squally1313

Candidly, I spent like two minutes trying to think through why the White Sox had a worse K rate, walk rate, ERA, xERA, FIP, and xFIP in four less innings but they were ahead of us in fWAR, but then I decided to give up because it fit my general narrative. 17th in K rate, 5th in BB rate backs up the xFIP. We need to find a couple guys in the pen, and there's going to be painful moments going through the roulette to find a (hopefully) Riley Martin. And then we need a starter, but we're probably not going to find one for a couple months. So....go offense.

Cubs now fourth in baseball in overall offensive fWAR production. 8th in wOBA, actually getting some luck there compared to xwOBA (8 points better), 9th in wRC, 6th in baserunning, 7th in defense. 21st in pitching.

If the cubs did a complete overhaul of their pitching development in the last year, then that’s a pretty damning indictment of Tommy hottovy, who has been with the organization since 2014 and been the pitching coach since 2018. Or, if we’re exempting him because he’s just the cubs major league guy (cubs are 12th in ERA, 21st in FIP, 25th in fWAR for relievers since 2019), then it falls on hoyer to have it apparently broken until last year. if the cubs secret sauce is that we can take a group of pitchers projected to be bad, and spend the first two months of the year watching them be bad just so they can be somewhat above average later on in the year and just be mediocre on the whole…that’s probably an argument against making the development guys start over every year, why can’t they do that with the $600k AAA guys, and it’s still, on the whole, a poorly run part of the organization that could not be more in ‘Win Now’ mode.

Sure. If we use your goalposts, that makes him the 57th best relief pitcher by ERA and 74th best pitcher by FIP (FG shows 3.55, whatever) out of 195 qualified relievers over that stretch. None of that is 'excellent' and nothing besides 2025 shows an 'excellent' single year performer. He's a fine reliever, he's absolutely nothing special. In reverse order 1. I never said anything about Drew Pomeranz 2. Is this true? We went into the season with Palencia, Brown, and 6 guys we signed in the offseason. The Brewers have Koenig, Megill, Uribe, Ashby, Anderson, and Hall that have been there since at least 2024. The Braves have had Iglesian since 2022 (you could it's the same situation as Thielbar, my counter would be that Iglesias is much, much better than Thielbar), Lee since 2021, Bummer since 2024, Payamps they picked up in September, Harris has been there since 2022. The Mets turned over most of their spots but also actually signed a good pitcher. The Phillies ponied up for Duran, Alvarado and Kerkering have been there forever. The Dodgers, similar situation with Diaz/Scott and then Vesia/Treinen. Not a single pitcher in the Padres bullpen was signed or traded for in this past offseason. We're an outlier in our inability to produce cost controlled innings or our willingness to sign top end talent. I get that you can throw a lot of bullpen results into the black box of 'bullpens are weird, small sample size'. I'm with you on that. But I don't think you can spin the approach is something worth being proud of.

Excellent? Years? Come on, man. We've got FIPs of 3.50, 4.33, 3.74, 4.26, 2.60, and corresponding fWARs of 0.6, -0.1, 0.6, 0.1, 1.5 from 2021 to 2025 (innings pitched between 61 and 67). He's fine. He was 19th in baseball last year, 73rd since 2021, 54th since 2023. We were banking on 2025, so far no such luck. Which he hasn't been since August 2024. This should not be a guy we're relying on as a key piece! Yes, and it was a bad bullpen for a team with playoff aspirations! 19th in fWAR, 16th in FIP. We point to Hottovy and Zombro all the time, how is it productive to make them start from scratch every year? Should we maybe not be clamoring for the Brad Kellers of the world? Sure. But it's an indictment of the organization that we're reduced to wishcasting for the few 36 year olds that actually worked out. Devin Williams, Raisel Iglesias, and Robert Suarez have a total of zero earned runs this year. They're all making $15m a year, give or take. We're paying Maton, Harvey, Thielbar, and Milner $21.5m, none of which are considered anywhere close to elite, because apparently the FO decided they haven't generated a single pitcher capable of pitching the 6th or 7th inning. Which is A. a failure of development, and B. about to be tested because multiple of the guys in the above group, all on the backside of their career, have either gotten hurt or lost their mechanics.

See I don't really care about this. If Matt Shaw gets you an ace with minimal control or a playoff starter with 1.5-2.5 years of control, you pull the trigger. We don't know what we're getting with Steele, we can't count on anything from Horton, and who knows what's going on with Wiggins. I think we all agreed that we pretty definitively needed to shift assets from offense to defense before the Cabrera trade, but now that Horton is broke you're basically back in the same spot you were 6 months ago pitching wise. Offensively you've both shored it up with Bregman and paid Nico to lessen the uncertainty going forward. Make another Caissie/Cabrera trade, but do it to maximize current production even more.

