squally1313
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Everything posted by squally1313
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Bored, putting off work, etc. An extremely pessimistic view of the 2025 roster is as follows: Offense (years of control remaining): Swanson (5), Nico (2), Happ (2), Seiya (2), Busch (4), either Bellinger (6?) and Wisdom (2)/Madrigal (2) or PCA (4) and Chapman (2?), Morel (4) as the DH, and either Amaya (2-3) or you need to find a catcher Pitching: Steele (3), Imanaga (4), Taillon (2), Wicks (4), Assad (4), and then Azlolay (2) and whoever else (a bunch) This is essentially the team I expect to field in a couple months, where I expect we'll be slight division favorites. Probably looking at roughly $50m in annual salary to add to this This exercise ignores, at league minimum salary and already in the upper levels of the minors: Horton, Shaw, Caissie, Alcantara, Ballesteros, Triantos, Brown, Murray.
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Signing solid, not spectacular players to long term, 9 figure deals is not the way to build a perennial division favorite. Trades can be made at any point. Given where the roster was at the end of the year, there was never a feasible path in a single offseason to turn this team into the clear favorites in the division for the next five years. But there were paths that could potentially decrease the chances of that happening. On Opening Day I expect us to be the division favorites in 2024, with a pretty consensus top 5 farm system, and my only real long term contractual concern on the books being whichever of these two we end up with. We'll have Smyly ($6m), Hendricks ($16m), and Barnhart/Mancini/Bote ($16m) coming off the books and no one of significance hitting free agency. Things are fine.
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1. Aware he’s never done it, because of how good he has consistently been at a premium position, but is it really outrageous to think that Chapman could handle first base in a pinch? 2. Kinda feel like you can’t make both the versatility argument AND the ‘well his WAR would have been even better’ argument. If they’re going to play him a bunch at first base, that makes him less valuable.
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Agreed that it doesn't seem likely given what we know about his tendencies (though that's limited data). I would argue that where the roster stands right now, 85ish wins, probably a coin flip to make the playoffs, is the perfect time to trade future value for immediate production.
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My kinda hot take is that neither of these guys are super exciting and I expect/hope that either would be the 5th best player in our lineup, total WAR wise, and my desire to get one of them is really only driven by the $30m-ish hole in the budget that I would strongly prefer not stay in Ricketts' pocket, and so give me Chapman because his contract structure is less likely to be used an excuse to not pay elite players down the road.
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Well those teams should try and add an impact corner infielder, and, if they are unsuccessful there, then they should consider Justin Turner.
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I get your point but we also thought Morel was enough for Soto and the Yankees package was a lot more valuable than that. If just morel for Bieber blows them away, then try to get naylor or prospect depth back too. Chapman to a multi year deal and Nico as the second baseman for the rest of the decade…I’m not going to put a ton of value on a .320 OBP guy who can only DH for the foreseeable future.
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Sign Chapman, trade morel+ for Bieber, if there’s anything left take your pick/the cheapest of belt/turner. Happ, PCA, Seiya, Chapman, Dansby, Nico, Busch, Yan, DH/bench is Amaya, belt/turner, canario, tauchman, wisdom/madrigal Steele, Bieber, imanaga, taillon, wicks, Hendricks adbert, neris, Assad, smyly, leiter, merryweather, almonte
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Cubs sign Hector Neris to 1yr /$9m with options
squally1313 replied to Jason Ross's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
Agreed, I just don’t know if any of those names mentioned represent a significant upgrade to our in house bats. If you want to replace morel with belt/turner, and use morels team control and potential second base ability to bring in the type of pitching not available on the market right now, awesome. But it represents an extra step and we’re under three weeks from pitchers reporting. -
Cubs sign Hector Neris to 1yr /$9m with options
squally1313 replied to Jason Ross's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
The issue with a belt, turner, JD Martinez type player is that you already have Morel, Busch, potentially Wisdom, and Mervis down in AAA in the ‘can this guy play defense anywhere besides maybe first?’ group. Yeah, I’m sure a couple of those three outside options or the 3-4 we already have are going to give you a 120+ OPS, but how are you possibly going to construct a roster/bench and divvy up ABs to get to the correct option in a reasonably quick manner? Basically, to me, signing a veteran bat kinda necessitates a Busch or Morel for pitching trade, and while I’ve been annoyingly persistent on the ‘the offseason isn’t over’ train….it is late January. -
Besides Ohtani (plus more), there really wasn’t a likely path to becoming the ‘clear cut power of the NL central’ in this single offseason. Some of it was always going to have to come from within, and obviously still can. I’ll be pretty disappointed if they don’t spend the last $30m or so everyone has collectively agreed is ‘in the budget’, but I don’t think Chapman or bellinger are these huge difference makers, nor do I think there really were any realistic ones outside of shohei.
