UMFan83
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Everything posted by UMFan83
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Look people can hate on Assad for a variety of reasons but playing a top 3 offense in the league on the road in his first start of the season mid-August is a tough assignment -
Which game will the Cubs randomly score 8 runs in to make the offense look decent and avoid the sweep?
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Cubs only hit through 3 innings is a routine GB to the SS that was inexplicably thrown late
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Of course he throws 50 pitches and doesn’t give up a run.
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Suzuki fail
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The Cubs were in 1st place 15 days ago. Now we’re the 2nd place team that’s farthest away from being in 1st. Thats wild
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Anyone interested in joining a fantasy football league this season with NSBB Legends like IMB!, David (AI functionality turned off), raw and other high volume, low quality posters like UMFan83? This is our 3rd season and it's been a pretty competitive league. Small buy-in, fairly standard positions and scoring. NO KICKERS though. Looking for 1-3 teams to join, drafting in 2 weeks. Let me know if interested.
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My kids would giggle and say something about "67". I still dont know what it means though
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I feel like there are 2 parts to processing: pre-snap and post-snap. Pre-snap can likely be fixed with good coaching and repetition. Post-snap is harder to fix. But if he can be able to read a defense prior to the snap, the post-snap processing will maybe limit his ceiling a bit but his physical gifts will still allow him to be a very good QB IMO. Josh Allen was criticized quite a bit his first 2 years for having slow processing time but obviously managed to become an elite QB. Cam Newton also struggled to go through progressions for much of his career but his speed and size allowed him to overcome a lot of that and become an effective QB. It's not a great sign if Caleb is struggling to go through progressions, late on reads, etc but there's a reason he was the 1st overall pick, he has elite traits that could allow him to overcome this if it continues to be an issue. I'm not really reading much into anything preseason anyways, he's basically going through boot camp trying other erase everything he learned as a rookie and trying to run what is a pretty complex offense. Unlike Nagy and Eberflus, it doesn't seem like they are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, Ben Johnson has stated repeatedly that the offense is being build around Caleb's strengths and based on his track record I trust that he will follow through on that.
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From September 18-September 25th we play 7 straight games against the Reds and Mets (right before ending the season against the Cardinals). Really hope those aren't meaningful outside of seeding.
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No I completely hear you. I'm in the same boat. The worst thing is, out of the 4 major Chicago owners the Ricketts are maybe 1st or 2nd in terms of best ownerships. But they still suck and it's pretty clear that they aren't going anywhere anytime soon and not going to change how they operate. But at the very least they put us in a better position to be decent year over year than Reinsdorfs teams and probably the McCaskeys.
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I am not sure. I mentioned just as speculation what if it's one of those things where he can get surgery or play on it at less than 100%. Surgery would cost put him on the shelf 6-8 weeks but playing through it still gives us a guy getting on base 38% of the time. Perhaps they thought he could play through it and be fine, but he's struggling and now its too late in the season to have surgery. Of course this is all just speculation, his bat speed has gone way down starting July 1st but he injured his finger June 1st and had one of this better months. Maybe he played on it and hurt it worse at some point? Or maybe the finger isn't an issue at all and he's just in a bad funk.
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Reading on twitter that the Statcast broadcast was breaking down Tucker’s hitting before and after the finger injury and it seems like he’s had a significant decline in bat speed and other areas that would suggest he’s not 100%. How long would it take to heal that finger? Is it one of those things where he needs surgery that will keep him out 2 months but can play through it if it doesn’t hurt him so he’s grinding it out? (Seems counterproductive when you are trying to earn a $500m payday) Because the Cubs need superstar Tucker desperately. You can see how teams are pitching the Cubs knowing that Tucker is not hitting like himself. We go back to having a lineup that has several good to very good hitters but no one that teams have to gameplan around.
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Likely even with this slump he's going to be worth 6 wins this year. It would definitely be a bad thing to lose a 6 win player for nothing.
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But you shouldn't fear that because it's going to happen either way. This is the way Tom wants to run his team and he's doubled down on Jed as the executor of his team building style. Hawkins, his equally conservative GM, will probably get an extension too. The Cubs will surely finish over .500 for the 3rd year in a row and have most of the pieces on this year's team set up for next season, except Tucker (and conveniently 2 of the Cubs top 3 hitting prospects play OF). I highly doubt at this point Tom sees the Cubs collapse, miss the playoffs and decide that all the sudden he's going to be a poor mans Steve Cohen, nor will Jed be on board with team building in that way because he's been a part of a Tom Ricketts led Cubs team that suddenly turned off the money faucet in the middle of a contention period and won't let himself get burned again like he and Theo did.
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Maybe if Jed didn't sign an extension, but at this point we're stuck with him, there is nothing good that comes from collapsing and missing the playoffs. Tucker will still probably walk because we won't offer him the money, Jed will still be here, we still won't spend as much as we should because we have Caissie, Ballesteros and Alcantara waiting to come up. Maybe 1-2 of them go in trades for someone thats cost controlled but either way not much is going to change regardless of whether the Cubs make the playoffs or collapse and miss out.
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Yeah ideally we stay away from "it didnt work so it was the wrong decision" second guessing. Both moves made logical sense to me, and Berti in my mind was safe. Nico and Dansby both got hits after the out call (obviously we dont know if the same thing happens if Berti was safe but still).
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next 2 series are against the Phillies and Brewers
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I don't know what people want him to say. Lou Piniella like tirade? "Guys the Cardinals are luck merchants, our xBA was significantly higher tonight" (it was). He's an even keel boring guy, thats just who he is. Edit: correction, the win expectancy was almost even, but slight edge to St Louis.
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I was kind of thinking about this earlier. The 2023 Cubs had an extended hot stretch similar to the start of this year (it just happened June-August) and won at a similar rate as this year's team started the season out. Then suddenly the offense went cold, the pen collapsed and the Cubs played themselves out of the playoffs. 2024 the offense also started out red hot for maybe a month before going into a 2 month extended offensive funk. This offense is better, I truly believe that, but still many of the same players who were involved in the last 2 years of this. I'm kind of a tweener at this point in the overreaction/calling out overreactions battle. If I'm overreacting here please do call me out, it just feels similar. I'm too tired to do my usual statical checking to see how they've looked the last couple weeks as a team, but it seems like every series is 2 games of terrible offense and then one game where they score a healthy amount of runs. Maybe thats just bad luck, like sequencing but over the course of a series instead of a game.
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8-11 in our last 19. Still not a complete bottoming out but this is an extended poor stretch. At least we're not the Mets or Yankees.
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if we're lucky
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That’s 2 series losses in a row, 3 of the last 4 and 4 of the last 6
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We are the unluckiest team ever. Of course Nico “ties” the game on the next pitch have the umpires ever heard of a palm? How can your hand touch the bag and then suddenly be off of it? His palm is in contact with the bag
