squally1313

Did Sand Valley/Mammoth over the weekend. My god. Have to make yourself not think about the price point too much, but what an incredible couple courses.

I don’t mind most of that besides the outfield still being a mess, especially with KB having to cover left field and also first base… For me get rid of the Happ/Trammell trade. And then you got to be pretty sure of yourself to give up that package for a starter with one year left. Give me (Corey) Seager and KB and figure it out from there.

The point is that we have a team with a bunch of holes to fill. I think we need to fill those holes first before upgrading positions that are already filled by players like Happ, Hoerner, Wisdom, etc. and then deciding if they need to be upgraded. The obvious holes to fill are 2 SP, 1B, LF, and the bullpen. It's not like we're going to be contending next year. those positions aren't "filled". happ sucks, wisdom likely sucks, and hoerner could very well suck. And also your idea is to sign KB to play left field (move him, make his bat less valuable) but somehow Wisdom, Happ, and Hoerner, who have all played multiple positions, are somehow locked in.

He was in the Epstein front office? Going to guess it was scandalous.

It was saying he had no other skill than the hitting. Hitting for average and power are typically considered different skills/tools in baseball. I didn't say hitting for average and we were talking about his potential as a 'lefty masher'. Think it's pretty obvious what I was talking about, but no, wasn't picturing him as the next Mark Grace.

To add to this, Schwindel has never hit more than 24 HRs in a single year (he has 22 now, but again, look at Oakland's AAA team). Of those 18 players in that list, only 3 of them hit less than 25 bombs. Yeah but he was hindered by his incredibly stupid name, those other guys had cool names that helped their power. Just change his name. It is a sharp little jab of depression that every time I have to go to his Fangraphs page to reconfirm that he does indeed suck, my autocomplete wants to give me Schwarber for those first few letters.

Because something will have to give. Here's the list of qualified seasons in the last 5 full years(2015-19) from players who have >20% K%, <7% BB%, >.200 IsoP, and a 110+ wRC: https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2019&month=0&season1=2015&ind=1&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=73235&players=0&startdate=&enddate= 18 seasons, and the only repeats are Jose Abreu, Baez, and Castellanos. Schwindel either needs to be an extreme exception to the norm in terms of skills/profile, or his approach needs to change in one direction(more BB) or the other(fewer K), otherwise the odds are very good the power will come down with everything else as pitchers adjust. To add to this, Schwindel has never hit more than 24 HRs in a single year (he has 22 now, but again, look at Oakland's AAA team). Of those 18 players in that list, only 3 of them hit less than 25 bombs.

His highest walk rate, at any level, ever (there's been a lot of levels) is 6.3%. The amount of hitting you have to do to overcome a lack of discipline/any other baseball skill is a lot, and asking that of a 29 year who has given 98 total MLB plate appearances and is on his fifth organization seems very dumb. There are ways to get less left handed than keeping this guy on the bench to hit a double twice a month. His carrying skill is slugging. I'm not sure why that keeps getting minimized/ignored. That sentence is talking about how much hitting (slugging) he has to do to make up for not having any other skills whatsoever. And is that actually a carrying skill? Seems like he's spent a lot of time in what used to be the PCL of AAA. Great, he slugged .630 for Oakland's AAA team. That was the fourth highest slugging in his own lineup. Then he did nothing in Iowa for 40 PAs and has put together 83 impressive PAs in Chicago. If your only path to being an MLB contributor is putting up elite slugging numbers, I'm going to need more than 83 PAs to override the rest of his career.

But Trey Mancini and his .319 OBP from first base does? There's other ways of doing this besides waiting for the next KB to come along, and we should explore those options because that doesn't happen very often. Brennan Davis is the best prospect we have, by a pretty considerable margin, and he's stroking out 28% of the time in AA, without KBs elite walk rate, power, or ability to play a premium position. Sitting around assuming him and a bunch of teenagers are all going to blossom into the next Cubs juggernaut is A. dumb and out of touch with reality, which is that prospects break, and B. the type of strategy that teams like the Pirates try to do because they have no other options. Madrigal and Hoerner are well on their way to becoming dirt cheap, productive major league baseball players. They will never be the three and four hitters of a division winning team, but they allow you to go find and pay for those types of hitters. Go get Correa or Seager, spend another $30m a year on a couple starters, and see where you're at. I'm all for sign top FAs and making this team competitive sooner rather than later, but Hoyer (and PTR) seems determined to take a 2-3 year timeout to wait for our top prospects before breaking the bank. PTR has already determined to put the money into the betting complex and his Hall of Fame honoring his family. He's learned from the master (Trump) to hide problems (the team) with smoke and mirrors so that nobody is looking at the problem. Please show your work. Hoyer has consistently said this is a retool, not a rebuild. If you think building a bar and adding some plaques to a hallway eats up the $60m or whatever they have coming off the books, not sure what to tell you. Draftkings is already paying them $10m a year over 10 years, so you maybe assume they're helping out here as well. If his goal was to hide the team being bad, don't think he's currently doing a very good job. You aren't grasping just how cheap this current roster is going to be. Even if the speculation is true and Ricketts are pushing a salary cap minimum of $100m in exchange for a $180m cap, and even if the Ricketts goal was to hit that minimum to the dollar (which, to be clear, would be outrageous), there's still like $30m to spend just to get there.

