Transmogrified Tiger

From a pure prospect rankings sense, there's been some intentional trade-offs that have been made. In the last 30 months they've traded elite prospects(Jimenez, Torres) and Top 100-caliber depth(Cease, Candelario, Paredes) along with promoting and using Top 100 players(Contreras, Almora, Happ). We're also 1.5 seasons since the 2016 draft where the Cubs didn't have a pick til the 3rd round, which is a sweet spot where most high picks still have the potential to stick on lists before reality smacks them in the face, so this will likely represent a floor in terms of prospect depth on lists. As far as non-first round pick draftees go, I think it's fair that they haven't had as much success as they want or we would hope they'd have. They did go very pitching heavy outside the high first rounders which itself is going to ramp up the variance, and the shuffling they did with Benedict and their quotes about improving their development of young pitchers indicates they think they can do better there. They also have started getting comp picks again, this past draft they had one for the first time since their first draft in 2012 and they'll almost certainly get 2 this year. That's always been a part of the draft success they had in Boston(e.g. the 2005 draft where they had 6 of the Top 60 picks and got Ellsbury, Lowrie, and Buchholz) so hopefully it continues.

From some quick searching, it looks like he's taking advantage of the NYCFC/Man City connection to be able to train at their facilities while he looks for a club in Europe, but to do so he legally had to sign something with Man City even though he's not going to have anything to do with the EPL club.

and even if we're alive, trump won't be president so i'll be good with whatever Oh boy your in for a real disappointment. I love how the moderators always keep these threads politics free. 2 of the 657 posts in this thread contain a political joke. 5 contain a reference to the movie Wanderlust. If this ratio alienates you then you might not be in the right place.

It's not a bad rap to criticize billion dollar professional sports teams for trying to lose games. The 2012-2013 Cubs were not going to be playoff caliber no matter what spending they did, and given the way the CBA is structured spending more may have made it take longer to be competitive. Same thing more recently with the Phillies. Be pissed at the owners as a group for the CBA, and there's situations like the Marlins, Pirates, etc where owners are just cheap and worthy of criticism, but the blanket 'they're billionaires they need to spend rabble rabble' doesn't land for me if your actual hope is the team becomes more competitive.

It's not really in many of those teams' benefit to go spend on Moustakas or Arrieta either though. 'Tanking' gets a bad rap for what everyone intuitively knows is true, not everyone is going to be competitive and some teams are much more depleted of talent, so it makes sense for some teams to try to make future seasons better instead. The problem is that the way to make future seasons better at the moment is to be as bad as possible to maximize your draft pool and to give opportunities for young players to overachieve, neither of which are aligned with actually spending money. Fix draft/international pools(eliminate them, lottery them like the NBA, fold them into a slightly higher Luxury Tax number so teams can ratio their spending that way if they want), and make it easier for money to go to younger players instead of 30+ free agents(close service time loopholes, restricted FA instead of arbitration, fewer years to FA, etc) and you'll be in a much better place. But none of those things can change today or probably before 2020 though.

Leaving aside the fair point about Santana(who is more likely than not to have already had his best MLB season), it's quite possible the Cubs have no interest in trying to time the 110 IP they'd get from Salazar just right.

Yes. Wasn't it 'your name is half L's' or something like that?

I normally don't care for Jon Greenberg's work too much, but I really enjoyed this: https://theathletic.com/221674/2018/01/25/theo-epsteins-almanac-a-fallow-winter-could-still-lead-to-a-prosperous-spring-and-summer-for-the-cubs/ After talking a bit (with quotes from Theo) about the slow offseason and how they're experiencing it, they started talking about the moves that were made and I thought this was interesting. Morrow is definitely the closer, in part because the rigidity of the role makes it easier to keep him healthy, and they were similarly intentional about Davis.

