squally1313

Wasn't CJ supposed to pitch sometime around now?

Maybe. But 1) Javy's got almost 400 AAA PAs 2) If they call him up soon, you are getting most of the "free" year still 3) The scouting reports have been pretty good on him lately 4) They sure do seem to be shoving Alcantara to CF pretty hard 5) Javy's changed positions, which is something you don't really need to do if promotion is still 9.5 months away 6) They just DFA'd the ostensible "starting" 2b and opened up a 40-man spot Maybe they want to get the "adjustment" period underway to help our chances in 2015. 1/3) Absolutely, Javy is getting very close to being ready 2) Unless you keep him down until June next year(defeating the whole purpose), you're losing a year of team control. 4) With Bonifacio on the roster that doesn't necessarily mean there's an opening at 2B. Also, Alcantara has 2 MLB games and 11 MiLB games in the outfield. 5) It's something you want to do to get a guy familiar with his future home if he's ~50 games and a ST away from being the MLB 2B too 6) The roster spot is for Bonifacio(or Alcantara depending on your perspective), they still need to send someone down tomorrow just so there's a 5th starter. Maybe they bring up Baez, but to me the service time reason overshadows all the others. There's no benefit to forfeiting an entire year of service time at this point, he hasn't so thoroughly mastered AAA to think it's at all needed to bring him up to advance his development. I think Kyle's last, unnumbered point deserves some consideration as well. With Alcantara already up, Soler having no contract concerns, and Bryant being seemingly ready, we're looking at having that first wave all be here next year. If they think we can compete next year with those guys and the money we have, maybe they think it's worth it to avoid having Javy's adjustment period (if that's an actual thing) take place in the first 2 months of next year.

Underwood six scoreless so far.

On Fangraphs, if you hover over the Search box, they'll show you a list of the top 10 most searched players in major and minor league baseball. This morning, the Cubs had 9 of the 10 for the minor leagues. 1. Russell 2. Bryant 3. Baez 4. Alcontra 5. Wada 6. Schwarber 7. McKinney 8. Joey Gallo 9. Soler 10. Almora

No offense, but....no. We're not going to outmuscle the Blues. We need to put someone with Kane who can keep up, and hope Toews continues his dominance of Backes. Most importantly, we're going to need big games from our D. Blues forecheck is nasty, but they go for the hit and leave gaps to exploit. The D, Hammer and Oduya especially, need to be willing to take that hit to get the puck out. Forwards staying deep to help out will help that.

Now that totally sounds like the kind of move we make at the deadline. How many bottom six guys do we need? Kruger has turned himself into a good faceoff guy, and then we've got Shaw and Regin already that can slot there. Yeah, you move Shaw back to wing, turn Kruger into 3C, and make Malhotra your John Madden, but that makes the Regin deal pretty irrelevant.

I keep coming back to Bickell, Teuvo, and some combination of picks. We'd need to throw in some other NHLer to make the money work. Unfortunately, I can't see someone like Tortorella having a lot of interest in a player like Teuvo. He'd probably love Kruger, but we're pretty thin at center as it is (and we'd need to throw more in if that was the case).

Carlos Martinez's Twitter follows are....interesting. https://twitter.com/Tsunamy27/following

And dingers! I admit I did fail to include that 'minor' detail. Honest question though (and not meant as a rebuttal). How much more valuable is a 28% K rate/30 HR profile vs 15% K rate/15 HR profile?

Castro doesn't make over $10m for 4 more years. If he rebounds to a 3-4 win shortstop, he goes back to being one of the best values in baseball. And he's 23 for another 2 months. I need more than minor league stats and 200 MLB PAs from Bryant and Baez to get rid of him. And let's keep Javy and KB's K and BB rates in mind before bringing up Starlin's offensive approach. They basically match what Starlin did, with more strikeouts.

