squally1313

If these are your starting positions, what are all the half measure trade proposals even for? If the Cubs with the hypothetical addition of, at worst, a top 5 pitcher in baseball, still have too many flaws to be 'anything like' close enough to compete for World Series, and also this is the best the team is going to be for a while...why even both trying to improve? Why pay the midseason premium on a pitcher when you can get him cheaper in the offseason, a la Cabrera last year? Let some better team (all four of them, per records to date) go mortgage their future. Put Happ, Suzuki, Boyd, Shota, Kelly on the market, try to rescue what apparently is a troubling future.

Or July 7

Was going to counter this as I assumed Happ would have made up the offensive gap on the defensive side, and then I realized fangraphs has seiya with more defensive value than Happ this year, somehow

This is probably a little too far fetched, but it’s fun to dream on the cubs saying ‘horsefeathers it’ and going all in and using their superior financial firepower to tell the tigers that we’ll take javy off their hands to be our utility guy (after we trade Ramirez and/or Shaw for other pitching) as the sweetener to get skubal

The Brewers traded away Peralta with one year left coming off a deep run and knowing they would be contending again, and thus far have been proven successful in that it hasn't seemed to slow them down at all (even though the guys they got might suck). I can't see them going in the other direction with seemingly everything still going exactly to plan.

With Ayers ready soon after that!

lol that makes no sense

also, if you're going to forfeit like this, throw 60 down the middle of the plate, these are absurd pitches

this is pretty crazy with these strike calls. they need to challenge one just to recalibrate the ump

It's beyond belief. You (more than happily) accept that he's some sort of streakier, center field version of Javy. And then he goes and learns how to put up an 11.6% walk rate.

PCA over 6 fWAR. No one else has more than 5 offensively. Ohtani also shut down indefinitely from pitching, so if PCA keeps it up I’d expect him to lead all of baseball pretty soon.

lol 9 guys got on base guys, we can be happy

Framber trying to figure out how to cross up every single player in the field.

lol thank god we had Carson there for the clutch (checks notes) 16 hopper to where the second baseman normally plays

A few probably conflicting points: - it’s not two months of skubal. It’s two months of skubal and at least one, ideally multiple, incredibly high leverage starts in october - I don’t disagree with the math sitting where we sit now. I’ve gone so far as to put out hot takes that teams with 99% playoff probabilities should sell at the deadline, playoffs are a crapshoot, no one moves the needle that much, sure. Rational side of the brain. - my frustration is that hoyer has now approached two straight seasons with pitching staffs that are unfinished at best, bad at worst, and then when they pitched bad, he used it as justification for not being aggressive. If the bar is ‘top two teams in the league come the middle of July’ then starting the season with a bullpen of 37 year old retreads is unacceptable. Watching what happened to our starters down the stretch and then only adding Edward Cabrera to it is also pretty unacceptable to me, but that’s probably more debatable. The team has played, overall, like they were built to play, 91 win pace, but in a way that is even easier to improve. The offense is elite instead of just very good, the pitching is terrible instead of just uninspiring. If the plan wasn’t to be good enough to make a big move, what are we doing here

You can’t double count that value though. The cubs don’t have the best purely offensive group in the league. They have the best position group in large part because of their defense. Build the 10th best pitching staff and have the defense turn it into top 5 in terms of results. It goes without saying that defense can’t do anything about giving up the most home runs in baseball.

I’m not saying you agree with the approach you laid out, but the obvious counter to this is that we went into last year as an unfinished product with bullets to spend and budget to use. Then we didn’t do it. Then we did a half measure this offseason, came in as unfinished product with a bunch of blocked prospects, unsurprisingly didn’t play like an elite/bye getting team, and now we’re…probably going to sit out the top of the market again? When in this cycle/plan do we get to ‘let’s go for it’ mode? Do we just have to hope for the very good offense or the mediocre pitching to super overperform for a few months?

