it all wouldn't have happened. The WS doesn't and shouldn't grant everyone working for the team immunity from accountability. It most definitely is when it leads to stupid money having to be spent on guys like Morrow and Kimbrel, or Chatwood since you can't even develop a single remotely serviceable backend starter.

No, that's not what happened. Oh, ok. So they are marginally better the Chicago? Sounds like you are comparing a fresh chunky pike of horsefeathers to a slightly less fresh chunky pike of horsefeathers. Are we talking about a different cowboy-themed team or something?

No, that's not what happened.

I agree with this whole post but bolded this because it's important. The Cubs never pretended they prioritized developing a homegrown pitching staff over a lineup. Not even sure why this is even a controversial choice today - we saw what other way around looked like already with the 2000s Cubs and the middle of the decade Mets Nobody was realistically expecting or wanting them to try and develop a homegrown pitching staff. Like, even just 3-4 guys between the starting rotation and the bullpen would have been perfectly fine.

But "not using high draft picks on pitchers means you're less likely to develop good pitchers" is just d'uh common sense. What people (rightly, IMO) take issue with is that in addition to making that choice, the Cubs then failed to develop even a single relief pitcher outside of Edwards via any prospects they drafted or signed. That's horrendously bad. And to try and spin that off via, "well, they won the WS while that was going on, plus other teams don't really develop THAT many pitchers," as a defense of McLeod is pretty weak, IMO. I really take issue with the idea that he's some essential asset where the idea of the Cubs kicking him to the curb is a ridiculous idea. I think this is where the starter/reliever distinction is important. They should've done better at being able to fill a bullpen from within, there's no excuse for it. It's also probably the best possible place on a roster to fail, because every reliever is a game of russian roulette from year to year and so things go unexpectedly well or terribly all the time. The SP I think they did okay given the circumstances they chose. I don't have particular attachment to McLeod personally, but I also think the 'if he's good then where are the pitchers?' is a bit too simplistic a criticism. It's too critical an area given Theo's overall pitching track record and the financial restraints they have and the age/injury risk of their starting rotation. Yes, I agree he's not THAT BAD, but based on how everything has played out, I'd rather have someone with a better Pitcher Whisperer-type rep running things to ideally fast track things as much as is realistically possible to mitigate things. I think we would all prefer that they don't effectively botch the last two windows of this obviously very successful offensive push because they're not able to pick up the pitching end of things enough. I don't think McLeod brings anything irreplaceable to the table, and, yeah, maybe it's meathead of me to want to see some damn accountability for how the pitching side of things has gone.

Yes, you're right in that the Bears AREN'T compared to a much, much better team like the Cowboys.

So are we saying this is a development that took them surprise? Like, we effectively have to be, because otherwise for them to act as they did is almost shockingly negligent. It also effectively means that we have to assume that the relative financial constraint from the Ricketts also took them by surprise, because otherwise for Theo Epstein, with his at least somewhat shaky track record of acquiring pitchers via signing and trade, to be plowing ahead with a "horsefeathers PITCHERS" approach in regards to player development while knowing all of that is....not good. Except for the time it lead to 4+ 90 win years and a World Series, that was good. Dude, come on. That's the baseball equivalent of "A WIZARD DID IT;" the Cubs being terrible at developing pitching for a significant stretch didn't "lead" to them doing all of that. But "not using high draft picks on pitchers means you're less likely to develop good pitchers" is just d'uh common sense. What people (rightly, IMO) take issue with is that in addition to making that choice, the Cubs then failed to develop even a single relief pitcher outside of Edwards via any prospects they drafted or signed. That's horrendously bad. And to try and spin that off via, "well, they won the WS while that was going on, plus other teams don't really develop THAT many pitchers," as a defense of McLeod is pretty weak, IMO. I really take issue with the idea that he's some essential asset where the idea of the Cubs kicking him to the curb is a ridiculous idea. The Cubs completely dropped the ball on developing pitchers via the farm under his watch.

So are we saying this is a development that took them surprise? Like, we effectively have to be, because otherwise for them to act as they did is almost shockingly negligent. It also effectively means that we have to assume that the relative financial constraint from the Ricketts also took them by surprise, because otherwise for Theo Epstein, with his at least somewhat shaky track record of acquiring pitchers via signing and trade, to be plowing ahead with a "horsefeathers PITCHERS" approach in regards to player development while knowing all of that is....not good.

Do you count Hendricks, Strop or Jake at all? I would get the argument either way. Sure they weren’t drafted, but they either were prospects when acquired and “developed” or sucked at the major league level and fixed/“developed.” Hendricks is exactly the kind of person I was thinking of, thanks; I would definitely count him. Strop and Jake basically just got plugged in right away, so no, I wouldn't count them in terms of evaluating McLeod. I just look at some of the defense of him as still this ongoing residual of the horsefeathers don't stink-takes on the FO that still perpetuate, like he's practically this scared cow, where the idea of moving on from him is absurd.

Hell, I'd settle for the Cubs having developed someone more notable than CJ horsefeathering Edwards. Someone please tell me I'm blanking on someone else really, really, stupidly obvious.

I guess that's the FO business mantra: something has gotta be god awful for years before it can be good. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY. Seriously, it cannot be understated how catastrophically bad they botched developing pitchers (literally ANY pitcher) for years. Let's say you're right (you're not, you're grossly exaggerating things, but w/e), is that worth catapulting him out of town? Yes. Not developing a single pitcher of any real worth is really, really bad, and a massively critical aspect of running a damn farm system. To shrug that off like it's NBD is pretty damn funny, and to say, right now, that the "pitching ship has been mostly righted" is even funnier. So the options were only McLeod or someone worse? Well, gee, when you put it like that....

Are you for serious? The Bears were awful in the 70s and everybody knew it. The Bears were awful again in the 90s and everybody knew it. The Bears moved back into respectability under Lovie Smith, enjoying some really quality seasons but always a step or more behind the best teams. Then they became a joke again after Lovie left, and everybody knew it. Nobody is unaware of the Bears less than stellar history. Everybody knows the stupid 85 team being the pathetic go to of every sad Bears fan. I want them to be shunned into the Browns/Jets strata where they belong.

This whole rant is pretty unhinged, but the bolded might be my favorite. He's put up 13.8 WAR in the last three years, which is not a difficult thing to fact check. That's also missing 50ish games in 2018, and sure, I'll even ignore the damage the injuries did while he was playing. Seriously man, all these weird capitalizations is very Trump-y. Everything alright? It was genuinely uncomfortable to read. Like someone screaming terrifying horsefeathers on a crowded train.

You're pointing out the flaws of a fanchise that actually has more success then your favorite baseball team. Think about that. So what? Cubs fans, and, really, the entire world, know what the Cubs were. The Bears, by contrast, have been ducking their rep as a Trash Team for far too long.