squally1313

Well well well

Sending Greene back out here seems pretty malpractice-y

This is low key the best game to be at at wrigley

Lolllllllll

Cool, fun, happy he’s been designated as our most important offensive dude

Would love to hear why tauchman should be getting more PAs than Happ

One of those start times where I’m going to be pissed all day it wasn’t a 1:20 start and then very happy, four beers deep, when it starts tonight. That’s assuming it happens at all, weather in the western suburbs looks like rain all day

Man this one is going to hurt. lollll madrigal just for the story line

lol that ball three call

Gomes would have definitely knocked him in with two outs, for sure

If we're lucky, we can reuse this post in a couple weeks with a different name in there.

Tauchman has plenty of value here, but I don't think he needs to be 'guy who gets the most ABs on the team'

Estrada has 16 major league innings where he's shown any semblance of success. Ben Brown, in his last 13 innings, has 19 Ks and 2 hits allowed. We got him for 2 months of David Robertson. These things happen, all the time, to every team in baseball.

Lol that's where we are at with our 24 year old clean up hitter third baseman with a .380 xwOBA huh? Excited to hear about Matt Shaw just keeping the spot warm for Christian Hernandez after he has an average rookie season.

I totally get what you're saying about aggressiveness and getting ahead of the market, but it's a little funny to see all the vitriol Swanson has gotten this year and then point to....trading for a shortstop with a history of success who, YTD, had given you negative defensive value and was hitting .197 at the time of the trade.

This is almost certainly not updated for today, but there's a current argument for the pen being 'decent' today, and that would be before you send Brown or Assad there. In May: 7th in fWAR 1st in K/9 10th in BB/9 21st in ERA 7th in FIP 4th in xFIP 25th in BABIP, which explains the discrepancy above Obviously they were brutal in April, and I don't want to talk out of both sides of my mouth when it comes to slicing/dicing sample sizes, but in April they were 5th in innings and May they are 15th, so there's maybe some credence to increased effectiveness coming from working a normal amount of innings

of horsefeathers course

The shadows couldn't be in a tougher spot right now, so Amaya (and Leiter) letting this guy go from first to third after an infield single is really annoying

They are half a game out of a wild card spot.

Managers don't matter. If they did, the biggest contract in managerial history would be a lot more than what Hector Neris signed for this offseason.

Think you're being a little harsh on Happ and Swanson, both have been above 3 (Dansby pretty comfortably) the last couple years and Happ is projected for 3, Dansby for 3.2 even with their suboptimal starts. But yeah, a 3 win guy making $20m-$25m a year? Sure, that's not going to kill you. Six of those guys? Well now you start running into financial and logistical issues. Now, that's not to say that this level of dude can't go off for a year. Swanson gloved his way there last year, Bellinger played at about the same pace, Shota is already projected for 3.8. But we haven't had the elite guy at the top of the preseason WAR charts in a long time. And in my mind there's two ways to do that: pay them all of the money, which we don't have for PTR reasons but also for lack of cheap developed production reasons, or (ideally) develop that guy and watch him go off. But we're already seeing PCA in a weird timeshare situation and getting sent back to Iowa...Caissie or Alcantara blowing up would just add to that, do we give up on Morel's cheap 'production'/potential for Shaw (you can substitute 'Busch' or maybe even 'Hoerner' there)? Obviously these are all lacking nuance. But, in a crude hypothetical, you'd trade 2 $20m a year, 3 win guys, say Happ and Seiya, for a $40m-$50m/year 5 win guy and then roll the dice with the top 100 prospect making $600k.

I don't entirely disagree here. Hoerner and Happ were both first round picks, and while I think you can be happy with what they've turned into overall, neither of them are offensive standouts. The rest of the line up is outside hires, typically at a premium, and then Morel (2.8 fWAR in 1100 PAs), and Amaya (which, so far, yikes). Looking through the 2021 top prospect lists is pretty bleak: Davis, Amaya, Hernandez (still hope yet), Howard, Morel, Strumpf, Preciado, Caissie (please save us), Roederer, Pinango, Made. Obviously the typical hit rate is low, but....that seems really low. And that's before someone like Hoerner seemingly levelling out at a 100-105 bat, Happ not taking the next step, etc. I'm more pro-Hoyer than most, but when things are going bad he kinda starts to look like the guy in the fantasy football auction draft who got a bunch of 'steals' in that they were projected to go for $20 and he got them for $15, but he never spent more than $30 and is left with the 7th best player at every position. I still don't think there's a bad contract on the roster, which is good. Individually, I don't think Happ, Belli, Suzuki, Swanson, Hoerner, Busch, even Morel are problems to be fixed given their expected production and cost. But it's also increasingly clear that we don't have an elite offensive bat at the major league level, we're scraping Ricketts imposed budget ceilings on all these second division starters, and we've limited ourselves on how much runway we can give the PCAs (and eventually Caissies and Shaws) of the world because handing them a starting spot comes at the cost of reliable MLB production during a 'competitive window'. I've taken issue, and will continue to take issue, with people saying guys like Happ and Swanson suck, should be traded, are the main issue on the team, etc. They're good players being paid like good players. But starting to wonder if we've eliminated the possibility of a 95 win team for the sake of putting out an 85 win team.

Like 7 innings of offensive competency doesn’t override a month of trash but…facing a very overexposed Milwaukee bullpen for these last three innings.

This seems like a weird thing to be excited about but you do you

These aren’t cheapies. Get them all out today I guess