This pitching staff was ranked 19th per FG going into the year. I know, for different reasons, you can point to those names, but you also have counters: Cabrera was a 2 fWAR pitcher last year and has given us 0.2 fWAR in 72 innings this year, relying on Matthew Boyd to be healthy has worked once out of the last six years, Cade Horton doesn't know how to strike people out. I'm not saying the injuries aren't great, I'm saying the difference between those guys staying healthy and what we've gotten from the rotation isn't all that drastic. Did Jed do a good job this year? I think he, slowly, put together a very, very good core, has avoided really bad deals, has made some shrewd trades (PCA, Busch), and he deserves a lot of credit for all of that. But, in terms of this offseason? Maton - Bad, another year left The whole Shota situation - weird at best Thielbar - 5.48 FIP, -0.4 fWAR Tyler Austin - Waste Jacob Webb - Good Hunter Harvey - was always hurt, stayed hurt Bregman - underwhelming? His defense has propped up his value, but presumably you weren't hoping for a 43 point wOBA and 29 point xwOBA drop Carlson/McCormick - wastes, but the offense is fine, so whatever Conforto - good Trading Kittredge for cash - he's been mediocre this year, but mediocre would basically make him our set up guy Cabrera trade - Caissie and Hernandez probably suck, but Cabrera might suck too. Right now, does not seem like the best use of resources. When you pair all that with the Nico extension, essentially locking in your infield for 4+ years, not trading a single infield prospect (or Alcantara, who is also super blocked) between last trade deadline and now seems like really, really bad resource management. The lack of pitching was obvious, healthy or not. He hasn't done nearly enough to address it.

Yeah I get that you're more so predicting what Jed is going to do. Maybe I'm just reading it wrong, but it's really frustrating that the messaging seems to be along the lines of 'well, if the team on the field had played a little better, then we'd really be aggressive, but, alas'. This offense didn't put together a bad pitching staff, the reason we're not closer to a bye is because Jed decided to build the bullpen on the fly again and has supplemented what has never been more than an average rotation with one starting pitcher in the last 18 months.

Honestly, picking up any significant offensive piece is a waste of resources. You have a pitching staff filled with weak spots where even picking up league average talent would be meaningful improvements. Starters: Peterson, Taillon, Rea all can be replaced. You can hope maybe one of these spots can be filled by Brown or Cabrera but that should not be the plan. Relievers: Trent Thornton has a 5.07 FIP. Caleb Thielbar has a 5.48 FIP. Gavin Hollowell has a 5.74 FIP. Tyler Ferguson has a 6.88 FIP. Aaron Civale has a 5.34 FIP. Javier Assad has a 5.17 FIP. Ethan Roberts has a 5.29 FIP. The league average for bullpen pitchers is 4.21. All of these dudes can go. Webb and Rolison are fine, if too far on the depth chart. As bad as the bullpen is, everything needs to be thrown at starters. I don't care if they have three months or three years left. Let Hottovy and Counsell and the current injured list fix the bullpen. It's much more likely that Brown, Cabrera, Steele, Wiggins can give you 2 high quality innings than 6 for purposes of this season.

No worries, and interesting, I feel the exact opposite. Although I do pay for a FG membership and it was mainly because the site was a total ad-cancer before I did, so maybe I'm just forgetting how brutal it was/still is.

Clarifying here to make sure I'm not looking at this wrong...did you mean 8th in bWAR? I don't really have any idea how to work the baseballreference site, but my method of pulling fWAR has them as 18th from the DH position YTD. https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/major-league?lg=all&qual=0&season=2026&season1=2026&ind=0&team=0%2Cts&rost=&filter=&players=0&type=8&month=44 Regardless, we should stop talking about trading for hitters unless it's Mike Trout. Get pitching, then get more pitching.

8.47 Ks/game, to close the loop (having played 100 games exactly makes the math really easy). Which is 13th most in baseball, but the discrepancy is explained by them having the second most PAs in baseball (due to being very good, generally, at not making outs).

Eh. We were statistically favored to win for like 12 minutes the entire game. It would have absolutely been stealing a win if we would have pulled it off so it's hard for me to call it some heartbreaking loss.

kenley being concerned with the pitch calling system is so funny. we all know what pitch is coming