squally1313

If you trade Morel for Soto you have 5 players that combined for 21.8 fWAR last year, which on their own would make them the 11th most productive offensive team in baseball last year. Gomes and Amaya gave you 1.6 last year, let's not even round up for getting rid of Barnhart and you're at 23.4. Madrigal and Wisdom gave you another 1.6 in not a full season of PAs, there's 25 (better than the Cubs as a team). Can we get 4 wins out of CF, 1B, better backups given the existence of PCA, Canario, Mervis, name a random old first baseman you could trade for, etc etc etc? Because there you go, you're a top 5 offense in baseball.

Well that was ultimately a pretty terrible October. Time to put 100% of our focus on arguing about Morel's value.

If the Cubs don't believe he can play third base or center field, and don't have a spot for him at second base, and other teams think that he can or have an opening at second base, that means that he's an asset that's worth less to us than to other teams. You can argue the Cubs are wrong, or that Morel is capable of getting up to speed at a non-first base/COF position in one offseason, but we haven't seen any evidence of that besides that he can throw hard. It's all wishful thinking and half-informed projections or like, retro-fitting Javy's Cubs career onto him. The Padres, as a team making a mini reset and looking to retool and cut costs for a year, are a perfect team to give Morel 650 PAs and all the time in the world in the field to sink or swim and see what comes out on the other end. So is any other team that's on either end of the competitive bell curve, either the rebuilders who see a potential future key piece with tons of team control, or a team very confident to make the playoffs who have the depth and cushion to exploit his hot streaks. The Cubs have a large majority of their PAs spoken for and need the rest filled out by improved performance they can rely on. Morel isn't it.

Why is Morel expected to improve going forward? Is this 2.5 WAR projection just accumulation from handing him the keys to an every day starters job? All of 2 people had a single digit BB rate and a 30+% K rate (which he also carried in AAA this year, somehow) and gave you 2.5 fWAR or more. Jose Siri and Luke Raley. Neither above 3 wins, Siri being a very valuable defender. How you get marked improvement with that plate discipline profile and a complete lack of evidence of defensive skill is kinda beyond me. He's going to have unreal hot stretches and he's going to have times he's almost entirely unplayable. A lot of these arguments are weirdly circular and just seem to want to avoid doing anything. There may be some (very) marginal benefit to having a year to negotiate, but ultimately we're going to have to convince him that we're offering him more money than he could get anywhere else. That isn't generally an 'efficient' way of paying baseball players, but it's the way you need to do things if you want to get elite players.

If you're saying that 2025-2030 or whatever Cubs without Christopher Morel don't have any chance at contention, then honestly they're probably screwed for that time frame either way.

To lean even more into it, as someone who follows Grant Brisbee, David Roth, and Clue Heywood, it's front of mind in pretty much every Arizona game this month.

For the terminally online

1. Bellinger CF/Mervis 1B/whatever pitching we can get for PCA 2. PCA CF/Mervis 1B/Ohtani or Soto at DH 3. PCA CF/Alonso 1B

For what

I love watching Kyle Schwarber hit postseasons dongs. Kyle Schwarber would have zero postseason home runs from 2021-2023 if he stayed with the Cubs.

Yeah the most non-rational side of me misses Schwarber just because he just looks and acts like he was put on earth to be good at hitting baseballs and terrible at everything else (see also: Castellanos). In a weird way, because I realize the 2021-2023 Cubs teams wouldn't have been noticeably better at all with Schwarber, I'm kinda happy we (poorly) decided to non-tender him and he got to go hit playoff dongs for Boston and Philly. Absolutely flawed, absolutely super fun player. Good for him. That being said, as much as 'not getting the premiere free agent' can be an unequivocal mistake, not getting Bryce Harper was a unequivocal mistake.

I mean, yeah, I was fine with the guy striking out 21% of the time and throwing up a 646 slug. His 25.6% K rate with the Phillies is less ideal, and his 200+ drop in slugging is especially not ideal.

To nitpick, every single person here would have grown beyond tired of Castellanos by now, and probably a long time ago. Dude signed a 5/100 deal and has given them 0.2 fWAR in 1200+ PAs the last two years. .478 OPS in the playoffs last year too. Couldn't have timed his hot streak any better, but he's a combined 268/308/437 for the Phillies.