The issue I have with this utility role is that I don't foresee 'the game favoring him' at 2B or 3B very often at all. They're not going to alienate their flashy new signing by bumping him to DH 6 weeks into a 5 year deal. Dansby and Nico are better players in every facet of the game. We have an injury prone RF, and a first baseman, CF, and DH that struggle against LHP. Unless we want to trust him in CF (and set aside that Alcantara exists), those are super not ideal spots for what was previously a (career to date) glove first infielder. If we had some split heavy starting infielders, great, the mix looks way better. But his current role is basically backup COF/1B, and there's probably not a worse use of his skill set. Meanwhile, a prospect with hype but one who projects as having less value than Shaw, who profiles as a COF/1B just got traded for a 4ish FIP starter with 3 years of team control. Basically, if we don't think he's starter level at any position, we're doing no one favors by taking away his maximum defensive value and putting him at a spot that expects elite offense. If we think he's a starter level third baseman or second baseman, we should trade him, because we have one, and other teams would pay quite a lot for that.

Is this an opener situation? Just basically to avoid having Rea face Schwarber and Harper in the first?

If we can appeal to authority on defensive metrics, then we can also call Matt Shaw a career 91 wRC hitter, which maybe plays with good defense at 2B/3B, but almost certainly doesn't in the outfield and definitely doesn't at first base. We won't talk about his one start already at DH. In a world where we aren't pinching pennies to stay under the first luxury tax threshold (FG has us at $1.3m above, $19m to the next threshold), we could find/have found a slightly below league average hitter with positional flexibility to take the 10th man spot. I don't disagree that there's a job with 450 PAs for a tenth man. But your bat needs to be able to play at the positions where those PAs are coming from if you aren't going to provide defensive value above league average. It worked when you could bump Kris Bryant into the corner outfield or when Zobrist was putting up 120 wRCs. It doesn't work with a 91 wRC guy learning how to play outfield at a major league level.

The whole infield is locked up. Yes, I'm sure if we would have traded him that would have prompted a Dansby injury or something and then Dylan Moore or whatever would have set a record most consecutive outs recorded. But you came into the season with 5 major league ready infielders, all with team control through at least 2030, and then took the worst hitting one and decided to try and move him up the spectrum to spots where more offense is expected. And also on top of that, he's not good defensively anymore. Hindsight is 20/20, but watching Matt Shaw, who seemed like a very high floor third baseman at the end of last year, flail around a different position every night while Jameson Taillon and his 89 mph fastball and his 37.50 spring ERA is slotted as our third starter is maddening.

Setting aside small sample size struggles, Ballesteros/Swanson/PCA/catcher is probably my preferred bottom of the lineup configuration. If Ballesteros can't outhit PCA, he probably needs to learn catcher real quick. (resets 'Number of Days without commenting on the lineup' sign back to zero)

Agreed. There was a fun Fangraphs article right before the season about how the Pirates pitching plus the Athletics offense is like a 90 win team. Signing O'Hearn and Lowe in 2026 is fine as like, secondary tweaks to an already established offense. Making them the focal points of your offense while you start a 19 year old and hope that Henry Davis and Oneil Cruz figure horsefeathers out is a different story.

Oversimplifying by a lot here, but my initial takeaway from that is that, generally, guys K about 2.5x as much as they walk, so you just need a bigger sample? Like, if the league average of something was 50%, you probably could start to pick up noticeable trends after 20 instances. If something happened one in a hundred times....you're going to need to wait quite a bit longer.

We're going to need high ceiling pitching down the stretch and he fits that model, so there's an impulse to slow him down and then let him rip in the second half, but also he's probably not good enough yet, and is only going to get there with more reps.

Are you sure? I'm almost positive that there's an 'h' at the end of it.

Nico got 10 in 2022, but sure. I think it's more likely he hits 13 than it is he gets anywhere close to Ichiro's .372 BA. Insane run for Ichiro back then.

How long does it take walk rate to start becoming a useful metric, because, man, a .380 OBP version of Nico is a legitimate 6 win player. Just scrolled through best individual offensive seasons by fWAR since 2000, I believe the best season of anyone who hit less than 20 home runs and wasn't a catcher was 2013 Matt Carpenter. .318/.392/.481, 11 HRs, good for 7.2 fWAR. I think hoping for those numbers is probably foolish, but Nico is going to have about 40 more steals and be an elite defender.

