squally1313

You have your hands full defending his .6 war, 52nd of war ranking, 12th on the cub and 7th among cub position players. Oh, and his defensive war of - 3.6. I’ll let you chew on that for a while. I could care less about yet another meaningless solo homer by one of the most overrated players in baseball. Clouding the issue with stat overload, nerd. Go check out his dong today.

Did he not see all the defenders on the right side?

Oh shoot, he pulled another ball in the air just now. What about all the defenders over there???

[bbvideo=560,315] [/bbvideo]One or a handful of at bats doesn’t change anything. His overall approach is to pull everything and to lift everything including when runners are in scoring position or when the pitch is outside or when there are eight guys right of second Schwarber: 40.9% Pull %, 41.8% fly ball %, 6.6% infield fly ball %, 48.4% total fly ball % Rizzo: 43.9% Pull %, 35.8% fly ball %, 9.8% infield fly ball %, 45.6% total fly ball % Before you move the goal posts to strike out rate, I assume you want to trash Rizzo's batted ball profile too?

I like how he has to anecdotally point to one game he watched 'the other day', as if other than that one inning, the Cubs purposely try to not get hits. As opposed to, you know, the sheer statistical improbability of stringing five or six hits in a row.

I know I'm pretty damn bleak on this team, but Baez and Contreras are two pretty gigantic "other than's." Out of the rest of them named, it seems like a lot of that is just baseball being baseball; most prospects are simply not going to amount to much than being Just Guys. It's frustrating for sure that either Russell or Schwarber, as highly touted as they were, haven't amounted to more, but 2 all stars out of 7 guys is pretty damn good. Giving credit where credit is due: this. "lol man it sucks all we did we develop two guys who compete to be the best C and SS/2B in the game" Also, "since 2016" conveniently leaves out trading for Rizzo after he had a .523 OPS in 150 MLB PAs, and then a .742 OPS in his first full season for the Cubs, and then Hendricks too. It's disappointing that we haven't too much come out of the system since 2016, but that's a product of having late draft picks, trading away talent for immediate help, etc.

Schwarber, Bryant, Rizzo, Baez, Heyward, garbage catcher, garbage right fielder, garbage second baseman It's a shame Bote has gotten BABIPed to death this month...he needs to be starting every day with this current roster.

I know there's less than no point in engaging here...I just really love that video.

He doesn’t defeat the shift because he has no interest in doing so which fits in with the rest of the launch angle club. In Kyle’s case, he thinks 2b is the foul line. [bbvideo=560,315] [/bbvideo]

I'd throw Bote onto the first mix too. From what I remember reading a couple years ago, aging curves have kinda shifted to the left in the last 5-10 years...more and more, players are coming up as pretty fully formed, and are peaking really early into their MLB career as opposed to their late 20s, as had typically been the belief.

I'm on team 'there's no such thing as bad hitting', but you may be on to something considering the best player in our line up hasn't batted in the top 3 once this year, which has probably led to a lot of garbage ABs with him in a scoring position. Then again, if you change the metric to hitting with guys on base, we have the 5th highest wRC and the best OBP in the league. Given that, I can't really see how it's anything but luck. Unless this is totally line up driven (KB and Rizzo walk a ton, so Baez and Contreras come up with a guy on, but not in scoring position, then by the time people get to scoring position, you're left with the Almoras of the world). But you would think that would be a league wide issue, not just a Cubs thing.

Schwarber walk, Almora 6-4-3 (first pitch), KB strike out (just to let Cubs twitter go wild)

Contreras to somewhere in the top 3 of the lineup, please.

They're correct takes, just look at the splits He has a 1.036 OPS with men on base. .938 OPS with 2 outs and RISP .923 OPS in 1-run games .915 in 2 or less run games .943 in 3 or less run games .800 in 4 or more run games .947 when winning .905 when tied .891 when trailing

Excited for the best people on here to throw out that KB home run in any future argument about how much he sucks.

Yes, with a runner on first and no outs in the FIRST horsefeathering INNING, let's definitely have Kris "I won an MVP" Bryant modify his approach to, best case scenario, see Almora struggle to go from first to third.

We got a very cut rate version of Hammer for essentially nothing. Are we better now than we were before? Sure. I'd put Murphy and still Keith ahead of him, but yeah, he's instantly our third best Dman. He played third pairing most of the time last year, but Carolina had a really solid top 4, so it's not necessarily an indictment. But this is a guy who absolutely tops out as a second pairing guy. We definitely need second pairing guys. But this is picking up Howie Kendrick, not Rendon.

Sounds like Kimbrel has left Iowa. Given the timing, probably makes it more likely it's for Alzolay right?