A slightly below league average hitter without any defensive value who only excels at hitting 15% of the pitchers should never be more than organization depth, especially given that at his age you can't really project any kind of development. I really believe one of the biggest contributors to his success right now is that other teams just haven't bothered to figure out how to pitch to him. That goes away the second you give him any sort of prominent role and/or the Cubs actually start posing any kind of challenge. Our "1B/DH mix" next year should be an every day first baseman and a revolving cast of starters at other positions getting days off. There's plenty of opportunity for a lefty masher on the bench. Whatever 1B we end up with is probably going to be LH. We know the outfield right now is heavily left handed. And with Hoerner/Bote/Wisdom's versatility we don't need to burn a bench spot on a super utility type. We can focus on having guys with leveragable skills to deploy, and early on Schwindel is showing the underlying skills of a legit lefty masher. His highest walk rate, at any level, ever (there's been a lot of levels) is 6.3%. The amount of hitting you have to do to overcome a lack of discipline/any other baseball skill is a lot, and asking that of a 29 year who has given 98 total MLB plate appearances and is on his fifth organization seems very dumb. There are ways to get less left handed than keeping this guy on the bench to hit a double twice a month.

A slightly below league average hitter without any defensive value who only excels at hitting 15% of the pitchers should never be more than organization depth, especially given that at his age you can't really project any kind of development. I really believe one of the biggest contributors to his success right now is that other teams just haven't bothered to figure out how to pitch to him. That goes away the second you give him any sort of prominent role and/or the Cubs actually start posing any kind of challenge. Our "1B/DH mix" next year should be an every day first baseman and a revolving cast of starters at other positions getting days off.

Nice strawman. But coming from the guy who swore Kimbrel would net very little in a mid-season trade, not shocking. It was a good trade, but Madrigal doesn't exactly qualify for your description of an "impact bat". But Trey Mancini and his .319 OBP from first base does? There's other ways of doing this besides waiting for the next KB to come along, and we should explore those options because that doesn't happen very often. Brennan Davis is the best prospect we have, by a pretty considerable margin, and he's stroking out 28% of the time in AA, without KBs elite walk rate, power, or ability to play a premium position. Sitting around assuming him and a bunch of teenagers are all going to blossom into the next Cubs juggernaut is A. dumb and out of touch with reality, which is that prospects break, and B. the type of strategy that teams like the Pirates try to do because they have no other options. Madrigal and Hoerner are well on their way to becoming dirt cheap, productive major league baseball players. They will never be the three and four hitters of a division winning team, but they allow you to go find and pay for those types of hitters. Go get Correa or Seager, spend another $30m a year on a couple starters, and see where you're at.

Yep. As a member of Team ‘why not go for it next year’…dropping 80%+ of your games for 2 months makes that path a little tougher to justify. Good to see signs of life from Happ, a couple pieces from the bullpen, etc.

I never expected the drop off between Rizzo and another 1B to be so obvious. It's not like I'm even watching a ton of the games either, but when I do he's usually botching a scoop or not covering enough ground to his right. Yeah we were spoiled with Rizzo, but I trust the advanced statistics enough to understand that it's not a very important position, and that you should be able to teach most anyone with any defensive skill how to be passable there and not hurt your team relative to the rest of the league. Which is why you go find some fat corner outfielder who can actually hit, not this dork taking advantage of pitchers going on cruise control with 8 run leads by the fourth inning every day.

He can't play defense, has a 16/3 K/BB ratio so far, and is outperforming his xwOBA by about 75 points going into today. He'll be 30 next year. Find an actual first baseman and keep this dude in the minors to the extent we even can in case of injury.

