Transmogrified Tiger

The Fire continue to be the Mets of MLS

Is there a theory as to why he turned it down the player option? I understand the appeal, but at the same time he's been a 1 win starter in MLB and 12 million is a lot to turn down. Especially since he's only 30 so any bounce back this year wouldn't jeopardize the length of his next deal.

1) Barnhart would've been a nice backup C option to have around. His 7.5 million option is a bit steep, but for the next-to-free price I wouldn't have been upset about adding him. 2) As some folks have noticed, there's some strong selling sentiment in that quote from Krall. Moustakas would be a good fit for the current roster as long as you assume his 2021 struggles are mostly due to injury, and his monthly splits would back that up. If you could get the Reds to pick up a chunk of his 2/38 (2/32 CBT value) to clear the rest, then that'd be a reasonably compelling option for LH corner IF.

https://twitter.com/TexasVC/status/1455741657295564802

Mexico got another punishment for the chant: https://sports.yahoo.com/mexico-puto-chant-world-cup-qualifiers-without-fans-153948541.html 1) good, I can't believe the fanbase is choosing to die on this hill (I kinda can, but nevertheless) 2) they'd be playing in empty stadiums for Costa Rica and Panama, which from a US perspective is good news if your aim is optimizing the chances the US get 1st in the Ocho(and the associated ELO/WC pot draw benefit), less good if your aim is maximizing the US's odds at qualification.

Brett points out that while the QO concern is real and the consequence for the Cubs is as significant as it can be given the current rules, there's a fair number of teams in a similar boat: https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2021/10/27/yes-the-cubs-have-a-qualifying-offer-problem-in-free-agency-but-so-do-a-lot-of-other-teams/

Is there a recent report on Velazquez's defense? Longenhagen said in the July list that he'll 'have to develop' on defense, putting a 30/45 grade on him to go with the 'will fill out his body' grade of 50/40 on speed. But he's playing enough CF at all levels that I have a hard time squaring that with the report, unless the Cubs and the AFL manager are dopes he's clearly not a DH *today*. Especially for a guy who's more of a swinger, that defense is gonna make a big difference in what a MLB role could be and how likely that is.

There isn't going to be a winter meetings in all likelihood, but depending on the progression of CBA talks I think end of 2021 makes a reasonable deadline. If the CBA doesn't get finalized til some time in January and Willson wants to wait until after that dust settles to negotiate(which would be very reasonable on his part), then it gets really tough to negotiate in parallel with a compressed offseason and need a contingency if those negotiations fail. I think you need to know by the time the CBA is agreed upon. As for who they'd replace him with, the Free Agent options are dire, which at least might help the return for Contreras. Unless there's a competing team that wants to give up on a young catcher for more certainty(maybe Padres/Campusano if the Cubs gave more value, or Seattle/Raleigh), I think it's a good candidate for a challenge trade where someone like Bote or Happ goes for the catching equivalent in another org. The only other option I spot from a quick scan is Miami might want to cut bait with Alfaro now that he's in arb years.

Named After Maddux appears to be too busy/modest to link his work so I'll do it. He's doing an offseason plan over several parts, today marked the 2nd of 4. Part 1: Building the Offense Part 1 with Wisdom, Ortega, and Schwindel Part 2: Building the Offense Part 2 with an Ian Happ trade Part 3: Building the lineup with Match-ups Part 4: Pitching Targets You should read both because they're very thoughtfully done and I'm just gonna give bullet points for the sake of conversation. His takeaway from the Giants success was their accrual of lots of position players with complementary skillsets, as evidenced by Crawford being the only player with 120+ games at a single position. In trying to emulate that approach, these were the moves: - Sign Kyle Seager to complement Wisdom at 3B - Sign McCutchen to platoon w/ Ortega in corner OF, pursuing Suzuki instead if posted - Trade Happ & Carraway for Kiermeier and Taylor Walls I like the idea of a LH corner infielder a lot. I'm less bullish on Schwindel so in my eyes this is more for 1B/3B than 3B/LF, but Seager or Eduardo Escobar would be smart additions. I'm less a fan of McCutchen at this stage in his career, I feel like you can find someone with more upside and/or better defense in a similar pool. To that end, Steamer doesn't see a whole lot of difference between Hermosillo and McCutchen when you layer in likely defense. And lastly, while I'm doubtful that specific trade would happen(to quote the article, "all mock trades are bad, including mine"), I like Kiermeier as a target if he's available and really like Walls' potential fit if the high end of the SS market isn't an option. He's a defense first SS that's blocked by Franco, and while he's not a heavy platoon bat(his splits go back and forth) he does switch hit so he can timeshare well with Hoerner/Madrigal.

