squally1313
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Everything posted by squally1313
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Astros (Teng) vs Cubs (Rea): 5/23/26, 1:20pm
squally1313 replied to Brandon Glick's topic in Fred Hornkohl Game Thread Forum
(Our bad pitchers pitch badly) what if we switch the batting order up and also maybe execute Ian Happ -
It’s always Happ and Swanson though, isn’t it? they had a day off yesterday. Whatever arguments you can make about a breather helping is countered by the concept of needing to see continued PAs. We also want to win baseball games and the guys that are playing are pretty definitely the best options compared to the alternatives. Did we bench Michael Busch for multiple games?
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Kevin alcantara is still a cub because A. Jed is overly risk averse and B. PCA has an injury prone profile, and he can moonlight as a worse version of PCA. Him playing corner outfield in the major leagues is a lot like playing Matt Shaw out there. You’re wasting his best talent (good defense at a premium position) and he can’t hit nearly good enough to justify the spot. But Matt Shaw is probably a better hitter.
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Yeah we should bench the 123 wRC guy because of his 33.0% strikeout rate. That’s just too many strikeouts. In his place, let’s bring up the guy who has a 33.3% strikeout rate against significantly worse pitching. This is smart decision making.
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There’s some monkey paw horsefeathers about the 2025 cubs refusing to get swept and winning 5.5 of every 10 games and people complaining about the competent mediocrity and then them doing this so far this year.
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We need to keep him around to be a backup infielder in case of injury??? Have you seen our rotation?
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I can find them just fine, taking advantage of them is a different story am I right fellas
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-1 outs above average in 1040 innings at third. Are you talking about trading someone else? also like, that article implies heavily that we’d need to beat out preller and Friedman being irrational. That goes both ways right? ‘Hey everyone, we’re trading Matt Shaw for two months of skubal. Does anyone want to offer anything better? He’s valuable-ish but we have no real use for him’
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Yeah I struggle to think of a trading partner where the other team gives up a piece that noticeably improves our team and also has multiple years of control and all they get back is a league average hitter (generously) with positional flexibility. If he can get you a needle mover, even if it's a 10 week needle mover, this is the time/year to do it.
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https://fansided.com/mlb/mlb-insider-what-could-the-detroit-tigers-get-in-a-tarik-skubal-trade
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Come on man. 29-21 without Steele. 26-17 without Horton. Cabrera has a blister. You will find no bigger ally on ‘the pitching staff is a disaster’ than me, but it’s been a disaster and we’re on a 94 win pace a third of the way through the year. The offense/defense combo is really, really good. If you’re going to say we played like the worst team in the NL for 27 games (probably statistically true) then you also have to say we played like the best team in baseball history for the other 23. The solution to the problems of a 29-21 team are right in front of everyone. For what it’s worth, we’re +380 to miss the playoffs. We’re (slight) betting favorites to win the division, even though we’re apparently cursed by beer cheese or whatever.
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The padres/brewers were projected to be good teams and have so far played above projections through a third of the season. If you only look at the games they lost though, they’re actually pretty terrible, so maybe we should look to see who they might be selling.
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Is it really a huge assumption though
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This is maybe over generalizing here, but everything discussed above is simultaneously valid evidence for why we’re only 9 games over 500 through 50 games and not, say, 11 or 12 games over, and good, predictive signs that we’ll score more runs in those situations in the future.
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I don't really care about 'shaking things up' and don't really see any point in yanking people up and down over sample sizes of 2-3 weeks. That being said, the best hitters on your team, based on large sample sizes, are Busch, Suzuki, Bregman, and Happ, and they should get more PAs than anyone else (setting aside handedness concerns).
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I was surprised that he's only had 24 PAs in May. That seems low after his start but....that's why he's the 10th man. The numbers in those 24 PAs are really bad (045/125/045), which I think is a combination of: BABIP, it being really hard to hit in limited opportunities, and him being a career 93 wRC, .301 wOBA/.301 xwOBA hitter. On the last point, obviously you shouldn't expect him to hit .045, but it justifies his current position as the odd man out because there are 9 guys on the roster (besides Conforto, whatever is going on there) that are better hitters than he is.
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Yeah theoretically there's no reason why a team can't rip off two ten game win streaks and then also win 5.86 (95 win pace divided by 162) of every 10 games besides that. But....there's not a lot of teams that have won 103 games in a season, so at some point you have to realize that's just, based on mountains and mountains of data, not how it works.
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I just refuse to believe that 11 games after a 20-3 stretch that there are legitimate concerns about the overall viability of the team. We need pitching, always have, to get to an elite level. But that hasn’t much changed over the entirety of the 29-21 stretch.
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It’s may. We’re on a 94 win pace.
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Yep. Team built to win 90+ games hits the 50 game mark at a 94 win pace. Brewers put up a 6 game losing streak and a 4 game losing streak in April, but those were different because Jed is (insert your favorite offensive insult that no reasonable adult uses anymore), especially compared to the Gods Amongsr Us in the Milwaukee front office.
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You’re acting like we emptied the farm system for a guy who everyone else thought was an ace. Owen Caissie sucks out loud, Cabrera has been who he’s always been. But hey, congrats on your stellar call or whatever.
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You’re taking a victory lap on him being a mental ****** after he watched his team commit three errors and give up a little league home run and then get hurt? You sure you want to play this card now?
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He hasn’t been good. The other options are way worse.
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You called out specific scenarios/individual at bats. There are 9 guys in a lineup, you can't pick who is going to come up in a key situation. One guy doesn't solve a (hypothetical) overall problem. Corbin Carroll in the three hole doesn't solve Dansby striking out with the 5 and 6 hole hitters on base. Carroll would replace Happ(?), per FG would give you an extra 1.5 wins the rest of the year. A theoretically healthy Tarik Skubal (using Christopher Sanchez's ROS projections) gets you an extra 3 wins over Taillon, who has been simultaneously healthy and terrible this year. Since the beginning of 2024, the Cubs are 4th in offensive fWAR, 6th in wRC, 2nd in defense, 10th in slug. Over that stretch, we're 21st in pitching, 11th in ERA, which follows that the ERA is propped up by the defense. Obviously in a fictional Corbin Carroll world the defense is fine, but it seems significantly easier and more productive to fix the pitching.
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But like, we both know that's not how baseball works. Are we keeping this superstar on the bench until the highest leverage moment of the game? Do elite hitters come through more than roughly 35% of the time in clutch situations? Are our current hitters (so far) performing worse in those situations because there isn't some elite hitter on the bench watching them? In 2025 in FG defined high leverage situation, we had the 3rd highest wRC in baseball. 111 vs 110 in all situations. So far in 2026 we're 17th in high leverage (101) vs 4th overall (112). You keep mentioning, not incorrectly, that it's basically running back the same lineup. They were fine last year in those spots. Do you think they just got worse? Or do you think we're talking about a pretty small sample size so far this year and we would be better off assuming it will come back closer in line to how they are hitting in every other situation?
