Transmogrified Tiger

The 4 best SP, the best reliever, and 4 position players(3 of them stars) are basically chiseled in concrete, it’s gonna feel familiar unless you start making trades for the sake of trades. The reckoning starts one way or another after next year, when you have half the rotation plus Rizzo out of contract.

I’m not anti-Schwarber, but he’s had good stretches multiple times before that didn’t end up representing a new norm. I’m also not the world’s biggest Castellanos fan, but he does represent a pretty good use of FA dollars all things considered. In other words, in a vacuum I’d rather buy Nick and trade for pitching than buy the pitching given what’s out there.

Since I'm off sick and my brain is obsessing with this, one permutation on how this could work: - Extend Castellanos - Contreras for the best SP you can get. Syndergaard? Snell? Marquez? Let's call it Snell even though I'm a little skeptical the Rays are willing to do it. - Schwarber and Short to SD for Margot and Hedges. Hedges has the pedigree to bounce back with the bat and he's a strong framing backup at worst, Margot is what Almora was supposed to be while having some upside(especially outside Petco). SD wants to compete and their corner OF situation is a bit of a mess. Margot is an easier filled hole than power bat in Petco, and they're probably ready to give the reins at C to Mejia. Short can be immediately infield depth since they don't have a ton of answers there either. - Almora for a hopeful reliever prospect you think can make a 2020 impact. - Sign your favorite reliever, there aren't overwhelming options but let's call it Will Smith. Rotation is now Hendricks/Snell/Darvish/Quintana/Lester, and you still have Chatwood/Alzolay as spot starters. Pen is now Kimbrel/Smith/Wick/Ryan/Chatwood plus your Iowa Shuttle pair of choice. They could also go NRI or cheap one year deal on whatever Kintzler/Brach/Phelps caliber depth they like if the money allows. The lineup becomes very flexible so you can do a lot depending on the day/matchup. Catcher has a RH and LH option, Bote/Hoerner/Descalso are your 2B/backup IF depending on the day, and most of the OF playing time should be spread across Castellanos/Margot/Happ/Heyward, which is a nice balance of R/L, defense, power/contact. The end product is a bit less sexy without Schwarber and Contreras's power, but a full season of Castellanos hedges against that plus the best option of the OF and IF rotations is likely to be solid.

The roster-building enthusiast in me would love that, but I think the roster shakeup can be significant while also not being 10 trades and having 20 new faces. I think the biggest 'shake up' is likely to be Contreras getting dealt, between his defensive shortcomings and his injury history he's not exactly a foundational piece, and he's still got plenty of team control to fetch something significant, plus backfilling him with a partner for Caratini that can frame isn't a super expensive proposition.

It mostly depends on how you think they can best upgrade the roster. If you want to get to a point of optimism(and admittedly this is a rosey view), this is the one year crunch they were always going to have and it's not nearly as bad as it could have been, 20-25 million free to fill several holes could've been worse, thanks to most of the longer term pieces(all of the SP, most of the position players) having good enough seasons that they can be counted on for significant roles in 2020. I also think some forced scarcity isn't the worst thing in the world for the front office, since they've relied on the free agency and deadline rental treadmill too much for my liking.

Mostly reposted from the Castellanos thread: This year's LT payroll is right around 235, 245 if you think they would've been able to do the same salary stuff without Zobrist spending most of the year on the restricted list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VJ9nVwD1eUJabnL9tuQuxJa1K2oM2HXyqJS8Od0pMIo/ I'm assuming that they aren't going to cross the 40M over the tax threshold, and as a result payroll will be relatively static. I say relatively because you can come to conclusions using similar logic that differ by ~5 million or so, and that could matter a fair bit for how you plan the offseason. Material increases in LT payroll for next year: Bryant Arb3 Baez Arb2 Schwarber Arb2 Contreras Arb1 Rizzo option Hendricks extension Staying on the high side to be safe, that's probably around 30 million. Let's be super safe and call it 35 million for the other prearb/arb increases(Kemp, Caratini, Wick, etc). And then the salary leaving: Hamels 20 Zobrist 14 Morrow 10.5 Cishek 6.5 Strop 6.25 Kintzler 5 Duensing 3.5 There's probably a couple mil more too from various relievers leaving like Brach, Cedeno, and Montgomery. Add that all together and if you put your thumb to the wind you can see somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million to spend before removing any guaranteed salary at the low(Russell, Descalso) or high(Chatwood, Heyward) end. As far as what you need, you probably need an outfielder, and you almost definitely need a SP and at least 1 quality RP. There's a lot of directions you could go to get there though, especially depending on your level of faith in various position players like Bote, Hoerner, or Happ.

