squally1313

Nico has one more hit this year than Bregman. This is an indictment of Nico, who I love unconditionally like a son. They both need to get going.

124 wRC from the best defensive player in baseball

I’m team Hoerner for life but his slump is really hurting us right now

weather looks very bad for this game (and this series). obviously tough to get the giants back in town after this, so they're going to try and squeeze it in when they can, but hopefully we avoid some sort of 1st/2nd inning rain delay situation. robbie ray so far this year is basically just jameson taillon but not totally cooked yet. stack the righties, good time for bregman and dansby to see some balls land in the seats.

An imminent Ohtani injury probably makes Carroll and PCA the co-favorites (with Elly right behind him). Ohtani playing another like 6 weeks probably does enough for him to get it.

The Cy Young guy

Come on Craig. Do better.

As an example: PCA in wins: .306/.382/.512 PCA in losses: .167/.265/.245 Seiya in wins: .283/.391/.500 Seiya in losses: .190/.244/.262

I'm not going to nitpick the particulars of your points (major prospects ready to take over all of their weak positions, particularly). Overall, your point is valid about how well they've been doing things for a couple years now. I think this board, on all sides of the spectrum, would have had a collective aneurysm about trading someone like Freddy Peralta in a contending window, especially for a 25 year old starter with a current 5.81 ERA in 70 career MLB innings and a fringe-y defensive CF with 400 PAs of below average AAA production. Then again, people want to dump good players after a below average month, so who knows. It's June 3rd. I watched people horsefeathers on an eventual 92 win team all year last year, and worship at the altar of the Brewers, and then watched us get to a deciding game 5 with them. No, we didn't win. But to think we're light years behind on a go forward basis is just being negative for the sake of being negative, and this endless praising of any other team, much less the one in our division, just seems...sad? Makes me prefer the pixie dust talk of 10-15 years ago.

Everyone screaming for Alcantara (and his overall 33.5% K rate) to take Happ's spot a month ago just reshuffling their grievance papers and moving on to wanting Alcantara (and his overall 33.5% K rate) to take Suzuki's spot, having clearly learned something from the last time. Also, not at all weird brewers circle jerk there in the Cubs/A's game thread last night. Super normal.

If only we would have given Dansby another 3-5 years like all the other shortstops got, then we could have avoided this whole weird talking point.

I could see Rea back to the pen, he’s better than Taillon but not by much and he’s used to getting moved around. But I also wouldn’t be surprised to see them look for an opportunity to limit Browns innings in the pen at some point this year.

Alright that works too

It’s 8-9-1 and I’m usually team ‘get an extra inning if you can’ but…probably would have let Taillon feel good about his 6 innings and put in a better pitcher.

Yeah but if you introduce enough nuance, pretty much every potential trade is 'a trade he's never done before'. He had never done a Tucker type trade for just one full season....until he did. How many GMs in baseball have traded for 2 months of a reigning Cy Young?

What about the Tucker trade?

Yeah I think that's fair in calling the construction unique for a big market team. I think the whole organization was pretty barren 5ish years ago, and you're still seeing some lasting effects from there (the Taillon deal in particular stands out for me. he was never going to be anything more than he was, but we needed innings because we had no internal options and really just needed to spend money somewhere after stripping it down to the bones). I think Jed needs to take more shots. I think his decisions have been largely proven correct compared to the alternatives (Dansby has been better than Bogaerts and Correa, Turner has put up 15 fWAR to Dansby's 13.5 but Turner is having an awful year and has an extra 4 years, $108m on the books for ages 37-40). But I think he's somewhat maxed out how far he can take this approach if he isn't going to produce studs (a la the big contracts that Julio or Vlad Jr have gotten) from within the organization. Take a couple chances.

Well if Shaw is a huge overpay, how much further is a team like the Dodgers going to go? Like, yeah, in an 'empty the farm' contest we probably can't compete. But the point of a guy like Skubal is that the market historically hasn't set the cost for two months of elite pitching to be 'empty the farm'. Is Josue de Paula (160 wRC in AA, corner outfield at best) and/or Eduardo Quintero (high A centerfielder with a 108 wRC) more valuable than Shaw? I have no idea. Are the Dodgers trading their best/top 2 prospects for a playoff starter when they have Ohtani, Yamamoto, and Glasnow already? It certainly won't be 'fair' in that we'd be getting like 2 wins out of Skubal and giving up 4 years of control of of a 2-3 win player. But there's not really a team in baseball (very good offense, decimated pitching, not guaranteed a playoff spot, almost assuredly would be playing a 3 game series if they made it) that would benefit more from that sort of upgrade.

