squally1313
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Everything posted by squally1313
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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.
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He's a rich white guy. He is certainly not constrained by weed rules.
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It's just entirely different for them than it is for all of us. Bellinger is 27 years old, the son of a major league baseball player, and has made almost $70m already. He's the definition of 'in peace' and has been for essentially his entire life. There are entire teams dedicated to making whatever his surroundings are as comfortable as possible, and he has magnitudes more money than I assume all of us to speed up that comfort. He's never once in this offseason been at risk of making less than $20m starting in 6 weeks. That's not to say it's not a 'difficult' decision, but it's a totally different world.
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I mean, and I don't want to sound overly short or anything, but it's guys with families, relationships, maybe small kids, etc etc etc deciding where they want to spend the next 3-8 years of their life? For a job that doesn't technically start for another month? Like, would you be in a rush? If you're a good player and you want to go to a winner, wouldn't you maybe try to wait and see if a certain team made any other moves?
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Wasn't really expecting to get into a debate about whether 2016 Jason Heyward is better or worse for the 2024 Cubs than present day Cody Bellinger. But, sure. Heyward was 2 years younger, coming off basically a four year stretch of playing to a 5 win pace, and yes, outperformed Bellinger in his free agent year. Not sure how you get to a 5.6 to 4.8 difference not being 'significantly' different but Bellinger putting up an offensive number of 26.3 vs Heyward's 22.2 is a 'much better offensive season'. Interestingly, the main thing they had in common was that Heyward outperformed his xwOBA by 29 points his last year in StL and Bellinger just outperformed his by 39 points. But that's probably just me trolling again.
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The Cubs did a very good job signing cheap players/reclamation projects and turning them into serviceable major league players while they were in their rebuilding phases. They missed on a couple/few last year, but every cheap offensive player isn't Eric Hosmer. I'm not saying that they'll be better than Prospect X, but to automatically dismiss a cheap veteran for a prospect because of Eric Hosmer is oversimplifying the process. Part of your job as a GM is to determine the differences between the waiver wire guy and the dude in AAA. The monetary risk is low, the playing time risk isn't. Pick the better player, not just the younger one.
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Well Heyward was a significantly better baseball player going into that offseason than Bellinger is now, so good for the players for bumping up salary expectations? Kinda just trolling here, but I just don't get the panic in someone like Bellinger to sign a contract before you have to. Go spend the offseason doing what you want, the money will still be there.
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Can someone explain the big like, existential problem of free agents signing later in the offseason, given that pretty much all of the contracts so far have fallen right in line with the projections made by everyone back at the beginning of the offseason? Like, besides it being 'boring' or whatever for the thousands of people who obsess over this daily (myself included), maybe this particular group of dudes just aren't in as much of a hurry to sign a contract?
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And that devastating injury, or maybe the mechanical changes he made to handle the devastating injury, made his batted ball profile look pretty abysmal. Besides the fact that it's hard for me to totally buy into the fact that he spent all of 2022 (144 games played, 550 PAs, all in the field) 'recovering' from that injury.
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Younger - Yes, agreed Plays a premium defense - He was a negative defender in center last year per FG. In 2022, when he was a positive defender, and played entirely CF, he was the 10th best center fielder in the game defensively. Chapman was 11th in 2022, 7th in 2023. Would argue Chapman is a more valuable defender. Premium position - League wide, Centerfield last year had a .249/,316/.414, .316 wOBA line, 3B had a .244/.316/.404 line, so you could argue third is a more premium position. Better hitter - Obviously the main debate. Bellinger put up clearly superior numbers in 2023 and has far surpassed that in the past. On the other hand, Bellinger has had 4 good months of offensive baseball in the last three years. Batted ball data loves Chapman, and he's projected to be the better hitter next year. More versatile - Yes, agreed, though it's not like Chapman has ever proven himself unplayable anywhere else, he has 10 innings not at third in his career. Probably can't play short, but who knows on the right side of the infield.
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To be fair, I don't know if it's that Chapman 'can't' play first or second as much as there's never been any reason to play him anywhere besides third, a premium defensive position where he gives elite defense. Obviously it doesn't help you in the outfield, so Bellinger gets slight credit for being able to play 4 spots.
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Yeah I mean, if you simply disagree with the projections, sure, I get it. Which is not a shot at all, I probably get annoying just blindly referencing them, but figure it's a common ground place to start. Splitting the difference between 2023 production and 2024 projections you gets you to essentially equal players, though Chapman pulls a little more value from defense (again, depending on where you rate both guys on both sides of the ball). On the Bellinger argument you have age and flexibility. On the Chapman side you have a cheaper/shorter contract (most likely), and the fact that I'd rather 'block' Shaw/Murray/etc at third than PCA in center. Your last sentence, to me, kinda comes down to whether you can include Morel and Busch as 'current 3B options'. Wisdom/Madrigal v PCA/Tauchman doesn't really inspire me too much one way or the other, especially given the theoretical elite defense PCA brings to the table.
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The Cubs were an excellent offensive team in April. They were a mediocre/bad offensive team in May and June. If you want to talk about inconsistency, you could point to that, and the whole they dug themselves which turned the whole second half into a playoff chase and eventually decimated the bullpen. From there, in the second half that you mentioned, here's how they went: July: .336 wOBA, 5th in fWAR, 15-11, 150 runs scored, 5.7 runs/game August: .324 wOBA, 10th in fWAR, 18-9, 149 runs scored, 5.5 runs/game September: .336 wOBA, 7th in fWAR, 12-16, 151 runs scored, 5.4 runs/game What kind of consistency are you realistically expecting here? I really don't think my response came off as a personal attack, even setting aside the fact that we keep posting these numbers and you responded with 'Summarize it in sentence for me' which is...whatever. Outside of the Braves, every contending team I looked at in the NL scored 3 or less runs over 50 times last season. It's just....how baseball works these days.
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Yeah hoping they all get dumped in one easy spot when they wrap up the last couple teams here, but I've been having to go to individual team previews to find them for the time being. Chapman being the best option for 2024, a year we are very much trying to make the playoffs, and also the year we're currently in, is more or less the most important argument out there for signing him. And, realistically, he's still the best option for 2025 until proven otherwise. No one seems to make this argument for Bellinger and PCA, even though Bellinger is only projected to provide one more win in 2024 than PCA, and PCA comes with having sustained success at AA and decent results at AAA. Chapman is projected for 3.6 next year and we shouldn't sign him to keep a spot open for a guy with 70 AA PAs in 2025, Bellinger is projected for 2.7 and is our best long term option for CF even though we have a guy already projected for 1.7 in 2024? Or is the argument to sign neither?
