squally1313

Sorry, forgot this weird tangent. Um, maybe? He's going to make like $9m next year with no long term commitment, so I'm not sure this is an apples to apples thing? But...if the deal is right? I liked him a lot better when he could at least fake centerfield (and obviously when he was Sorianoing on offense). But I don't think he'd get you a whole lot on the market so...take the cheapish maybe production until Davis gets here and then figure out a way to utilize his hot streaks somehow.

Other than 30+ and glancing at 115, what’s not to like about Contreras’ bat moving forward? He’s got a better than league average CSW% and K rate this year (big jumps are good!), hits the ball hard (116 max EV is a career high), takes walks, hits HRs…The only hole in his offensive game is a 50% GB, and it's entirely possible that's an area the Cubs can improve overall (since they're among the few worst) without losing an overall impact bat There's a bit of bird in the hand thinking but also a DH capable catcher or catcher capable DH is a very Future player too (he's also taken innings at 1B, both COFs, and even an inning 3B in 2021). All the good teams are 2+ deep (Zunino/Mejia, Smith/Barnes, Realmuto/Stubbs, Kirk/Jansen/soonMoreno, Trevino/Higashioka, Grandal/Zavala/Mcguire, so on) at catcher now, Contreras can hit with any of those guys (plus gives them the flexibility to sign and roster someone like Hedges to play defense), aaaaand we all seem to agree he's going to be cheap. Even if it's just him signing the QO ---- BTW Ian Happ with a 29% K rate in the second half entering tonight (152 PAs)...has a K in 3 PAs tonight...Are the Cubs trading him in the offseason? I mean, sign me up for the QO. I sorted the FG leaderboard by offensive value, just to see what someone with his bat but negative defensive value gives you, and the first name that popped up was Rhys Hoskins, career 126 wRC+ hitter, noted defensive liability. 126 wRC+ would be an exceedingly generous projection for Contreras' bat going forward. Rhys Hoskins, who generally gets significantly more PAs than Contreras has or will, has never put up more than a 2.5 fWAR. And yeah, maybe Contreras as a mostly DH/sometimes catcher in a couple years doesn't end up with the real bad defensive ratings, but split the difference between that and an actually realistic offensive projection and you're left with similar overall production. And...two 2 WAR guys are good! We need more of them! Is something like that worth $80m for four years? I'd hope we could find that more efficiently (eyeing The Deepest Farm System We've Ever Had). And again, this is all ignoring the less quantifiable parts of this, both good (he is the man and would most likely provide intangible value somehow) and bad (see: Jason Heyward 2019-2022).

I might have picked the wrong post to quote, but my overall point stands. 'The market not coming together' essentially means no team thinks he's worth a six figure contract. There are a few obvious reasons for that. Say what you will about defensive catching metrics, but Willson has never rated positively there, and he certainly would be worse at another position or spending more time as the DH. The career 115 wRC+ compares favorably to the current 107 wRC+ coming out of the DH spot this year, but I don't know if it's an advantage you want to pay $20m or so a year for, and it's also something you probably need to regress as he continues to slide down the age curve. Absolutely, if he's 90% or more of what he's doing this year, go for it. But I think if this wasn't Willson Contreras, Cub Legend, we were talking about, this would be a different conversation. I think there is some value in having that influence around, whether it's measurable or not. Maybe I've been brainwashed by living in STL for too long but there's a marked difference in how the Cards perform when Molina is around vs. when he's not and I really think there's something mental to it, whether it's accountability or confidence or whatever myriad of other things it could be and I think we saw some of that last night with the conversation he had with Morel before he hit the HR. Is it worth an extra year or an extra couple million per? I don't know, but Jed and Co. get paid a lot of money to determine whether it is or not. Sure, I don't disagree there, and there's probably a weird, meta offshoot of that conversation along the lines of 'baseball is entertainment, and Cubs fans love and are entertained by Willson Contreras, which is worth X'. I just think some of that more...theoretical benefit is showing through what is otherwise a conversation about how good he will be at winning baseball games on a go forward basis.

