squally1313
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Everything posted by squally1313
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I think everyone here is hoping for a significantly better LHH addition to the lineup. But if they were to miss out on Soto/Shohei, or maybe they spend the big money on the Japanese pitchers....there's got to be some way to make a Belt/Morel platoon work right?
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Trading Nico Hoerner to clear a spot for a guy with 70 PAs above single A is some galaxy brain stuff
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It's certainly better if he can play one position vs zero positions, though I guess this doesn't automatically mean they think he can't play second...we just already have one of those. Looking at his raw tools (crazy strong arm, fast) and picking first base when centerfield is the other big opening is a bit of an odd choice.
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I'm certainly not going to bad mouth the writers here covering what has thus far been by far the biggest story of the offseason. Do think they occasionally come off as a little repetitive if you're here every day, but I get the motivation and I'm sure the goal is to drive traffic here, which is a good thing. At the same time, there's a little bit of a disconnect between daily articles posted separately and everyone here's desire to contain the back and forth on a single topic to a single thread. If you don't want to read it, more power to you, but don't think we want to be discouraging people trying to build the site up.
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Going somewhere, Soto? Yes, to the Yankees
squally1313 replied to Bobson Dugnutt's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
But ultimately your argument here is still 'write a check big enough that he doesn't think any other team will match it', which isn't really gaining much of an advantage. Being able to match the best offer on the market means you're paying more than 28 (maybe 29) teams are willing to pay. Offering anyone besides Ohtani a contract that starts with a 5 is just paying more than anyone else would have. If that's the case, I don't really care whether they do it in August or November, it's still the same result. -
Maybe, but they were 7th in offensive fWAR in September. The pitching and specifically the bullpen kinda fell apart, and I don't really know if there were good options that he avoided in some sort of hard headed method. Like, I assume the complaints are bigger than 'he didn't use Luke Little enough'....but the offense was fine, and he threw Wicks into the rotation and kept him there.
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To be clear, that's a totally reasonable position. It just comes off a little weird when you're like 'I think you're wrong, and I think most people agree with me, but that's all I'm going to say, not because I can't defend my position, I just don't want to'
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Not to cherry pick here, but that comment got a ton of criticism at the time and seemingly still now. And I interpreted it, at the time, as pointing to the roster that had, up to 9/6 when he said it, beaten all preseason expectations, had us in a playoff spot (2nd wildcard), and had also pretty significantly underperformed their expected record. He said this and then they won the final three games of the Giants series. At that point in the year, I didn't see anything wrong with that approach.
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Going somewhere, Soto? Yes, to the Yankees
squally1313 replied to Bobson Dugnutt's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
Yeah I think I disagree on there being much negotiation value to having him on the roster all year. But you make a really good point about getting the rights to the comp pick that I hadn't initially been thinking about. Ups the value of what you're getting even if you don't sign him long term (and theoretically ups the cost) -
I could list specifics, but I'm not, but also it's just a feeling, but also most baseball people supposedly agree with me. Ipso facto.
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Going somewhere, Soto? Yes, to the Yankees
squally1313 replied to Bobson Dugnutt's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
Thinking about a Soto extension pessimistically and probably too 'rational markets'-y....the financial details of a Soto extension for the Cubs or another team are probably such that no other team was willing to match those amounts, which implies a lack of surplus value on a go forward basis. The Cubs can decide how much a 5-6 WAR DH/bad corner outfielder making $33m is worth in terms of a trade offer for one year. I don't put a lot of stock in like, this exclusive negotiating window. He's going to go for the biggest offer 12 months from now. -
Craig Counsell, per ESPN EXWL, which I'm 99% sure is just pythag, has been a cumulative 3 games above their pythag in the last 4 years. Most people cite his record in 1 one games, which has been proven pretty definitively to not be predictive.
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And then lost in the playoffs, repeatedly, which was famously his reputation until he ended up getting the best player in football. This is setting aside the obvious: Andy Reed designs and chooses from hundreds of different plays a hundred times a game. Baseball managers make like 4 decisions a day.
