squally1313

Kyle Tucker isn’t going to demand that he doesn’t get some of his salary for another 15 years. This isn’t some bargaining chip, it’s just math that all involved parties are more than able to comprehend.

So….this isn’t a real concern.

Red Sox, present day value: 3 years, $95m, $31.6m/year, opt out option after year 1 Cubs offer: 4 years, $115m, $28.75m/year, no opt out after year one. deal one is better for reasons that had nothing to do with deferrals.

At a nominal dollar value that was way higher than anyone anticipated but, hey, when you run the numbers back to what they’re actually worth and what they count against the tax for, AAV wise, it was basically right in line with what everyone was expecting. basically, I’ll Venmo you $10 today, or I’ll Venmo you $12 five years from now. Which one would you rather take?

So the agreed upon argument here is that the player and their whole team of representation just has no concept whatsoever concerning the time value of money or how to do a present day value calculation huh

The odds of Gage Workman, Opening Day Starter drop from +Infinity, Holy horsefeathers, Could You Imagine to +500

This is where I'm at (for the moment). Maybe not specifically Bellinger, once the Tucker trade got made you were in a pretty tenuous spot in terms of crowding in the outfield. Jed was probably an early adopter on the 'let's wait out the offseason' thing, but...I'm not totally sure it ended up bearing much fruit? Like, yeah, he got Bellinger for way less than projected last year, but he objectively should have gone for Chapman instead at that moment. And this year he got beat out by the other teams who decided to adopt the same approach. A couple things can be true: The Cubs are universally projected to win the division, win between 86-90 games, they still have an upper tier farm system with a lot of talent knocking on the door, and their payroll situation is relatively very clean. It's a healthy organization by those metrics. Unless the budget has always been $200m, Jed, to date, hasn't done his job of maximizing the team within the understood budget. It's that scene from The Office where Oscar is explaining what a surplus is. You can't logically spend $30m on midseason acquisitions and you don't get to carryforward extra luxury tax space. The offseason is fluid, things don't play out in the order anyone wants, but his job is to land the plane going into the season, and while we're a better team than we were a year ago, 6 months ago, whatever, there's more we could have done.

1. As mentioned elsewhere, it's probably pretty standard for the ownership to get involved on any contract above $100m, especially in a situation where the GM has one year left. I don't think we necessarily need to read those comments as suddenly spending to the luxury tax budget being this concept that requires extraordinary permission. 2. It seems like people have been saying that the offseason is over for like 3 months now, and it's still not, but....it's obviously pretty close, and IF there aren't any more moves, I'd say you probably got to assign some blame to Jed on how it ended? Like if you want to carve out this niche of waiting for the market to soften, fine, I see the logic, but....you have to finish the job. Just like I didn't think it was fair to blame Jed for not landing a huge name, if we go into the year $30m below the tax line I don't think it's fair to PTR to automatically assume he just dropped the budget by $30m. Jed meant to spend the money, as you could see in the Scott and Bregman offers. He just didn't close, and is currently left holding a stack of cash and a pretty tough path to turn that into good baseball players. Caveats: This is just in response to his comments today, which could/probably are worthless. And PTR deserves no benefit of the doubt. But...still.

Tom this is a horsefeathers message board with like 16 regulars, and anyone else ends up here through a Trueblood article, reads that, and then bails. Would it make you feel any better if we all voted to just have like, a default disclaimer attached to every post? "Tom Ricketts should spend more money on the team because he's an horsefeathers who can absolutely afford it and it's infuriating that he doesn't". And then, having got that out of the way, we could go back to what we were actually talking about.

Like 90% of the good discussion around offseason transactions, team building, etc around here is people mostly agreeing on a set of financial guidelines, that we can't control, no matter how many random words we capitalize, and then trying to figure out the best team that can be built within those financial guidelines. You can debate the merit/value of the discussion, but here we are, in the Transactions Forum of a Cubs Message Board, where we've all been, for years. And then the other 10% of the time is like, you and CubinNY coming in and being like, 'well hey, what if those guidelines just didn't exist', or, lately, from you, 'it's actually all your guys fault that the guidelines exist in the first place'. It's like you're watching us all play HORSE in the driveway and then being like 'well why don't you just spell the word with more letters?'

A. As far as I can tell, no one said that. Please correct me if I'm wrong. The closest thing I can find in the search is JDL saying: nobody expected a 4 WAR 31 year old to get paid like a 6 WAR 28 year old. B. Do you understand, in this hypothetical situation, that this type of complaining around here is not: oh man, thank god the Cubs owner didn't give the guy more than he deserved? Instead, it's more: oh wow, I think that was a bad use of a, for all intents and purposes, finite amount of money, and I think the Cubs (or the Red Sox, or whoever), could have used that same amount of money in a different way to put together a better overall baseball team.