You joke, but it just so happens I scrolled through most of the Game 7 thread earlier today. It was very therapeutic, not just because of the end but because of how sincere the excitement was at all the small things that happened along the way. We've talked about this before, but I've definitely lost some of that as the team being super successful has moved from hope to expectation.

Maybe it'll be a Rookie of the Year-type of situation. surely cubswin11 has accused the Cubs medical staff of diagnosing a player with 'funky butt lovin' already

Gleyber Torres sucks and we were always right to trade him

Sponsored by Toys R Us is a really nice subtle touch

The Cubs having a relatively poor season this year and being poorly run more recently than the Dodgers doesn't make the fact they were a half step better over a very long time horizon. Defining 'long term' in a conversation with you is likely to be the 8th circle of hell but 4 consecutive years qualifies to me given that I've long thought that any roster planning beyond 2-3 years is basically absurd. You can spin this however you want, but if you get to set the starting point *and* still have to cut out some of the data, you know you’re stretching Include this year if you really want, if the Cubs having more postseason success and winning 9 fewer games over a 5 year span isn't 'on their level', who's the one stretching?

why stop there? Surely you can slice it down a little further to squeeze more of an advantage out for the Cubs The Cubs having a relatively poor season this year and being poorly run more recently than the Dodgers doesn't change the fact they were a half step better over a very long time horizon. Defining 'long term' in a conversation with you is likely to be the 8th circle of hell but 4 consecutive years qualifies to me given that I've long thought that any roster planning beyond 2-3 years is basically absurd.

Heading into this season the Cubs had won 8 more games, one more World Series, and made the same number of LCS over the last 4 years.

Agree, but it’s still nice to have the emergence of guys who seem above average to really good. ~5 months ago it looked like we were going to have to spend at least Brach/Kintzler money on every bullpen spot. Now, and I agree with you, we need to just spend on one spot for a solid guy. That spot could be filled with a trade too. For sure, there was a period of time after Carl had shown he was cooked and before they signed Kimbrel that future bullpens looked really bleak.

IMO we need the new Strop. Kimbrel is great in the 9th, and Wick, Ryan, Chatwood, plus your favorite Iowa shuttle guy(s) is pretty solid 3 thru 5-6. I don't think it's prudent to consider Wick a guaranteed lock down guy at this juncture for those purposes, so you need another guy who is reliably very good(at least as far as relievers go).

I don't really like seeing either of them, although I do feel like the backlash is getting a bit extreme because of the circumstances(this is mostly because the USMNT fanbase is particularly self-loathing and toxic). Especially at striker the player pool is super thin, and I fully expect that Sargent will start tomorrow and by the time qualifying starts he'll be ahead of Zardes on the depth chart. Hopefully someone like Toye, Ebobisse, or Soto continues to progress too. Trapp I have less patience for, I get that Berhalter wants someone who can play beautifully weighted long balls in every direction, but Trapp can barely get the space to do that against subpar international competition and he's a defensive zero. Really hope that Adams getting healthy and some more progression from Yueill knocks him out of selection.