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Cubs sign Hector Neris to 1yr /$9m with options
squally1313 replied to Jason Ross's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
There’s always this guy:
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Also we signed Carl Edwards! Minor league deal. Pen issues solved.
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To clarify, we scored 10+ runs like, an obscene amount of times. It’s one of the things people use to discredit their pythag record and claim they weren’t actually an 88-90 win true talent team.
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15th in fWAR, 17th in win probability added. Both numbers that you would like to be better, obviously, as a team with playoff aspirations. When you miss the playoffs by what...2 games? You can point your fingers a lot of places. The 15th best team in offensive production at first base got 2 fWAR last year. We got zero. There's two. We got negative production (-0.7) from the DH spot, though the 15th team only got 0.5. These seem like easier problems to fix. I can't wrap my head around trying to 'fix' a bullpen given that each dude throws like 50 innings and there's going to be 15-20 of them and like, the FG preview for the Cubs last year had the top bullpen names listed as Brandon Hughes (13 innings), Manuel Rodriguez (0 innings), Brad Boxberger (20 innings), and Rowan Wick (0 innings). I basically just treat like the BABIP of roster construction. Hopefully someone there knows what they're doing (and hopefully Counsell knows how to use whatever he has), but trying to discern the Staneks from the Brasiers of the world (assuming everyone agrees that giving Josh Hader $90m is dumb) is the definition of splitting hairs to me.
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Robertson to the Tigers for 1/11. Edit: Rangers. No idea what I was reading. But, big picture, not the Cubs.
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The gap isn't about spending money. https://sports.yahoo.com/inside-dodgers-juggernaut-farm-system-130041487.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKFnhGxf8IUM_JlImpYtATMbTvAeAfaMDyKYy1S6nJyB_7PDDeIDp_aciDUo0e84xNyJ8lncD5W0kNipyBrtr4C5h8_GENSvsd2FN5vJPsG_HVxxNLR0qIfaKwAeL1-7tR7GXaQSlA9VfbRA-cg1VvF_GSl_WpyqTBkk02O0eY4l Nothing Jed or Tom does now is going to go back in time and get us the kind of elite, cheap, team controlled production they've gotten over the last 10 years.
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What's your plan to having a better chance to make the playoffs than the Dodgers in 2024
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How come players only regress in this scenario though? Why isn't Suzuki's second half a sign of better overall performance? Why wouldn't Taillon's career numbers suggest improvement on his 2023 numbers? Why is there no chance that PCA or Busch turn into first division starters given their pedigree? If you're going to distill it down to comparing the two rosters, you can't only look at the downside.
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You came into a thread based on matto writing an article doing a deep dive on zips projections, asking for people's takeaways. You quoted a single sentence from maddux, leaving out literally the sentence before: and your response is, quoting verbatim: Analytical data also do not come straight from God. He never said that it did? He literally, the sentence before, said it was an oversimplification. You mention how everything is relative, and how you need to consider context, like somehow Zips, which compares baseball players to other baseball players, doesn't do any of that. I would quote the relevant parts of this article (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/here-come-the-2024-zips-projections/) but he goes into too much detail of all the things he considers. It's a conversation about people's opinions on the ZIPs projections. Not the concept of statistics in general. But I'm the troll.
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No one is arguing against anything you're saying, and everyone understands the limitations of a website that tries to predict the results of 600 PAs for 75 players over the next 8 months. Of course it's not going to be super accurate. But do I think the guy who does this for his full time job, and has been refining ZIPs for like 15 years now, probably has a better system of projecting players than anyone here, even the group who 'really watch a lot of baseball' and 'have been following baseball for years'? Yes, of course I do. It's a baseline based on a lot more than gut feelings or selection bias or potentially worse ways of judging players that we can use to compare players and make observations about the team/baseball in general. I would think discussions here about who sign/start/etc would be better off using some sort of metrics, even if they are predictive metrics, vs just going 'well data is actually kinda worthless when you really think about it, so who do you guys just innately like more?'. But that's just me
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Certainly two normal responses to a prompt asking our takeaways from the Zips projections
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- dansby swanson
- nico hoerner
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Wait are you implying that a hitter needs 6-8 weeks to consider themselves ready to play a regular season baseball game?
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Hoskins to Milwaukee. Of course.