I'm rusty on my 40 man roster nuances, what's the action and consequences here? Looks like the current 40 man is at 47 including the 60 day IL. EDIT: Assuming this isn't a one way door and the only forcing function is getting down to 40(meaning we can keep 5 at most), I'd say Hermosillo, Alcantara, Adam, Stewart, and one of the lefties, I guess Brothers. EDIT2: Are some of the catchers part of this too and just not in Bryan's tweet? I could maybe be convinced to keep another reliever like Nance over the 4th/5th catcher like Lobaton.

I’m pretty skeptical that Gray gets a deal that modest, but I do think that might be telling about the Rockies view of Gray. Even if the 3/30 is exaggerated and they would be willing to give him 4/50 or something, that’s still in the range of not being a slam dunk qualifying offer, especially for a more modest spending team like Colorado. Good news all around.

I’m not sure I follow the logic for this one. The argument seems to be “if you intentionally limit the pool of players you can add, you’re left with scraps that doom the season to failure if you don’t sign your targets”. But even if you set your sights higher, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able get more than the scraps if you miss because the players in between are still getting targeted in the meantime. If anything, aiming for the top the market likely has greater risk in that regard, because they’re likely to be longer negotiations, you can’t use playing time as a differentiator so less is in your control, and there’s the possibility that free agency is condensed into a much shorter window post-CBA negotiations. I’m also not sure I agree with how narrow this seems to be defining what counts as ‘intelligent’ spending. The implication seems to be any FA that can get more than 2 years is off limits. Not only does that not match past behavior(the 2013 Cubs gave Edwin Jackson 4 years without the “must be aggressive” messaging of 2021), but it’s very likely that depending on the post-CBA landscape, there’s more options in that bucket than there were in 2012-2014 thanks to the continued emphasis on suppressing FA spending from owners via the CBA.

we got the rock to tweet about MLS, we’re a soccer country now

Going from Randy Bush to the masters in statistics guy that worked for Houston and the Dodgers R&D is about a dramatic a shift in skills and perspectives as you can get in modern front office.

BN with a good roundup of a good NPB outfielder that may get posted: Seiya Suzuki: https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2021/10/22/top-japanese-outfielder-seiya-suzuki-will-reportedly-be-posted-soon/ I am admittedly the easiest person in the world to sell on Japanese imports, but this seems like it could be a really good fit. The profile seems like it would translate well, as Brett points out the Cubs can take the risk on that unknown more than the average contender, and a RH corner OF complements the current roster nicely with all the lefties hanging around(Happ, Heyward, Ortega, Deichmann). Brett also notes that the posting fee is a good outlet for the one off 'savings' of shedding the salary they did at the deadline, though the exact internal accounting on that front is far from certain.

I almost said something similar yesterday, but I think the size of the market is an underrated case for optimism in landing one of the SS. IMO you've got 10-12 teams that you can reasonably say *could* land one of them(NYY, TOR, DET, HOU, TEX, NYM, WSN, PHI, CHC, LAD, maybe CIN or MIN). That's a little bigger than the reasonable market for the average top FA, but in this case there's 5 of them, if we treated all their odds equally you're north of a 40% shot. And you could make the case the Cubs have better odds than a decent chunk of the field. CIN/MIN probably aren't going there, TOR, NYM, and LAD have SS so their incentive on this particular group is lower, NYY, LAD, and HOU might have luxury tax concerns depending on the CBA details, plus WSN, DET, and TEX aren't inherently more attractive/competitive than the Cubs. In this light you could say the main barrier is the Cubs willingness to give out the contract, and the nuances of what teams target which players, since it's tough to negotiate with 5 SS simultaneously and they aren't created equal.

I think there's a logic to this, but probably good reasons teams don't do it. - One is not all Free Agents are created equal, but the QO treats them the same. If I'm a big market team who cares less about dollars, then I'd probably prefer to have e.g. Harper, Cole, and Correa if I'm giving up my draft picks than Correa, Ray, and Conforto. - Another is the bidding wars thing you mention, though if there was a year this was less of a concern it's probably this year with the likely number of QO FA's. - Another is around flexibility. You can say that you'll go deep on one class and then not do so for several years to avoid cratering your farm system, but the Dombrowskis of the world probably don't have that discipline, and other FO's probably understand they can always open that box when next year gets there and want to stave off that risk. - The last one is that there's likely cascading effects from having such a lost year in terms of young talent acquisition, especially since the teams most likely to pull off 3-4 QO FAs are big market teams without competitive balance picks and who lose IFA money for each QO FA too. You can be smart and make up for a slight handicap in a given year, especially if you're this year's Cubs and the ACL/Low-A teams are stuffed with promise. But if you have to functionally sit out IFA and have 1 pick in the top 150 or so that's a pretty severe problem. Layer on that increasingly FAs are more 31 year olds than 27-28 and you get even further from the benefit being worth the risk/cost.

