squally1313

‘Third best third basemen’ prospect rankings since 2020: Nolan Jones nolan Jones jordan walker Curtis mead brayden Taylor

Good thing we have the second best third base prospect! and why won’t we win anything this year? Because the dodgers? Should we just punt the next two years then? Hate to break it to you, but there was no path to spending $75m to get better than they are.

Huh, when I type out a response with 80% of my focus on my kids playing in the CFA play place, it comes out significantly more Tom-ish. Who knew.

Cam Smith has 5 hits above single A ball, trading him for a dude with the same wRC as Juan Soto last year probably isn’t ’one of the most boneheaded moves ever’ or whatever the phrasing was, regardless of what a single offseason prospect ranking system says im guessing the cubs internal projections systems are more advanced than zips, but it’s worth considering that they value the same inputs given how much zips likes the cubs this year. Unless the pirates or cardinals hack into the zips computer, the cubs have a 10 game advantage going into the year based on the projections (as an aside, funny how there’s significantly less glazing of the brewers front office and their grand total of zero dollars spent this offseason lately). I know, That’s Why They Play The Games, but it’s possible they’re very confident in the gap they’ve created and are holding the money back for a super discounted (money and years) Flaherty or Bregman, or, as mentioned above, a premium talent mid season.

Look, any sort of constructive discussion about how they may improve the team halfway through the offseason must also have a certain amount of posts making the same complaints ad nauseum. Oh you wanted to talk about who they may or may not sign? Did you not consider that Jed sucks at his job?

We're getting closer to splitting hairs, but I'm on a terrible work call so why not. Ian Happ wasn't a bad draft pick, which I think we agree on, though I would have preferred if he hit the ground running a little quicker in his career than he did. Alex Lange, Brendon Little, Ryan Jensen, and Ed Howard were bad first round draft picks. Having a 2016 draft class that has combined for -0.6 bWAR was a bad draft year. 4.4 bWAR total for 2017. Not a single major league contributor past Hoerner in 2018. Porter Hodge in 2019 and no one else. Those aren't safe picks that lacked creativity or didn't aim high enough. They were very bad drafts by pretty much any measure/strategy. And it led to Jameson Taillon and Hector Neris and the nightmare rotation of first basemen pre-Busch, etc etc. They had to spend way too much money just getting to 'good', and as a result every time a 'great' opportunity came up they were able to make excuses about how close to the luxury line they were. Just look how much easier it is going forward to plug PCA and Busch (and hopefully Shaw) into future lineups and essentially write a 'zero' next to their names for salary commitment. Hopefully this time next year we can say the same thing about Horton, but we're still fighting the lack of depth produced internally (see all 28 bad relievers signed in the last 6 weeks). It's how you end up with 'how do we spend all this leftover money' (I know, I know, not a guarantee) vs 'I guess we have to wait until February to sign whatever is left of the Boras 4'. The system is maybe, finally, hopefully producing. It took way too long for an organization with the resources we have.

You felt the need to repost your own Jed rant from another thread just so people could...read it again? Even though this is a Roki Sasaki thread and you were complaining about drafting Ian Happ (the second best player that could have reasonably drafted) and signing Dansby Swanson (the best and also cheapest of the four targets everyone wanted that offseason). The team isn't middling because they signed above average players to above average contracts. Dansby Swanson and his 'messy' contract makes as much as 37 year old Nathan Eovaldi (2.4 and 2.7 fWAR the last two years) the next three years. The team is middling and missing out on elite talent because A. the Ricketts family refuses to spend more money than the first luxury cap even though every reasonable analysis of their revenue has them with a lot more ability to spend, and B. our farm system in the last 10 years has basically given us Ian Happ, Nico Hoerner, Justin Steele and essentially nothing else and we've had to pay free agent market values to fill out far too many spots on the roster when most of the good teams at our (dumb and too low) budget are churning out league minimum talent at a much higher clip. That is absolutely a criticism of Jed and Theo and whoever is running the minor league system and making the draft decisions, and it's more than anything else a criticism of Tom Ricketts and his clear desire to point to the 2016 flag in center field and then rest on his growing mountain of passive income from turning Wrigleyville into his own Potterville. He sucks, I wish he would go away, I hate him. No one is ever going to agree on the definition of a word like 'star'. Ian Happ is almost certainly not one, but he's making essentially the same amount of money as Christian Walker and Joc Pederson this year, and I think he's better than those guys. Swanson is 18th in offensive fWAR the last two years, so he's plenty good. But 'star'? Who knows/cares. Plus, get the feeling you discount the defensive contribution to that overall analytic, which is fine, that's a difference of opinion.

