Transmogrified Tiger

2B

how many baseball games would you say you've watched before

The Cubs lead 3-2 after 3 innings

Doesn't look like they have a shared off day the rest of the season, so I'd assume double header. The Sunday game is already scheduled for 1:35 local time, so I'd guess they try to keep that firm? Since it's a travel day and there may be Sunday Night Baseball window considerations I lean towards it being more of a pure back to back DH where Game 2 starts X mins after Game 1, but I'm not all that confident.

Also makes it a lot easier to talk yourself out of paying for a particular reliever if you've got e.g. Assad/Wesneski/Brown all slated for the MLB pen on opening day. Jed has been pretty consistent so far in his tenure of making money investments in at least 1 SP and 1 bat per offseason(Stroman/Seiya, Taillon/Dansby, Shota/Bellinger). Maybe that reaches a point of diminishing returns, and it doesn't necessarily mean a Steele/Shota caliber arm. But especially with the young pitching injuries limiting the IP they can get from them in 2025, I would expect to see a material SP addition.

There is 20% of the season left, there is basically no chance they don't get anyone to 3 fWAR? At full season paces they're on track to have four: Happ very easily, Swanson semi-easily, Seiya and Paredes barely, Busch/Hoerner barely missing

Smith since his 3 game acclimation to Low A(2 for 11, 8/0 K/BB): 40 PA (10 G), .353/.450/.843, 5 HR, 4/6 K/BB

My goodness. I gotta admit I didn't see PCA reaching this level of locked in so quickly, even if it's simply a hot streak

Please just talk like a human being, the second sentence doesn't make any sense. Also Harvey was traded to Kansas City at the deadline(and then was bad for 6 outings and got ILed)

Bote was on the active roster though, so if there is an IL stint too there's another player on his way to the MLB club. Given that Bote's playing time disappeared once Paredes was acquired and Vazquez is also a RHH IF with more defensive flexibility, it'd be a little surprising if it wasn't connected.

Best guess is the shoulder thing is bothering Paredes enough to IL him

If I were to nitpick this it would be that Shaw has played 15 games at AAA, and purely from a results standpoint has seen a fairly stark adjustment in the first week's worth of games to the 2nd week. I struggle to make macro conclusions about his profile's readiness when a couple games of post-promotion adjustment that are likely less predictive weigh so heavily on the numbers. That said, the nitpick does still gesture towards the broader point given that there aren't 100 games left in the AAA season. It would be irresponsible to be counting on Day 1 MLB contributions from Shaw this year, and at his current overall trajectory it would be pushing it to expect anything meaningful in the first half of the year. That's fine! He was drafted 13 months ago. But it also means that you can't approach the offseason as if he's a plug and play solution unless he repeats this week's outcomes while improving on his overall peripherals for the remainder of the AAA season. That's not a very realistic expectation, so the likely optimistic case is Shaw is broken into MLB a bit slower than PCA was this year, and PCA wasn't a meaningful contributor until summer.

The current WC3 pace is for 86 wins. If the Cubs finished the season at the pace they've played since the trade deadline passed, they'd finish with...86 wins.

Players with his profile(low K, high launch angle/high FB) tend to do that. Think of this simplified example: if I hit 4 scalding line drives, 5 weak hit outs, and 1 K, I will have a lower xwOBA than someone who hits 4 scalding line drives, 3 weak hit outs, and 3 Ks. But in an outcomes sense we want the first set of PA, especially if that's repeatable, and players with Low K high FB tend to be really talented hitters with good barrel control. But even if that's not convincing it isn't a nightmare scenario! Paredes at his xwOBA is an above average hitter and 3B.

Players have slumps man. As we have seen multiple times this year, shrieking about every bad plate appearance when players have a significant track records otherwise just ends up making you look foolish.

if it weren't for that grifter we'd be up by 9 after 4 innings instead of 6!

