Transmogrified Tiger

The Cubs will win the division and bypass the wild card round. In the divisional round the majority of starts will be made by SP who are not Steele or Shota.

I think especially in the college game it's easy to overstate the height differences. Having a few inches on a player is an advantage, but it's not an easy button to free points and rebounds. Between the possibility of turnovers, lack of elite passing out of double teams, etc, that advantage gets minimized by good/smart teams.

The scores page says the first game is on big Fox and the second game is on FS1.

I hope they have a fairly quick trigger with Miller since his profile isn't necessarily one you expect to hold up for years. But Morgan is optionable so if they like what they see under the hood from Miller(and don't want to ditch Merryweather or option Pearson) they could start Morgan at Iowa.

No, that's not the assumption at all. The idea is that there is a point where the productivity you get in the at bats you don't K makes up for the marginal negative of putting the ball in play less. The existence of that line is the point, because you have to consider what that line is and not just the singular at bat or the focused idea of 'are strikeouts worse than other outs'

is it better to know this or not know this, asking for a friend

Of course you would rather have that first one, there's no difference in the upside, which is the entire point! An actual more grounded example of this dynamic would be something like 1B, HR, K, K, GO vs. 1B, 1B, GO, GO, K.

This is on the right track but you have to zoom out even more to see how things swing back the other way. Strikeout rate is a byproduct of approach at the plate. So the question is not about that single at bat, "would you rather have a K or a ball in play/out in play". It's are you better off with the good things that the approach that generates more Ks gives you. As an extreme example, if you were in the same situation 5 times and went HR, HR, HR, HR, K with one approach, and GO, GO, GO, GO, 1B with another, we would never say the second one was better just because it avoided strikeouts/unproductive outs. In practice, higher K rate is associated with doing more damage when you are not striking out, so the idea that K's are bad because they remove the chance of something good happening is incomplete. This doesn't mean more K's are always better, but that you have to look at the totality of production instead of putting a microscope on the bad outcome when it happens.

if Kilian is a casing into which new pitches are dumped in, does that make his arsenal a Kilianbasa

what's the magic number for the cactus league

I agree, I for one am sick of CubinNY's constant fawning over the Ricketts family and stumping for ownership

I think this is my guy Mickey Morandini

Welcome! I don't think they'll go too nuts trying to play regulars in uncomfortable positions just for the Tokyo series, especially since it seems like both Shaw and Hoerner will be ready for domestic opening day at least. That means no Busch at 2B/3B or Happ on the infield(which he hasn't done in years now). If Shaw is ready to go(and that seems like a possibility), then you'll see Berti fill in for Nico with minimal fuss. If neither are ready to go, then it'll depend a bit on the matchup and who the last man on the bench is. Since the two LHP are going in Tokyo, that puts more of a premium on 3B defense, so you would probably see Workman/Brujan taking that last spot. But it's not impossible that Turner could get a one game look, especially if Snell starts Game 2(I haven't seen the Dodgers plans outside of Yamamoto Game 1).

Bolded players are optionable, the rest have to stay on the roster or risk being lost in some fashion. The underlined are not currently on the 40 man roster so even if they're optionable they need to be added at someone else's expense. Ryan Pressly Porter Hodge Ryan Brasier Caleb Thielbar Julian Merryweather Tyson Miller Keegan Thompson Brad Keller Chris Flexen Phil Bickford Ben Brown Cody Poteet Nate Pearson Eli Morgan Luke Little Daniel Palencia Jack Neely Caleb Kilian Ethan Roberts Gavin Hollowell Ben Heller Brooks Kriske Trevor Richards Brandon Hughes

That’s fair. I’m a little skeptical that Brasier is ahead of Pearson in that pecking order without seeing them go in opposite directions in ST, but we’re talking about small margins.

I think they'll try to position the initial roster in a way that tries to preserve depth, but I don't think they'll do it at the expense of their preferred leverage pecking order. So in practice that means they might keep Merryweather and option Morgan, or ease Brown in at Iowa until the first IL stint strikes. But if Pearson is in line for the same role he finished the year I don't think he's getting optioned in the name of avoiding a decision on the Keegans/Hollowells of the world. Same with Hodge.

Yeah, I don't remember enough about Junior Lake to know how similar the swing was, but there's a lot of Soler indicators in the follow through, bat, even the long sleeves while the crowd is not bundled up.

While he's clearly being eased in, Nico has been throwing in some fashion since he got to ST.

Jed bullied PCA into changing his number

Here is a comprehensive list of qualified 2B who were clearly better than Hoerner *offensively* last year: Ketel Marte Jose Altuve

My takeaway is that Canario is a prospect who was on one trajectory before he exploded his leg, and another very different trajectory afterwards. And we fans have been hopeful that he was still on the first trajectory or was a small step away from it, but in actuality he was not. Too much swing and miss, too little overall productivity, and not enough defensive value/versatility.

I still don't think Tauchman is much of a fit for this roster, generally the LHH bats are in the OF and the RHH bats are in the IF, so a LHH 2B/3B will get much more mileage. Hopefully that's Workman, but also in the alternate case they did bring in 2 bench players(Turner and Berti) that are much more split neutral than the typical bench player.

Help me understand how this was supposed to play out then. The idea is that they're going to go really hard in the next CBA negotiations, and they don't want big contracts on the books beyond that point because if they succeed then having those big contracts hurts their flexibility/bottom line, right? In order for that to be true, you either have Bregman opting out heading into his age 33 season, and making that choice days before a work stoppage. Or he opts in and you trade him in the time before that point and the lockout? Because if we agree on the premise, trading him after a work stoppage doesn't make sense. The team will be operating under those new rules by then, and if the whole point was about optimizing your books to get the best CBA result possible, you've failed to clear Bregman's money before then. Both of those seem really implausible to me, what am I missing? Instead, what I think is more likely is that if the team may have preferred to not have Bregman for all 4 years(or at a minimum worried less about the opt outs offered heading into age 33 or 34 season), but the CBA isn't the animating factor or close to it. Instead it's a general preference that means they value shorter contract tenures, and are less interested in paying for Bregman's mid-30s in making an opportunistic attempt to sign him. Throw in a dash of what Bertz mentioned about Jed's job security too for good measure. That to me feels much more logical and still consistent with the front office/ownership SOP.