squally1313

At the prospect cost it would require to get all three of those players, can we just ask for Ramirez instead and then send Yamamoto a blank check?

I'm aware that my thought process here falls into 'waiting for the perfect player at the perfect time, for the perfect price, and so you're left with nothing.' But....the Yankees package there seemingly far exceeded anything that we had discussed as being comfortable with in a hypothetical Soto to the Cubs trade. Did anyone want them to throw in Horton? Or Wicks and a few other solid prospects? I don't know your definition of 'fully attacked' but it also seems very likely that they put in an offer, the Yankees put out a better offer, and the Cubs saw it as an overpay and bowed out. Should we be upset about that?

Per CBS, 6 of the top 50 free agents have signed so far. 'Half' is being unnecessarily pessimistic.

This assumes that the Ohtani decision just comes down to who offers the most money then, right? Does it give anyone any pause in that case that the 'Cubs getting Ohtani' conclusion relies on the Dodgers being like 'oh man, that's too much money, not worth it, we're out'?

The main gap between us and the Astros and Dodgers is that we went years without producing any supplemental talent in our minor league system, had to find expensive bandaids to keep the championship core together, and then it all kinda blew up. If you want to be pissed at the front office and the organizational approach, that's where the main issue lies. It's getting better, but it was bad for a long time. Cubs drafts by top BWAR producer: 2015: Ian Happ, 14.1, Scott Effross the only other positive contributor 2016: Davis Daniel, 0.5 2017: Keegan Thompson, 2.1 2018: Nico Hoerner, 11.6, no other major league players 2019: No major leaguers, no one particularly promising Five years with 2 players, one of which, according to you, is 'marginal'. Not great! The biggest free agent signing in Astros history is Carlos Lee in 2006. Altuve was their largest deal ever at $151m. Alvarez and Bregman also got large deals. All three came through the system. Freeman's deal was smaller than Dansby Swanson's (who had the best year of all the shortstops out there last year), and is their biggest actual free agency contract in history (Betts and Kershaw signed extensions for more) (admittedly, for about 3 more days). The player advancement infrastructure just hasn't been at all enough to match up with those teams (who are, by a decent gap, easily the best two organizations in the last 5-10 years). I think we're comfortably in the next tier, and whether or not we sign Ohtani isn't going to change my opinion on that.

And it won't be, definitively, so this is all stupid. Setting a standard of 'we must beat out all 29 other teams for the coolest free agent player in maybe baseball history' is basically just people looking to complain about something.

To be clear, Swanson > Bellinger, both in 2023 and going forward

It's pretty rude of Ohtani to be the only free agent left who hasn't picked a team yet. We'd be able to start the baseball season if he just hurried up and made a decision to end the free agency period.

Weird....if you click on the video it takes you to the Marquee site, but if you click on the actual tweet it just takes you to twitter and lets you watch it there. Also....has Bruce Levine always looked like that?

The thing about the half billion at 32 point font is that it becomes less of a differentiator when every other team also includes it in the powerpoint. Having said that, if it leaks or if for some reason they try to sell the Counsell move and whatever other player moves as a substitute for cash (rather than a complement), I will be incredibly disappointed at their cheapness/stupidity.

Occam's razor is just 'offer him the most money' for sure. But to the extent Ohtani cares about winning (which we don't honestly know), there's maybe something to him, coming off his Angels run, being wary of some team throwing their checkbook at him just to tap into new revenue streams and boost ticket sales while point to his salary as the reason they can't supplement the team around him. While this wouldn't like, help us beat out the Dodgers, who can just point to all the other HOFers currently on the roster, I could see something like this (and the Counsell hiring) at least making the powerpoint.