No one here is doing that. The argument against signing Bregman isn't 'oh man, he's not worth that kind of money, he's just playing a game out there, etc'. If we work within the framework of a $240m budget, the corresponding moves required to accommodate this contract, to me, more than offset the value Bregman brings to the team in terms of winning baseball games. If we aren't working within a budget framework....then yeah, go get him. Go trade for Trout. Take Arenado off the Cardinals hands. Bring back Baez to be our defensive specialist late in games and just do cool tag stuff. Every post on here in regards to any particular player can just be 'Sure! Why not! There's plenty of money!'

Because we understand context and how doing one thing impacts other decisions. I feel like once a week I need to throw out this caveat that I'm aware the Ricketts have more money than I can ever fathom and they could have written a $50m check to Bregman every year for the next 4 years and have it not impact their lives one bit, and I would love to live in the world where that was their approach to owning a baseball team. I think they suck as people and as owners, and whatever else you want to see here to prove that, big picture, we all agree. But we don't live in that world. Every single piece of evidence out there has the Cubs committing to staying at/just below the first luxury tax line in terms of AAV, or $240m. In that world, a $40m Bregman inevitably leads to other players getting traded away to get back to their stated salary goals. Bregman at $40m minus Hoerner minus anything else we can do with that net $28m minus really any financial flexibility going into the year minus the freedom we would have had if we didn't have to wait and see on Bregman opt ins the next two years, to me, makes the Cubs less likely to win baseball games.

Turns out the whole 'Just give Bregman $30m/year and be done with it' is also something (a narrative, maybe?) that only exists in MLB The Show.

According to FG the Padres need to shed roughly $17.5m AAV to get under the luxury tax. This ownership problem seems to be more cash based than a Ricketts-esque staying under the cap drive, but Cease at $13.7m and Suarez at $9.2m gets them somewhat comfortably under and saves them whatever their penalty number was (think TT did this math already). Their rotation is currently Cease, King, Yu, Pivetta, and then....Randy Vasquez made 20 mediocre starts for them (0.8 fWAR in 98 IP), Matt Waldron made 26 decent starts (1.8 fWAR in 146 IP). So in theory this Pivetta move wasn't super redundant, there's not a lot of SP depth there. Obviously they could more back in a Cease trade, but there's probably also always the chance that they decide to just 'tough it out' through this ownership transition and screw over their great great grandkids instead.

Alright well, time to get one one of those two dudes. We can take Suarez too, it's fine.

Appreciate your point that the situations he would find himself in would have an outsized impact on the outcome of the game vs treating every PA the same. On the other hand, Steamer gives you projected splits. Either I can't find ZIPs or they don't exist. Against LHPs: Turner: .256/.339/.406, 111 wRC Canario: .228/.295/.428, 103 wRC Certainly an upgrade, but 22 points of OPS? I just don't want to confuse 'this role gets more ABs' with 'Turner is a noticeable upgrade for those situations'. Suzuki, Tucker, Swanson, Shaw all project as better against LHP, Hoerner as the same, Happ, Amaya, Kelly all as above average hitters. It's Busch (90 wRC) and PCA (80 wRC). who are markedly worse. As an FYI, Turner, with a Steamer projected 104 wRC against RHP, would be tied for 6th on the roster, again tied with Hoerner.

Agreed on the larger point that we should optimize the roster as early as possible besides leaving some cash around, and that $30m is way too much to leave around. But we start to get away from the math a little bit when we start to talk about 1-2 wins/month in a conversation about a theoretical part time player projected for 1 fWAR in 500 PAs.

No arguments that we can get him to 300 PAs if we wanted to. I'd just rather not....we've got like 10 years of PCA and Busch and I don't want to have to worry about finding handcuffs for them every year without a much bigger sample size that says they can't handle LHPs. Obviously you lose defense in a Busch for Turner swap, the knock on effects for him filling in for PCA (worse defense in center, worse defense in right) are similar. Again, fine signing him if we can't find anything better to do with the money. You're basically making Canario irrelevant if you're saying he hedges PCA and also Suzuki fills in to spell Turner and Happ, which I'm not going to lose sleep about, but in that case go get some pinch runner/defense only outfielder? But ultimately it's the timing/ordering of all these hypotheticals that is making me real hesitant. Turner at $8m means Bregman is off the table (or else a Nico trade is essentially a guarantee). I'm probably getting too caught up in these fading starting pitching hopes, I don't know. We don't know for sure that Turner is just sitting around waiting for us to offer him a contract, so these are all hypotheticals. Taking Suarez off the Padres hands seems like a good way to lower asking price for one of the starters, which is another $9m. Taking a larger contract (Haniger) could get us a starter elsewhere.