Generally agreed. In terms of Brown, the overall, still small sample size numbers have been fine. 10.2 innings, 9.3 K/9, 3.4 BB/9, getting better luck on HR/FB (9.1% v 15.5% last year) and BABIP (.259 v .347). 4.22 ERA, 3.46 FIP. You give Assad and Rea the edge on 'pitchability' or the less metric skills, you give Brown the edge on pure stuff, I'd say at this point, they're all about equal. Brown is also bringing a third pitch into the mix this year. In 2025 he was 56% 4 seam, 40% curveball. So far this year he's at 44% 4 seam, 36% curve, 16% sinker. He probably deserves a shot at the starter spot at some point, if only just for attrition at the top. But think he's needed in the role he's currently in and it would be a pretty significant drop off to stretch him out in AAA and have to either make do with a bunch of short relievers behind 5 starters that aren't going deep, or go to like...Cam Sanders or Vince Velasquez. Any set back from Boyd or Steele and you need to start coming up with another plan here, but in the short term it's....fine.

We definitely have, so no need to rehash. My small clarification isn't so much a stars and scrubs thing as it is like, are there enough balls in play for 4 guys to rack up 2 defensive wins a piece. There conceptually seems to me to be a limit on how good defensively a team can be. Setting aside a 75ish difference in PAs, Schwarber put up 4.9 fWAR last year, Nico put up 4.8. The math probably says that 9 Schwarbers wins as many games as 9 Hoerners. But I think you ideally want half and half. Probably splitting hairs though.

And like, as much as I'd love to run some sort of Baseball Mogul experiment on putting nine Nico Hoerner's in a lineup...we're likely not getting elite or even comfortably above average offense from Nico, PCA, and Swanson. Bregman should stay above average but a 125 wRC is ambitious and also good for 36th in baseball based on last year. Busch is great but the projections seem him as another 120-125 guy. I know you stack wins however you can get them, but....does Busch/Bregman at 120 and 7 guys who can run and field and put up 100-105 really get you that much? I keep going back to like, if the ultimate plan was to play Suzuki in RF this year anyways, would we have been better off with Shaw at 3B, Schwarber at DH(essentially identical contract to Bregman) and Ballesteros as the man without a spot/likely trade bait. It's an easier fit to find the guy that works between Shaw/Rojas/Ramirez/Triantos, Ballesteros gets to work on his catching in AAA. Just a thought experiment, and it's probably just watching early April baseball, but worried that we are indefinitely missing an actual big bat.

If the value they're ascribing to Rojas is in terms of 'value he can provide to the major league team in 2029 and onward', I would prefer they run a present value discount onto that and prioritize wins that come sooner.

You don't think committing $316m to other infielders in the last 4 months (to slot next to the other infielder with 4 years left) says anything about how much they do (or don't) value Rojas?

Yeah that all makes sense. This is probably an obvious statement, but I think if you were to play out the careers of Alcantara, Rojas, and Shaw, there's probably one above average corner OF bat in there, and there's temptation to let Shaw do his Zobrist thing in the majors, Alcantara to keep destroying AAA, and Rojas stay on his progression and keep all the cards in your hand. But like, the current team is going to need (slash already needs) help, and those are the guys with the biggest gap between 'trade value' and 'value to the current team'. They've started turning the corner and building the roadmap for the rest of the decade, but think tough decisions need to be made on this group soon.

This is probably a General Cubs question more than a Minor League discussion, but I struggle with the concept of taking anywhere from a reasonably ready to developing infield player (that Shaw to Triantos group), and thinking it's the best use of resources/plan of attack to be like 'alright, now go learn outfield'. Especially when none of these guys are like, super bat first, maybe they can fake it in the infield for a few years type pedigrees. The average wRC at 2B last year was 90, at 3B was 96, LF was 102, RF was 105. Feels like you're handcuffing one of their most valuable talents (infield defense) while also asking them to move up the spectrum offensively. Or said another way, maybe: if we put Shaw's offensive profile at a 96 wRC hitter, ie a league average hitter for what was his position, isn't his value somewhat equal to a league average RF (assuming team control, etc)? And then if your goal is to have above average production offensively, why not just go get the (yes, hypothetical) 105 guy instead of telling Shaw he now has to improve by 20 points instead of 10.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-last-place-cubs-are-injured-but-all-is-nowhere-near-lost-yet/ This is good for talking Cubs fans off the ledge while still pointing out some of the flaws. Cubs were projected to have the 19th best rotation in baseball going into the year. With Horton on the shelf for presumably 2026 but Boyd likely expected back, they fall all the way to....21st. It wasn't a good situation before, it's a slightly worse situation now, but this team, for better or for worse, was always going to live and die by the offense and the defense. That said, the first ten games count, and we've got to make up 4 games. Positive regression here, negative regression up there, hopefully both. But probably puts us on pretty even playing ground going forward.