Brennen Davis isn't real, he never existed and never will

always fun when you can tell out of the infielder's hand that a throw isn't ending up anywhere near 1st

Paredes has over 1600 PA with a 118 wRC+. Since his initial cup of coffee with Detroit and getting traded to Tampa, it's 1457 PA with a 125 wRC+. He's in his third straight season with a wRC+ over 115. But more than that, the whinging about Paredes lacks a coherent 'why'. Often players play well for stretches and then have something change and start playing poorly, but in almost all cases there's a clear reason. Hitters struggle with different methods of pitching(e.g. the velocity surge hurting Heyward), or they have injuries that sap their ability to play at that level. But there isn't a plausible reason for the Paredes pessimism that I've seen anyone offer. Certainly not one that we'd expect to dampen future enthusiasm, as the most likely factor beyond normal variance is he's carrying a knock like the shoulder that kept him out the other day. The closest is people hand-wringing the fact that he hits lots of pulled fly balls and that might not work in different ballparks. This ignores that 1) the margin of the difference matters, it is not a dynamic that costs you 30 points of wRC+ 2) Paredes was a very good hitter on the road for multiple years, and 3) that doesn't cleanly match his more recent struggles that started pre-trade. So what we're left with are 'but what if he's bad?!!?!' worries that don't have any grounding other than pessimism as a default.

Tauchman is arb eligible for the next 2 seasons, and there was no indication that he was a particularly hot name at the deadline. So if the argument is 'even seemingly inconsequential trades can turn up big names', you can still do that! And do it with greater knowledge of Bellinger and PCA's future to boot.

Was it Rogers who had the news recently that Caissie was going to be called up with roster expansion, or a twitter rando with less credibility? He feels like the right choice on the position player side given the amount of AAA time he's had already compared to the alternatives. I can see the argument for Alcantara though given his 40 man clock and better roster fit as a RHH who isn't bound to a corner. On the pitching side, I don't have strong opinions on the current AAA guys vs. the players with 2025 contracts who are there now, so mostly I'm curious if they'll be so aggressive as to cut Smyly to make room. Given the multi-year relationship they've had with him, the odds they may bring him back in some form, and the opportunity cost being like 6 innings of evaluation, my hunch is he stays. So then it's a matter of if Wicks takes the expansion spot or not, and if they're going to finally admit Counsell hates Roberts and give him a different arm to try out.

Both of those Smith HR's appear to be fastballs in the upper 3rd, that's pretty fun given his size might normally cause some issues getting to those. Their swings are different but reminiscent of Bryant in that way

6 of the Top 11 relievers in fWAR are FA to be, 3 of them are young enough to potentially get a 3+ year deal for serious money(Holmes, Hoffman, Strahm), and 3 of them are not(Jensen, Robertson, Yates). There's also a few guys who have been good closers who are not quite in that elite FIP grouping hitting FA(Scott, Estevez) so I think it's fair to say it should be a pretty robust market. In addition to the FA market though, I wonder if we see a more modern twist on the Wade Davis deal, and see a trade for a reliever near FA. You give up some currency to do it but you also lose the multi-year downside that we've seen exists even with guys getting higher end reliever deals(hint: the Cubs just released one). Fairbanks, Kopech, Helsley, Kimbrel, and Iglesias are all names that would qualify, probably others that my 60 seconds of Fangraphs searching left behind.

He's not making a full season of starts at this level of performance. His repertoire is based heavily on deception which expires quickly, he's facing 20 hitters a game because his OPS against the 3rd time through the order is 1.259. Throughout his minor league career he had a terrible time throwing strikes, that's fortunately improved but at the expense of a very poor HR rate from his unremarkable stuff living in the zone. If he has to pitch with the 2023 ball it's gonna be a difficult choice between pounding the zone like he has and giving up 1-2 HR/game or trying to work the edges and spiking his walk rate/pitch count(which will accelerate the unvirtuous cycle of getting him to the 3rd time thru the order). He's not a garbage player or anything, and I can see the argument for preferring him on a roster to someone like Assad who is more purely getting by on guile that has less structural reason to be repeatable. But that just means he'd maybe be as high as 7th on the Cubs SP depth chart, and we don't have to lament trading away that caliber of player.

DJ Herz is likely a deluxe version of latter career Drew Smyly, or in terms of total value not dissimilar to Assad. Useful guy to have in your bullpen or sucking up some starts as a 5 and dive guy, but not a rotation anchor or someone who is served being in a playoff rotation