squally1313

Locked in!

I don't know, I just don't look at 'we have either $50m or $80m to spend this offseason but we don't have any obvious holes in our lineup to put a new player' as an 'issue'. I also still don't really know what the Aggressive Road Not Taken was last offseason. I don't know how it's going to play out. But there's 5.5 months till baseball still.

Alright my bad, that's a semantics thing I think. The season is over, none of those guys, with the exception of maybe Bellinger, is getting paid or taking up a roster spot for the Cubs on a go forward basis.

Don't necessarily disagree with any of that. None of them were some huge problem, by your own math above they cost us all of like...one more Jameson Taillon. This doesn't seem to be a Cubs specific problem. Pick another team, I'm sure you could find $20m in bad deals. Brewers, as an obvious example, are on the hook to pay Rhys Hoskins $22m next year after he gave them all of 0.1 fWAR in 131 games this year. And, to get back to the question I asked, the only person you named that is still employed by the Cubs (maybe!) is Cody Bellinger. We have 7 non-arbitration guys under contract for next year. They were all in the top ten of team fWAR.

What are our current bad contracts

Even if you wanted to glean anything of substance from this (you shouldn't), given that he was, as far as I know, completely incapable of signing free agents or making trades during the actual press conference, would you prefer the message to the players currently employed by the team to be 'these guys are good, if they exceed expectations we'll probably be a playoff team' or 'this is a terrible roster and no amount of individual improvement is going to help'

It's a press conference on October 1st, guys. Not sure what anyone was really expecting. "I will not be outbid for Juan Soto or Kyle Tucker, who are both currently still playing in the playoffs for other teams."

Contreras available you say?

The 50/50 raffle thing is an extremely weird thing to complain about in a Cubs-centric way. It’s been standard across professional sports for years now. All the other stuff isn’t cubs centric either. Beers are expensive, there’s advertisements at the stadium, lights flash occasionally…you guys just don’t like modern baseball.

Said in a less Tom way, Dansby is a very good player by all conceivable measures and thinking lesser of him because he signed the contract offered to him is a terrible position to take.

The absolute stupidest argument in the world

lol yeah that was insane

The Cubs traded for Paredes (or, perhaps more importantly, they traded away Morel) on July 28th. Since then, they are: 2nd in offensive fWAR 3rd in OBP 5th in slugging 3rd in wOBA 4th in wRC 2nd in baserunning 2nd in defense 24th in pitcher fWAR during that stretch.

Sorry, was probably an unnecessary shot in your direction. It's hard to build that elite of a team and simply being in a big market doesn't automatically make that the baseline. Ultimately though, while moving in the right direction (FG projected 79 in 2023, 82 in 2024, I'm aiming for 87 or so in 2025), and while I think the franchise is generally pretty healthy at this point in time, at the end of the day it's 4 straight years without a playoff appearance, and that's too long.

$11.5m next year, $12m the year after that.

Cubs player being good after being bad? You'd be surprised how much that is, in fact, news around here.

Teams projected to win 90+ games (per FG) going into the year: Atlanta Braves Los Angeles Dodgers Baltimore Orioles

- how do you beat the game? - easy, set it on beginning difficulty and then turn off any rules that makes the game hard

Yeah, it helps by minimizing their load and also by giving yourself whatever combo of Wes/Wicks/Assad as 'go throw as hard as you can for two innings' bullpen options (at basically league minimum!)

Agreed on the pen but also don't really know any scenario where you go into a season not worried about it. Cleveland has the best pen this year. Last year they were 16th. It's the starting pitching by a pretty large margin for me. I would like the offense to be better but realistically we're going to be talking about somewhere between the 8th and 12th best offense and it's just going to be marginal differences one way or another. Shota or Steele goes down for any extended period of time and things can very ugly, very quickly.

Look man, I don’t go find conversations you’re having and tell you to stop the ‘pedantic bull horsefeathers’. There’s an entire rest of the internet out there if this isn’t up your alley. It’s a message board about a sports team, this is all pointless.

this you?

In terms of semantics, I specifically said small point. Others made that into a bigger deal. But, officially, no. If the winner of the Masters shoots -10 and then 8 guys shoot -9, the guy who shoots -8 doesn't tie for third. They (and roughly 25 other relief pitchers) pitched a lot over a 2 month stretch. Throwing notoriously streaky Leiter in the mix kinda weakens your argument on the long term damage because he came back in 2024 pitching effectively (but streaky) and obviously held up enough to get traded at the deadline. You can't call it 'lucky' on the healthy side but somehow pre-ordained on the unhealthy side. I'm guessing if you look at those other 25 pitchers you'd see a mixture of 2024 effectiveness/ineffectiveness/injury. I'd guess if you looked at the next 25 guys after that you'd see a similar mix of results. Pitchers break, relief pitchers ERA explode, etc. If this was anywhere close to an exact science people would be a lot better at it. I don't know. It seems like a narrative that's easy to put together in hindsight. We were in a playoff race and Ross leaned on his best pitchers. If he would have handed the ball to Michael Rucker or Palencia and we missed the playoffs all the same, that's a whole different narrative to throw at his feet. We had a garbage May/June and had to treat the entire second half like they were September playoff chase games, and at the deadline Jed (and everyone else in baseball) decided to go get a AAAA reliever and roll with that. There weren't good answers.

Because he’s saying anyone who threw 28 games was 1st, anyone who threw 27 games was 2nd, etc. Which isn’t correct. 4 guys threw 28 games, 6 guys threw 27, 7 guys threw 26, 12 guys threw 25

So are we done with the Kevin Alcantara experiment? I’d like to open up this spot to give the kids some opportunities to give us a spark here.