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Joe Torre managed the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals for 14 total years and won 0 playoff games, and then went to the Yankees and won immediately. Probably all due to him!
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Andy Reid is such a funny example to cite because he made the playoffs 9 times with the Eagles and never won, lost 4 more times with Alex Smith as his QB, and then put in Mahomes and won 2 SBs (while losing in the playoffs 3 more times). Coincidentally, Andy Reid makes $12.5m and Pat Mahomes makes $56m. But yes, go Andy!
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It's a fun story and a team as big as the Cubs should have one of the widely considered best managers out there on a yearly basis, so definitely not against the move. But like, the title of the thread is 'so what exactly makes Craig Counsell so much better than David Ross'. And the supposed 'naysayers' here are just saying: there isn't anything exactly, because he's not.
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It was actually 1.2 more fWAR but go off. And I would think you would argue that that's a bad investment because instead we used $7m to upgrade our manager position by like 5-10 wins, which is a way better return on investment.
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What makes you say that
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It's always the games Ross (not the players) blew. It's never the games we came back and won, or the leads we held onto. I get that that's just the way we remember things, and it's a mostly thankless job, but Hoyer signed two starters who struggled significantly and went into opening day with a bullpen that was by all measures bad, and that was before Hughes and Boxberger gave us 33 innings total. Like Kyle said, every single team in baseball had the opportunity to offer him $10m a year, and chose not to. If you're going to make the argument of like 'well Jed clearly thinks this is a good move', go for it. Every other GM absolutely had the financial opportunity to beat it and didn't.
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Genuinely curious how you, knowing what you know now, would have wanted last offseason to go for the Cubs, that aligns with your repeated point that the Cubs don't spend enough money.
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Cubs signed 10 players for a total of $310m last offseason, 5th most in baseball.
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Hosmer: 100 PAs, .234/.280/.330, -0.4 fWAR Mancini (to help your argument): 263 PAs, .234/.299/.336, -0.8 fWAR No one else besides Mervis turned in a negative fWAR performance in over 50 PAs Rowdy Tellez: 351 PAs, .215/.291/.376, -0.9 fWAR Jesse Winker: 197 PAs, .199/.320/.247, -0.8 fWAR Luke Voit: 74 PAs, .221/.284/.265, -0.4 fWAR Josh Donaldson: 69 PAs, .169/.290/.390, -0.1 fWAR That's not to mention giving .585 OPS Brice Turang 448 PAs. Teams have bad players.
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My overall opinion about this move is that it implies an exciting short term future of signings/trades/decisions/etc that will actually move the needle towards a more competitive team. I don't think this move by itself does much of anything. And my frustration here (and, candidly, boredom at work) is people attributing credit to Counsell and blame to Ross for things that largely have nothing to do with them. It's much easier to 'press the right button' when going to your bullpen when you have 5 buttons that are all right, whereas David Ross had an 'Albert Azlolay' button and then like 6 interchangeably bad ones. And people here spent the last month of the season blaming Ross for picking a bad option out of a set of bad options, as if Counsell's presence would have just magically imparted the ability to throw strikes. I hope the team does great with him as manager. I just can't imagine a situation where people in the game threads next year are going to be like 'wow, what an inspired reliever decision, genius'. It's just misallocating blame to Ross and patting each other on the back for the hypothetical moves people here would have made that would have saved the season.
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Can we talk about how FG projected the Brewers to win 84 games and the Cubs to win 75 games? Under that metric, seems like the performance was pretty even? You're not going to be able to point to any substantial evidence that one run records are at all sustainable or predictable going forward. Anecdotally, the Cubs had a disproportionate amount of blowout wins. That's what drives the advanced statistics being so favorable for the Cubs. There's an argument that you should discount those extra runs against position players or the back of the bullpen. Fine, but there goes your argument that the Cubs are better/equal to Milwaukee. Otherwise you're just dinging David Ross for the players grouping their runs in a very suboptimal way over the course of a season.