Yeah, some weird dissonance on the 'actually every team is going to think he's maybe going to suck or at least get significantly worse, so this is actually an opportunity for us' reasoning I’m not understanding the all catcher or no catcher mentality. He’s got a 131 wRC+ this year doing less catching but not doing zero catching. From the sounds of it, JD’s comments at least, that’s what an extension would look like Also the career 115 wRC+ is like 30 points above what the position’s done. It’s not a straight 115 for the purposes of forecasting or even projecting Contreras in a less straightforward role I might have picked the wrong post to quote, but my overall point stands. 'The market not coming together' essentially means no team thinks he's worth a six figure contract. There are a few obvious reasons for that. Say what you will about defensive catching metrics, but Willson has never rated positively there, and he certainly would be worse at another position or spending more time as the DH. The career 115 wRC+ compares favorably to the current 107 wRC+ coming out of the DH spot this year, but I don't know if it's an advantage you want to pay $20m or so a year for, and it's also something you probably need to regress as he continues to slide down the age curve. Absolutely, if he's 90% or more of what he's doing this year, go for it. But I think if this wasn't Willson Contreras, Cub Legend, we were talking about, this would be a different conversation.

Yeah, some weird dissonance on the 'actually every team is going to think he's maybe going to suck or at least get significantly worse, so this is actually an opportunity for us' reasoning

I haven't started it yet but I've heard very good things. In terms of the whys, I'm pretty sure it's not a thing they did just to do the documentary, they've sunk serious money into the club(e.g. they brought in a striker who was successful at a higher level and went down a rung to play for Wrexham) so there's no ROI to be had. And because they've sunk money into the team my guess is it will work out okay for all parties involved. I don't think Wrexham's ticketed for the Premier league, but they can get back into League One(the highest level Wrexham has played at I believe), and probably make it to the Championship too. I want to like it because Rob seems like a really good guy. Not sure I'm with you on the 'serious money' part...from what I can tell they spent $2.5m on the club and then that record transfer was a little under $400k. Obviously a lot more costs involved, but it seems pretty reasonable (I think?) to recoup most of that in selling the doc to FX/Hulu. Agree that it will end up working out, seems like it's headed in the right direction so far, just have this negative feeling that it could be the first step to like...rich guy fantasy football 2.0?

Is anyone watching Welcome to Wrexham? Not the most in depth documentary, but pretty fun through the first couple episodes. Can't figure out if I like the big picture idea...from what I could tell in the episodes that came out, seems like they (the team/trust) almost begrudgingly took the money because they needed it, but weren't thrilled with a couple foreigners with no soccer experience coming in. And I can't tell if this was just designed to get them a documentary, if they just felt like playing a rich man's version of Football Manager, or if it will actually turn out ok.

About how valuable is that plus bad defense plus whatever he does on the bases (I have no idea)

You do know most good teams get there by mostly beating the bad teams and not sucking against the good ones? They're 24-28 against teams over .500. Come again? They have a bunch more games against good teams. We'll see how they do. 2016 Cubs: 31-25 against over 500 teams. 72-33 against under 500 teams. Like, you've been around for a while, you have to know this is how this works.

This has been an incredibly satisfying and entertaining half inning.

He's been a 0.5 fWAR player in 218 PAs, who cares.

Maybe this is just a hindsight thing in that the ones who made it are the only ones I remember, but checking the minor league threads almost feels more fun now than it did in 2013-2015. Back then we had the studs but there were really just a few names to keep an eye on and if there were any minor injuries or cold stretches it seemed like there weren't any positives coming out of the system. Now it feels like every day there's 2-3 people with some sort of future major league potential putting out something impressive, and that list is like 40 deep.

In case anyone just uses these threads to see how the team did (guilty of that)... 4.2 IP, 6 hits, 1 walk, 4 Ks, 4 unearned runs. Was scoreless through 4, then... Reached on error Single to shallow right Single to left K Bases loaded GB to third, out at second, runner scores Single to right center, runner scores Stroman pulled Double to shallow left, both runners score

Doesn't really seem to be looking at the whole picture to just mention rolling snake eyes on the injuries to our starters, a good portion of which are bad when healthy, and ignore Steele and Thompson exceeding all expectations and then Sampson giving us like 10 very above average starts. Yes, 10% of the games were started by bad pitchers. But, Alec Mills was regarded as our 5th starter to open the year.

