squally1313

I've come around a little since yesterday thanks to some of the posts above. I think going into the offseason I wanted a pitcher at the Shota/Steele level (Fried, Snell, Burnes in a dream world) and then a pitcher at the Taillon level (ideally cost controlled and acquired with prospects). So far we have Boyd, who can pitch at the Shota/Steele level but seemingly very sparingly, and Rea, who is more an Assad than a Taillon. But....we also have Kyle Tucker, which is very nice. I think, barring a major external acquisition, the hope has to be that Brown or Horton can come up and give you stretches of Shota/Steele level starting, and that Assad, Wicks, Birdsell, and Rea can give you league average production for the rest. Say you need 900 innings from your starters, 150 each from Steele and Shota, 100 from Boyd, 150 from Taillon, 100 from Horton/Brown. That's 600 innings of 'good' pitching and 300 innings from the supports. Ideally you time all this out so that a couple of the top guys are full strength and peaking down the stretch. This would be by no means a sexy move, but what I wouldn't mind seeing with whatever excess cash is Jed going out and getting the best of the bad free agent starters on a one year deal. Lance Lynn, Jose Quintana, Turnbull, Corbin, Junis etc. I know, they're all bad. But if we're going to commit giving Boyd and Shota extra days whenever possible, I'd prefer to start the year with Assad and Wicks in AAA, not burning options, fully stretched out. Junis and Turnbull had both starts and relief appearances last year, let them be the stretch/6th man. Wicks and Assad are ready for when Rea/6th man break, Brown and Horton are ready for an inevitable injury flare up with the top three. Maybe it's overkill, maybe that's already Poteet or Kilian or Keller's job. But would still like to slot everyone down one slot if possible.

Haha I mean, Jake arrieta is 4 years older than Boyd and we traded for Arrieta 12 years ago. I would settle for Nate Eovaldi, the first lackey year, etc.

Just so I'm not only playing devil's advocate here: I'm overall pretty unimpressed with the direction Jed has taken on the pitching side of the house. I thought Boyd was a fun upside play that the bigger teams have been doing to varying success for a few years now, where you have a bit of a cushion and you can somewhat optimize the time of the season you want him throwing at full strength, and someone who put up a 2.34 ERA across 50 innings in the regular season/playoffs can be a very effective weapon when employed at the right time. But I also assumed that they were going to fill the rotation with innings, and that those innings would be thrown by someone more effective than Colin Rea. I saw a ton of blocked offensive prospects at AAA and figured there was a trade for a controlled starter coming, and then I figured there was going to be a signing for someone at a Taillon type level. Maybe the Tucker deal wasn't in the cards and basically took Smith and Shaw out of the prospect glut (one to Houston, one to Wrigley) and they got a little gun shy of gutting it too much. And of course there's still money out there to spend. But if you're down on the idea of Assad as a consistent starter, I think we're still a little significantly short on effective starter innings. Shota and Boyd are probably both ideally utilized on a close to once a week schedule. That means roughly half your starts are coming from Taillon, Assad, and Rea, which isn't great. Maybe they love Birdsell or think Wicks will come back. Maybe they're waiting for some fringe contender to go 8-22 in April and then give them some of our Iowa guys. Maybe they're looking at the (almost uniformly bad) starters still available and waiting for one of them (Heaney, Quintana, Stripling, I know, it's ugly) to take a deal small enough that you can ride them for a couple months until they break and stash Assad in the meantime. I don't know, but hoping there's a plan here.

While in normal settings where you're comparing like statistics or output or whatever it would be dumb to include minor league and playoff numbers, in the context of 'how much did he actually pitch' it's worth noting that he pitched 72 innings last year total (21.2 in the minors, 39.2 in the MLB regular season, 11.2 in the playoffs), and that's all from the middle of July on. To your point: it's very much not ideal. But for as bad as his injury record has been, he essentially made 16 starts on schedule from the all star break through the ALCS. I'm not going to pretend to know why he 'only' averaged a shade under 5 IP/start in his 8 regular season starts. Pessimistically it's because they were babying him and he wasn't close to being built up, optimistically it's because Cleveland had a bullpen of death and they leaned heavily on it (he had the second most innings pitched for the team from his debut through the rest of the season). Are we going to get 180? Almost certainly not. Would 125 surprise me? Also no.

That's a fair argument. I'm guessing back in October if given the choice between those two players at those two contracts we would have collectively opted for Flaherty, and obviously neither dude has pitched since then. The arguments I'd make for Boyd are that, as referenced above, injuries can be fixed and put in the past, and that what he showed in the 50 2024 innings were of a higher quality than anything Flaherty has done in the last 5 years. I also think, as others have pushed back on, that you have to wonder why there wasn't a single team willing to offer more than what the Tigers did. There's no reason to think he took some sort of discount to play for a team that traded him 7 months ago. If there's some league wide collusion to point to injury issues, why'd the Cubs supposedly overpay for Boyd so early on? Or are we just back to 'Jed Hoyer Is Uniquely Bad At His Job'. Like ultimately, using this Flaherty signing to relitigate the Boyd signing from November is just a way to always be mad about things. We couldn't sign Flaherty for 2/35 (or however you want to define those terms) back in November. It wasn't an option. Did you want them rolling into February with $50m of free cash and Taillon as their third starter? Would that have gone over well around here?