Here are the core offensive players career wRCS compared to their career wRCs with RISP: Bregman: 132/140 Swanson: 96/105 Happ: 117/121 Hoerner: 103/118 Suzuki: 125/119 PCA: 99/118 Busch: 123/115 Now we could say that based on 2 months of high leverage at bats, the offense is somehow broken in only those scenarios and these struggles will just continue because Cobs. Or we could say that the struggles thus far in key situations has absolutely impacted our record to date, but should in no way be expected to continue at the level of futility it has because this is a group of good hitters and (take your pick) a. clutch isn't really a thing that exists or b. the group has collectively performed better in those situations over a sample size much more meaningful than 2 months.

At the risk of going circular, they'd stop being 'random names' if they won a championship right? There may not be a Betts-type name in there, but Contreras, Misierowski, Yelich all either have or could put up those elite offensive seasons. And I guess your contention is that they haven't won a World Series because they aren't elite players, but at the end of the day I was taking issue, and it might not have been you specifically, of this thought process of like, 'well we don't have a superstar so we shouldn't try to improve the team'. It just feels like self-defeating logic. We have very good and good players, and I think, offensively, within the group there's plenty of potential to raise their games and put together elite performance. PCA was 15th in fWAR last year and is 13th this year. Do you need a top 10 guy? The Yankees and Dodgers, as expected, each have a guy better than PCA this year. But it's Ben Rice and Andy Pages, not Judge and Shohei (offensively). The (comfortably) best player in baseball plays for a 23-37 team right now. So you need an elite guy AND a Cubs level supporting cast, otherwise don't bother? There's 9 guys in a baseball lineup. Any one hitter can only take 11% of the PAs in any given game. Pile up good players and you get good offensive results, we have 8 months of the Cubs to show that, as much as people seem to hate the numbers there. Go get the best starter you can if costs you a bunch of dudes who are blocked and haven't produced at the highest level. Will it work? Probably not! 29 teams go home every year. Will it be more fun and give us a better shot? Yes.

Do I think the Cubs are as good as a team that won 108 games? No, of course not. But this is what the qualified Red Sox hitters did in 2017: Going if you were to compare opening day rosters based on past performance, would we really be that far off? I'd say we would have looked better offensively than that. They picked up JD Martinez coming off a 4.3 fWAR year, so a slightly better pickup than Bregman. It's hard to articulate, but it's bad logic in my head to be like 'do you think this team in June is as good as teams that went on to win world series'. The players were good, and then they became great. Unless you throw a Dodgers level payroll at it, that's usually how teams go from good teams to teams that play in November. PCA is a top 10 player offensive player, Nico is top 25. I promise you if this team goes deep in October that Bregman's name will get thrown on that pile too. And that's before our 131 wRC gold glove LF and our 121 wRC first baseman who raked at the end of last year. They actually have to do the work, of course. But there's no actual serious reason why they can't on the offensive side. 'We'd be heavy underdogs to the Dodgers'. A. 'Heavy underdogs' is like a 40% chance. B. Who cares, what a loser attitude, take your shots anyways, they aren't going anywhere.

This seems like backwards logic, no? These guys are considered ‘superstars’ or whatever in hindsight…because they went out and won a bunch of games or won very important games? It wasn’t like Boston slotted Xander bogaerts in the starting line up and on day one was like ‘perfect, we have our superstar, now we can compete’. If Michael Busch wins 85+ games for the next four years and continues to hit like he did last year, how is he any different? Same for the overall performances from PCA, Hoerner.

And we don’t have multiple of them. What the hell jed

1. I think, and I don't mean this in an overly critical way, there's a disconnect between what you expect an offense to look like/produce, and what the baseline is for an above average offense in 2026. League average slugging is below .400. It's just not the game any of us grew up with. 2. For the star category, since you acknowledged PCA, which is mostly defense driven...he's 8th in fWAR since 2025, right above Soto. Hoerner is 22nd. Busch is 39th. Bregman 44th. Happ 46th. Dansby 47th. Stars? No. But I think you'd be really hard pressed to find another group that can put 6 guys in the top 50. Actually I just did it, we're 2 higher than any other team (Yankees and Dodgers with 4). 6 teams have 2 guys in the top 20 (Judge/Bellinger, Witt/Garcia, Raleigh/Julio, Ohtani/Pages, Carroll/Perdomo, Soto/Lindor). Naming stars in hindsight is easy, you have the memories. Right now, we absolutely match up. 3. If Judge gets hurt, the Yankees go from a 95 win team to a 90 win team. 'Horrible' is an extreme over exaggeration. He also slugs 137 points lower in the playoffs. 4. No one has ever called Edward Cabrera a star and if they did they were very mistaken. We traded the 65th prospect in baseball for a starter with multiple years of control.