squally1313

I don’t think it’s “really, really bad.” Hendricks and Stroman should combine for 6+ WAR, he’s hurt but once Miley is healthy he’s probably good for 1-2 WAR, Mills/Smyly probably add another 1-2 WAR, then if we can get anything out of one of the young guys (Keegan, Kilian, Steele, etc) it’s a decent enough rotation. Not super high end/ceiling but there’s enough there for it to be middle of the pack like ~10 WAR 15thish in the league. Nothing to be excited about and they should’ve done more but I can see the rotation being decent enough and I have faith the bullpen will be plenty good. Setting aside the 6+ WAR prediction for Stroman/Hendricks (which I'm skeptical amount), the issue with the Miley/Smyly/Mills predictions is that the only way they put up that kind of production is just through volume. Their whole skill set is just 'mediocre when healthy'. There's almost no chance that one of them pops into some sort of top 30 starter in the league. And yes, I know Miley had his best year in 9 years last year and ended up at #30 for fWAR, but he's already hurt. To TTs point, sure, a couple of Hendricks/name your offensive dude might pop up to 3 WARish, and by June you might figure out which guys are 1.5 win guys and which guys are terrible, but I don't see any 4.5+ guys. If you could run the numbers and strip out the worthless players and throw a roster of 80% 1.5 guys and 20% 3-3.5 guys, great, that would be boringly effective in a crappy division. But you can't, and we'll basically just be doing the bullpen experiment everyone loves where by the end of the season we have terrible overall numbers but we've 'finally found a good mix'....but with the whole roster.

FG position power rankings: Catcher: 13th (and the player most likely to be traded!) First base: 24th Second base: 17th Shortstop: 24th Third Base: 26th Left Field: 15th Center Field: 21st Right Field: 6th DH: 24th This is the good part of the team! It's Seiya and....??? Bullpen: 23rd Starters should come out tomorrow. Just wall to wall depressing, with all of one exception.

I feel like when people talk optimistically about the team, relatively, it's about how the offense is built to be that high floor/low ceiling mix that is theoretically attractive coming less than a year after tearing down the old guard. But the starting rotation is really, really bad, and I don't know what the optimistic view point is there. Yeah we have a lot of bullpen arms and maybe eventually after we weed out all the bad ones we might end up with a decent mix, but they are going to be worked to the bone on non-Stroman days. And even then, the path to 'contention' is mostly paved with 'look how bad the rest of the division is! plus maybe Burnes gets hurt like most pitchers do!' It's just not at all exciting. Thank god for Wrigley.

This doesn't really belong here, but just occurred to me...is Hendricks going to go down, performance wise, as a Jon Lester-lite? Obviously their personalities couldn't be much different, but could definitely see the tail of his career look a lot like Lester's.

IIRC Ohtani was an absolute train wreck his first spring training, so if I understand the timing correctly Suzuki will be the 2025 NL MVP. With a 3.18 ERA?? Sign me up!

Unfortunately, yes. Whatever small value I place on clubhouse dude, mentor to the guys trying to break out, etc, it's pretty much all erased by his pretty clear views on the vaccine, and there are very clearly real world and team implications to those. Sorry Jason, you used to be pretty cool and you used to be good at baseball before you got here. Bye. Edit: But also, PTR seems like the type to hate a completely sunk cost, and also all the grumbling about how low the payroll is will get a lot louder if we cut our highest paid player, so there are those dumb reasons for keeping him around.

The development of Davis is more important than pretty much everything else I'm going to mention here on a macro level, but this is still a team with probably a not very significant chance of contending this year, with a lot of pieces on the roster who may or may not have value going forward, and they need PAs to determine those paths. To the extent that there is anything to learn at AAA, Davis can still learn it, with a baseline of it being a confidence boost. You bring him up on opening day, you suddenly have 2 outfield spots pretty much written in ink before even getting to Ian Happ and then getting to the random assortment of junk that may have value/excess middle infielders/etc. Send him to AAA, give us something to get excited about when we're 21-32 in two months.

vs Cubs, career: .295/.396/.609 1.004 OPS vs Reds, career: .343/.423/.626 1.049 OPS vs Brewers: .325/.420/.604 1.024 OPS vs Pitt .358/.444/.664 1.108 OPS He was just terrifying, to everyone, all the time, back then. Wasn't just an us thing. But also, yes, given our pitching staff, probably.

First thought is that Vooch's value is bringing a big defender out to the perimeter to open up the lane for the guards to drive. Totally agree he hurts you on the other end outside of soaking up rebounds, but Vooch's ability (or at least threat) on the PnR definitely gives more options than someone like Thompson just crashing the lane.

They signed Josh Harrison and Joe Kelly but I don't think they've done anything major. Based on what I'm seeing on twitter they're pretty pissed about it. Edit: And I forgot Graveman before the lockout They also went to arbitration with Giolito over, supposedly, $50k.

