Jason Ross

Another injury. Wheeeeee.

I'm fine with the team drafting a hitter in the first. To be fair, their last first round hitters have been guys like Nico Hoerner, Cam Smith, Matt Shaw and Ethan Conrad. Jury is out but they're getting value with that strat. So if Tyler Bell is there and they love Bell, go for it. But they do need to hit the "pitching" button as often as they can all draft.

BA just did a podcast about Rabe. He's #39 right now. Cooper thinks he might get into the 1st. Compared him a bit to Cade Horton (not in terms of stuff so much but in trajectory); coming off TJS and he hadn't throw into the 6th until April 12th - this is what they think held him back. Small track record.

Bertz mentioned Reid Detmers the other day and he's quickly rocketed up my list. Skubal is probably your best pound for pound player but with Detmers potential control he might just be my other favorite.

I'd probably have Kepley high on my "trade em if someone lives him" list. It isn't that I dislike him, but all of this, added with what we currently have in CF, it feels like he is more expendable.

Yeah, in many ways it's a self fulfilling prophecy. It's a lot easier to win when your players play well.

Ferguson is an easy DFA candidate when Boyd is ready to come back, but gives the team an extra arm until his start. Makes sense.

Well, to be fair to the Cubs, they have a positive run value against breaking balls this year. It's just that the league is terrible against breaking balls. We have to get used to a norm; we focus so much on the velo that we forget how nasty breaking balls have gotten and how much harder they are to hit. Are the Cubs good against breaking balls? No. But the league is so bad at them, they hold a positive outcome against them relative to the rest of the league. The issue is that in the May particularly the Cubs have faced a historic amount of breaking balls. So being slightly better than average against them isn't really helping when everyone is just so bad against them. Fangraphs Link Mike Petriello's look at Cubs and breaking balls

Fangraphs wrote an article about this today. They highlighted some of the struggles, but also again the pitching the Cubs have faced. They've had a pretty brutal stretch of pitching lately, on top of getting a ton of breaking balls. They made mention that the Cubs struggle against spin isn't unique to them; it's a league wide issue. Hopefully an easy stretch here should even things out again.

6 (qualified) hitters had a .900 OPS last year.

Pete.

...who had "Ben Brown looks like an ace through May" on their bingo card?

The Hardball Times has an article discussing catcher ERA. Here's the link. Below, I'll also post the conclusion from the study as well as a TL;DR. TLDR: Catcher's matter, but need tons of data for that to matter. How does this deal with the discussion at hand? Well considering we're talking data far smaller than the sample size needed for this, it's essentially meaningless. Not all data is useful. In this instance, Amaya or Kelly's ERA when Shota pitches is not what we should be using.

It's Tarik Skubal. I think we have to assume that literally every team who's expecting to make the playoffs will be interested. Of those teams, five to ten of them will have serious discussions over him and if you're going to win that race, you're going to pay more than whatever it is we think a rental costs. SP's go for insane prices at the deadline the last few years and none of them are Tarik Skubal.

A decent amount. Skubal is great. But looking at SP prices, it's going to cost an arm and a leg and probably another limb. You like what Josiah Hartshorn is doing right now? Assume Detroit does too - type of stuff. Basically, every team at the deadline who needs an arm will be involved. So you need to take whatever it is you think is fair, and then beat that offer because there will be eight teams who are willing to offer what is fair and you need to beat those eight teams somehow. So for two-three months of one of the three best starters in baseball you're going to pay a price that is going to start at "it hurts" and ends at "it really hurts". And then expect to hear a full discourse on here about how this team isn't one player away from a WS. I'd pay whatever that price is, probably. I think I'd block off Hartshorn's name, however and be willing to pay whatever else it costs. Prospects are going to fail more than they succeed and Skubal is that good.