1) we need to have the painful waiting period for that talent to mature since there’s a huge void in the age groups in front of them. Case in point last night with Dest getting roasted on the first goal. Thankfully we’ve seen the Berhalter USMNT comfortably dispatch CONCACAF minnows in competitive play so they’ll qualify, and we’re still more than 3 years til the start of Qatar, so the McKennies, Dests, Pomykals, and Weahs of the world will be much different when we need to rise to the challenge. 2) At this point it’s clear that Berhalter is willing to let friendly results sink in the name of learning. That’s okay with me, but if he’s going to have his eye on the long term prize then he needs to have a longer term eye with his rosters and playing time too so we can get the full benefit.

Not a Cubs Q obviously, but something to keep in mind for college guys their first summer. Like I'm very disappointed in what Strumpf has done since signing, but it's hard to take numbers the summer after the draft too seriously, good or bad. On one hand, I definitely see the argument there, especially since the conditioning program at the college level should hopefully be lesser than what someone can get in a pro offseason. On the other hand, to use Vaughn as an example, he's played 107 games this year, and every full-season team is between 130-140 right now. Maybe playing regular games over a slightly longer time horizon is more taxing, but that doesn't seem like such a heavy workload that you should expect a guy to be substantially worse than expectations.

The guy I would go after to replace Zobrist and pinch hit is Howie Kendrick. viewtopic.php?p=364499#p364499

Castellanos has a .607 OPS as a pinch hitter, can't keep him. Rizzo is at .478, might be time to put him out to pasture too. Baez is at .542, definitely pump the breaks on his extension. Bryant is at .583, the gutless choking dog. Thankfully, the MLB leader in pinch hitting the last 3 years(min 10 PA of course) is going to be available, so we can snap up Adam Jones and fill that gaping hole in the roster.

JD Martinez seems like a near-perfect analogue, but all bets are off in this newfound era of collusion so, maybe? Martinez was a fair amount better with the bat for a long while, although he was 2 years older. 4/60 feels like a decent starting point to me, I wouldn't be surprised with AAV going up a few million or a 5th year, maybe both in a hotter market.

The point is that Gorman is not “blowing away his peers”, most organizations have a player with a similar age/production profile. He had a .623 OPS in the month before his promotion, so it’s quite an assumption that he would have been wrecking the MWL if he stuck around. But if you want to leave that tangent, if you’re trying to talk up the long term viability of either team, you need to start at the top of the roster. The Cardinals have missed the playoffs 3 straight years not because they don’t have role players like Bader or fringe major leaguers like Edman, but because they’ve lacked star power, guys who can put up a 5 win season, and preferably with consistency. The Cubs are in their most precarious roster position in the last half decade, but they still have multiple years of Bryant, Baez, and Hendricks, plus guys who have very recently done so(Rizzo) or could make the small leap to that echelon(Contreras). The Cardinals still don’t really have anyone to count on in that regard, since Goldschmidt and Carpenter have fallen flat and have decline in front of them. You can maybe squint and see DeJong or Flaherty in the Contreras sense, but the roster still lacks starpower. If the solution to that is Carlson, an avalanche of roster fill, and far off prospects like Gorman, then their long term prospects as a team are going to be as dim as their recent past.

My point is that being young while failing doesn’t give you extra credit(fwiw its the same point i’ve made about Cubs prospects like Ademan). In the MWL Gorman was barely in the top 10 of fellow teenagers in offensive performance. In the FSL there are very few teens, but he’s still been outight bad there, and the things that were suboptimal about his MWL performance have been even more worrisome. That doesn’t mean that Gorman isn’t a good prospect, not completely collapsing in the FSL at 19 is commendable. But being 19 doesn’t mean its a given you’re going to start destroying that league and the multiple leagues between there and MLB, especially when his MWL performance wasn’t elite and he plays a position that requires a big bat to be valuable. Gorman remains a good prospect and a big part of the Cardinals organizational depth, but if you’re writing him in a future MLB lineup in pen, or treating him in the same caliber of actual elite prospects(past STL examples being Taveras and Rasmus), you’re putting the cart before the horse.

how did Hiura come up lame running that slowly?