Transmogrified Tiger

I think a dynamic that is fairly true of all prospect evaluators is also uniquely unkind to the Cubs in this specific cycle. For all the refinement in scouting over the years and increased data at our finger tips, you're still going to see large variance with players at lower levels, and players may have flaws that simply cannot manifest themselves at those levels due to the quality of competition. So prospects with no other track record who wreck shop can get the benefit of the doubt because some of those flaws haven't yet come to fruition, so they might not! The inverse works with players at higher levels, especially those with 3-4 MiLB seasons under their belt. They've been exposed to both the time and quality of competition to see those flaws and to create educated skepticism about their ceiling and MLB futures. Now think about this dynamic in the context of the Cubs' top prospects as well as those they've traded away in the last 12 months. The shiny new toys are mostly those who are no longer in the system(Hope, Smith, Ferris to a lesser extent), while the remaining top prospects are those with several years and levels to build up skepticism(Caissie, Alcantara, Triantos, Ballesteros). Shaw is the closest to splitting the difference of great performance at high levels without much track record of imperfection, and as a result he's far and away the #1 ranked prospect in the system. This time next year it could be the inverse, you might see a chunk of that AAA cohort graduated or traded, a few 2024 draftees break out(Mathis? Southisene?), maybe next year's 1st round pick pulls a Shaw/Smith, and the story may be 'the Cubs graduated 4 Top 100 prospects and they're ranked just as good as last year'.

I've noticed this too, we talked about it a little here: I suspect that this is 3 main factors, in the likely order of importance to the current roster: the FO's general preferences lead them away from IFA players even in trade/FA, IFA has become less successful league-wide, and the FO hasn't been particularly successful relative to the league in developing IFA.

I'm not sure how long these posts take you to write, but you could probably save yourself some time and just say "I don't think scarcity is real" every time instead of translating that idea into increasingly unreadable street-corner ravings.

In that case he will probably have plenty of time to read them too! Which is really where I am at the moment, we can hand wring the specific acquisition that marks whether Jed is doing enough with the top of the roster, but if they don't make the playoffs this year Jed is gone and whether everyone agrees on who counts as a 'star' or what FA he reasonably could have signed doesn't matter. I believe right now they project as the 3rd best team in the NL by ZiPS(probably closer to 6th than 2nd), if that holds true they're probably even money or better to extend Tucker. If it doesn't then Jed probably won't be around to answer whether or not he ever could sign the deal that made everyone happy.

I don't know about the sustainability aspect of it(the SEC has had solid depth for a few years now but not ranked close to the best conference), but with the SEC and ACC in particular, a big driver at this point in the season might be the SEC/ACC challenge having the most lopsided outcome I've ever seen in one of those challenges. Normally you see home teams win all but a couple games and that determines who wins 9-7 or 10-6, etc, but this year the SEC won that over the ACC 14-2.

Michael Arias' career best walk rate was a hair under 12%, in 24 IP at AA this year, and he was completely uncompetitive at AAA. He is fun to dream on but as a relief only prospect the ramp to the end of the 40 man carousel is a steep one.

Multi-page thread of discussion of the Rea signing here

I think the bolded I added in is where this comes into greater focus. If I get to pick between Rea and that list for any given start, he's either 4th or 5th on my board as things stand today. The problem is at different points in the season I don't know how many of that list will actually be available to choose. If you get rid of Assad then you could have an outright problem if there's any injury. That's why to me this points so clearly to something going on with Assad(or one of the worse outcomes you alluded to, especially injury).

My maybe hopeful attempt at the logic is something like that. Assad or maybe Wicks is about to depart(maybe in a SP deal, maybe for a bat), and if you look at the current rotation without Assad and consider the lack of innings you can count on from the various options 6-10(Wicks/Horton/Brown *combined* for 175 pro IP last year), then adding a rubber arm to the mix makes some sense. The timing being right after the arb deadline to give you clarity on the price of a trade target might be related too.

Jed saw how much we loved a bullpen without an opening day hierarchy and decided to do that with half the rotation as well. A true man of the people.

I think there's two particularly good points here. One is that just meeting Tucker's arb ask doesn't move the needle on him signing an extension later. No one picks a particular airline because they have the best snacks. The other is about the perceived animosity created by haggling and I think it's reflective of how we tend to look at these relationships in a flat, un-nuanced way. Tucker is new to the Cubs so he hasn't built up a relationship, and this act moves the needle from neutral to negative. Ian Happ had many years with the Cubs so the lost equity from going to arb still left the relationship ledger in the positive and facilitated an extension. But that's not how relationships work in practice, where potentially small slights hurt more from someone you're close to compared with someone who you just met. Even if I were sensitive about a particular point, I'd be far more likely to chalk it up to a misunderstanding with someone I had just met compared to a close family member. The last nod I'll make at this point is that we are talking about humans, and we are not known for our rationality in all circumstances. Going to arb is likely a nothingburger in most cases, but possibly not all. That said, everything we know of Tucker doesn't seem to point to the case, whereas I might have a greater concern if it were, say, Marcus Stroman they were trying to woo long term.

