squally1313

Contreras is 30. Since 2017, his first year as a full time member of the Cubs, he's third in PAs for catchers, behind Realmuto and Grandal (who both put up roughly twice as much value in that time frame, but I digress). He's been catching in the organization since 2009. I love the guy, though realistically we're talking about a guy who maxed out at 2.6 fWAR and was not Kyle Schwarber in terms of postseason awesomeness. But someone is going to give him 4-5 years, and it should not be us. well yes it's these 'thoughtful decisions' that have us a bottom-5 team if you build the whole team out of hopeful minor league retreads you won't have any bad contracts! Without relitigating the entire last 4-5 years, they essentially brought up an entire crop of incredible baseball players that were all around the same age/contract status, and then supplemented those players with essentially nothing in terms of home grown players after that. Yes, some of that was due to trading from the farm to supplement the current rosters with short term fixes. They are now all on the back side of their career, on the verge of being very expensive if not there already, and Contreras does not have the elite career numbers that would justify keeping him around for his decline years in the way you could have made the argument for a KB or a Baez (or Hendricks). Every member of that core deserves far more money from PTR than what they got for what they gave all of us (and what they gave PTR financially). But as a forward looking Cubs fan who has watched The Jason Heyward Contract take up far more of a percentage of total salary than it should, I'm not super excited about doing the same with Contreras as we figure out what supplements we need for the next competitive Cubs team.

Contreras is 30. Since 2017, his first year as a full time member of the Cubs, he's third in PAs for catchers, behind Realmuto and Grandal (who both put up roughly twice as much value in that time frame, but I digress). He's been catching in the organization since 2009. I love the guy, though realistically we're talking about a guy who maxed out at 2.6 fWAR and was not Kyle Schwarber in terms of postseason awesomeness. But someone is going to give him 4-5 years, and it should not be us.

Trade Happ and pay Willson. There's no reason he can't continue to put up good numbers for another 4-5 years, especially managing his catching workload with DH starts.There's, uh...a lot of reasons he wouldn't continue to put up good numbers for the next 4-5 years. About 30 of them, starting tomorrow.

I think this thread took a little turn towards 'Bash the Ricketts' which...never really going to have much of a problem with that. My original point was that Ian Happ in May 2022 isn't going to get you anything substantial because it's basically just like, 6-8 weeks of success going back to the end of last year. If he throws a couple 'NL player of the week's in there like he's been known to do and the rest of the team still looks totally hopeless, then you can explore trading him for a more legitimate return as we get closer to the deadline. If he keeps chugging along in the low-mid 800s for OPS, and maybe you can start to squint and see a path to contention for next year (which, let's face it, is 80% 'the reds and pirates are terrible, the cardinals are old, and the brewers are super reliant on pitching which breaks'), then it becomes, to TTs point a question of 'do I get more from a mid level package of prospects than I would from Happ putting up 2.5ish wins for a team that may be a fringe contender? People seem real willing to just dump the entire (bad) ML roster to (therefore not incredible) prospects while also trashing the organization for not producing anything of value coming through the system. Happ is here, he's going to give you 2+ wins this year barring injury, and he'll be projected for the same next year. He will not, right now, get you anything of substance on the trade market.

I don't think it is a quickie rebuild despite what has been said in the past. This year has a long way to go and time to prove that they're on the right track, but right now it doesn't look like there are a lot of signs that the Cubs have enough pieces in place to feel like they can have a big offseason and compete in 2023. I wouldn't trade him for a non-premier prospect package either but I would in no way consider him untouchable when teams come calling. I just don't think the conversation makes sense right now. He had a really good 2020, but a pretty mediocre 2021, and a month of elite discipline isn't going to bring his profile up that much. What's the concern, that we pass up a middling package and have to settle for a lottery ticket next summer? The Sox blurb already rules out the top three prospects of the worst farm system in baseball. Daz Cameron should probably just be DFAd, Gage Workman had a .302 OBP last year in high A with a 35% K rate and is doing worse this year, Reese Olson has thrown 22 good innings so far this year in AA but has never recorded an ERA before 4 anywhere. If Happ is the one shining gem in a team of garbage from late June (somewhat likely!), and raises his profile enough to get something beyond that, maybe. Obviously he's not 'untouchable', but the potential of what he can give us, and even the baseline of what he already provides, is worth more than what he can get now.