Play the 10th inning and if you're still tied, one batter starts with a 1-0 count, if he reaches base his team wins, if not they lose. Home team can pick which side they want.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/top-49-prospects-chicago-cubs-2/ The Cubs have 8 teenagers who are a 45 (a Generic Team's Top 10) caliber or better, and 4 of those are 50's (Top 100 Caliber). No other team FG has done so far has more than 4. Like I get that you wanna complain, nothing from the last 3-4 years makes that unreasonable, but you don't have to pull things out of your ass to complain about? Fine, I'll slightly modify my point. I assume that the other sites who are putting the Cubs somewhere around the middle of the pack aren't just ignoring the lower levels of the minors. That would be pretty ridiculous as they aren't 'AA/AAA Rankings'. So it stands to reason that what they are doing is more heavily discounting the future success of those lower level guys than FG is. Given attrition rates and frankly, our success level at producing talent outside of top 10 overall draft picks (read: terrible), I'm going to side with them. And that's ignoring the fact that an FV of 45 means that these dudes project to, eventually, become the next Hoerner/Madrigal/etc level players of the 2025 Cubs. Yay.

Other teams have young/raw prospects too, guys. "Well yeah, it's average now, but a couple of these young players will hopefully get better at baseball, and meanwhile the other 29 teams will just...pass on developing their young talent? and voila, top 5 system!"

To echo, isn't this built in to the rankings all those websites do? People are acting like everyone just ignores the lower levels, when in reality they're just (correctly) discounting the potential down there because baseball is hard and most prospects fail, and the further away you are from the majors, the more chance you have to fail.

Now do our rotation.

Also, there were choices made to target a bunch of 13 year olds in trades and in the draft. The major league team has been treading water, at best, for two years now, and people are pumped because maybe next year the professional prospect ranking people will finally see all these teenagers as actual baseball players and give us the honor of having a top 10 farm system, which, as we all know, actually does nothing in terms of what goes on at Wrigley.

ZiPS says around 80: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jonathan-villar-joins-the-cubs-as-their-newest-jack-of-all-trades/ You're not wrong about the projections, but forgive me for not heaping extra credit on the organization because the Reds decided to do a bunch of stuff that bumped our projected record against them from 11-11 to 15-7.

They're the high mark, everyone else is largely in the teens. So....no.

(Looks around at a locker room with: 31 year old Ryan Carpenter 31 year old Tyler Johnson 33 year old Toews 29 year old Brett Connolly 33 year old Kane 30(!!) year old Eric Gustafsson 28 year olds Jake McCabe/Connor Murphy 30 year old Calvin de Haan 37 year old Fleury Decides to trade the 23 year old) I know, oversimplifying. But christ, this doesn't really feel like a step forward.

You’re starting to wander from the generic homer schtick into Sulley territory here, and that’s not good for anybody. As I was writing thought I should have added "the following is tongue in cheek..." nevertheless, I believe the Illini have good chance tonight. Given how inconsistent and mistake prone they've been coupled with that crappy game in the BTT its understandable Chattanooga is a trendy upset pick. As someone who has a lot Illinois alum family members, and thus a natural tendency to want bad things to happen to the team...I'm pretty confident in an Illinois blowout today.

I made a point to try and keep up on as much as I could this week, because I'm pretty sure if I didn't, baseball would fall into the NHL group of "no idea who plays for who" and I would never really get it back.

I know very little about basketball, but it seems like we've reached the level where we're good enough that all the top teams are going to give us a full effort (yay?) and usually win, but not good enough that the bad teams just completely mail in a 30 point loss. A few weeks ago it was getting Zach, Caruso, and Lonzo healthy. Now it looks like this is the Zach we're going to get, and not sure if you can much more than that about Caruso. Putting a lot on Lonzo coming back all of a sudden (as the miles pile up on Demar).

One promising thing I saw this morning was that his plate discipline is better than recent imports. https://www.prospectslive.com/prospects-live/2021/10/22/seiya-suzuki-a-deep-dive-on-the-next-big-thing-out-of-japan That article also has glowing things to say about his build, athleticism, and bat speed, so hopefully he's more Ohtani than Shogo. He's coming over with more of his prime in front of him than the non-Ohtani guys, which certainly helps on that front too. This kinda screams Fukudome right? Which, for the contract, it's a good signing. But worried they're going to point to this guy as the marquee signing of the offseason when he kinda just looks like...another Ian Happ?

It was a fun stretch when they looked like they might be able to achieve more than being the next regular season all star bulls team. But hey, im sure our 34 year old star will probably stay healthy next year after carrying this team for 90 games.

Just start the innings with the bases loaded if you're going to do it this way.