Wrong

Eff it, I'm bored Soto: Morel and Assad gives you more value going to the Padres than us getting back Bichette: PCA and Ben Brown gives you more value going to the BJs than us getting back Alonso: Mervis, Canario, Wesneski gives you more value going to the Mets than us getting back All per BBTV, by the way. BP put out the following top 10 list last week, crossed out names would be gone PCA Shaw Horton Caissie Alcantara Ballesteros Triantos Wicks Rojas Brown You can argue that it should be like, Alcantara instead of Canario to give them an impact player back, sure. But that's still leaving the top 10 mostly intact. For a lineup of: Happ Soto Bichette Alonso Suzuki Swanson Horner Tauchman/whoever Gomes/Amaya Will it happen? No. Could it happen? Kinda?

How do you guys expect the Cubs to make a serious run for Ohtani when they've never signed a guy who can pitch and also hit 45 home runs in the same season

I only had the Spanish broadcast and I very much do no speak Spanish but that all seemed especially shady.

Mexico scores at 101 minutes to tie the aggregate score at 2-2 (9 minutes of extra time announced). ET should be interesting.

I don't know why this is bothering me so much, but going into the offseason thinking that we're in this like, 9 win hole or whatever that we have to make up before we can call the team improved just strikes me as very unnecessarily pessimistic. I don't think you can name a team out there that doesn't have somewhat significant production from last year currently unsigned/without a contract. Said another way, there's a ton of talent that was contributing across the league now sitting in the FA pool. It seems one sided to only look at Stroman and Belli. We also 'lost' the -2.3 fWAR generated by Young, Mancini, Hosmer, Rios, and Mervis. And even if we don't replace Stroman and Belli with stars, you can still reasonably expect like, 1.5 wins from each position just from internal replacements or minor signings. PCA is projected for 1.1 in 94 games, as an example. Basically, of course it would be nice to still have that production under contract. But the Cubs lost their 3rd best offensive player and 3rd best pitcher by overall fWAR value. Not exactly an emergency, and I'm sure that 'loss' isn't unique across baseball.

Oh man I just clicked on the little Newspaper thingy again and the post blurbs disappeared. Potential game changer. Thank you a lot

I'm the same way and honestly this is the issue I have with the 'new' version of the Active Topics that Wrigley (helpfully) put together and Poster (also helpfully) linked above. The page shows the most recent post in the thread, so I'd be 'spoiled' (in the lamest way possible). Whereas from what I remember before it just showed the topic name and a reverse chronological list based on latest posts, and would take me to my last read spot when I clicked on it. Not sure if there's a fix for that. But, like I said before, small issue, just have to do it through each forum.

I get the frustration, and in an ideal world I'd cut a check from my endless money supply to cover operating costs on this site for the next 50 years and turn it back into NSBB circa 2012. But, bluntly, that site (in that form) doesn't exist anymore, and neither does your old site, and there are reasons for that. They're clearly trying to use the articles to drive traffic here, and if I had to guess they probably aren't thrilled with the most popular thread of the last month being 'Cubs Offseason Chat'. But they haven't done anything about it as of yet. I'll absolutely take this site over the alternative of Tim shutting down oldNSBB and nothing so far has made me really consider anything else, although that's probably for more 'I'm old and stuck in my ways' reasons than anything else. I don't know if the business plan works. But happy to put up with these types of minor inconveniences if it keeps this place up and running.

Bingo. They're going to make him captain or something dumb like that. Need someone to fill the Wainwright retirement tour slot.

Career wise, that's a fair answer. 2023, the difference between Ohtani and Alonso was bigger than the difference between Bellinger and Hoerner

Define 'similar'

Fairly sure there's not a forum breakout that's going to please everyone. Assume Brock and team have run the numbers on what arrangement is most likely to drive engagement. Feel like even at the old site we went through phases, mostly dependent on how the organization was doing. There were offseasons with expectations like this one where I feel like 90% of the activity was in the Transactions forum and no one ever really did anything in the Cubs General one. The years they were good and then forum was active, feel like there was always a fresh game thread up and that got most of the posts. Everyone here has obviously figured out a way to make it work, otherwise they wouldn't be here. My one frustration is that I never found anything that reliably replicated the 'Active Topics' feature from the old site, so I'm still having to click in and out and of the sub forums. But, the notifications are nice (and instant), the site generally moves quickly, it's fine.