Trading a 27 year old who can play the whole outfield, has another year of control, and is pretty comfortably one of your top 3 offensive bats for a non premier prospect package is a pretty big sign that this isn't some quickie rebuild. 1.9 fWAR in 2020 is a pretty good sign that he can give you more than 2 WAR, and I'd take the over on it this year pretty comfortably. Considering he'll cost like $9m next year, not sure how we're going to fill a roster spot better than him.

Weather is gross, so obviously this makes sense, but always a little sad to miss out on a Friday 1:20 game, probably my favorite Chicago experience. Hopefully today's the last day of this miserable stretch and we don't have any more of these issues.

that's definitely real, it's called moral equivalency how can i be a bad person? i attended tolerance rallies as a child How can I be a bad person? I’m pro life.

Help me understand the bolded. Is this due to having ticket prices that change based on demand as opposed to set pricing while STH pay a flat rate for the entire season? Simplistic made up example. STH pay $30/ticket for the whole season, right now individual buyers are getting them on the secondary market for $10. Fewer STH means less of those $10 tickets available, which the club prices at $20. That $20 can change to find the revenue maximizing point, but it's never going to hit $30 if the team is the same quality(which is assumed if STH decrease), so the team loses money. We also assume that the individual prices are never going to stoop so low as to hit $10(it's almost certainly better for revenue to have fewer people paying $20), so the total number in paid attendance will never reach the amount from before the STH decrease. Couple points here: 1. You guys probably knew this, but season tickets are still priced per game. Our draft would always charge people on an average ticket price/per game, but I know some people who charge per ticket. Think your overall point there still stands, that they can be more reflexive in season if attendance starts to lag vs STHs who paid everything up front. 2. I'm curious on the actual breakeven point once you start pricing that low, factoring in the price of beer/concessions, potential memorabilia, and whatever value you want to assign to recruiting future fans. Seems to be the most purely profitable part of the experience for them is taking the 15 seconds to pour a beer they paid 80 cents for and having someone swipe their credit card for $12.

How deep was the season ticket holder list like, a year ago? Buddy got the 'sorry' email last year that had him about 100,000 on the list, and got it again this year that said he was like 8,000. Meanwhile, I dropped my tickets but I'm still in the season ticket holder facebook group, and it's nothing but complaints about how they are being forced to sell their tickets for like, $6 on Stubhub. Can't imagine that holds up over a few year period. Yeah i don't think he'd be ok with the Cubs being bad forever but the fact that he can charge the highest ticket prices in baseball (though to be fair they are a lot cheaper in April and May) and still fill almost 80% of the park despite the team being bad and people generally angry with the team says a lot about how inelastic the demand for Cubs tickets is. People may be less willing to buy an entire season up front, but go to Wrigley for a weekend game in the summer and there will be a minimum of 32k. Plus the Cubs payroll is about 2/3s of what it was 3 years ago, so if attendance is 80% of what it was in 2019 he still comes out on top (I think?). My thought, and maybe I'm misunderstanding how these numbers are being put together, is that a lot of the 31k so far (and hypothetical 32k this summer) are people scooping up $9 tickets on Stubhub from the full slate of season ticket holders, and it's my understanding that they ran through a huge portion of the season ticket wait list in this offseason between people dropping tickets and peoples name getting called and passing on buying them. It seems outrageous that would it would get to a point where there would be no wait list, not a full amount of season ticket holders, etc, but...maybe it wouldn't? Pretty much everyone knows how to use the secondary market websites now, and they're all seeing how cheaply they can go to the game if they use those and let STHs subsidize the Cubs for the rest of the ticket price. But those people showing up for $9 a ticket aren't going to walk up to the gate in a couple years and pay the face value if the thousands of season tickets available on Stubhub for every game starts to dry up.