I liked Mr. 'if Ozuna and Pham outperform projections by 5 wins then the Cubs and Cards are basically the same' suggesting that the Cubs' having several players projected to get better after down years is somehow an increased risk. 2017 is the only year that has ever happened, no other context is useful or necessary in projecting players, no siree

The thing I don't understand is that the Brewers have had a good farm system before, and in not too distant memory. Did they forget what that was like? Do they not realize that they don't have a wave even close to the Braun/Weeks/Fielder/Hardy/Gallardo group that got them one division title and a wild card berth in a less competitive landscape? They have about 1.5 guys who you can squint and see a path to being a 4+ win player, and you can talk to the Pirates about how easy it is to thread the needle on competitiveness when you don't decide to have a grown up's payroll(and the Pirates actually had the stars too). Also, and I've said this before, but the 'they emptied their farm system, in 3 years they'll be in huge trouble' narrative remains incredibly funny to me. If only we had held on to Eloy, Cease, and Paredes, you know, guys who 3 years ago were struggling in rookie ball if they had even turned pro at all. The Cubs had 4 picks in the Top 105 last year, will have 5 picks in the Top ~105 this year, and have proven their player development bona fides many times over. The odds of them getting the farm system up to the current Brewers caliber is wayyyy more likely than the Brewers striking it rich with Brinson and Hader and having no other regression and having Nelson pick up where he left off before he tore his labrum and actually serving as a consistent playoff threat.

ZiPS came out for the Brewers yesterday. Their depth chart was one win worse than the Cardinals. Sorry, did I say Cardinals, I actually meant the Reds. Their depth chart was one win worse than the Reds.

As mentioned on the last page, Ross came after Lester was signed. This is true but we were rumored to be interested in Ross before signing Lester and the thought was that it was to lure Jon to the Cubs (or was a condition he had to sign). I remember the board thinking that we didn't need to sign Ross now that we've got Lester (since we already had Welly and Montero signed). Tweet from Rosenthal a week before Lester picked the Cubs: [tweet] [/tweet] I don't think anyone denies that Gimenez signing is clearly part of an effort to sign Darvish. The distinction I'm making is that because the signing of Ross came after the signing of Lester, we probably shouldn't use it to draw conclusions about what signing Gimenez means about the likelihood of signing Darvish.

As mentioned on the last page, Ross came after Lester was signed.

Looks like the Nets are the big thing that carries the offseason, maybe Jersey has more specifics. http://web.yesnetwork.com/schedule/index.jsp

Maybe future free agent classes will help take the sting out by 2020, but early indications are the union is going to be about 1000% more angry next time around. It's probably worth assuming a work stoppage of some sort at this point.

I thought Ross was after Lester. EDIT: Yep, about a week later.

do you know who ben simmons is

Below is a list of Brewers that Steamer projects to reach 2 WAR this year:

They will have to go into the Luxury Tax to sign Harper alone, probably even in the (impossible) situation where Heyward opts out. So it's a matter of what penalties are you comfortable with. If you're signing Kimbrel too you're going to be paying significant penalties and probably also losing some draft position, depending on how the SP pursuit wraps up this offseason.

The Blue Jays are not good at this.

Also, it remains so silly that the idea that 'you might have more good players than you can afford 3 years from now' is considered a risk. Sure maybe you don't have the flexibility to extend a guy that far out, but it's just as much a feature in case Russell or Schwarber's bat doesn't come back around. Then you just trade or in a worst case non-tender them and all of a sudden your financial worries disappear. And it can't be repeated enough that these downsides are in a situation where you have a four headed monster of Rizzo, Bryant, Harper, and Contreras terrorizing opponents. Who gives a rip if the 5th best slugger in your lineup is Schwarber or Happ if those are your headliners?

At the moment, the 3 most important/valuable position players are Bryant, Rizzo, and Contreras. Contreras would be under control for 4 years of Harper, Bryant and Rizzo for 3. Even if it meant you eventually choose between Bryce Harper and the arb years of someone like Schwarber or Russell, you very obviously pick Harper over them.

Sounds good to me. The stricter proposal is preferable anyway(and the reset for stepping off the rubber is a huge loophole either way), and the union gets to show they're pissed off and project that they're going to fight the owners on other things which should be much more consequential than the pace of play stuff which should make games better.