Number of players drafted in the 2015 draft, after Ian Happ, in the top 5 rounds, with a higher WAR than Ian Happ: One. Number of players drafted ahead of Ian Happ in the 2015 draft with higher WAR than Ian Happ: Three. Two of which currently play for the Cubs. Combined 2023-2024 fWAR of the shortstops available in the 2022-2023 offseason: Dansby Swanson - 9.2 fWAR (7 years, $177m, 2nd youngest of the four) Trea Turner - 8.2 fWAR (11 years, $300m, 2nd oldest of the four) Xander Bogaerts - 6.6 fWAR (11 years, $280m, oldest of the four) Carlos Correa - 6.1 fWAR (6 years, $200m, youngest of the four) There are plenty of reasons to be critical of Jed (and we should all really be more critical of the end of Theo's time). These two are not it.

oh nice, wonder what's happenin-

Draftkings has them at 51.5. I'd take the over just from the normal bounces of baseball and just how clearly checked out the entire team was for like...4.5 months out of the year. But agree there's been no meaningful improvements.

There's a part in that article, I believe, where he still says they are projected for 61 wins or so, so seems to be pretty good value in that number on the gambling site.

But he was fine with trading our starting third baseman (three years of cheap control) and a top 100 prospect for a guy with one year left before free agency (aka Hoyer's Save His Job year)?

All very good analysis and the comparisons to Freemand and Goldy are apt. I think part of the reason for the skepticism around here is that we've become really accustomed to seeing above average, not elite offensive performance. I'm pretty tired of watching the Cubs day in and day out and being like, oh wow, Happ has had a hot month, and then seeing him come in at like a 145 wRC, and then looking at the leaderboard and seeing these offensive freaks sat up there or surpass that easily in their YTD numbers. Since the 2018 season, so seven of them, 2019 Rizzo has had the best offensive season by wRC. Second best? 2024 Seiya Suzuki, somehow. Tucker's projections this year, which are 38 POINTS LOWER than what he did last year, are better than both of those seasons. Projections are notoriously conservative. He simply meets hits his projection, he eclipses everyone since 2018. He's a different level of hitter than we've had since KB/Rizzo. He's worth the money.

It's a little funny that there's been this underlying tension around here on how relevant the advanced numbers are, fWAR specifically, and then Szymborski comes out and basically calls us a 90 win team today, 10 games better than the Brewers, 16 games better than the Reds, etc. Like....I guess we'll see how relevant they are!

Generally agree with your point but hoping it's not a case of expecting more than we should just because the names are newer. Like, is Gavin Hollowell just the 2025 version of Richard Lovelady? Is Matt Festa just Thomas Pannone, is X just Colton Brewer, etc etc Splitting hairs here because no one really knows and no one will get the requisite sample size required to actually know. We seem to be throwing even more bodies at the pile than last year, just still have to find the ones that work.

I think there's maybe a little confirmation bias in 1908's analysis just in that you're going to automatically lean towards the guys still performing because they're just much more present in the baseball landscape/conversation, vs someone like, say....Anthony Rendon (21.5 fWAR, 136 wRC from ages 26-29). But at the end of the day I come to the following conclusions: -The evidence is on 1908s side generally, because Kyle Tucker is so good at baseball and when you look at comparables that high up you end up with a group of generally special baseball players) -Even if you regress expectations a little bit further....I don't care. Nathan Eovaldi is making $25m a year in his late 30s to give you 2.5 fWAR. In 8 years that number is going to be $40m for that kind of production, which where Tucker will be. Oh he only might give us 1.5 fWAR? I'm fine with that because he'd have already given us 8 years of production.