The Cubs are averaging 31k fans per game despite historically bad spring weather, low expectations, a lockout and while school is still going on. So I bet they are very happy with how things are going. How deep was the season ticket holder list like, a year ago? Buddy got the 'sorry' email last year that had him about 100,000 on the list, and got it again this year that said he was like 8,000. Meanwhile, I dropped my tickets but I'm still in the season ticket holder facebook group, and it's nothing but complaints about how they are being forced to sell their tickets for like, $6 on Stubhub. Can't imagine that holds up over a few year period.

Looking for positives…His velocity’s on pace to be a little hopefully significantly higher than last, CSW% and SwSt% are league average for SPs…Too lazy to check but maybe we’re seeing approach change similar to Stroman, FGs has the fastball (4S not sinker) as his most valuable pitch this year, both first pitch and called strikes are way down I don’t know, don’t really have a problem with veterans like Stroman and Hendricks thinking more big picture if that’s the case. These guys don’t have so much to prove and would immediately find work with a better offense if made available so just keep them healthy and try some things until an offense shows up I'm fully on the 'This is a Bad Team' train, but seems a little defeatist to write off Stroman/Hendricks not aiming for success when those two pitching like top 30 pitchers was really our main path to some sort of wild card contention. But if they're written off the offense already like some of us have...whatever. Get tickets in the bleachers and bring a glove* for Kyle's starts. *Kidding, do not under any circumstances bring a glove to a baseball game.

His ERA over his last 18 starts is about double what his career ERA was before entering this stretch. It’s beyond a slump at this point. He’s not putting the ball where he wants it. He got very screwed by two hits that had a less than 70 mph exit velocity last night. He's out of that 6th inning with the game tied and a 4.5 ERA for the game if not for some terrible BABIP luck. I'll freely admit the dingers are a big problem, but he was mostly fine last night. He had 2 strikeouts. You let that many balls get in play, those types of things are going to happen. His BABIP for the game was .263.

I'm making up this theory in the moment, but I think if you picture 'being a good person' as like, a box to check, and then understand that everyone has different requirements to feel comfortable checking that box...and then you think about people in the decimals of the 1%, like a Bauer or a Armie Hammer or a Trump, who can spend 20 seconds and cut a check to charity that eclipses most/all our yearly incomes, and realize that they can say, somewhat credibly, if you isolate enough, that they've helped more people than 99% of the population....I don't really know how to grammatically end this monstrosity of a sentence, but hopefully you get my point. How can they be bad people, they donated $150k to their local food bank, what have you have done for the less fortunate?

Rationally I know this is a baseball wide phenomenon. Less rationally, I think it’s horsefeathering hilarious we’ve puttered around ‘depressing and bleak’ for like 10 games after putting up a 21-0 after all the boom and bust complaints the last couple years.

Cubs are third in the league in BABIP and six of the seven guys with the most PAs on the year are outperforming their xwOBA.

The Nationals fixed Schwarber and Rizzo has 3 HR if he's playing almost anywhere other than Yankee Stadium. Meh. Sorry for liking dongs.

Rizzo and Schwarber, combined, have as many home runs as the cubs.

This team is so, so bad.

I've long felt that draft strategy should entirely be based on how cool a players name is. I've now refined that somewhat and believe that the focus should be on players with animal names. He's also got the pedigree, being basically brothers with the greatest and youngest pitcher in Cubs history.

I assume he'll end up playing overseas somewhere? Don't want to make any guesses at the risk of sounding ignorant, but assume there's somewhere that will pay him a few million to pitch.

I'm trying to put myself inside the head of the (expected) idiots already rushing to his defense. It's so bleak.

I won't tell you you're wrong. I will tell you that you're using 16 PAs as your sample size.

If you would have told me to guess Heyward's slash line so far this year, which would be based mostly on reading stuff here, I would have guessed like...210/275/350. It's 296/390/371. wRC of 128.

CP is 23...list is 21 and under. Edit: Just realized you were much more likely talking about the Chelsea game than that list. Carry on.