I'll love him forever, but I just don't think he fits into the plans. He's a guy that you really can't peg as anything higher than a 5th starter on a contending team, and as of now we don't really have a third or fourth starter. Assad isn't it (4.93 FIP as a starter, 4.30 FIP overall), but his stuff plays up out of the pen and he's shown that ability to give you multiple effective innings in relief. I'm fine, pending spring training, giving a slot to Wicks, given his pedigree, youth, past ability to get strikeouts, his profile being kinda perfect for Dansby/Nico, and the fact that he should be stretched out enough to handle most of a full season load (126 innings total this year). Justin and Jameson are fine, though I think Steele got pushed pretty hard the second half and pretty clearly hit a wall, hoping it's not an injury risk going into next year. I think this is the offseason where we need to make significant educated guesses and be right. If you want to ride with Dansby/Happ/Suzuki/Nico (plus a top bat) as your core, then you have a three year window where roughly half your lineup is filled with everyday players. And then you have PCA, Alcantara, Canario, Caissie, Shaw, Triantos I guess, Mervis even more I guess, that other 3B that Tom loves, all sitting in the upper levels of the minors. While I know that 'logjam' will eventually work itself out if given the chance, there are significant holes to be filled on April 1st next year, and these are all pieces who can get us players who can do that. Find a bad teams young, controlled pitcher, give them an outfielder or third baseman they can build around for when their window opens in 2 years. Then do it again. Apologies for being significantly off topic there...to circle back, can't give Kyle $15m knowing what we know about the market, PTR, etc. To reiterate, I will love him forever.

We can't have it both ways. The Phillies won 87 games last year and 90 this year. As mentioned, the Cubs probably outperformed them this year. We can't both confidently declare that the 2023 Cubs team was a clear step below what it took to achieve success but then also say the Phillies Way was successful. The playoffs are a crap shoot. Make it as often as possible, however you go about achieving that goal.

Leafs scored a goal with 6 seconds left to make it theoretically 3-2. I believe the Blackhawks challenged (unless it was automatic) that it was an offsides play, which it was ruled that it was because it was an offsides entry at 51 seconds. So without the review it's 3-2 with a center ice drop, 6 seconds left, after the review it was 3-1 with a neutral zone (Hawks side, right?) drop, 51 seconds left.

16 team playoff would be painful. Would love it just being the 8 division winners, would settle for a 12 team/old NFL playoff model.

Tired: Trade for Juan Soto Wired: Trade for Mike Trout

The Hall injury hurts. Got the feeling Bedard was leaning on him pretty hard to get acclimated. Even more in the deep end now. Encouraging to see them sticking around until the end last night, even though the advanced stats (especially with Bedard off the ice) were very ugly. Back to back against two likely playoff teams at their home opener is a tough way to kick it off. Canadiens should be an easier test, but overall a very rough schedule to start the year.

Is your suggestion to trade one of Happ or Seiya in this scenario? Reteach Happ centerfield? If all three are going to be in the lineup, I want Happ and Suzuki in the corners.

We don't know if it will be bad. Sure, there's a decent chance. If you avoid any long term contracts with a risk of them ending bad, you end up with a bunch of not elite players.

It was an extreme hypothetical to show that there should be more nuance beyond 'I have a max number of years and that's that'. Players occasionally take less annual value to lock up longer term security. The other advantage to spreading out the deal is freeing up cash (and luxury tax space) in the short term. And to reiterate my less analytic stance that I've brought up before, you just aren't going to get me to care about contractual cash obligations in 2030 or beyond. Future problems, plenty of ways to solve them.

Hypothetical: which of the following Alonso contracts would you prefer: 5 years, 100m 8 years, 125m

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/layoffs-havent-hindered-playoff-teams-historically/

I'm going to make a very high level guess (83 wins this year minus Bellinger's 4 makes 79, everyone else is kinda easily replaceable) and say that the 14 WAR he's looking for is to put together a mid 90s win team. That rough math would put us at 93, which is one better than the Brewers 92 this year Couple issues/observations with that: I think the statistics bear out that we were a better team than the 83 win result. The easiest place to point to is run differential, but I think the floor is a little higher than you think. It seems really, really difficult to put together a 93+ win team without ample production from homegrown, cost controlled players. At a certain point, probably soon, we're going to have to rely on a few of the prospects coming up and being major contributors.