I'm selectively quoting because I wanted to highlight the actual problem I had with your post. I don't really care if you think or have an opinion that teams are colluding to drive the price down or if you think or have an opinion that Boyd's future health is less trustworthy than Flaherty's. That's totally, people have all sorts of opinions and ideas around here, good and bad. It's the definitive language you constantly use when you believe something, like it's an accepted fact, and then your tendency to get just incredibly pedantic in terms of facts, opinions, burdens of proof, etc etc when someone says something you don't agree with. Make your argument and support it with the underlying information and then respect other peoples' arguments when they're made in good faith (as the people here clearly are). Everything else is moving the goalposts at best.

I find it hard to believe there's a team out there who would give up a cost controlled mid rotation starter and $12m (x 2 years) for Nico Hoerner instead of just....signing Alex Bregman themselves.

Really more Paredes for me. I don't know if I put Shaw on a different level than like, Owen Caissie. 144 wRC in 35 games as a 22 year old vs 121 wRC in 127 games as a 21 year old. There's a gap there, position-wise, K rate wise, etc. But it's really just their respective fits on the roster/in the organization. Losing Caissie doesn't really hurt the 2025 Chicago Cubs, losing Shaw does to a pretty significant degree.

Age 21 seasons: Cam Smith: 32 games (15 in single A, 12 in high A, 5 in AA), 134 PAs, 7 HRs, .313/.396/.609, 179 wRC Matt Shaw: 38 games (20 in high A, 15 in AA), 170 PAs, 8 HRs, .357/.400/.618, 170 wRC Seems pretty close to me!

Would you guys consider Amaya as the main major league piece?

Eh....they're the ones that need to cut payroll. The Cubs (and everyone else) know it. If the Yankees or whoever want to beat our offer, more power to them. Won't adversely affect us. See if they want to punt the year and then take King, or go sign Bregman, or go sign Robertson and Moncada and a 1B. It's all going to wash out to about the same (as long as they do something).

Why? If anything, Suarez has negative value.

The Shaw for Cease deal isn't happening in my opinion because...it would have already happened if Jed was willing to go that route? It's almost February, Padres need to start cutting checks in a month, Cubs wouldn't leave a gaping hole at third a couple weeks before spring training, etc. In the hypothetical, it's interesting in that Shaw for Cease leaves 3B wide open, which would obviously imply Bregman, but unless we're blowing through every budget number thrown out there, you need to cut salary, which likely means Hoerner, who no longer has a Matt Shaw-sized replacement. I think people are a little too pessimistic on our ability to sign Tucker/Padres pitcher long term. We have a lot of 2026 money tied up but it clears up fast after that, and a lot of the 2026 money is moveable. We were able to dump Bellinger, we should hypothetically be able to get rid of guys like Happ/Hoerner (better players making less money) if we wanted to reallocate resources.

Also pass. Offense gets worse, defense marginally better? If you buy into Bergman’s 2024 defense, then you have to buy into his much worse than Suzuki’s 2024 offense. moving a 3-4 win guy to bring back Bregman does nothing for me. For me, It’s either him filling out the budget, a king/cease-type pitcher and minor bench/pen improvements, or significant bullpen and bench improvements. We don’t need to move money to sign him, we would just have to pass on filling out the outskirts of the roster. Positives and negatives all around.

Why would the padres want Nico when they have Machado, Bogaerts, and croenenworth all locked up through 2030 and are trying to cut costs

-1.2 per the 2025 zips projections, 0.2 in 2024

Want absolutely no part of swapping Nico for Bregman.

Clearly there's a push here to attempt to create new discussions when there are news articles that come out about the Cubs and their offseason plans. I'm not going to pretend to understand the intricacies there but it's clearly designed to drive traffic to the site. 'How many times and ways can (the same thing) be said?'? Great question!

(done with memes after this, sorry)

Sure, but Horton and Birdsell could be. At that level you get a lot more fungible. I forgot Shaw too. And then just make more prospects.

Yeah I don't think you should obsess over the timing of the Waves (c), but the team is clearly in its competitive window with the major league roster, which includes4 very good outfielders, hopefully all signed for at least two years, and two of its top 5 prospects are outfielders with very little to prove in the minors. Not ideal timing, but it's what we've got. And it seems a little rash to empty the chamber on a one/two year window, but the window is slowly getting stretched out (a Tucker extension would greatly help there). Dansby, Shota, Busch, PCA, Hodge are all here for four plus years, Steele for three, hopefully Brown/Wicks/Amaya proves worth of joining that group this year.

I'm going to push back on the distinction of 'rental' just a little bit. This isn't mid July, we'd get a full year of starts out of him. This is a guy who, minimum 200 innings the last two years, is 6th in ERA, 12th in FIP, and 14th in xFIP. You can rely on that production for a team that has serious playoff aspirations immediately. Trading for a hypothetical Michael King with 2-3 years remaining on his contract basically starts with Shaw and/or PCA. Losing a Caissie or Alcantara hurts, but not going to lose sleep over them not sitting behind a fully blocked outfield for what is in all likelihood another 2 years. Or whatever concerns I have will be assuaged by having the 9th, 15th, 18th, and 27th best 2024 starters ERAs (minimum 30 innings, yes I know I'm cherrypicking).

I think this general argument/thought process falls apart if you play it out. Like yeah, it's easy to make Boras the villain here. But ultimately both guys are going to (correctly) want to maximize their future wealth. Getting into some weird theoretical discussion about markets or weather or agents or whatever else is pretty futile when you can just pare it down to 'these guys want the most money they can get'. Now, there's maybe some merit to 'the market values Cease higher due to track record/throwing really hard/has a cool mustache, but I think King will perform/age better based on proprietary models'. But that would drive the first decision (the trade) more so than the subsequent extension conversation.