Jason Ross

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.

Yeah, we are clearly in "nonsense" time in which both sides are putting forth offers neither side would ever agree to, with just enough apparent "give" to seem like the good guy. To be clear, I am on the MLBPA and players side of "getting as much of the pie as possible' but just because I hope they get that doesn't mean I can't recognize an offer of this stature from their side, too.

Skenes is still really, really good but there are some interesting things in there. His fastball velo is down again, his arm slot is a bit higher, and his K% has dipped. He's also gotten less whiff. Like, he's still one of the absolute best pitchers in baseball, but he's more "one of the best handful or so" instead of like "one of the two best".

Andrew McCutcheon has the third lowest xWOBA of any hitter in baseball (337 possible) with at least 80 PA's. And he can't play a position. At least Lopez or Kingery might add some defensive or base running value. If they're going to get essentially zero PAs, Cutch offers nothing else. And even in those PA's I'm not entirely sure Lopez (career 72 wRC+) and Kingery (career 72 wRC+) wouldn't be better than McCutcheon at this stage (57 wRC+ this year and who's wOBA is outpacing his xWOBA). Between those three, I'd probably rather have Kingery and Lopez and I think those two suck.

What position does a DH who doesn't hit have on the Cubs roster? He wouldn't hit lefties better than Shaw., He can't play a position; he's been a DH for years now. He adds no base running. Here are his Savant percentiles and his xwOBA of .237 is lower than his actual wOBA of .254: I'd much rather the Cubs keep Pedro or Alcantara or find another Nick Lopez who might do something positive.

McCutcheon is cooked. He's dropped bat speed and contact rate, His batted ball data is horrible. At best he's going to be Justin Turner 2.0 and we saw how much fans loved a mascot 26th-man last year. Assuming Matt Shaw isn't out too long, I don't see any role for him on the bench.

Neither. I care about a system that ensures players have a fair slice of the profits. A cap or a floor without open books will almost entirely favor management. The best system would be one in which the cap and floor is defined yearly based on open, transparent profits. Sadly, with MLB's anti-trust exemptions, that's impossible now. And I don't blindly believe a cap or a floor will create any more or less parity than we currently have.

Imagine how many runs they'd have scored today if they had fired Craig Counsell before the game, though.

Hey. Lots of runs.

There's a lot of snarky, sarcastic things to say, but I'll just stick with "I appreciate the team scoring 7 runs".

I think firing the manager right now is ridiculous. I think the fan outrage at firing the manager is not only incredibly over reactionary, but one borne out of a strong misunderstanding of what is going to fix anything. Counsell has done what you'd expect anyone to do in this situation. He's played his best players in the positions they should be played in most every day. He's dealt with injuries to the best of his ability. He has both changed the lineup (didn't work), given guys a day off (didn't work) and kept things the same (didn't work). He can't make Cade Horton's elbow healthy, he can't make PCA's 100+mph line drives land, he can't make Suzuki hit a very hittable fastball right now. The only thing he hasn't tried is just putting random people in random spots. Firing Counsell feels like a good idea because it's visible, and actionable. But as I said, it's a massive misunderstanding in the issues of this team. Replacing Counsell with (insert whatever manager you can imagine here) would fix zero of the issues with the Cubs right now. But I guess social media warriors would feel better for about three hours. And fans would rather feel better for three hours than accept that Counsell isn't really the issue here. It isn't like Craig Counsell is calling some antiquated offense like an NFL coach, or refusing to play the good players but right now, you'd assume Ian Happ was starting at shortstop and the Cubs were playing with a literal ostrich playing right field with how badly people are thinking Craig should be gone.

The Cubs have done great stuff with Pete, so I'm not sure what more they're supposed to do. As with Ballesteros, what's there to do? The Cubs have had tons of success with young players over the last few years. Pete, Shaw, Busch, and Amaya just to name a few. All have struggled initially, made swing and approach adjustments and made progress. PCA just went 0-3 the other day on three balls over 100mph and with the lowest xBA of .660. H's frustrated and trying to do much on the field, but they've lost 10 games in a row and he's 23. I'm not sure what else there is to do right now with him or Ballesteros. We have to remember, we only see the games. And it's unfair to both sit here and talk out of one side of the mouth about how much the things in the clubhouse matter that we can't see (like the attitudes and looseness of players off the field) and pretend we know what's happening the other 21 hours of every day we can't see on the TV with someone like Pete or Ballesteros and that work.

I didn't say coaching doesn't matter; coaching, especially in terms of player dev, matters a ton. You're putting words in my mouth. What I am arguing against is the idea that a managerial change is anywhere near the top-10 reasons why the Philadelphia Phillies, or any team, begins winning. Whatever slight psychological change it creates is entirely masked by things like data regressing to the means, schedules, etc. Don Mattingly didn't make Christopher Sanchez pitch 42 scoreless innings. Getting to pitch against SF, the As, the Reds, the Rockies and the Padres did that. Sanchez may tell you it's because Don has created a looser clubhouse, but it's almost assuredly because he's good and those teams can't hit water if they fell out of a boat on top of positive luck (anytime you go 42 innings pitched without a run you're getting the benefit of luck, too).

I've played 30 years of baseball. I'm about to play my 31st year of baseball. Attributing "everyone" is not a smart choice. I don't subscribe to that. I'm not an MLB player. Didn't come close to that. Let's assume you didn't either. Thus, we don't know. And frankly, listening to baseball players talk about what they think about the game isn't a great idea. The appeal to authority here isn't that good. There is a reason the nerds run the game and not the guys who hit the ball 450 feet. Because those baseball players would still be running teams based on batting average and RBI if we let them. I respect what they think they know, and respect the hell out of their baseball talent. But what they think what is happening and what is actually happening on a baseball field isn't always the same. And the reason a guy sucks one place and thrives elsewhere is not magic. It's not a uniform color. It's because that team used their data sheets and cameras and fixed something. They add a pitch. They change a swing. They do something tangible.

Yeah, meant Mattingly. Regardless, there is a whole lot of "I think" with nothing to support it here. What we have here is anecdotal evidence. We do know this: Playing 13 games against the Cubs (in their 10 game hot streaks) and Braves is a lot harder than the bottom dwellers they got right afterwards. We also know when players have ERA/xFIP disagreements that the x data eventually wins out. If we want to attribute some sort of new manager hokum? Fine. Maybe players are marginally looser or whatever. But whatever marginal looseness we think is occuring and want to add here it doesn't hold a candle to things we know.

I have watched exactly zero Bulls games in my life. I don't know. I don't care. The people in charge of the Bulls aren't in charge of the Cubs. Jed Hoyer didn't deserve to be fired 10 games ago; not only was the team winning, he had what looked like a successful off-season. Further more, the Cubs issues this year are injury related and beyond what likely could have been planned for at any given moment. Was it possible all of these players would get hurt? Sure. The likelihood they all went down before the middle May was not. Being on the 10th best SP on your org chart is not anything that could be really planned for. Nothing between 29-16 and 29-26 has been specifically a Jed issue.