squally1313
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Everything posted by squally1313
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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.
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I don't even know where the goalposts are anymore. You started by saying they play their home grown prospects, theoretically their relievers. Absent Devin Williams (wow, impressive that Counsell recognized that talent), that isn't true. Then I point to how the offensive prospects haven't turned into anything under Counsell, and it turns out those were just bad players regardless. I get it, all the players suck without Counsell, so any player that doesn't suck is because of Counsell.
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So, to be clear, we're crediting Counsell for some players playing well as a Brewer, and when other players play poorly, we're assigning blame to them being a small market team.
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I mean, maybe? Does he get dinged for the fact that they were 22nd in wRC this year? Their three best offensive players (Contreras, Yelich, Adames) were either savvy trades or predate Counsell. No one else above 1.4 fWAR. Should we expect our offense to take a step back next year?
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Devin Williams, yes. Joel Payamps, no. Hoby Milner, no. Trevor McGill, no. Elvis Peguero, no. Abner Uribe, yes. Bryce Wilson, no.
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Honestly attributing the success of their relievers to the coaching staff seems very backwards to me. Devin Williams has been elite for years. Joel Payamps was 29 years old, in his 5th MLB season, and has a career 2.6 BB/9 rate. Hoby MIlber was 32, had 150 career innings already, and has a career 2.57 BB/9 rate. Trevor McGill was 29, third season, 3.22 career BB/9 rate. That's the top 4 fWAR producers in their pen, all with major league experience and either elite, elite stuff or above average control. We had one of those guys.
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I assume in super important games down the stretch you're going to want Happ, Swanson, Hoerner, Suzuki, and Bellinger in the lineup. Plus Gomes is 6. Candelario is seven? If you think PCA and Canario and their 6 hits total this year change things in a seven game sample, then yes, sure, managers are the most important thing in the world.
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Cubs offense in the 7 games against Arizona: .212/.285/.329, for a 614 OPS. This is obviously David Ross' fault.
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If Counsell is worth 5 wins over an average manager and we got him for $8m a year, roughly the cost of 1 win in the free agent market, for 5 years, that's the biggest steal in baseball history. Alternatively, he could just not be worth that.
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He let the starters pitch too long for their ability and then also used the few good relievers he had too much. Maybe, just maybe, the issue didn't lie with David Ross. It was a middle of the pack pitching staff on a team that was designed to be middle of the pack, and it didn't get fixed during the year. The Brewers had 5 relievers pitch over 55 innings this year and the highest ERA among the 5 of them was 3.38. If you want to call that some sort of Counsell magic, go for it. But to me that's just hitting on talent when putting the roster together in a way that Hoyer very much didn't. Otherwise, what TT said. I don't think this manager swap really matters really matters on its own but it's not my additional $4m. Outside of this being a situation where Counsell fell in love with Wrigley as a kid, every team came in and pitched him on their future and he picked us. It is the definition of signaling that you're ready to win and compete and make the tough decisions sometimes required to do so. It's reminding everyone else in the Central that the Cubs are the lone big fish in an otherwise small pond. Looking forward to seeing what happens the next couple months.
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This move by itself doesn't do much for me. The implications of this move have are pretty incredible.
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Going somewhere, Soto? Yes, to the Yankees
squally1313 replied to Bobson Dugnutt's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
Said another way, Juan Soto is so, so good at hitting baseballs.