This is mostly bad. "Superstar" and "SS" are pretty obvious holes, right? How long do you want to wait to see if our prospect list turns out a superstar? Davis next year, and then....Ed Howard, all of 21 years old in 2023, currently getting owned in single A? The even younger Preciado/Hernandez/Caissie/Made group? And if those don't hit just press the reset button again? We have $38m in guaranteed salary next year, another $15m in arbitration for Willy, Ian, Ortega, Wieck, and then the league minimum for Mills, Wick, Heuer, Madrigal, Adbert, Hoerner, Steele, Wisdom, and whoever else. Call it, what, $60m? How does signing 34 year old Tommy Pham do anything in your plan as your top offensive move? Go get someone you know is good, gives you a shot of being good soon, and will still be good when those cheap prospects finally make it up. Then figure out how much money you have left and go from there. SS is not an obvious hole until you see what Hoerner can do. Signing a superstar SS for $30 million per year still leaves this team a 3rd place finisher waiting for 2024. Meanwhile, we have almost no pitching (besides Hendricks) and probably very little to count on for the next few years. As for Pham, I'm more than open to finding another RH LF that PTR can fit into his austerity budget. Also, I mentioned trading for Mancini/Voit to help the offense. I'm looking at many/most of these players as placeholders until 2024. As for your comment about the Preciadp/Hernandez/Caissie group not making it, Hoyer will be fired if they don't because this is where he has put all of his faith into. If you truly believe there's nothing we can do until 2024, why are we wasting money and prospects on dudes who will be 34, 33, and 32 on opening day 2024, and then spending 'big money' on Stroman (will be a month shy of 33) or Rodon (31)? You've got $80m coming off the books, you've got Heyward in 2 years, and you aren't scheduling any big paydays for your internal guys anytime remotely soon. Use the freed up cash, get the team to project to .500, and reassess next June on if you want to wait for the teenagers or use them to get big league talent.

This just made me sad thinking that Nico Hoerner is now a top 3 position player on this team. It was always nice that Willson was like the 5th best player, now he's the best? And for some reason, the Cubs website does not list Madrigal (assuming he's in this sad little group) on the IL. He's shown as in the minors. And the first thing everybody wants to do is sign a $30 million per year superstar SS instead of spending it to fill the obvious holes on this team. Next year (and probably the year after) this is a 3rd place team (at best) waiting for our next "core" of possible star players in 2024. I can't see PTR spending a ton of money until the team is ready to really be competitive. Spend big money on at least 1 SP (Stroman, Rodon, etc.), sign a RH LF (Pham), make a couple of trades (Mancini would be my 1st choice, but Voit would be cheaper at 1B and Merrill Kelly), keep Ortega and Schwindel for DH/bench, and keep Chirinos around for another year. By the 2022 offseason, reassess the ML team and the progress of the prospects in the minors to determine the plan of 2023 and 2024. This is mostly bad. "Superstar" and "SS" are pretty obvious holes, right? How long do you want to wait to see if our prospect list turns out a superstar? Davis next year, and then....Ed Howard, all of 21 years old in 2023, currently getting owned in single A? The even younger Preciado/Hernandez/Caissie/Made group? And if those don't hit just press the reset button again? We have $38m in guaranteed salary next year, another $15m in arbitration for Willy, Ian, Ortega, Wieck, and then the league minimum for Mills, Wick, Heuer, Madrigal, Adbert, Hoerner, Steele, Wisdom, and whoever else. Call it, what, $60m? How does signing 34 year old Tommy Pham do anything in your plan as your top offensive move? Go get someone you know is good, gives you a shot of being good soon, and will still be good when those cheap prospects finally make it up. Then figure out how much money you have left and go from there.

This is getting to be historic ineptitude.

That’s not it at all. It’s this mock disbelief that people on the cubs message board are discussing the players who are currently playing for the cubs. You chose to click on a topic with a very clear subject that fits in pretty well with the purpose of the board. On the flip side, the Cubs actively chose to tank this year and put the fans in a situation where if they want to think about their team they have to discuss garbage players and whether those garbage players have a chance to play for the team next year. That sucks, it should be inexcusable for a fan base that provides a tremendous financial cushion to the owners who are acting as though they are the greatest victims of the covid shutdown. If a fan wants to express his frustration with the situation that the owners of the team chose to the put them into, then they should feel free to do so without being criticized by fans who think we should just shut up and accept the situation. More than one thing can be true at once. The Ricketts dealt Cubs fans an unnecessary, garbage filled hand. How people react to that is totally up to the individual. You can be pissed off at them, at the system of MLB, at capitalism, etc etc etc and still enjoy talking about the baseball team/players, and discussing how to theoretically improve the team (which, I believe, most everyone here still wants). It's like going into the minor league discussions and being like 'who gives a horsefeathers, the Ricketts are going to trade them anyways, why are you wasting your time talking about this'. A reasonable contribution is 'This guy sucks and has no place on a competitive Cubs team'. That's also, in this case, the correct contribution in my opinion. 'lol these guys all suck so stop talking about them' doesn't really do anything.

