squally1313

Swanson getting back here without a setback, much less ahead of schedule, seems borderline miraculous

I don't know nearly enough about organizational structure, priorities, etc, but honestly at this point it's mainly the complete lack of relief arms coming through the system that all other teams seem to churn through with ease. Palencia was....fine last year. He was also 25 years old. And there doesn't really seem to be anyone anywhere close to being one of those guys either. Guys like Palencia, Azlolay should be coming through all the time, not once every couple years. It's a much bigger problem and solution than to try and write out in a couple paragraphs, but ultimately the results just haven't been close to acceptable. Pitchers break, they hit a wall, I get it. But this pitching staff is not one Cade Horton and one half of Ben Brown away from being even average. I liked the Zef pickup because it seemed like they were finally trying to find some guy with nasty stuff that would be around for seemingly forever (see: Abner Uribe, Ashby, Megill), and I admittedly bought in on the 'woah guys, look at these 16 innings'. But even that's been ugly so far. It's incredibly difficult and complex in a way that like....Bregman vs Schwarber isn't. But they're very clearly worse at it than almost every other legitimate major league team.

Having said all that, I'm of basically two trains of thoughts at the moment: 1. This organization is absolutely brutal at putting together pitching, and this current pitching staff is, agreeing with everyone here, depressing bad and almost completely reliant on the defense and the wind blowing in. 2. The idea that we have zero chance of competing in October, or that we're somehow not going to make the playoffs, is just tiresome doombonering. The pitching is terrible. It's been terrible all year. The hitting is elite. It's been elite all year. There's been no real change in the outlook of this team, and we have a 154 game sample size that says they are the 6th best team in baseball, record wise, and the third best team in baseball, RD wise. I'm of the belief that October baseball is just baseball, it's the same rules, the same goals. The best teams in the regular season tend to play the best in October. There's nothing in the data that says it can't be us.

Cubs bullpen by fWAR, monthly: April: 22nd May: 24th June: 28th July: 19th August: 28th September: 28th I'm not going to divvy out a pie chart of blame amongst Hoyer, Counsell, Hottovy, Zombro, Ricketts, the pitchers themselves, etc. But it's a complete organizational failure in terms of pitching. The list of what-ifs is endless and essentially pointless, but ultimately this is a pitching infrastructure that hasn't produced above average results in the last three years and is very clearly trending in the wrong direction. We have all of two pitchers signed for next year who have both A. produced positive value this year and B. thrown a pitch in the last three months: Ryan Rolison and Jordan Wicks (somehow). It's bad, and it's absolutely a problem going forward. Credit where credit is due on an incredible offensive roster full of what all appear to be contracts that range from reasonable to absolute steals. But it's hard to argue against the idea that this is as good as it's going to get for that side of the ball for the next few years, and I have very little confidence we can offset it.

Two absolutely unreal 3-1 pitches there

Luzurdo to the IL is kinda huge

Is this just solely a list of acquisitions you’re not happy about

He just gave some quotes praising the next owner of the Angels (Kroenke, the Rams guy), which, combined with everything that's been going on with Mark Walter in the last few weeks, is probably enough for me to leave the door open on him. I do think you need to address at least one of the corner outfield spots externally, and there's a lot of guys still floating around without any path to a starting spot. Peterson and Holmes have shown how much nicer it is when you have a GB rate above 40%, and you don't necessarily need to break the bank for either those guys or adjacent guys. Can you get both of them, trade Shaw/Ramirez for another one, and then use the rest of the money keeping the outfield as elite as it is? Steele/Holmes/Brown/Peterson/controlled starter/Cabrera/Assad I guess/the hypothetical version of Cade Horton isn't bad, and the costs to pick one up midseason weren't terrible this year.

10.1 after tonight

I mean, like 70% of the conversations around here are centered around ‘will we/wont we make the playoffs’. Obviously this stat doesn’t like, drive managerial decisions, except for probably reassuring counsell that he doesn’t have to start homes every other day for the rest of the year. But it’s a good counter against the doomboners that it remains, statistically, highly, highly improbable that we miss the playoffs.

just to entertain this a little bit, what does 'now' mean to you? is it the 3-3 in the last 6 games? the 4-5 in the last 9? 19-17 since the trade deadline? or just like, the last 25 pitches thrown by our bullpen (all of which were thrown by guys, to soccer's point, that have been on the team all year)

we have a 95.5% chance of not winning the world series this year, so by the metric of 'statistically rare things have happened before', we're in good shape

does it take into account the skill of the teams? yes does this change how math works

Because their odds of making the playoffs went from 98.9% to 97.8%. The math is still very, very substantially in our favor.

It looked like a terrible pitch because he hit the absolute horsefeathers out of it but....I don't know. I think traditionally you don't want to leave change ups on the upper half of the plate but it wasn't like this was middle middle.