davearm2

This brings up a fascinating question. Do the Cubs spend any time evaluating where other teams are rating draft prospects? Do all teams? Even if Wilken and co liked this guy better than everyone else left on the board, a critical question is if they could have gotten him later. How much resources do they expend on this question?

You don't consider Prince Fielder to be close to Lee's production? Or did I (and Cot's) miss an extension he signed? The Brewers control Fielder through 2011. This is not his walk year. He is slated to hit FA at the same time as Adrian Gonzalez.

If Gorzellany doesn't factor into the future of the team, then couldn't the same be said of guys like Soto, Marmol, and Marshall? All have similar service time.

He's 27. 27 is approaching 30 if you start from 0. Then he's also approaching 80 :)

seriously? You wouldn't rather have a guy that puts up a .900 OPS every month than a guy that goes .700 to 1.100 to .700 to 1.100 to .700 to 1.100 over the course of the 6 months? You realize you don't just add up the runs at the end of the season and the teams with the best run differential makes the playoffs, right? One of the popular sabermetric sites (can't recall which one) did an analysis that showed that the streaky player generates more wins.

It's not pure arrogance, it's pure economics. Naturally the Cubs aren't aiming to alienate fans, but by the same token they make more money if they have one fan paying $50 for that bleacher seat, versus two fans duking it out in the Virtual Waiting Room to buy the same ticket for $40. As I mentioned earlier, their profit-maximizing pricing strategy is almost certainly going to result in the sort of attendance %'s we're talking about here (i.e., less than 100%). You sometimes hear about how such-and-such team has had 100 straight sellouts or whatever. That's all well and good, but at the end of the day that team is leaving money on the table (or more accurately, allowing scalpers to suck it up).

But why? His situation is clearly different than those you (or others) listed earlier. They guy barely has any experience as a starter and needs to get the innings. If he ends up in the bullpen for the rest of this season, they are limiting how much they can get from him next season, no? It's not like the Cubs are a dominant set-up man away from contending this year. Even one believes they are, (as you said) there are plenty of other options. Yes they're limiting what they can get from him next year. If the tradeoff is 30 or 40 fewer IP next year in exchange for MLB experience this year, and a boost to the current team's bullpen, I'm willing to make that trade. Let's not lose sight of the fact that this team is still focused on winning this year (regardless of how realistic folks here might consider that). Now that presumes that Cashner's the best candidate to provide that bullpen boost, which I think is easy to argue against.

So you're OK with increasing his workload from about 95 innings to 150? That seems like a pretty big jump. It's not really that bad. 150 is not a lot of innings overall. If Cashner's max was 95, I'd be more worried, but with his 120 last year he should be able to do 150 next year even with going to the bullpen. Other pitchers have made similar sorts of jumps. I think the big question becomes then, why now and why Cashner? The bullpen has been pitching better lately. It's about to get another decent to good pitcher when somebody leaves the rotation next week. Stevens has pitched just fine in his two outings so far and he'd likely be the one sent down for Cashner. If the Cubs felt they needed more help, they already had Jackson waiting in the AAA bullpen. So why the sudden reversal to want Cashner in the majors? How is that better than the other options especially when Cashner could have had his innings he needed by being called up into the bullpen around the All-Star break? They are sacrificing 30 potential innings next year to get 10-15 innings this year. That's an awfully hard choice to make when he's not even going to be the primary setup man. Putting him in the bullpen this year was almost inevitable to keep his innings down and it will have benefits to him of being able to see major league hitters who will challenge him more. That's not a problem. It's just too early. I can certainly get onboard with the notion that there should be other guys ahead of Cashner in the line to the MLB bullpen. I'll listen to that argument. The notion that Cashner's development into a MLB starter is going to be sidetracked by a move to the bullpen now is what I have an issue with.

If Cashner throws 40 innings in the pen this year, how many innings would you be willing to let him pitch next year? Is there a max pitching limit you think he should stay under? Of course. You have to be smart about ramping up his innings. I totally get that. So maybe next year he throws only 150 IP, and not 180. I can live with that.

Who are all these top prospect SP that the Rays and Red Sox moved to the pen without having innings as a starter? Price and..... Dude quit while you're behind already. You sound like Dusty with this "that's how they've always done it" logic. Why don't you address the previous post he made? What post was that? He asked for guys that were starters in the minors, broke into the bigleagues as relievers, and then ultimately settled in as starters. Such a list has already been provided. The larger point I was making is that normally dextermorgan and many others here are clamoring for the Cubs to eschew conventional wisdom and be more progressive in their thinking (embrace OBP, ignore pitchers' ERA and W-L, and so on). Two examples commonly cited are the Rays and Red Sox. Those clubs have broken the mold, so to speak, and have been very successful. So why are we clinging to conventional wisdom and standard practice in this instance? It's inherently contradictory.

Who are all these top prospect SP that the Rays and Red Sox moved to the pen without having innings as a starter? Price and..... Dude quit while you're behind already. You sound like Dusty with this "that's how they've always done it" logic.

