Transmogrified Tiger

I don't understand why the right call when Taillon has 4 ineffective innings is to leave him in to work it out, but when Smyly has 4 ineffective innings the right call is to yank him. This goes doubly so given the context. Taillon's 4th inning was his worst yet, giving up 2 singles, a triple, and a sharp lineout(105 EV, .640 xBA), and 2-3-4 were due to face him for the 3rd time. This stands in contrast to Smyly, who while he had given up 4 runs, had given up only one bit of hard contact in the previous 2 innings, and was ultimately undone by a favorable matchup(bad LHH who didn't start and had K'd in his first AB). Yes the game state is slightly different with the one run lead v. deficit, but with 5 innings to go in both cases and no sign that runs will be particularly hard to come by(like Saturday's game), I can't get on board that it swings the decision to the other end, especially with the nuances above included.

I could've sworn Derek Law was taken to a nice farm upstate after 2016 this is not a metaphor

Yes, but the point was platoon matchups since they had 3 LHH in a row (yes Barnhart is technically a switch hitter but is awful hitting RH). Today's bench is Gomes, Torrens, Madrigal, and Mastro.

If Wisdom can't swing what in the world is he doing in the game, what are we doing here

This roster really needs Seiya and Velazquez(or Morel), it is way too easy for guys to be forced into suboptimal defensive positions.

Can't give up a left on left oppo HR to the AAAA journeyman

I'm sure the service time doesn't hurt, but I think the primary motivation is that Mervis was a non-prospect 12 months ago, so they went with strength in numbers for 1B & DH between Hosmer/Mancini/Mervis. Plus Hosmer signed before Mancini so they wanted to bank at least one option even if it was a mediocre one.

Great send by Harris

Between the two teams, that inning had 5 hits on below 85 mph EV balls in play

It's a small thing but MLB.tv finally realized that if I have the Cubs listed as my favorite team they can automatically load the Cubs broadcast instead of asking me which one I want. It's one click/button press but feels a lot smoother

To be clear, that was mostly talking about investment rather than how successful they are. For 3 years running there's been a lot of folks *convinced* that payroll wasn't going to go up(then they signed Stroman) or that Jed wouldn't go beyond 3 years(Suzuki) or multiple years for a player over 30(Taillon) or sign a very long term deal(Swanson) or that they wouldn't come close to the luxury tax(2023). Even today these things are getting framed as being something begrudgingly done to keep fan interest from cratering. My main point is that given the circumstances(macro environment in the previous and current CBA, the state of the roster/org talent around 2020), that the path they've taken is understandable and in some ways absolutely necessary. It hasn't been perfect and may not work out at all because Jed isn't better at his job than enough of his counterparts. I can't tell how much I would love for the macro complaints around the Cubs to be focused Jed potentially being incompetent instead of being the result of ownership-fueled malevolence.

I think there's two ways to think about that pipeline. One is about being able to develop stars, this gets a lot of attention because everyone needs and wants this caliber of player, it highlighted the rebuild that led to the 2016 world series, and it's a safer class of prospect. I don't think the Cubs have figured out anything special where there's a bunch of Baezs and Bryants that will reveal themselves despite getting 40 grades from the prospecting community. That's not ideal given the current composition of the roster, because that's the biggest limitation keeping them from having a higher ceiling this year and likely into the future. This is also not a uniquely Cubs problem. For example we hold up the Cardinals as a player development champion and they get extra pity picks every year, but in the last decade their track record here is basically one year of Jack Flaherty before his arm exploded and Matt Carpenter figuring things out at age 27. The other way to think of it is about the number of average to slightly above average players you can churn out. This is something that wasn't a huge feature of the 2016 build up, which instead had more shrewd moves for MLB players like Zobrist, Fowler, Montero, Lackey, Hammel, T Wood, etc. *This* is the thing the Cardinals are excellent at, the non-stop parade of quality MLBers from their farm. In the current environment this is almost as important, for a couple reasons: You get more chances of getting lucky and unearthing a star, the Guardians have been a good example of this(Ramirez, Bieber, etc) You raise the team's floor via depth, and the back half of the roster is cheaper. It's easier to do 'uncomfortable' contract decisions on stars when you have lots of depth that doesn't require much payroll These players are increasingly the currency used in trades for existing stars. Again the Cardinals have done this for decades, but the Dodgers have also been super opportunistic in how they got Betts and Turner without giving up some 70 grade superstar-in-waiting And this is the thing that I think it's fair to have belief that the Cubs have coming, partially because we're already seeing small doses of this(Wesneski and Morel last year), and also because these types of players frequently come from prospecting community misses since the line between AAAA fodder and MLB regular is thin. Plus the prospecting community does have pretty strong agreement that the depth of the system is quite good. EDIT: One last thing on that second part, is that it can become self-fulfilling or a self-perpetuating problem. For example, one of the reasons the Cubs didn't have any talent to turn to in 2019-2020 is they used it for temporary solutions to previous problems. If you do better with your prospecting middle class then you can more easily hang on to the Dylan Cease's of the world.