These are super fun posts to read, over and over, 2 weeks into this rebuild. We get it, the team sucks. Last I checked, Cubs message board, Cubs discussion. Just my opinion, but I see Schwindel as a guy who's rounding out the ML roster right now... nothing more. I'll be incredibly disappointed if he breaks camp next spring. Sorry if this post serves as a reminder of how bad this team is. Guess what? There's still 8 weeks of this crap ahead of us. Suck it up. That’s not it at all. It’s this mock disbelief that people on the cubs message board are discussing the players who are currently playing for the cubs. You chose to click on a topic with a very clear subject that fits in pretty well with the purpose of the board.

But last year was arguably the best year of his career. Only 50 games, but definitely not a 'half assed rebound season', especially coming off two 2 win seasons. Maybe he's broken, but also maybe these career minor league dudes just suck and it's better to shoot for another Heyward rebound. I don't think that we cannot take literally anything away from the 2020 season for anyone. Like for instance, from April 19, 2018 to June 30, 2018 Heyward recorded a 50 game stretch where he his .314/.363/.481/.844. Still finished with a .731 OPS for the season. I get that we cant assume that he would drop off in 2020 and comparing his entire 2020 with a cherry picked best 50 game stretch in another season is not totally fair, but its still a small sample that jumps out as an outlier from the rest of this Cubs career. He also had the highest BABIP as a Cub, and his average EV was at 2016 levels (though his LD% was much higher than any other season in his career). The thing I keep coming back is the walk rate, which he's flashed before (his rookie year/Atlanta years, 2019 was in the right direction). It's not like pitchers in 2020 were scared of his bat and pitching around him, but he was still able to produce an elite walk rate. This year it's a career low, as is his BABIP. To be fair, he's on the wrong side of the aging curve, and his soft hit % is close to a career high, LD% is down, etc. But Heyward came in with sky high expectations, he bombed, and then he turned into a league average starter, performed way above that last year, and way below that this year. We aren't going from this current roster to 8 above average starters next year. But he's not blocking anyone remotely regarded, and eating his contract when your current other options are an assortment of garbage doesn't make any sense to me.

that's a bit of a stretch compared to his braves/cardinals days. His rookie year, 2010 he had a .393 OBP. From 2011 to 2019, his highest OBP was .359. In 2020 it was .392. Looking at it again, he put up 5.6 fWAR in his one year with the Cardinals (of course) in 154 games, which is slightly better than 1.8 in 50 games last year. And most of his 2020 success was driven by a fantastic walk rate, which should age well. This isn't Jason Heyward vs some actually good free agent going into next year. This is Jason Heyward vs the Schwinder/Deichmann/Ortegas of the world for the next 7 weeks. Of those guys, Heyward has the best shot of contributing next year.

Prior to this year, which is terrible, he's been a 2 win player or better the last three years. When I say 'contend next year', I'm not talking about racing the Dodgers to 100 wins, but having a reasonable chance of winning a very average division. A two win player can definitely be a starter on that kind of team. He was also a 28/29/30 year old scraping together half-assed rebound seasons after back to back 1 WAR seasons. He's already 32 years old and will just be getting worse as time goes by. But last year was arguably the best year of his career. Only 50 games, but definitely not a 'half assed rebound season', especially coming off two 2 win seasons. Maybe he's broken, but also maybe these career minor league dudes just suck and it's better to shoot for another Heyward rebound.

This is a pretty dire statement, but considering we're on the hook for his contract regardless, and given the lack of any other options, if the goal is competitive in 2022, isn't it prudent to see if he can figure out how to be 2020 Heyward again? If the Cubs want to contend, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Heyward gets significant at bats and we still have a competent offense. We’ve basically seen how that plays out the past four seasons. Prior to this year, which is terrible, he's been a 2 win player or better the last three years. When I say 'contend next year', I'm not talking about racing the Dodgers to 100 wins, but having a reasonable chance of winning a very average division. A two win player can definitely be a starter on that kind of team.

These are super fun posts to read, over and over, 2 weeks into this rebuild. We get it, the team sucks. Last I checked, Cubs message board, Cubs discussion.