But which ABs in question? If we're stripping out defense and base running, we're basically just talking about pinch hitting right? He's not pinch hitting for Happ, Tucker, Suzuki, Swanson, Hoerner. If he becomes someone who has to take key PAs from Shaw, we probably have a problem bigger than a Justin Turner solution. For Busch and PCA, it's probably only against LHPs. Amaya or Kelly sure, but they're going to try to avoid using the backup catcher whenever possible. I think the theory beyond that is that injuries happen, which they do, and Turner theoretically slots into the lineup in case of an injury to Happ, PCA, Tucker, Suzuki, or Busch. I'd rather that just be Caissie. Overpay for Cease or King, overpay for a Marlins starter, overpay for a Mariners starter, sign Robertson, take Suarez off the Padres hands as a salary dump, sign one of the crappy starters (Corbin, Gibson, Flexen, Lynn, Quintana....whoever the pitch labs likes the best) to build redundancies in the rotation against injuries as a lot of the supporting cast barely pitched last year (and, in the case of Assad/Birdsell, are already dealing with things). If none of the above, or if we do one of those things and still can fit Turner and TDL space, then, yes, give me Turner.

And ZIPS (the most optimistic projection for Turner) gives him 1.0 fWAR in 478 PAs vs Berti getting 1.3 fWAR in 319. It's not an either/or situation, we can have both, but Turner is still little more than a 'use it (the money) or lose it' situation for me. He's basically there to start against Chris Sale and Blake Snell and then pinch hit for Michael Busch if they're able to get a LHRP against him? If we can't trust Canario and his .961 OPS against RHPs in AAA last year to do this for PCA (and maybe even Busch), then what is he even doing here? We currently have $30m to spend. Turner is a nice luxury if we still have this money this time next week, but there's better ways to spend this money.

Conceding the point on Busch potentially being Bad against LHPs but not sure if you want to totally take away that part of his development. Long term (or at least for the next two years) having a dedicated DH in Suzuki and a short side platoon first baseman on the roster makes you a little inflexible. The guys making up the bench on Opening Day, as presently constructed, are absolutely not great. But the league wide average on pinch hitting last year was an 83 wRC, so not sure I'd say it's uniquely a black hole as much as it is a league wide black hole. Further, outside of an injury to Amaya and maybe Nico or PCA, none of those guys would be named the starter in the event of a long term injury. The absolute maximized Cubs roster on Opening Day has a bench of like, Kelly, Caissie, Berti, and Ballesteros. but that's just not practical given the opportunities available. I think the next up first basemen in the system aren't Caissie/Long/Ballesteros but rather Happ and Tucker.

Yeah someone on the roster/next man up list has to be able to do this, a handful of them have before, theoretically Shaw won't be spiking every throw over to first like Morel was, the opposing lineups are going to be stocked with RHBs....it's fine. If you don't think a starter or Bregman is going to happen and you need to spend the money somewhere, fine, bring on Turner, he's essentially the next man up for any injury to the four outfielders (PCA might be a stretch) and Busch, maybe he can be a second hitting coach. But it's not some glaring hole to me. As for the 40 year old FAs....eh. Cubs were linked to basically every free agent besides the ones at the top of the list, and they've shown a tendency to wait out the offseason, which I think they have in common with veteran free agents. You could put together a list of 35 year olds they were linked to (Eovaldi, Chafin, Canha, Boyd), a list of 30 year olds (Bregman, Bader, Polanco, Kelly, Moncada), etc.

Turner is fine in a professional hitter type sense but he's also 40 and has had over 500 PAs every year for the last four seasons so even if he's willing to take on a pretty limited role, there's plenty of obvious red flags (wOBA trend, xwOBA trend, moving from consistent ABs to mostly pinch hitting, etc). I think I....just don't care about the lack of a true backup first baseman all that much? Like, the whole Bregman sequence of events ends with our backup shortstop likely being....Vidal Brujan? A guy who hasn't played about AA? Berti, who didn't play it once in 2024? And that seems far more difficult to fix than just finding some 28 year old AAAA dude to keep it warm while you spend a week getting Happ, Tucker, Caissie, Ballesteros, Canario, whoever (back) up to speed. Just go get a starter.