But our bullpen has generally outproduced the rest of the team, after being projected to come in as 23rd in baseball (not to over rely on the FG numbers, but seems like a solid resource for this discussion). 21st in ERA, 22nd in FIP, 6th in xFIP (we're also bad defensively!), 15th in fWAR with, to your point, a ton of innings pitched, so not the most efficient way to get to league average. Again, was supposed to be bad, is bad, just maybe for different reasons.

I suppose they could both be true, if Hoyer was naive enough to believe they would never have an injury. There’s a lot of space between never having an injury and the top 6 starting pitchers in the organization at the beginning of the season all being on the IL at the same time, which was the case at one point in July. This has basically been a .500 team since Stroman and Smyly got off the IL. Which is not good enough and nothing Cubs fans should be happy about, but not the team that was on pace to be one of the worst teams in franchise history at the ASB. The Cubs were projected to be 25th in the league in starting pitching fWAR at the beginning of the year. They are 26th. It was supposed to be bad, and it is bad, just in a different way. Giving us another win or two in the standings from hypothetical Stroman/Smyly innings doesn't change much in terms of the overall outlook.

Today’s game one included, Hendricks, Stroman, Miley and Smiley have started 47 of 103 games this year. Consider what kind of disaster this season would have been if Thompson and Steele weren’t able to perform as well as they have. So maybe I'm thinking about this wrong, but Thompson and Steele have performed above average, so they are far from the main causes of us being terrible. Sampson, somehow, has also given us 7 starts of a 3.74 ERA. So that leaves us with 16 games by the other misfits, which, to your point, went pretty terribly. But I don't think you really want to lean on a hypothetical of like, Hendricks or Smyly taking starts from Steele/Thompson and somehow giving us better results.

Optimistically, it's him getting tired of getting the Schwarber treatment on borderline pitches and just swinging more, though I can't find the swinging strike stats that would easily prove/disprove that hypothesis. Walk rate is way down in July, but he got his K rate below 20% after it being 27% in April and 32% in May.

If I remember correctly K% normalizes quite quickly, so we should be at a large enough sample size to confidentially say that there's some type of mechanical change that caused this and we should be optimistic about it going forward. I understand conceptually what you're saying, but that also requires you to toss out the theoretically 'normalized' K% from the first set of games, so probably a little early to be sure of what's going on.

But not here.

lol garbage take

Willson in July: .149/.259/.230/.489 Happ in July: .279/.299/.385/.684 Happ’s is a “I’m a good hitter slumping this month” type of stretch, Willson’s is a “I’m either hurt or I have something occupying my mind and affecting my play” type of stretch Splitting hairs given how important it is to us, but Happ's 33/2 K/BB ratio seems more concerning than anything else. To put up a below average line with a .400 BABIP is pretty hard to do.

Didn’t need the thread title to be phrased that way, thanks

He said the Cubs as an organization shouldn’t have budget constraints but they do. The Cubs as an organization don’t have budget constraints. The owners are being cheap and don’t want to spend. We’re not the A’s or the Rays. They have budget constraints. EDIT: Regardless, the Ricketts suck and I know we can all agree on that. While they don't have as much money as the other owners, let's not pretend that ANYONE who owns a professional sports team doesn't have enough money to pay anyone. They're all ridiculously rich. They just don't want to cut into their profit margin, just like every other rich bastard in this country. Yep. Oakland's owner was worth $2.2b in 2015. Rays owner, per google, is worth $800m. Everyone plays this game, ours just do it in a much more explicitly garbage way.

The Cubs don’t have budget constraints. They’re choosing not to spend money. There’s a big difference there. We’re splitting hairs right? Ownership directives is a budget constraint to me. I try to do whatever I can to remove them from the equation.