squally1313

Depends on where the runners are, and yes, I know the Cubs anecdotally and also in reality love getting thrown out at home on going on contact plays, but in that even more hyper specific case a 6 hopper to SS is better than a rope right at a corner infielder. I will now, for an abundance of reasons, take myself off the Nick Madrigal hill. It's certainly not an optimal situation, but...I don't know, what else do we got? The best hitter in AAA is Mervis. Do you throw Caissie into the outfield blender and take away a bunch of PAs from him? Jake Slaughter can't really be a thing, can he? That's the list of AAA guys with wRCs over 100 (Vazquez barely qualifies but trending hard in the wrong direction). Realize the easy answer here is just PCA. But think they're kicking the can down the road a few weeks on him and whether he can just glove his way to a 3 WAR production while very much an unfinished offensive player.

I think they realized they didn't actually have any backup middle infielders nor a first baseman capable of bailing them out. Tauchmann is your fourth outfielder (call it a 4 man for 3 spot platoon if you want to trash Happ), Vasquez is your backup infielder, Wisdom is there if you need a dong and Madrigal is there if you need contact. The starters all just got healthy, there's no way they can get hurt again (right? right?!?). Think Counsell is going to lean on the every day line up pretty hard for the next few weeks here.

Repeat of the game from last Wednesday, let's hope we get the same result. In the meantime both teams struggled, with the remains of the Cubs roster dropping three of four to Pittsburgh and their annoyingly good pitching and the Braves having the same results at home against San Diego. Tomorrow we'll see Steele and Fried, and I don't think anyone has any idea who is going on Thursday (FG and ESPN has Hendricks vs TBD). We'll see on Hendricks and it looks like the Braves just called up something named Darius Vines, who has made two mediocre starts for them in spot duty already this year and has been similarly mediocre in AAA. Cubs pen is pretty well rested after the day off yesterday, would assume only Brown is unavailable, though they'd probably like to avoid Wesneski as well. The Braves are a different story coming off a doubleheader yesterday that had their top four relievers all throwing, though none of them threw on Sunday so it's possible they're all likely for game 1 of this series. Even if that's the case, important to get to the pen today because it could open up the underbelly in games 2 and 3. It looks like the final roster moves yesterday are Dansby and Vazquez up, Miles and PCA down. Probably not the place to get too in the weeds on those, but would guess Vazquez gets a start or two at second here assuming Dansby can hit the ground running. Generally pretty optimistic about the state of things, but....been a rough stretch here and the Braves remain Very Good and Scary. Hoping the warm weather in Chicago can wake up the bats and we can figure out a way to get two out of three here before this Cardinals/Brewers road stretch coming up here. Go Cubs.

Cade HortonPete Crow-ArmstrongOwen CaissieBen BrownMatt ShawMoises BallesterosJames TriantosJefferson RojasKevin AlcantaraAlexander CanarioJaxon WigginsLuis VazquezBJ Murray JrBrennen DavisJosh RiveraDerniche ValdezHaydn McGearyCristian HernandezMichael AriasDrew Gray

Perfect, I got this one, thanks!

I don’t think Hendricks is one of our best 5-7 starters right now and I don’t think whatever he has left plays up in the pen and we need everything we can get from the starters given all the injuries and underperformance on the offensive side and we cant stash him in Iowa, so…fine. It sucks, and holy horsefeathers people around here have short memories and a weird amount of hatred here, but whatever. Make the call here and let him enjoy his well earned retirement. Morel is fine. Happ is fine. The catchers have been bad but like 80% of the catchers around are bad so I don’t know how you fix it besides hoping for some babip luck (and Amaya progression). Madrigal is a guy who should get the one ‘we need contact’ AB a game (because he’s good at it), should not ever start. Mastro…I don’t know, whatever, let’s not churn through 40 man decisions trying to fix his role because it should go back to being minimal pretty soon here (or he’s likely back at Iowa with this Vazquez news, whatever). Busch is cheap and fine, but doesn’t seem likely to be that guy who gives you outlier offensive production. Which we need.

Like can we get madrigal back at the plate now

Wisdom makes sense, PCA makes sense, Wisdom and PCA seems a little bit in conflict

Pitchers break. Pitchers throwing 101 with run especially break.

26-21

I use 88 win pace because I think there’s a disconnect in how people view 88-74 (generally pretty good) and 25-21 (eh, essentially .500) when in reality it’s winning games just as often. we won 83 or 84 games last year, can’t remember, and our best hitter was a free agent. Expecting mid 90s in general for any team is going to lead to mostly disappointment, doing it for a team that was Actually Bad in 2022 and surprisingly slightly above average in 2023 is going to lead to even worse results. If you don’t think we’re an 88 win team, that’s just a vibes based thing because if anything you’d look at the health issues we’ve faced, none of them season ending, and assume just from regression to the mean we’d get better from how we’ve currently played. I wanted Chapman over bellinger. That’s been wrong so far. I still don’t know how you could write the offseason realistically, even with the benefit of 6 weeks of performance.

But you get the point on just how well mastro was performing at AAA right?

What are you proposing here

I don’t understand what the first part means. This incredibly flawed team everyone is complaining about, if they continue playing the same way they’ve played, would win 88 games. Are we just ignoring YTD performance and going off vibes instead? ‘Well they’ll probably collapse down the road for reasons, so throw out the first 30% of the season’. We weren’t getting Ohtani. And even if you think he would have considered the cubs, that’s not a Jed problem. Who else do you mean by ‘top free agents’? We signed the top starting pitcher. Bellinger is pretty good, though he’s been hurt (Jed’s fault). Been better than Chapman, which is who I wanted, so I was (so far) wrong there. I’m not sure what you would really go back and retroactively do here to overcome 15 injuries in the first 45 games.

Jed hoyer didn’t do anything this offseason! Please ignore this historically successful starting pitcher and also our really good starting center fielder that he doesn’t get credit for for whatever reason because he…already had the good idea of signing him last year. Also don’t worry about that first baseman who gets paid the league minimum (for two more years after this!) and carried our team offensively for a week and has a 123 OPS+ this year (rizzo for his cubs career: 130). None of that counts. He should have found really good hitters to accept bench roles and then found an extra $60m to spend on bullpen guys, but only the ones who have pitched well this year. outside shota (again, no one gets credit for signing him) literally every key player besides morel has had injury problems. We’ve been facing a brutal run of starting pitching (hat tip @UMFan83). We’re playing at an 88 win pace, 4 wins above last year. Things could be worse.

Where

2 runs in 3 innings, what an unmitigated disaster

So might be worth watching this game, not for the right cubs reasons. Skenes 6 Ks through 2. apologies on the thread, caught me on a vacation

Scheffler arrested outside of the PGA this morning for disobeying traffic cops after a pedestrian was killed a couple hours prior. Like taken out of his car walked to a police car in cuffs, on video. talk about opening up ‘all cops are bad’ to a new demographic

Madrigal at short, whatever. It’s a bad idea but it’s all we got and mastro doing his 4-3 thing lets me do the thing where I can pretend that would have been the game changing move.

PCA for mastro? Ian can play 2nd if it ends up working.

He had an RBI single like 18 minutes ago

The cubs have like 8 MLB caliber outfielders, 7 quality starting pitchers, two half’s of a starting corner infield, and then two little leaguers in the middle infield and maybe one effective actual reliever. Is that a good team? I don’t know, doesn’t seem like it, but…maybe?

I’m not watching but…it’s a warm humid night in Chicago? I mean, the worst left fielder in baseball history hit a home run, things must be weird out there