It wouldn't be about 60 at bats in March. So it'd be about the last 400 PAs with the Rangers and Cubs AAA teams (.745 OPS with the Rangers, .207 BAPIP with the Cubs) completely overshadowing the prior 1,000 MILB PAs? Even with a widely reported medical issue going on? Look, maybe his eyes/head will never be normal again, and if that's the case, that sucks for him. But that's something the medical team has to decide, not Theo looking at him for 3 weeks next month and declaring him broken. If he's healthy...he needs to have a shot somewhere. The upside is too high.

He's 25 years old and this team sucks. If he can't make it, he's not going anywhere. Throw him in AAA and let him find ABs where he can, but there's no reason to worry about a logjam. I'm not ready to write off his career because he has 60 bad at bats in Arizona in March. Yeah he's 25, but it's not like he's running out of service time. He put up better numbers than Rizzo at every stop until AAA. Maybe last year was caused by his eye issues, maybe he actually sucks. But if he says it's not an issue now, so give him a few hundred at bats somewhere before making him a AAAA player. Cut 33 year old Ryan Roberts, have Watkins back up the middle infield for a few months (Barney can play SS in a pinch, and hopefully by July everyone makes room for Javy and Arismendy).

You almost have to wonder if he switched Johnson and Edwards because they had an interview lined up with Johnson that's running today as well. I haven't seen many people besides him put Johnson ahead of Edwards. But yeah, pretty dull rankings. The Steamer projections were even weirder (nice BAPIPs).

If you're being sarcastic, stop. If you're being serious, stop.

[expletive] me too. WTF happened? Jets D is so suspect. Pretty much. Plus terrible goaltending. In order, Hammer on a rocket off the draw, Bollig keeps it on a 2v1 off a bad pinch, Sharp puts away a breakaway, and Leddy put one through about 6 screens.

Was sitting at Emmit's last night around 10:30...probably 15 people in the bar. Guy walks in with a huge trunk, pulls out the Cup. Was there till close, never more than 50 people in the bar. Turned out one of the official handlers loves that bar....he probably downed about 12 Guinnesses. Randomly one of the best nights of my life.

That's some really simple math that you're asking help with here... 364 now, give him 370 at the end of the year. Bonds has 762, so 39.2 for 10 years to tie the record.

i hope that rizzo singles bryant home and vogelbach is playing for some american league organization that traded us a really good starting pitcher. That would be even better... I know it's irrational, but after seeing Vogelbach's bat flip a few weeks ago, having him and Baez on the same infield would be incredibly entertaining. Edit: Or batting 3-4 in the batting order.

AJ got ejected for arguing after the 1 walk. I guess the 2-2 pitch was borderline and AJ started to head to the dugout.

AJ got ejected for arguing after the 1 walk. I guess the 2-2 pitch was borderline and AJ started to head to the dugout.

Yeah I was just going to post that. Didn't look at all of them in too much detail, but the Cubs team was by far the worst I saw on there. Here's your starters: Catcher: Soto 1B: Vitters 2B: Barney SS: Castro 3B: Donaldson OF: Lake, Colvin, Fuld Jesus Christ.

Also Iowa's last game is September 2nd, so...

#marmol'd

This may be a different conversation altogether, but I was discussing this with a friend the other day. Given how the current focus for every major league is taking advantage of those cost controlled years when the player first enters the major leagues, couldn't it be seen as an advantage to have those cost controlled years be from ages 23-28 rather than ages 21-26? The obvious counterpoint is that it pushes back the time spent adjusting to the speed/skill/etc of major league baseball, but there are some benefits to having a player locked down for cheap while he's at his physical (and historically skill-level) peak. The conversation with my friend ended with me wondering if that's playing into the "one level at a time" strategy that Theo/Jed are seemingly employing.

Doing some quick math on what his contract ended up looking like... He's owed $19M next year, and (let's say) $8M the rest of this year. Let's say we pick up $20M of that contract. That means, in total, we paid Soriano $129M (136-7). According to Fangraphs, Sori has been worth 19.0 WAR throughout his career as a Cub. Works out to about $6.8M per win. Obviously it's above what we should be paying, and we didn't accomplish anything while he was here, but I don't think it ended up being the total disaster that the average fan believes it is.