Transmogrified Tiger

"somebody" And that difference is more or less inconsequential unless you think Harper is bad(no) or that MLB and the Cubs in particular are going to see a huge reversal in their revenue. The avenues to effectively use money to improve your team are getting narrower every year, the idea that the 2027 Cubs might be disadvantaged by having Bryce Harper take up a smaller percentage of the payroll than he does today is not a compelling argument. Not the 2027 Cubs even. Try the Cubs in three years when they hope to sign Bryant and maybe Baez and others and they have $80 million wrapped up in three players already. Sure, I suppose they can worry about that then. 3 years from now you're talking about essentially a different franchise. Bryant, Baez, Rizzo, Lester, Zobrist, Hendricks, Schwarber, Montgomery, Quintana, the whole bullpen sans Edwards, all at free agency. If anything Harper extends your window of competitiveness by having a star caliber player to build around instead of completely starting from scratch and spending your money on worse players than Harper anyway.

"somebody" And that difference is more or less inconsequential unless you think Harper is bad(no) or that MLB and the Cubs in particular are going to see a huge reversal in their revenue. The avenues to effectively use money to improve your team are getting narrower every year, the idea that the 2027 Cubs might be disadvantaged by having Bryce Harper take up a smaller percentage of the payroll than he does today is not a compelling argument.

Heyward, Fowler, and Zobrist are a reasonable counter-argument. For 2019 and 2020 they have more pitching that can potentially help the big league team than bats, too.

There is a part of me that enjoys trying to brainstorm how to optimize the roster given constraints, team building has always been a fun puzzle in that way for me. The Dodgers especially have shown the benefit of not being slave to free agency to find really good production(Turner, Muncy, Hill, etc). That said, even if I'm in that brain, and I promise to not beat this drum for a month, I have a hard time understanding why you bring back Hamels if you're stifled financially. If you successfully bring in Harper(and it's easy to do at the 246 mark without Hamels' contract), then the remaining spots on the roster needing filled(pre-Hamels) are *prime candidates* for the type of outside the box thinking that you'd need for upgrading on the cheap. 5th/6th starter, bullpen arms, backup C, an infielder to play SS, etc. I mean, it's cherry picking, but Anibal Sanchez, Jeremy Hellickson, and old pal Trevor Cahill were league average starters for a combined 4 million and change. Erik Kratz was a minor league signing last offseason, outside of Cozart getting signed to play 3B no SS made 3 million in free agency last year, and we all know how good relievers come and go like the wind regardless of their origin. Harper's productivity gives you the most cost certainty if you're dealing with a limited budget, and he also more easily enables you to make a trade of Happ/Almora too, unlike if you're taking a gamble on Timmy Waiverclaim where you'd like the depth. That's what gets me about the crying poor stuff. If it's true, then you very clearly shouldn't have paid Hamels! So either it's not true, or the front office made a huge blunder on day 1 by means of not optimizing the roster and/or way overestimating Hamels. I'm continuing to think it's the former, at least to the degree that they didn't shoot themselves in the foot on the Harper front and they simply want any Harper suitor to be willing to take on their salary dumps without seeing them as a threat for him. If it's the latter I'll be as upset with the front office as I've been their entire tenure.

I’d have given long and hard thought to trading Almora for Zunino

Either that’s referring to Hyde being up for manager jobs, and/or Hickey/Butterfield/Borzello is looking around. Eyepatch just got hired and Strode will be here til the heat death of the universe.

Yeah, Russell is very obviously never playing another inning for the Cubs. There's worthy debate as to whether it's moral to try to maximize his value in the meantime(and whether it's legal to simply release him/non-tender him in the other direction), but he's done in Chicago. This post will self-destruct in 7 days just in case I look very stupid later.

I just know I'm going to regret asking, but what is a day of plastic bottles

Yeah I really like that move if the money is a net zero. I’d even include a fairly decent prospect on our side with + like Vic/Maples to get it done. what motivation would the angels have to trade cozart for chatwood? what's the upside for them They have Simmons already, so the odds of them getting their money’s worth(the money and years are identical) from a bounceback with 29 yo Chatwood are more likely than with a 33 yo Cozart who is at 3B.

