dew1679666265
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Everything posted by dew1679666265
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That would be dumb. Headley is good, but not that good. .268/.378/.430 slash line without extraordinary luck (21% LD% with a .331 BABIP) in PetCo. Add in very good defense and he's very good. I'd imagine if he wasn't already untouchable, he probably is now.
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Keep Garza and Shark, sign Liriano. You have a rotation of Garza/Shark/Liriano/Maholm/Wood. If Liriano gets too pricey, plug Edwin Jackson in instead.
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Getting Greinke at 5/60-70 would make me really, really happy. I keep thinking if Hamels hits FA, though, whichever major market team loses out in his bidding will (even if reluctantly) turn toward Greinke and drive up his price. If that doesn't happen, though, I could see the Theo regime seeing a major value and jumping on it. Getting Greinke and Upton and committing, say, $100-120 million in total value would be a fantastic offseason.
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Could is the key word there, though. We're seeing more and more young, really good players getting locked up before they hit FA, making it far more difficult to project who will and who won't hit the market. I'm sure the Theo regime has far more info on this stuff than I do and maybe that means they have a much more concrete idea of who will and won't hit FA, but it feels like a really big gamble to pass on talent that is definitely available just because it came available a year before we really felt like we could contend.
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There's very, very few things I disagree with Theo on, but that's one. What if that FA class is really poor? Do we overpay a less-than-stellar FA just because we feel we need to (Carl Crawford, Alfonso Soriano-esque?) or do we just put off truly being great for a year because we didn't feel like signing the really good FAs available the year before? If we were the Pirates, Royals, etc, that strategy makes really good sense. As an elite market team that can turn things around in 1-2 offseasons (even with as bad as the talent pool has gotten for the Cubs), that's a really questionable strategy. I'm pretty much convinced at this point there just isn't money available at this point, likely because of Wrigley renovations, McDonalds, and the Dominican Academy.
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How so? He looks like he's doing just fine to me, if not a little better in some aspects of his game His K/9 is down, HR/9 doubled, LOB% up, HR/FB way up, and ERA/FIP/xFIP all considerably higher than last year. All of those numbers are pretty close to in line with his pre-2011 numbers (save for HR/FB), and all of that is with a .249 BABIP (around 60 points lower than last year). Couple that with a complete inability to field his position and it's a real concern at this point. And at this point, he's started 11 games. 3 bad starts is a pretty significant portion of his appearances this year.
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I'm confused. Weren't people talking about how we could be a horrid team (100+ losses) and all of the good players who mattered could develop perfectly fine? If so, I think that response was perfectly on topic.
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I wouldn't call a year of plateau meaningless even at Castro's age and I certainly wouldn't call Garza regressing to career norms (which aren't terribly impressive for a TOR pitcher) meaningless. I'm not all that concerned with Castro's plateau offensively, but it is disappointing. Garza and Soto are the biggest concerns for me, though. Had Garza continued the progress he made last year and Soto had managed a bounceback year, we'd have a much better chance at putting together a competitive team next year. However, Garza took a considerable step back and Soto has been awful, and the team is on pace to lose 110 games (which we won't lose that many, but still). Had the two of them developed like we all had hoped, then the team wouldn't be as bad as it is. So the comments that we've been horrid and everybody who matters has developed fine are untrue.
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I'm not sure how you can argue that all the players who matter have been as good or better as last year. Garza has taken a pretty considerable step back and Castro hasn't developed offensively like pretty much anybody hoped. Soto has also been pretty awful, and while he's not a key part of the future, him hitting well would make us a little more likely to compete next year. It also would have been nice to find 1 other good, young reliever aside from Russell this season - that could still happen, but it's not likely. You really can't lose 100+ games and have everything go right for every important piece of your team.
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Soler is a pure RFer and Jackson is a pure CFer. Soler is also multiple years away from the majors and still risky, whereas Jackson will almost certainly be up by the start of 2013, if not sooner.
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I still think it's a good idea to try guys like that since some will work out. However, this season shows that you shouldn't try to build a full team of buy low guys.
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I still have issues with the idea that the only two options were: awful now and great later or mediocre now and mediocre later I'm not convinced we couldn't have built a better product today by adding assets that would help us be better in the short term without hurting us long term (Cespedes, keep Z, put together a better than awful bench, etc). I have full confidence the Theo regime will make this organization and team great in time, but I think it's misleading to assume the previously mentioned were the only two options we had.
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The problem is, if we go 62-100, it means we've had some disappointing seasons out of guys like Castro/Shark/Rizzo/BJax/Garza. Having the #1 pick and extra money in the draft would be nice, but if this team loses 100+ games, then it means we're a long way away from putting together a contender on the field. It means we'd have to either commit to a 3+ year rebuilding plan or spend like crazy (and probably not intelligently) in free agency for quick fixes. If this team can rebound in the second half and get anywhere in the vicinity of .500, it means some key guys will have played very well and, thus, we're a lot closer to fielding a competitive team than we would be in a 100-loss scenario. That said, I don't think this team ends up losing 100+. I still think we finish in the low to mid 90s (so high 60s to low 70s in wins).
