Transmogrified Tiger

In the context of 'do the Cubs have a curse with their ROY winners', it doesn't seem to make much difference if Bryant has injury issues 6 years later playing for another team. He was enormously successful as a Cub even after his ROY year, and won an MVP when they won the world series. Sure he's been a bust as a Rockie due to injuries, but calling that another instance of the 'Cubs ROY curse' that laid dormant for a half decade and manifested after he left the Cubs makes the whole idea silly.

That adds up to an 81.8% SB%. League average is... 79.7%, so they've allowed 2 more steals than you'd expect given the attempts. EDIT: Average is 107 attempts as well and the Cubs have 102, so they aren't getting beaten up on volume either

I thought Morel hit that to the moon off the bat

some classic Royals baseball there

If the Cubs want to win more and lose less in 2023, they should probably not play PCA instead of Seiya. PCA is a really good prospect, I think he's gonna be a good player for a number of years. He is not going to be a good major league player tomorrow, and it does a disservice to go through this cycle where we repeatedly don't recognize the difficulty and more importantly the *time* it takes to make the leap from AAA to MLB. The Cubs could call up a left handed bat with OF experience that's hitting .296/.450/.480 with a near 1:1 BB/K ratio, that's stealing bases at a clip of 28 SB per 500 PA at a 100% success rate. They aren't doing that because that's Miles Mastrobuoni, and while AAA performance isn't gospel(see: Tauchman), we should pay closer attention to how close it is between the players we hope are future stars(PCA, Mervis) and the players we also see as MLB flotsam(Mastrobuoni, Madrigal)

I believe some hitters wear that to reduce sting on the hands and improve grip

oof

If Shaw were at Myrtle Beach, sure, look at what Brian Kalmer is doing there as an 18th round senior sign as a better example. But at High-A I don't think humiliating the level is the expectation. You expect a first round college hitter to do well there, no one rushed to re-rank Brooks Lee as a surefire all-star after he put up a 140 wRC+ in High-A. The excitement for Shaw stems from in this limited sample doing so much better than Lee's line that the longer it persists the more sure you are he should've been skipped to AA like Schanuel(a 'bat-only' prospect without positional value) was.

Whoops, forgot that Iowa already had started, things didn't go so great for Greene in that 3rd inning and gave him an ugly line today: 2.2 IP, 4 H, 4 R, 5/4 K/BB, HR

Greene's other 2 Iowa outings: 8/6: 2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0/1 K/BB 8/9: 3 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 3/0 K/BB Given the amount of rest he's getting in between outings I'm not sure how imminent he might be to a callup unless they want him to be a long reliever/piggyback starter(which he hasn't done in 7+ years), but interesting especially as a September option with expanded rosters.

It's been 10 full season games, and anything can happen in that short a timeframe, so I wouldn't make grand proclamations based on it(the convo elsewhere about dumping Happ or Suzuki b/c of his start is silly). But I struggle to take him hitting .415/.442./707 with a sub-15% K rate(good for a .506 wOBA and 217 wRC+) as anything but unexpectedly good. With those results and no big swing and miss issues, any of the nitpicks you can make(namely swing selection, which you could interpret through a BB% or GB% lens) are impossible to draw conclusions from because the current level isn't forcing him to adjust given the cartoonish production.

There's nothing wrong with using a site like BBTV as a tool, it's an external measurement that can be a starting point for understanding if a potential deal is feasible. You still have to think about the other teams' needs, motivations, and opportunity costs though, which lots of users of that site seem to not bother with. Anyway, they won't trade Happ is because he's a good player who they just intentionally extended, they aren't looking at Happ's 2023 and wondering 'what have we gotten ourselves into', this is what they signed up for. But most importantly when they signed him they gave him an NTC, and considering Happ is a union rep who took a potentially below market deal(at least in length) to stay where he wanted, he's not going to be itchy to leave.

