squally1313

I don't know how I would have felt about this in early November, but after 2 months of complaining, coming out of this and signing Bregman or Bichette while keeping Shaw and Ballesteros in the organization gives you a lot of fun possibilities. Happ LF Suzuki RF Busch 1B Bregman/Bichette 3B Ballesteros DH Swanson SS PCA CF Hoerner 2B Kelly C Then you have a bench of Shaw, Amaya, Alcantara (or a Castro or Tauchman) and a bat of some sort. Shaw can slot in against LHPs for Ballesteros or Busch (if you can teach someone to play first), spell Dansby and Nico, make the Nico extension conversation a lot easier, etc. Alcantara gets some spot duty whenever you want to move Suzuki to DH, backs up the rest of the outfield. Lot of fun possibilities.

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, per Steamer while we wait for the rest of Zips to come out, there's not a top 50 pitcher in this group for 2026. Boyd is 51, Shota 66, Cabrera 74, Taillon 100, Horton 132, Steele 134 (in 83 innings), Rea 192 Back on the first hand, maintaining the elite defense that we have, whether with Shaw or with Bregman, will help all those guys play up. On the second hand, it would be fun to see what a truly elite pitcher could do behind that defense. On the first hand, finally, there really wasn't much of an option to get one of those, so the largely cost controlled depth paired with Zombro and Hottovy and gold gloves is fine, especially if (HUGE IF) we drop a big check on a bat here shortly.

Well one of those names is probably gone in this right? Either Taillon or a Wicks/Assad. Wiggins is fun. Wiggins threw 78 innings last year and 9 at AAA. I wouldn't put him in the 'kicking off the year' group. Give me Cabrera/Horton/Shota/Boyd/ST competition to start the year, with the loser being your long reliever and Brown being your 2 inning fireman.

I hope not. I'm back on the other end of the pendulum. Keep Wicks and Assad as your depth starters, go trade Taillon.

well then why didn't we do this in July then

Yeah maybe but that can't hold up a deal. His value as trade capital as a top 100 centerfielder prospect is way higher than his value as backup outfielder forever blocked by PCA. If they want him, go sign Willi Castro or Tauchman or whatever. Or teach Shaw to fake it.

Ballesteros on the surface (ie doing 30 seconds of reading on the Marlins Roster Resource page) doesn't seem like a good fit. A team like them should obviously be in the business of acquiring the most talent possible, but they have Joe Mack, a 23 year catching prospect with highly regarded defense who put up a 107 wRC with 18 HRs in 100 games in AAA last year, ranked top 40 league wide per FG. Meanwhile, Caissie, Alcantara, and Shaw all almost definitely make the opening day lineup next year.

Im also fairly tired of this whole ‘the cubs are uniquely approaching free agency with an eye towards this hypothetical lockout. None of the other big teams seem to be shying away from signing long term deals with elite players, but still, Clean Books.’ Like the mlb is going to force the dodgers to cut Ohtani or something.

Yeah I mean, it's not a salary cap league so obviously there's more complexity there. But, at a huge oversimplification, the 2025 Cubs were better than the 2023 Cubs because Michael Busch and PCA were a lot better than Christopher Morel, Nick Madrigal, and Patrick Wisdom. Dansby, Nico, Happ, Suzuki....those guys are essentially metronomes of above average performance. And having more Busch/PCAs, and also the Miguel Amayas and 2025 Matt Shaws of the world to avoid spending 10x those guys on Carson Kelly or Justin Turner or Colin Rea or whatever, keeps the bank account that much more open to overpay stars. Now that we have all those guys, we, in theory, have so much more room to aim high, and we just aren't. The fact that it's, at most, a one year crunch, makes it even more frustrating. Going into 2027 we have $55m committed and can pencil in Dansby, Maton, Steele, Assad, Amaya, Busch, PCA, Palencia, Horton, and Shaw just from the 26 man roster. That's what...24 wins right there? Before Ballesteros, Caissie, Wiggins, Alcantara, etc, and with $200m to spend after that. There's good players out there, and we're going to both need them and be able to afford them in a year. We should be flying past the luxury tax limit (Ricketts problem), and the fact that we've shown no signs of coming close to it (Hoyer problem, problem) is maddening.

This isn't basketball, or NFL quarterbacks or whatever. Mike Trout has one 90 win season in his career. They're good players making good player money. The surplus value doesn't or shouldn't come from the free agency market where you generally have to outbid 29 other teams. It comes from the players you develop, and we're (finally) getting that now.

The hate for Dansby, Happ, etc is so backwards. I know this is at risk of oversimplifying the concept of 'teams that win more games have better players', but here were the players under team control in 2023 and what they produced for the Cubs (fWAR, sorry, cover your eyes CubinNY) (spoilered for size): And here's 2025: Paying good, experienced players their approximate worth on the open market is fine business. The key is young, cheap talent. It's also a little bit paying top prices for elite talent, but the standard targets for complaints aren't the issue. It was the development of internal talent from 2018-2022ish that had to be backfilled by guys like Taillon and led to largely mediocre teams.