There's a growing consensus in the neighborhood of 33 million AAV for Harper. Heyman and his industry friend averaged that, Fangraphs crowdsourced that, and now Ralph. Even if it's 35 million, and even if 246 million is a hard cap for the offseason, you can make that fit. How deep the roster ends up being does depend on how well you can do for yourself in the trade market though. If you can dump Chatwood/Duensing/Kintzler without eating significant dollars or attaching meaningful prospects, and/or if you can get small pieces in return for them or Russell(e.g. a reliever, a bench SS, a backup C), then things get a lot easier.

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Every November we hear variations on ‘boy I don’t know, we’ll have to see if there’s room in the budget, we’ll have to be smart with our spending’, and then every year they end up with a Lester, a Heyward, a Darvish. Again, the most salient bit of information we have this offseason is that the front office(who has made not so subtle allusions to pursuing Harper on multiple occasions) knows what they have to work with and chose to give Hamels 20 million. Does it make more sense for a suddenly cash-strapped front office to do that, or does it make more sense that they’re signaling conservatism in the first hours of free agency like most teams and especially this team typically does? [tweet] [/tweet]

They don’t have any money for Harper so it doesn’t matter if they give 20 million to Hamels is logic I have a hard time getting behind.

Mooney decides to get in on the doom mongering: https://theathletic.com/630609/2018/11/02/what-the-cole-hamels-option-means-for-the-cubs-and-bryce-harper/ If the Cubs are so tight financially that they are unlikely to be able to be serious contenders for Harper when nothing has changed in 6-12 months on that trajectory, you have to think that Theo prioritized bringing back Hamels at 15-20 million over the pursuit of Harper. Or, you could see them needing to make a decision on Hamels and using the leverage that decision had over Texas to get rid of some of the modest amount of payroll they'll want to shed after adding Harper and Hamels.

Are there rumors Doolittle is available? Or is that an assumption that if they miss out on Harper they'll play for 2020 and beyond?

Updated with Hamels' option being picked up and the Smyly trade.

Back to Hamels, Brett lays a reasonably compelling case that his LT number is the full 20 million. Basically, the buyout does come out as a LT discount, but for the team that actually paid that discount in the previous years, so the Cubs don't really get relief from it in this case. [tweet] [/tweet]

The logic I can come up with for why it's Smyly is that as a starter, with Hamels he's currently what, 8th on the depth chart? 9th if you're a big Alzolay fan? He threw one competitive inning last year. It's not certain he's ready to start games in April, and he's not going to be a guy you can plug into the rotation and let him go like you can with Montgomery or Chatwood, so even in positive outcomes for his workload you have to monitor him pretty intensely. As a reliever he has some higher end potential, but that productivity is also easier to find, and it's especially easier to find when you've moved Montgomery to 6th(7th if Chatwood cures his brain worms) on the SP depth chart. He'd also need to be babied a bit as a reliever, which is prevalent enough with the rest of the pen to dampen enthusiasm for that positive outcome too. I'd have given up Kintzler and/or Duensing as a pure salary dump first, but Smyly has always been a guy at the fringes of the 2019 pitching staff for me too.

Smyly makes 5 million. for luxury tax purposes, 7 million in actual payroll for 2019 2 years/$10M (2018-19) signed by Chicago Cubs as a free agent 12/12/17 18:$3M, 19:$7M 2019 performance bonuses: may earn up to $6M as a starter and up to $1M as a reliever That's my bad, I had it in my head he had a 5/5 split in raw dollars too and should've double checked. But yeah, for purposes that matter, 5 million

If they don't get Harper or Machado, the path to a similar type of improvement is probably far less correlated with spending.

They were 11th in the NL in home runs last year with all those boys on the roster. And one home run off of first the year before that with the same cast of characters. I'm also told that the hitting coach last year was unpopular. Point being that if the primary thing you're worried about is home runs(since the team scored plenty of runs, had a high wRC+, etc), the players on hand already are going to make or break that, you aren't going to ship off Schwarber in search of more homers.

I think it’s $7m Smyly makes 5 million.

NEVER SETTLE FOR THESE DONGLESS SCUMBAGS. Your home runs uber alles campaign is going to some strange places. Wherever will an offense with Bryant, Rizzo, Baez, Schwarber, and Contreras find power?

Also, Buster's admitted source here is other teams' executives, which is like a half step more accurate than whatever fever dreams inform Nightengale's reporting.