I agree that playing teams outside the normal league is a compelling reason for those competitions, but I think the biggest potential benefits aren't tied to *who* you play, it's mixing up competitive stakes and motivations. One of the things that plagues American sports is that by having a singular point of success at the end it creates sometimes perverse incentives when combined with the other rules and realities of the league. Tanking in MLB(though improved over a decade ago) and load management in the NBA are prime examples. One of the ways you can address that is to mix up competitive stakes, tie that end goal to other competitions, or provide some other type of reward to give the competition meaning. This first edition for the NBA doesn't do a lot of that, though I understand their desire to trojan horse it a bit by making some games dual-purpose and draw corollaries to divisional standings in terms of adding meaning. But off the top of my head, what if the Eastern and Western conference teams played separate march madness-style brackets at a neutral site for a guaranteed playoff spot? What if those winners played for a cash prize and a lottery pick? Or to take a different tact, what if you had a chunk of games(15-25?) that were designated as part of a different competition, Champions League style, with the best record(s) getting a playoff spot the next year(or a bye if they made it on merit) and the worst record(s) being ineligible for next year's playoffs regardless of record? The point is not the specific nuances of those ideas(though without dwelling on it that first one sounds pretty fun), but that once you recognize the idea that all the competition specifics we currently have are a combination of arbitrary and optimized for entertainment, that you can make something that's even better and fixes some current problems by embracing more complexity and separation in those competitions.

Doesn't feel like this first version has all the dials tuned quite right, but multiple competitions is exactly what American sports need more of so I'm excited to see it happen.

PCA walk off HR

Hearn is at 16

Seiya is 7 for 17 with a 2B, 2 HR, and 1/1 BB/K since his week off

Pete Crow-ArmstrongCade HortonMiguel AmayaMatt MervisMatt ShawOwen CaissieBen BrownJordan WicksKevin AlcantaraMoises BallesterosAlexander CanarioJames TriantosJackson FerrisJefferson RojasLuis VazquezBrandon BirdsellHaydn McGearyCristian HernandezJosh RiveraBJ Murray Jr

Something like if Verlander had signed with a AA team this year instead of the Mets. Post-prime, still very good and better than this level but not at past peak. I'll also add that I underestimated how much Miami was able to remake their whole roster. Someone pointed out that tonight's starting lineup has 10 full internationals and only like 4 of them played in their last MLS game(a loss I saw in person), so a lot of the 'Messi single handedly pulled a team from the bottom of the table' is gonna be overstated even if he is easily the most important piece.

Between this and the possibility that Wander may have a long suspension/jail in his future, I'm low key wondering if Glasnow becomes available this offseason

Shaw is 2 for 2 with 2 SB

genuinely thought this was gonna be a Wander Franco thread

lol, I'm as much of a keeper apologist as there is on these but that is a stone cold penalty, the EPL's VAR decisions are always great entertainment. You can almost tangibly feel their hubris getting in their own way.

I don't think it's very likely the Cubs give him the dozens(hundreds?) of reps in corner OF that it would take to find out. I especially don't think they're going to look at Morel's performance this year and decide that getting rid of Happ(who has an NTC) or Suzuki in order to find out is the best way forward.

I think he can probably become a decent corner OF with repetition. He hasn't spent a ton of pro time there and his issues there have been more on the route-running variety than tripping over his feet. On the infield though, I dunno. Yes he has pro experience and a cannon for an arm, but I don't know if the hands are there to be anything but below average. Errors aren't everything but I think they're probably emblematic of the disconnect between potential and production that we're describing. As a minor leaguer he had 28 errors in 84 games at SS, 39 errors in 156 games at 3B, and 0 errors in only 13 games at 2B. He doesn't strike me as *incapable* of making progress, but I can't bet a major league roster spot on it. So then I'm left with a guy who's below average defensively on the IF and maybe an okay defender in RF/LF with time, but that's not a great roster fit for a team that has prioritized defense and doesn't have corner OF playing time to spare. No issue keeping him as a DH and occasional position player, but I think the risk of the K rate/approach imploding on him are greater than him figuring out how to play a useful defensive role in this Cubs roster.