At the risk of sounding like a PTR defender...they already bolstered the bullpen, and they did it with straight cash. Sure it took too long, but they acted better than all the other contenders out there (the definition of faint praise). I think the decline, if you can call it that, was A. an inevitable (and part of any successful run), especially with the newer research saying most players come into the league essentially fully formed and just go downhill from there, and B. sped up by Heyward/Chatwood/Darvish more or less blowing up in their faces from the second the ink hit the paper. Heyward has been about 9 wins below a 4 WAR/season projection (conservative), Chatwood about 3 wins (-0.7 so far, would think about 2.3 for 1.5 seasons is fair), and Darvish about 4 (0.6 so far vs a conservative 3 WAR/season). That's money gone, and it's playing time taken up by formerly successful players who haven't performed to expectations. While I certainly expect Theo to know way more about this than I do, it's hard for me to criticize those signings because I liked them at the time. While the theoretical solution to this is taking more of the Ricketts clearly endless money to remake these holes in the roster, in reality we all know it's hard for any team to overcome three signings that backfired that badly. They weren't trying to settle for a putrid bench. Descalso was by all measures an upgrade on LaStella, and Bote was supposed to be the new Zobrist, not someone who needs to be playing every day. Benches are a crap shoot anyways, so I'm not going to hold someone to the fire for that. This thinness in the offense is in large part due to the position we've been in the last few years (and a disappointing failure to produce high velocity bullpen arms that other teams seem to find with ease). Vogelbach and Torres (and McKinney, who made it, but has been garbage) in 2016. Soler, Eloy, and Candelario in 2017. We've been trading future for present for 4 years now...and now we're in the future. It's just how this works.

Someone start this thread so I can appropriately express my rage and disbelief at Albert Almora batting lead off

But the Cubs were what the Yankees/Astros/Dodgers are now. Their kids came up and dominated and they hit on veteran players to complement that perfectly (and their pitching was 3 years younger and better). We struck gold with Dexter, and Zobrist as a happily married dude in his mid-30s is a lot different than current Zobrist...but you had to commit to current Zobrist to get 2016 Zobrist (just as you had to commit to current Lester to get 2016 Lester). We've averaged 96.75 wins the last four seasons. Houston is on year 3...if they're still throwing up 100+ wins in 2021, I'll be very impressed. The Dodgers have won 90+ games for 6 years in a row, and it will be 7, but we have what they don't. The Yankees have made the playoffs the last two years, but before that they were non-competitive to the extent that they got to reload by being sellers. It's really hard to do this for an extended period of time. Yes I wish our payroll was higher or that we could have picked up a Michael Brantley (doing an eerie Dexter Fowler impression) or whoever else. We didn't, and it's almost July now, so I'm tired of talking about it (not to mention the fact that we made the biggest in season acquisition thus far). We're in first place, and our offense is 8th in oWAR. The Astros went into the year with 35 year olds Yuli Gurriel (1.2 WAR in 2018) and Robinson Chirinos (0 WAR in 2018) penciled in the starting line up. I guess they should be ripped apart for settling at those positions too, right?

Keep it up, Rumpelstiltskin. I'm hardly the only one here talking about how many black holes the Cubs have in the line up. The plan was for Schwarber to be the 5th good hitter, because he was last year (115 wRC), and for Heyward to be an average hitter, like he was last year (99 wRC). Instead Heyward has been a 5th good hitter (108 wRC), and Schwarber has been the average hitter (100 wRC). Again, neither of these are 'black holes', the term you continue to use. And we haven't even mentioned David Bote (108 wRC), who was a career minor leaguer until a couple years ago, so credit should be due for that. Theo put together a truly horrendous bench, and we've had to pay for that with Zobrist out in the form of giving Almora/Descalso/CarGo/Zagunis/Russell semi-regular starts (and having put up a .540 OPS in team pinch hitting so far this year). But one bad spot in the lineup, due largely to totally unforeseen circumstances, and a terrible bench, does not make the offense or the team terrible. A hypothetical lineup featuring Schwarber/Heyward/KB, Bote/Baez/Zobrist/Rizzo, Contreras, given what we know of those players, is 8 hitters who are league average at worst, and has at least 3, probably 4 elite bats there. That is still a possibility come October (though who knows what you get out of Zobrist at that point).

We do this like once a week now. Sofa claims, repeatedly, that outside of 4 players the entire team is garbage (and sometimes even those four players are garbage too). We show why that's wrong, and then it turns into rehashing the terrible offseason that we all agree on, so...he wins? I know it's a bit at this point, but still gets annoying considering this started as a reasonable discussion about hitting with RISP.

That's fair, and I essentially agree with the last 75% of your post. Being fully aware this is the lamest possible hill to die on, I just don't want to throw out the (probably slim) chance that Brach (3.60 FIP, 1.49 in June) or Kintzler (2.18 ERA, 3.85 FIP) can play a reliable part down the stretch as a 4th-6th inning guy to get the marginal upgrade, at best, of Alzolay over Monty/Chatwood for a start or two.

Our better starters are all fragile/volatile and half the bullpen arms are trash. So, what exactly is the downside? Pitching our better starters less? If one of them gets hurt, absolutely let Alzolay go every 5th day. Adding a 6th fragile/volatile starter, who, again, didn't pitch that well in his 9 innings here so far, is something you do with a huge lead, not in our current situation. And I agree that our bullpen pitchers are pretty trash. They still have to pitch. Putting in a 6 man rotation, and keeping Monty/Chatwood around (see below), means you have 5 other relievers, and your best one just started pitching about a week ago. Your second best one has been fighting injuries the past few weeks. Your third best one, we've been complaining he's been overworked for the last year and a half. From above: If they want to just dump Chatwood and give that job to Alzolay, I'm totally ok with that. But given PTR, seems highly doubtful.