In the last 5 years, 6 teams have averaged a 90 win season over that timeframe: Dodgers, Astros, Yankees, Rays, Braves, and Brewers. The closest commonality those teams have is not anything related to payroll or spending, but to player development, in particular through the farm system. The next two closest teams are the Cardinals and Guardians which furthers the point. In the current environment(teams hoard prospects, FAs are almost all 30+ and carry draft penalties), if you are not good at player development, you will run out of rope and the team will suffer, we've seen this happen to the Cubs first hand, but the Red Sox, Nationals, and Giants are big market teams that have seen this happen to them too. What's especially bad is that the results of player development(especially thru the farm) are a lagging indicator, so by the time that well dries up you will be in for more pain in the short term even if you address the problems. What that means is that if you diagnose your org is bad at player development *today*, it's very difficult to keep the ship afloat in the ensuing years. This is the realization that Theo/Jed had around 2019-2020, and the things they believe they fixed are just now starting to begin to trickle to the MLB level(compare the excitement over this year's Iowa roster to the last...5 years? 8?), and that informs Jed's aggressiveness for 2023 in particular. He clearly believes they have a pipeline of good players and the faucet essentially gets turned on this year(Wesneski, Mervis, Morel, Davis, etc) and won't stop afterwards if they're doing their job right. But without that in place there's a ceiling to how good they can be, and he wasn't willing to borrow much from 2024 and beyond to prioritize 2023 when it's supposed to be the first competitive year of many. So he took the payroll higher than it has been in years(both nominally and relative to the league) to raise the floor of the team to make this year as good as it can be. As a result this year should be better than last year and they should be pretty good even if they aren't a playoff team, but it's still the proof of concept and there should be belief that further investment(trading prospects, more FA aggression, going into the LT) is in the plans for 2024 and beyond. I can understand that not everyone has that belief and that's fine, but we've seen that skepticism-as-default thinking doesn't have a perfect track record either.

Clark getting her 4th for this technical was particularly egregious

I think it's also an oversimplification, at least when describing front offices(owners, sure, especially on the extremes). Every front office is trying to win and win consistently, and there's a spectrum of investing in the current roster v. the future roster in order to do that. No team is all the way at the end of sacrifice everything to win today(think Dombrowski or DiPoto on steroids), so 'trying' becomes a matter of personal definition/taste. For this year's Cubs in particular, I think Jed is using all the resources available to him, and he's doing so with an eye on the team's current performance. He's spent money on short term deals(Mancini, Smyly, Bellinger) where he could've mined for longer term assets for much cheaper but with less certainty. At the same time, he's clearly not making moves that have significant downside for the '24-25+ team(mostly around commitments to post-prime players), so I think he's eyes wide open that the likely outcome is this year's team isn't playoff bound

Stroman having an opt out means he's functionally a rental(especially if he's pitching well enough to be desirable at the deadline), and the returns for deadline rentals has cratered in the new CBA. It's hard to see an outcome where it's preferable to trade him, doubly so with the team in contention.

ban the shift

Morel/Mervis/Velazquez: 5 for 9, 2B, 2 HR, BB, 2 HBP, 0 K

Iowa's 2nd inning at the plate: E-5 Flyout HBP Pop out HBP HBP Infield single HBP Groundout 4 runs, 1 (infield) hit

ball go far

There's something that always bugs me about the 'manager lost the game' framing. I think it's that it flattens difficult decisions into right/wrong, smart/stupid when in many cases it's a very narrow margin and the 'answer' is only there with the benefit of hindsight. At the time of that decision, Assad didn't have trouble with his first inning, 7-8-9 was due up and was a string of 5 straight RHH(though it was prime PH territory), the weather and game thus far had given no indication the Brewers were going to rally. Letting Assad go a 2nd inning carries risk, but so does introducing a new pitcher who might not have their control or stuff that day. If Merryweather comes in and walks a pair of guys or hits a guy and gives up a bloop the same amount of danger has been created and at least one of us wonders aloud "Assad was stretched out and got 2 Ks and a weak GB, why didn't he stay in?" This is not to say that I think leaving Assad in was the right call, I was the first person to question it in the game thread when it happened, and I think an irrefutable mistake is not having someone warming to start the inning so Assad didn't have to face Winker. But bullpen management is making a bunch of 52/48, 55/45 type of decisions, and in a game with so many individual events that could be influential I think framing the responsibility for the loss on one or two of those creates a false impression that the manager took them from sure winners to sure losers(and therefore implies their lack of competence/intelligence).

honestly Bellinger just sit changeup on the first pitch and try to hit it to the moon

he was what, an inch from getting Prior'd

I've enjoyed Girardi more in this game than opening day, but that "hey that sounds a lot like the Sports Reporters show" is killing me