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This is about where I was in the offseason. I advocated some combo of Pujols/Cespedes/Darvish in an effort to add impact talent (or potential impact talent in Cespedes/Darvish) to a roster bereft of it. My thought was that we could possibly fight for right around .500 this season (75-81 wins probably) with the outside possibility of contention if the Central were really bad. Then we'd be set up to start seriously contending in 2013 since we'd only need minor tweaks rather than what we have now, which is still a need to add impact talent to the roster. I could be remembering wrong, but I don't recall anybody strongly advocating the idea of the Cubs definitely contending in 2012. There were scenarios given where it could be a possibility, but certainly nobody proposed it as a certainty or even a necessary goal.
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It depends on what you mean by overreacting. I'm under no delusion that we'll get significant value for Soriano, but it is possible that somebody like Colletti might bump up their offer a bit (or even get interested period) in Soriano because of this 1.000 OPS since the start of May. To me, giving up 2-3 low level guys (i.e. "lottery tickets") and paying any salary at all would be overreacting.
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I don't know that dealing Soriano for little is going to severely alter our chances of winning in the short or long term. He's probably not going to be particularly productive over the entirety of this, or especially next, season and his production can probably be replaced relatively easily on the FA market. I'm hoping Theo/Hoyer are working the phones hard with Ned Colletti and GMs like that who may overreact to this torrid streak by Soriano. If they could move him for something of value because of this hot streak, that'd be pretty awesome. Then go get Upton in the offseason and go with BJax/Upton/DeJesus next season.
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It's not just a momentary thing, though - he's been hitting the ball hard and hitting a lot of line drives all season, and his BABIP has been abnormally low all season. This hot streak has been his numbers evening out a bit. That said, I agree with your latter point that Stewart is likely no more than a stopgap - which is actually all I've ever seen argued on here. But the reason I questioned your post is because the insinuation seemed to be that Stewart was always going to have poor offensive numbers, and I think the stronger than normal peripherals this season have given room for optimism that he can be more than he currently is.
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Probably shouldn't start this debate again, but why do you think this? Are you arguing his BABIP won't improve, that his numbers won't get better even after his BABIP adjusts up, or that he'll quit hitting the ball hard as his BABIP rises? I can understand not believing there will be a huge spike in his numbers when his BABIP adjusts, but to say that he "is what he is" right now seems to ignore the strong likelihood of a strong improvement in his numbers correlating with a natural BABIP adjustment.
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That makes sense. There's really never a bad time to add an impact bat, so I don't get that argument at all (though I didn't get it this past offseason either and we saw how that turned out). Your second point is exactly why I think we should keep Garza. It's very unlikely we get the type of deal we want for him anyway, but even if we do, you're crippling a team that has a chance to get kind of competitive next year. A lot would have to go our way to have a chance to be competitive next year, but there's been enough positives this year that I'd hate to see us trade Garza and pretty much surrender any chance at being competitive next year (without going crazy monetarily and adding Hamels/Upton/Drew/Marcum or something in the offseason).
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Good analysis. The only real question I have is why are we content with, if everything breaks right, being average offensively? I realize we can't fix this offense completely in one offseason and I don't think we should necessarily try, but the fact that this squad's offensive upside is average is exactly the reason we shouldn't stand pat. I'm not sure we should overhaul the offense this offseason, but we need more offensive upside than average.
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Upton is 25, is due $39 million total the next 3 years, is 3 years away from FA, and Zips projects him to be a 3.8 WAR player in RF this year. Starlin is 22, is due a fraction of Upton's cost the next 4 years, is 4 years away from FA, and Zips projects hims to be a 4.0 WAR player at SS this year. Starlin's significantly more valuable than Upton. It's a bit closer than I thought originally, though, so I'd probably settle at Upton and one of Bauer/Skaggs and maybe a low level piece. If they don't want to do that, I very happily just keep Starlin. As others have noted, I really think Starlin's value is being pretty heavily underrated in this thread.
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Any Castro trade with Arizona would have to start with Justin Upton and include at least one, if not two, of Bauer and Skaggs. And then a couple more low level pieces.
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Under Hendry, the Cubs acquired Derrek Lee, Rich Harden, Nomar Garciaparra, Matt Garza and Juan Pierre who were proven talents (of varying quality) while acquiring unproven talent that turned out very well in Aramis Ramirez and Michael Barrett. Acquiring ML talent wasn't a problem for Hendry, it was developing young talent that actually performed for us at a cheap price that was the problem.
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Dale Sveum to re arrange the deck chairs
dew1679666265 replied to Little Slide Rooter's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
That would've been a Brinks truck. This will be a U-Haul. -
The speculation is fun, but is this even a story? I guess it depends on whether Sullivan means call-ups/DFAs or trades. If it's trades, then I would expect some of them to start happening (or closing in on happening) after the draft anyway and this is a non-story. If it's call-ups/DFAs, that's news.