Do not be me and accidentally stumble onto *David* Festa's fangraphs page thinking he was the acquisition. That will really dampen your already limited enthusiasm for Matt Festa.

Steele is under team control until his age 33 season, there's no reason to extend him

For those like me who didn't remember the full list, the remaining Cubs arb players without agreed terms are Tucker(MLBTR estimate: 15.8 million), Steele(6.4), Pearson(1.4), and Morgan(1).

This is a really interesting premise and touches on the underlying thing that makes me gunshy when it comes to how quickly folks latched on to bat speed as a proxy for hitter quality. It's more sophisticated than this, but in the same way that pitchers are optimizing for velo and movement more than command, there's clearly some profiles of hitters optimizing to swing hard to maximize bat speed and max exit velo more than bat control. I've mentioned him in similar contexts before, but Paredes is closer to the opposite of the 'close your eyes and swing hard' archetype. There was lots of handwringing about his exit velos(and bat speed when it came out), but that narrow focus ignores that his greater bat control afforded him other positives(the ability to elevate the ball without increasing Ks, & a lower K rate in general). I wonder what his squared up distribution looks like.

Spags got his first DC job in New York but was a positional coach under Reid for 6 years prior. Reid has been an NFL head coach for 25 years and successful for basically all of that time. That's a long time to have assistants plucked and they certainly can't all be good because it's a zero sum game. Especially when Reid is still coaching and has won 3 of the last 4 super bowls. I mean, Pederson is one of 6 coaches to win a Super Bowl in the last 10 years. Rivera won 4 division titles and made a super bowl while coaching 2 not great orgs. If these are failures then why would you expect any coaching tree to have a meaningfully high success rate.

Reid and his coaching tree pretty much have a stranglehold on the AFC in the recent and foreseeable future, along with multiple different super bowl winners(possibly more if it weren't for Reid himself). What type of success rate are you expecting from a coaching tree

What's the over/under on career IP as a Dodger, 200 might even be high?

I could've goofed the napkin math but that's like 10 wins worse? That's a chasm for a regressed projection system

As an example, Rojas (5), Canha (8), Yates (10), Heaney(12) gets you to 37 pretty quickly as a middle of the road outcome. Depending on how Sasaki pans out and some of the quieter teams that have money to move, you could see money shift among those roster spots for other options in FA(Flaherty? Hoffman? Scott?) or trade(Minnesota, Seattle, etc).

Yes that seems relevant to a discussion of the Cubs signing Josh Rojas, good point! I'll be more direct. I appreciate you've been polite with your posts, but if you're going to continue to exclusively show up to neg people about their opinions of the Mariners or their players, your stay here isn't going to be much longer. We did not ask for nor want a Mariners Ombudsman to make sure everyone is perfectly aligned with your more optimistic view of your team.

See KCCub, the Seattle offense was only horrible for 122 games, bet you feel foolish now that you’ve seen that and a comparison to a Cubs offense that everyone complained about. (Also wRC+ is underestimating the Cubs by 5ish points since their 2024 park factor was an extreme outlier and wRC+ is using multi-year weights)

Not sure there's a silver bullet for this, and I certainly don't give more weight to Merrifield's complaints in particular, but I do think the topic is worth looking into. HBP have clearly continued to increase: 1990: 861 (993 extrapolated to 30 teams) 2000: 1573 2010: 1549 2019: 1984 2024: 2020 When you combine that with the simultaneous rise in velocity, there's no question there's more danger to hitters. They certainly bear some responsibility with their positioning, but with the steady increase in walk rates and emphasis on movement and missing bats(while de-emphasizing pinpoint command), there's little question to me the increase in danger to hitters is mostly on the pitching side. As to what to do about it, as I said up top I'm not sure there's an obvious solution. Ejections or making HBP a 2 base penalty feel like they create some perverse incentives for the hitters. Maybe something at the macro level would work, e.g. every X HBP(or HBP that meet criteria of 'dangerous') for an individual pitcher or team results in a suspension.

Not worthy of its own thread, but this is a fun MiLB reliever addition Heller had terrific K/BB numbers in AAA, and after some initial HR trouble(and a horrible 2 outing MLB cameo) ironed that out and was outright dominant in AAA before getting called up for another MLB audition: 10 IP, 10 H, 4 R, 12/5 K/BB, 0 HR