squally1313

It is pertinent because we're comparing hypothetical 2026 production per dollar to what we got in 2025. Yeah, it would cost you more to retain Tucker's 2026 performance, but losing it is still a downgrade in terms of actual output. And you need to spend more money or trade capital to make up the difference. The actual equation is Caissie plus whatever they do with $16m vs Tucker and whoever/whoevers that $16m replaces. We didn't have a lot of black holes last year, so you're going to be losing some additional 2025 production on top of Tucker in this scenario.

Aggregating war from multiple spots to replace one guy is not a strategy you want to indulge in very often, and I think you’re going to struggle to find someone at $16m to pair with Caissie that matches tuckers production anyways.

1. Matt Shaw had a 130 wRC in the second half, but the related .354 wOBA was paired with a .309 xwOBA. Still above league average for 3B, but let's not pretend there isn't room for improvement here. 2. I don't think it's a lock that Caissie or Ballesteros will be better hitters than Shaw, as laid out by OO above, but that says more about Caissie and Ballesteros (negatively) than it does about Shaw (positively). Hitting at a young player in the majors is really hard. 3. Matt Shaw as a .309 wOBA third baseman still contributes a lot to a baseball team's success. The defense looks to be there (though the metrics aren't), the baserunning is good, it's a good package. We know that, other teams know that (and can see his team control). League average ish hitting infielder with good/elite defense and good/elite baserunning....sound familiar? I think his roster/starting spot represents, along with the DH/RF spot, a chance to steer away from the glove first value and towards just getting the best, MLB-ready bat possible, partly because I don't see Shaw, Caissie, or Ballesteros as high quality 2026 MLB hitters, and partially because those guys represent the best chance we have to supplement pitching outside of the free agent market that is already down the top starter and the top few relievers. 4. Matt Shaw sucks personally. Most of these guys do, and he sucks in a (to me) more acceptable way than like, Addison Russell or Aroldis Chapman suck. But he also sucks very publicly and so if he wants to go skip games for midterm rallies, I'd be fine with him doing it for another team.

Or rename it the offseason general discussion thread?

Farfetched attempt at staying on topic: Um, you know who would be cool for Shota to pitch to in the event that we needed an emergency third catcher? Willson Contreras! Anyways, reports are out that he's willing to waive his NTC. Two years, $35m left on his deal. .344 wOBA, .358 xwOBA, 124 wRC, 142 wRC against LHP, makes him the perfect Busch platoon/DH and frees up the AAA hitters to become trade bait as we watch the market sign all the free agent pitchers. Bring him home. (Separately, I vaguely understand the business model case against megathreads but feel like it definitely drives down overall activity here.)

I was scrolling pretty quick but pretty sure he was talking about Ben Brown (you know, it’s hard to tell sometimes without a general discussion thread, nudge nudge)

I thought the question was why Busch was worth less offensive runs than Tucker even though he had a higher wRC in essentially equivalent PAs. Could be wrong though.

Go sign a hitter, trade for a pitcher, and start telling Ben Brown, Javier Assad, and Jordan Wicks to see how hard they can throw in 20 pitch spurts. Or just sign Cease, I guess. But feel like I like the Imai option a little less than I did before Shota resigned, which sounds racist but really just more I want to avoid the uncertainty of a pitcher new to MLB now that we more definitively need a top end guy.

Baserunning, if you're looking at Fangraphs. 25 SBs for Tucker to Busch's 4 is the main driver I would assume, but know the metric goes into more depth than that.

If you combine Busch's 2023 and 2024 you end up with a 109 wRC which is about where I fall out for him. Plays up in a corner outfield spot though.

I can't see a scenario where we sign the top arm, and then sign a top bat that basically blocks the valuable group of Caissie/Ballesteros/Alcantara. It's too much money to throw at over 30 players. You can dump the money on pitching and turn Caissie/Ballesteros loose, or you can sign a top hitter and then use your blocked MLB ready hitters to pick up a pitcher. But can't see them committing $55m-$60m in free agency money and then still having to buy a bullpen. Having said that, I'd be thrilled. I'm feeling irrational enough at the moment to get a Schwarber or Alonso and then blow away the Tigers with Caissie/Ballesteros/Alcantara/Long....maybe even Shaw for Skubal.

This whole proposal is kinda the definition of a hedging plan, no?

I mean, this is a pretty impressive performance when you consider what the pitching staff was made up of during the year. Shota and Taillon were free agents at market rates but far from considered elite pitchers, the rest was a guy with 40 innings last year, internal development, and relievers in their late 30s. I agree with you that of the big names, the pitchers are more likely to hold/meet their value. But I also think Hoyer and Hottovy have proven that they can get outsize value from their (generally mid tier) pitching targets, so between that and freeing up trade capital on the offensive side to expand their pitching options trade wise, I'm more ok with overpaying for a big bat, because I think this offense is short one.

Fair. Regardless, losing a .363 wOBA/.382 xwOBA hitter is going to hurt. To paint with an overly broad brush, three of these hitters have career wRCs below 100. Strides have been made, yes, progress isn't linear, yes, but it's not like PCA and Shaw ended the season on a positive note, and the advanced metrics didn't love Amaya's 103 PAs this year. That doesn't make them bad players, but I worry we're making too much of the airplane out of .730 OPS guys with good gloves. I think, to make this sound more optimistic, the Cubs have had some success bargain hunting for pitchers, but their attempts to find bargain rate hitters has been largely a disaster. The offense is above average but will not project to be elite if we don't do anything meaningful to improve it. Jed deciding to spend the majority of his energy/resources on pitching, to me, makes it more likely that we end up pocketing a bunch of money, because why get a Corbin Burnes (Dylan Cease) or a Jack Flaherty when you could get a Matt Boyd (Michael King)? And he might not be wrong on that thought process, he's proven he can find value that way to some extent, and that's his whole thing. But then we're left with a pitching staff that outpitches their salary and a young, top 10ish offense, a pile of unused cash, and the same 88ish wins projection.

