Transmogrified Tiger

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

I think he could see Busch was definitely drawing a throw and gambled he could make it behind the play. Problem was they fumbled the relay and made him an easy target.

Cam Smith HR

Again, this only makes a difference if they would change their spending significantly to avoid repeater penalties. Unless they previously intended to be way, way over the tax line(30+ million) in the next 2-3 years, the penalties are a rounding error of total roster spend so there's no reason to think it does impact future spending in any meaningful way.

It's less that Fangraphs is *wrong*, it's that we have to work with estimates so when you get within a couple million you can't be certain one way or another. Even the teams themselves have to operate this way, as Sahadev pointed out today (emphasis mine)

I could probably be convinced of either removing Neris or adding Neely being the primary motivation. Neris wasn't pitching poorly on the whole, but the pen doesn't have a bunch of optionable guys and the 40 man already has a lot of pitchers not easily removed thanks to the glut of 60 day IL guys. On the other hand, they're using a 40 man spot on Wingenter who they just claimed in August, Neris was still pitching in leverage situations, and we're 10 days from roster expansion making it easier to add to the pen. So if I have to pick I think this is more about the option.

Ultimately I think it's dependent on specific contract language, but based on how incentives have been described in other situations I think it's safe to assume that 14 appearances on a new team would convert the option to Player.

Still? The Dodgers are outspending the Cubs by about 100 million this year on an LT basis. Do people think the Dodgers have a similar or even lower payroll than the Cubs or other teams at large? Because the only team in the NL within 60 million of the Dodgers are the Mets, and that's partially because they're paying Scherzer and Verlander to play on other teams.

The devs really need to release a patch for Jack Neely, the trade clearly glitched him and now he's the best reliever to ever live

It's never only one thing, but the trend line and the relationship to his actual success at the plate seems like a clear positive step

Shota start and an off day tomorrow hopefully helps, though the current pen is light on obvious candidates. 5 of the 8 can't be optioned, Hodge is not gonna be optioned in his form, which leaves Roberts(the only currently fresh arm) and Pearson(a weird developmental move). The other silver lining is that Miller, Lopez, and Smyly haven't thrown too many pitches in their outings, so I could see them sticking with the status quo and counting on Shota + Roberts to make it through 7, then picking one of those guys to go a 3rd day and then Neris. With 9 straight before an off day right before expanded rosters, if Roberts goes multiple innings I wouldn't be shocked if he goes down after today though.

I'm sorry this is a bonkers take that is like reading news from a different reality. Cade Horton is a failed pick because he is a pitcher who had an injury is nonsense exceeded only by the idea that he now is behind the 8 ball to be a starter because he didn't throw more college innings. At least on the Swanson signing it's bad analysis that is more common, but we're also going to pretend that "Nobody was saying the Cubs absolutely had to get a shortstop entering 2023", excuse me? Hoyer would've been carried away to fan-built gulags at Cubs convention if he went 0 for 4 on the SS. And the scorecard on which one he picked still looks quite good even if Swanson had a crummy first half with the bat.

Having seen Neris in person today I’m more open to the idea that he is a menace to society that must be stopped

Can confirm That might be the longest HR of Happ’s career, almost certainly as a RHH

I'm not inherently opposed to the 6 inning minimum, and I think the whole suite of options discussed are generally trying to get to the right outcomes. I think double hook DH and the longer reliever minimums discussed might be a little better carrot to try first. The third time through the order penalty weighed against losing the DH and having to insert a reliever that has to go 5+ hitters may be enough to tilt the scales enough to restore SPs as main characters without needing a harsh SP minimum that also has 4 exceptions in its hypothetical version.

This seems only clear if we invent restrictions on exceeding the luxury tax that don't have a good reason to exist, and flies in the face of how Hoyer talked about the team heading into the season. The team wasn't going to exceed the luxury tax in seasons it wasn't a competitor, partially due to the makeup of the roster and Hoyer's approach to team building(which seems to value incremental expensive additions vs adding 5 big contracts in one offseason) and partially because ownership likely didn't want to take an unnecessary haircut on top of having an expensive uncompetitive team. Now that they intended to be playoff caliber for the foreseeable future starting with this season, the marginal difference in roster spend from the LT penalties is a rounding error. Said another way, if this is shocking to anyone, they can either reconsider how they interpreted the team's relationship to the tax line, or we can conclude that Hoyer did something grossly incompetent, out of character, and ignored obvious mechanisms to fix it mid-season. Occam's razor gives us a pretty clear answer to that one. What the 2024 team being over the tax does seem to confirm is not about Jed but about ownership, and it's that there is no reasonable situation we can expect them to blow out the tax and go 40+ million over it, even for a single season. THAT possibility would have made exceeding the tax in 2024 meaningful, and if you take it off the table and have the team risking repeat penalties at the more mild rates, then there's nothing incorrect or irrational about Jed going over the tax and (crucially) not going back under this year when he had opportunity at the deadline and little competitive motivation for 2024.