squally1313

Mike Cameron had 10 MLB seasons with a higher wRC+ than what PCA put up in AAA last year. He had 8 seasons with over 20 home runs, which was PCAs total in the minor leagues last year. Over the course of his career (1995-2011) he put up the second most defensive value (and not even half of what Andruw Jones did), but some of that was just driven by volume, and guys like Darin Erstad and Kenny Lofton weren't super far off on a rate basis, so I think that's a pretty reasonable comparison to 'top 3 centerfielder in the game'. Mike Cameron had a long and successful major league career. He had 40 fWAR. PCA doesn't have a major league hit. I hope he's a stud! But it's very likely he won't be and still provide a lot of value for not a lot of money, which (unfortunately) matters quite a bit.

Mike Cameron is the 30th best centerfielder of all time. 8th best centerfielder this century, and that's not giving him credit for 2 seasons over 4 wins in the 90s. 'A decent bat similar to someone like Cameron' as if guys who hit 278 HRs and steal 297 bases are commonplace.

Call me crazy, but I prefer my pitching prospects to 'prove' they can have an ERA under 5 in AAA.

If I'm following correctly, you have to follow that thought process through. Pencil in your normal line up with Morel at third, there's not some huge bat only stud on the bench ready to fill that DH spot. You can rotate dudes from their normal positions, but there's usually extra days off baked into the early season, these guys are by definition fresh, and moving one of them to DH leaves you with a position that will most likely be filled with a weaker hitter (not so dissimilar from having to put a weaker hitter at third base). Like, Morel DHing and Wisdom or Madrigal playing third vs Morel playing third, a normal outfield starter DHing and Tauchman playing the outfield, in the aggregate, is just Wisdom/Madrigal vs Tauchman. It's not Wisdom's bat vs Morel's bat. It's Wisdom's bat vs....anyone else on the bench's bat. And right now they're all about the same.

I think we're focused on different things. If you offered me 25.7 fWAR in just over 1000 games, I'm locking that in yesterday. Hoping for Kiermeyer's glove AND Cameron's bat isn't like, far fetched given his profile, but setting expectations that high for pretty much anyone is going to lead to more disappointment than it should.

Pedantic here, but if you could tell me that PCA ended up being basically the second best defensive outfielder of all time on a rate basis, but ended up offensively with a career 98 OPS+, I will take that 100% of the time.

Yeah to be fair when I threw that exclamation point on there I was kinda having a total brain fart on Bellinger being back. The kid never really seems to be lacking in confidence, but hopefully he goes down there, proves he doesn't belong, and we start talking about how to force Suzuki or Happ into the DH spot.

Cubs made their first set of roster cuts. Too lazy to figure out how to get the tweet on my phone into this post, but: Ben Brown PCA (!) Luiz Vazquez Brennen Davis Arias Hodge Alcantara (5-7 all to AA) Ethan Roberts Riley Thompson Aliendo Matt Shaw (sad face) Owen Caissie (also sad face) ST games just got a lot more boring.

Maybe don't look up what he was acquired for then

https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-basketball/big-ten-basketball-tournament-schedule-bracket Can anyone who follows CBB more than me tell me if this schedule makes sense? Specifically, the all night games part, and then the championship game tipping off at 5:30 central on Sunday part. Kinda assumed any/all games on that Sunday would be early afternoon to feed into the bracket selection show, which has always been late afternoon. Waiting on the Big 10 game would put the selection basically in prime time, right? Really asking because we've always done a family get together for the big 10 game and the selection show, and that gets a lot tougher on a sunday if it goes until like 10:00

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/accounting-for-free-agencys-biggest-gainers-and-losers/ I don't think most of this article is particularly helpful, but wanted to include here because of the first chart, which shows that after all the back and forth, the Cubs ended up spending the 4th most money in free agency this offseason.

But a tired good reliever is still potentially better than a bad, fresher reliever, or at the very least it's not an automatic decision. And who's to even say Little was fresh? He'd thrown 65 innings in 2022, 64 innings going into his callup, which is the same amount of innings as Azlolay and Leiter threw all year and just 8 less than Merryweather threw the whole season. The bullpen options all sucked, there was no good answer. Blaming Ross instead of Hoyer for that, or in your scenario giving Hoyer a pass for not calling someone up because he couldn't make the manager, the guy who reports to him, use the guy, is not how you should be looking at it.

Not to relitigate this, but I don't know if David Ross not using Luke '42 walks in 64 minor league innings' Little enough is really some fatal flaw.

details?

I look at the current luxury tax situation as one where we are so close to the limit already, we would be pretty handcuffed going into to the year if that was actually the internally communicated 'hard cap'. Far from an expert here, but you've got things like incentives, obviously being open to mid season trades, etc. If given the choice between the first tax line and the second tax line, I would bet the actual hard cap is the second line, which makes it more feasible to throw in a quality bat. That said, setting aside all other variables, hoping for a meaningful addition in March is probably a losing value prop.

I'd honestly probably be ok with Bote taking Wisdom's role, especially in a scenario where you go sign some bench/DH guy with a ton of power (JD being the obvious example). Lose some of the offense but I kinda hate Wisdom's offensive profile and I think you'd get back better defensive flexibility. But also, this is pretty much the definition of splitting hairs, so whatever.

33 starts at catcher and his season started on game 31 of the year, so basically got a little under 25% of the starts. Like most people here, hope it's closer to a 50/50 split in 2024.

I'm 6'3", left handed, and forever afraid of looking bad at something in front of other people, so basically avoided the whole thing (even as a caddied my way through high school and college) until about 5 years ago, when I bought one of those Strata bag-in-a-box sets off Amazon for like $200. Took about 3 years to even flirt with 100, playing 10ish times a year. Like you, finally upgraded my irons to clubs that fit me/aren't made out of basically plastic, and have managed to break 100 a few times and 50 in 9 a few more times. I realize that I started about 15 years later than my friends, I'm not going to have the time to commit to this to make any serious progress in the near future....it's still frustrating as hell to duff an approach after a rare good drive or have that stretch where you can't get the ball off the tee, but man just being out there and walking the course with a beer in your hand beats pretty much anything else I do socially these days. My friends who are super into have dragged me to courses I have no business playing on....Sand Valley a couple times, Streamsong a couple months ago. Yeah, it's not cheap, but when you're paying that much for a good concert ticket or a really nice dinner these days anyways, just enjoy the fun of it, the scenery, the 4 good shots you have each round, etc. There are golf shots I hit 3 summers ago I think about weekly.

Lol he's gotten on base in 7 of his 14 PAs

It was 28 innings, but he was probably our second best reliever on a per inning basis last year of anyone who got any substantial time. I'm not good enough at Fangraphs to sort by just his relieving innings and then look at LHB/RHB splits, but he got a lot of Ks and generally kept the ball in the park. Fine with them treating him as a starter in spring training in the event of multiple injuries or whatever, but he'd have to blow up a lot more than once to take him out of the opening day bullpen for me.

Should Have Been a Cowboy and, maybe once a year, I Love This Bar erasure

As a reference point last year: Rays (172) - just complete and utter Rays black magic, my god Braves (159) - Olson Dodgers (159) - Freeman (gigantic gap) And then there's 8 teams between 127 (Cardinals) and 120 (Oakland, somehow). 19 teams were above average, Cubs were 24th at 92. Just getting up to somewhere around 110 gives us about 1.5 wins over last year.

https://www.nestle.com/sustainability/people-communities/community-giving

Not saying you're wrong, but if it helps, 'worried about the back of the rotation and the bullpen' is a concern for like, 28 other teams.