I think, maybe oversimplifying, not offering Shota a three year deal but then offering him a one year deal, limits your downside and limits your upside, both in terms of what Shota can do for your team, and in terms of what your team can do overall. And that is absolutely a Jed calling card, and he's, in practicing this, taken very, very incremental steps over the last 5ish years to get us to a very good base of a roster, and he remains, to this day, which is not the end of the offseason, seemingly entirely unwilling to risk increasing downside for the potential of increasing upside. And while there's a separate, more Ricketts focused conversation on whether it should have taken as long as it did to get to the 2025 success, that's in the past, the core is there, and I would really, really prefer him starting taking swings, ideally a year ago. And the justifications for not doing it are getting tiring. - We actually don't have as much money as we think because we had to totally overhaul the bullpen (again), because we've been unwilling to sign relievers to long term contracts (or develop them internally, Palencia maybe aside), and that's gotten us the 17th best fWAR bullpen and 11th best ERA bullpen in baseball over the last three years. - We can't start throwing in opt outs because we have this huge roster cliff because we gave bridge extensions to guys like Happ and Hoerner and we signed a mid tier guy like Taillon to a mid length contract instead of a top level guy to a lengthy contract. - We've built a very solid core of team controlled players through recent drafting skill and shrewd sell off trades during the aforementioned incremental steps of 2021-2024. Which is good, because besides them and Dansby, we have nothing to soften the blow of this roster cliff because we sat on $30m last offseason, then also didn't use it at the deadline, and seemingly made no real attempt to sign the elite guy they traded for. And yeah, maybe what they would have spent that money on would have sucked! We'll never know I guess.

Didn't we just get done talking about Imai with a one year opt out was a non-starter because there's too many guys we have to replace after next year already? Like, Shota was clearly battling injuries all year, there's maybe an identified fix, whatever. I think we should be careful about appealing to authority in these conversations because then ultimately this all becomes even more moot than it already is ('if Jed thinks Shota at 1/22 or Gallen at 3/60 or whatever is a good value, then obviously it was a good move'). But taking 40% of your day one offseason budget and throwing it at a one year guy you evidently don't think highly enough of to give him multiple years in a non-free agency setting, and then spending the rest of the offseason worrying about the roster cliff doesn't really line up to me.

Not being able to offer opt outs in 2027 and also consistently needing to save room to annually rebuild the bullpen are problems, not features. I know we’ll sign gallen and get an article about how actually he’s perfect for the coaches but come on. You can do that and also sign the good players.

They went into the season with like $25m under the tax! You can credit the good decisions and also say that their unwillingness to overpay for good players is a problem. Oh we don’t want to give opt outs? Guess we should just check out from any major negotiation going forward. Would hate to be inefficient.

Come on man. Just be critical for once. It’s January and we have no one.

So anyways, can we talk about the disaster offseason potential situation yet, or are we still doing the guy in a hot dog costume about all the expiring contracts next year thing to justify why this is fine

My guess (could be wrong) is that this is yet another example of why no one should ever use ChatGPT

As for Webb or Fairbanks, why not both. Becomes a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy when you steer away from elite relievers because you have so many bullpen spots to fill each year because everyone you signed last year was on a one year contract. Real ‘we’re all trying to find the guy who did this’ situation. agree with your last point. Just…haven’t been up at that level in quite a while. Prices have been too high, for a year now, apparently.

I generally try to share your overall approach, and have certainly preached it in the past. And, even in the event that this offseason does end up being a disaster, I’m not going to roll forward my frustrations and say the team is garbage and whatever else like you heard so much during a 92 win season. This is frustrating to me because there’s just…such a solid base there. You’re going to get 17 wins from paying Nico, PCA, Shaw, Busch, and Horton like $15m. Good job by Jed, but just…finish the horsefeathers job. I find myself replying to you mostly because I like you and respect your thoughts, but it’s also just a little bit frustrating that (almost) every other signing seems to be met by you with ‘he’s actually not that good’ and/or ‘he’s actually not that good of a fit’. I know we can’t sign everyone. And I know free agent signings, by the general nature of a salary cap-less market, are generally going to come in on the high end. Pete Fairbanks, who hasn’t had an ERA over 3.60 since before Covid, signed a one year deal for the amount of money that we ‘have’ to hold back to pay 2 months of a hypothetical trade targets salary to avoid paying an extra 20% on like $6m. A slightly diminished fastball shape or whatever does not make him worse than Ethan Roberts.

If you’re going to promise me that the cubs are willing to commit as many dollars as possible to needle moving offensive and starting pitching talent, much of which requires multiple years of commitment, then yes, hottovy/zombie a bunch of reclamation projects to death and I’ll be more than happy to live with the early struggles to get there. I, candidly, don’t buy that that is the case right now. That type of talent tends to be old, want years/opt outs/deferred money/etc, and also tends to be ‘overpaid’ by the general consensus math on salary vs production. If you’re going to keep yourself in the short term commitment pool, but continually ignore the biggest needle movers in that pool (elite relievers)….what are we doing here? Yeah, Dylan cease or Kyle schwarber or Alex Bregman in 2031 is maybe scary for 2031 me. But 60% of your 2026 rotation being shota, Taillon, and gallen so that you can keep the books clear for…the 2031 version of those pitchers is scary right now.

Sure. But what was the ultimate post Tucker vision last offseason? What was the vision at the trade deadline? How did that work out? I mean, and I mean this as a compliment…you’re better than this. The April games matters, and going 18-13 during a run of elite offense and losing out on the division to a team that went nuclear for 6 weeks matters. 92 wins is great. The core of this team that he painstakingly put together is great. Doesn’t mean there aren’t very valid criticisms on his past moves/non moves, and very clear evidence this offseason is shaping up in similar ways.