Perhaps you should consider the possibility that the "all other practices" you mention are precisely the ones that forward-thinking organizations like the Rays and Red Sox (you know, the clubs folks are clamoring for the Cubs to emulate) are rejecting as flawed and outdated.

What "all other practices"? Scenario A, Cashner remains in AAA and throws another 80 IP as a starter in 2010. Scenario B, Cashner comes up to MLB and throws another 40 IP as a reliever in 2010. Why would Scenario A inherently prepare the guy better for the MLB rotation in 2011 and beyond? Getting acclimated to the bigleagues may very well be more valuable longterm than logging more IP in the minors. Meanwhile, he's helping the big club this year.

Wow... if that isn't one of the best examples I've ever seen of pulling an argument out of your ass just to argue a crappy perspective... :-)) :-)) Hey bud the wear and tear a guy puts on his arm is the same pitching in AAA as it is in MLB. If Cashner is ready to get bigleague hitters out, then keeping him in the minors is just wasting miles. Do you understand that if he wants to be a starter, his arm is going to need to be stretched out? Cashner only pitched 120 innings the last 2 seasons combined. Cashner. needs. innings. http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=price-004dav

That comment doesn't speak very well of your ability to comprehend.

Wow... if that isn't one of the best examples I've ever seen of pulling an argument out of your ass just to argue a crappy perspective... :-)) :-)) Hey bud the wear and tear a guy puts on his arm is the same pitching in AAA as it is in MLB. If Cashner is ready to get bigleague hitters out, then keeping him in the minors is just wasting miles.

People vastly overstate how bad every move actually is. It's the NSBB way. Standard irrelevant post from davearm. Oh the irony.

He's not getting any younger. He'll be 24 when this season ends. No matter how much you want to downplay it, it makes no sense to do this just as he's dominating as a starter. You can justify it all day and you can probably make a good enough case that it's "no big deal" or that it isn't that bad. But there is definitely no defending it as a good move. It's completely illogical and completely desperate. At best, they're delaying his development to fill a hole on a team that isn't going anywhere in an attempt to save their jobs. Or, better stated, the chances that this team are going anywhere (combined with the chances that this move is the quick fix they're going to hope it is) aren't nearly worth delaying his development. If you ascribe to the theory that every pitcher has X number of pitches in his arm, then it makes complete sense that as many of those X pitches as possible be thrown to bigleague hitters rather than AAA hitters. Presently there's no room in the bigleague rotation, but there is room in the bigleague bullpen. It's pretty much the opposite of "completely illogical and completely desperate", actually.

People vastly overstate how bad every move actually is. It's the NSBB way.

It should go without saying that in any trade involving prospects, both teams are taking a calculated risk. I have no intention of examining his record, and I'm not trying to defend the guy, but I'm sure one could point to a bunch of trades in which Phillips dealt away guys that never did anything in the bigleagues. So in the end the only way to avoid trading away the next David Wright or Jason Bay is never to trade prospects at all.

FWIW if the Cubs are playing to less than 100% capacity, and the secondary market is drying up, then that's evidence that they're probably pricing tickets pretty close to optimally from a profit-maximizing standpoint. When the scalpers are doing well, that's money the Cubs could have had for themselves if face values were higher. Naturally if they're playing to 50% or even 75% of capacity, then they went too high.

Why is there such a decline in interest here, but not other sites? Where did everyone go?This might catch me some flak, but honesty reigns: NSBB can be a very polarizing message board at times. There are, without a shadow of a doubt, many extremely intelligent, humorous and well-spoken people that post on NSBB. There's also a fair amount of elitism and a subtle bullying streak aimed towards specific members and people who aren't as well-versed in "advanced" baseball. Not saying that NSBB is a bad place - quite the contrary. It's just flawed like people in general and everything else on earth. And of course I can't say for certain that people who used to post here regularly did leave due to the above ... but I can say that if I were to leave, it would be a factor. Witnessing the alternatives first-hand, NSBB is the best Cubs board I've found. I couldn't agree more. Me too. Me three. And IMO the atmosphere you describe is created by about a half dozen posters.

Amazing that that entire discussion contained no references to the implications for salary/payroll/years of control. Putting aside for a moment the issue of who would be the better pitcher this season, you would think Phillips would grasp that Oswalt will be paid huge dollars for 1+ years (or 2+ if the option is picked up), while Strasburg will be paid significantly less for 6+ years. That's absolutely huge, obviously.

It's April and the dude's unemployed. Fretting about some multiyear, mulitimillion dollar contract is pretty silly. 1 year for $500k-$1M seems about right.

I don't know that Jack Cust is illustrative of anything, but it sure seems reasonable to me that young players coming up through the 2000s might have tended to focus on their hitting (be it power, patience, OBP, or whatever best suits their game) to the detriment of their defensive games. Nobody in MLB was getting rich with their glove only. That may be changing, but if it is, it'd be a very recent trend.