It's just like...it's the beginning of the winter meetings and they have $80m to spend. Maybe....don't feel compelled to mention minor league free agents? I hate the arguments that use like, a four season run to then predict how Hoyer is going to act. But the types of bats that he's gone and picked up (Swanson, Suzuki, Paredes, Tucker) makes me a lot more confident in actually spending all this cash then his pitching approach (Imanaga, Taillon, Boyd, Rea). He has a built in advantage with Hottovy and the pitching infrastructure, and he obviously should use it, but that's even more money to go overpay Pete Alonso to hit 130 home runs for you the next three years. Saying 'we're set' on the offense after losing your best hitter and then being like 'well there's the good pitchers, and then there's the weird project pitchers you can get for $5, and it's important I mention those' is maybe, possibly Jed Hoyer Speak for Japanese league pitchers and 'hm, you know, if you look under the hood, this guys got a profile that could really play up in the pitching lab' and a $175m payroll.

This is concerning, if you'll allow me to keep leaning into this apparently newly acquired doom boner.

There wasn't a single qualified pitcher in baseball last season that averaged 7 innings per start. Dylan Cease averaged 5.25, recorded 21 outs twice last year. Imai averaged 6.8 IP/start but I know most Japanese rotations are six man rotations. I'm fine with an argument that elite pitching is better than elite hitting, but I don't think the math holds up here.

'The offense is probably taking a step back'/'I don't think there's a pathway to being a significantly better team'.....why? We're bringing back 8 starters, and there's not a single person on that list with the exception of maybe the catching position that I would look at their overall 2025 stats and say we should expect it to get significantly worse. Schwarber and Alonso both outperformed Tucker offensively, in results and in expected results. Suarez/Bregman comes with more serious concerns offensively, but also don't weigh down your defense. Naylor is a step down from Tucker but a step up from the AAA group. Schwarber/Alonso make the offense better, Suarez/Bregman offsets the step down in offense in RF. I don't know, sign one of those at $30m on the top end and you have $40m-$50m to play with and a pile of major league ready hitters with nowhere to play. Instead of Cease (heavy rumors to Houston) or Imai, you've got a list of teams that would be want to pick up a major league ready outfielder (or a unicorn catching prospect, or a third baseman with a productive half season under his belt) and whatever starting pitchers they have.

I think for me its a few things: I don't really like any of the free agent options, on either side of the ball, with the exception of Tucker. We can't really trade from a non-existent pile of pitching prospects to plug the hole in RF/DH, and the offense looks very 2023-2024 Cubs without doing that. I'd rather give Hottovy the list of (younger, cost controlled) pitchers that are acquirable for a Ballesteros/Caissie/Shaw/Alcantara centered package than essentially 'here's Framber Valdez, Ranger Suarez, and Michael King'. This is probably a little irrational, a win is a win no matter how you slice it, but....if there's any team that has room for a 100% bat guy (like a short term deal in the Alonso/Naylor/Suarez mold), it's the Cubs. Right now we're going to have what....4 guys locked into the lineup that are going to project as valuable (because they are) while also projecting for like...100-110 wRC? Give me a 140 wRC to pair with Suzuki and just have PCA start every play in RCF.

I think the money is better spent on a big bat, preferably Tucker but would settle for one of the other options given our flexibility (DH bat pushes Suzuki back to RF, third baseman makes Shaw available), and then trade from Ballesteros/Caissie/Alcantara/maybe Shaw for a cost controlled arm. But largely you're ending up in around the same spot.

Kyle Tucker is not represented by Scott Boras Tucker had a wOBA 16 points higher than Bellinger, a wRC 11 points higher, and an xwOBA 50 points higher. Caissie, Alcantara, and pretty much any other alternative would be a significant downgrade from Tucker.

Eh....I don't think so. No one was judging the trade at the time based on only getting 2 months of Kittredge, the option was always factored in. I'm not saying it's never happened, but if these types of handshake deals actually happened with any frequency, why wouldn't every team out of contention just trade all of their valuable cost controlled players out (Skenes, as an extreme example) for whatever equivalent value 2 months of Skenes would bring you (a lot) and then send some pocket change back at the end of the year? The community is way too insular/incestual to renege on a hypothetical deal like that.

Yeah no need to have this conversation in multiple threads, but unless there was some weird NTC baked into his option that I'm missing, this all falls apart from an optimistic point of view when you realize that 'we can trade an effective reliever on a 1/$9 deal for cash' is an option pretty much any day of the week. Baltimore doesn't do this trade in January? 28 other teams are going to have a settled bullpen on March 1?

Is there a rational reason why this trade had to happen first in the order of operations? Was Kittredge never going to be able to be traded for cash considerations at any other point in the offseason if we actually ended up earmarking the money elsewhere?

Let's hope so. I also don't get too excited at the concept of looking at these decisions, then looking at Jed Hoyer, Mr. February, and trying to be optimistic with like 'oh, cutting bait on Shota and Kittredge? that must mean he's got a plan that is so comprehensive that there's no room for an effective reliever on a 1 year $9m deal.' You can see the logic on Shota, there's only so many spots in the rotation, it was a lot bigger commitment, he's likely a lot closer to the Rea/Brown/Wicks category than any of us would like to admit. But the bullpen is Daniel Palencia and AAA guys.