Might need to recalibrate on what is worth giving starting PA to, especially for certain positions. Merrifield put up a a .712 OPS with +5 defense and was worth 3.3 fWAR. In practice Nico might be shy of that mark in a similar line since Whit added value by leading off 162 times, but even if you cut that by 10-15% thats still productivity well worth having. As for Madrigal, he was tracking better than that through a third of a season, so him being similarly worthwhile is not an abstract concept.

I wanted to start a new thread because I think the Qualifying offer is still a bit underdiscussed in terms of how much of a limiter it could be to the Cubs offseason plans. One caveat to begin with is while all the reporting I've seen expects the QO to still exist this offseason, it's possible the new CBA changes or removes it. The expectation is with a few exceptions, most Free Agents are going to wait to sign until after the new CBA is signed, and if there's any rumbling that the QO penalty will be removed/lowered, those folks would be extra incentivized to wait. But for now, let's assume the structure remains the same. A refresher on the actual consequences of signing a QO FA is in the spoiler below if you need it. I spell this out because this isn't a trivial price to pay, in a league where player development and the success of pre-FA players is increasing in importance, giving away what amounts to a Top 10 prospect and a Top 30-50 prospect for the right to pay a FA salary can't be taken lightly. To that end, even high spending successful teams don't regularly make it their business to pay that price. There have been 35 FAs that rejected the QO in the last 5 years. The most successful big market teams in the 5 years that followed(Dodgers, Astros, Yankees, Red Sox) have paid the penalty to sign one of those 35 players twice: Gerrit Cole to the Yankees, and AJ Pollock to the Dodgers(the Dodgers gained QO compensation for Grandal that year). The Nationals also signed a QO FA in the same year they gained comp for another twice(Murphy/Zimmermann, Corbin/Harper) if you want to include them. What this tells me is even well run teams that spend oodles on payroll are hesitant to give up the player assets to sign a FA unless they have the 'house money' of that benefit coming back to them elsewhere. I don't think that means QO FA should be off limits to the Cubs as a result, especially when it looks like an abnormal amount of QO FA's will be on the market thanks to the end of CBA/Covid weirdness in classes, but it does indicate they should have a good reason. I made this a new thread because I'm curious what everyone thinks the target or limits should be for signing a QO, since I'm not sure exactly how I feel about it quite yet. What I feel most confident in saying is 1) given the FA class it's very unlikely signing 2 or more QOs is a good idea and 2) any QO player you sign needs to have pretty big upside(5+ WAR) even if it's far from guaranteed.

Thor, Gray, and Taylor are all in the 'likely' category to receive a QO from MLBTR's August breakdown: https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2021/08/2021-22-qualifying-offer-candidates.html Say what you will about the likelihood/benefit of signing a QO'd Free Agent(I think I'll start a separate thread about that soon), but I don't think signing three of them is a particularly realistic (or even desirable) path.

Maybe a silly question, but would PSU want to match that? I get the sense that Franklin at PSU is a situation not too dissimilar to Pelini at Nebraska, where the results are objectively good for what the program is but the fanbase has an unreasonable standard based on the bygone era/legendary coach. Since it's one of their up years it's probably more likely he'd get kept, but if you had this rumor before the season I'm not sure.

I thought they played with 2 strikers a chunk of the time but maybe not. Definitely takes the shine off that option if so.

Let's go back to the Ajax rumors please, give him a few months to break into the team then ~18 months of playing on the front foot in the Eredivisie before going to a super club instead of skipping straight to a Steffen-esque limbo at one of those clubs. Wolfsburg would be fine too for similar reasons.

Non-Contreras catchers put up -0.7 fWAR in 257 PA last year, that's the part that's not that hard to improve on. Yes, if you trade Contreras and have 2 new catchers you could add up to a similar amount, but the biggest gains are just from finding a functional backup. Plus if you find the functional backup you likely get better performance from Contreras since he will not get overworked or have to face every elite SP. Probably not a coincidence his 2nd half was better with Chirinos around to be a worthwhile backup.

1. A writer or two saying "if they're rebuilding maybe they'll trade Contreras since he's a FA to be without an extension" is not 'hot and heavy' trade rumors, characterizing it as such is outing yourself as an unserious person. 2. Trading Contreras as an academic exercise is not punting on multiple years. As mentioned, he's 30 as a catcher so his best days are likely behind him, and he's never hit 3 fWAR in a season so the bar is not so absurdly high in replacing him. 3. However, any team you're trading Contreras to is unlikely to be giving you substantial 2022 contributors, which further hurts the likelihood of 2022 and 2023 being playoff caliber teams. Plus with Amaya's disappointing 2021 there isn't an internal candidate at the ready to take on a starting role, nor is catcher a particularly deep position in FA. Contreras's skillset is well rounded enough that until I hear otherwise about him having absurd contract demands, I'm assuming the best way forward is extending him.