Yeah you can kinda squint and see the larger bullpen strategy here. It's honestly not much different than the previous strategies (throw a bunch of young arms at the wall and see what sticks, go through some growing pains in April/May and by the end of the year you're probably fine). I don't think it's a strategy they should necessarily get credit for, those early games count and they are pretty consistently back of the pack in first halves under Hoyer, but I also don't think you can or should solve a bullpen by throwing multiple 8-figure contracts at it. They just need to do a better job of developing from within in bulk, so that you're not having to stash arms in AAA as starter depth, etc. The 2025 version seems to be like, but Also With Funky Veterans. None of these guys we've picked up are good, took any sort of capital to acquire, or should have any sort of major league guarantee. But, statistically, do you hope 3-4 perform well in spring training and can pitch well out of the gate? And then another 3-4 pitch poorly, can sneak through waivers, and get themselves right in Iowa when that first group inevitably goes bad? Maybe? It all looks a lot better with a big name at the top of the list, but there's still money for that and names out there. For sake of the numbers exercise, you basically have Hodge/Miller at the back, let's (a little generously) assume another written in ink guy, and then five of: Pearson, Thompson, Morgan, Thielbar, Merryweather, Rob Z, Ben Brown, LIttle, Neely, Aria, Palencia, Roberts, Festa, Hollowell, Bickford. That's 15 names, while keeping Assad, Wicks, Horton, and Birdsell as starters 5-8 (hopefully 6-9). It's to the point where it's in the pitching infrastructures hands to elevate some skill sets and make the best decisions, knowing that ultimately any sort of results to judge them on are going to be extremely small samples and based mostly on sequencing luck.

So now we have 3 non-question marks. How is hoerner a question mark? League average hitter, elite defense, like clockwork, his entire career. Same for Swanson. That’s 5 to me. How many non-question marks should a team have before it can be considered a contender? And that’s with granting you a Busch, but I guess in that case any team that has a second year player has a ‘question mark’

If Ian Happ and Suzuki are question marks, how many players in the league aren’t question marks

Shota is a very outgoing personality and went 15-3 with a 2.91 ERA last year (Fernando rookie year: 13-7, 2.48 ERA), but yes, I'm sure Sasaki is totally capable of performing to the extent it bridges the gap between Shota's niche personality and Fernando-mania

And he did it in 78 GAMES! Do people not understand how insane his season was last year? The wRC difference between 2024 Kyle Tucker and peak Kris Bryant (2016) is bigger than the difference between 2016 KB and 2024 Isaac Paredes. In terms of raw, slash line production, the only Cub comparables in the last 40 years are Sosa and 2005 DLee. In terms of league-relative performance, it's 2001 Sammy and that's it. He's 6th in outfield fWAR since 2022. It's Judge, Betts, Soto, Yordan, and Julio, and on a per/PA rate he's better than Julio. That's a combined like 50 years and $2b of contracts (don't quote me on that). These guys aren't available. 80% of Kyle Tucker is an unrealistic goal for any of our outfield prospects. It's not 'not easy', it's almost impossible.

Yeah look how much everyone loved Kyle Hendricks this year!

Ran the quick math on the zips projections for the 3 teams and it's the Cubs at 48.6, Brewers at 42.8, and Reds at 32.6, so there's a pretty huge gap there, though this was obviously before Lux and his 1.5 fWAR came over. They HATE the Reds bullpen, -0.3 combined projection there. And they love DLC and McLain (9 wins combined) but think that Candelario and Encarnacion-Strand are only going to give them about 2.5 wins total from the corners (little more now with Lux I assume). Outfield is pretty uninspiring too. Rotation certainly has potential, but not a whole lot else there besides the middle of the infield.

Even more of a pass? Guy hasn't taken a major league at bad in three years and has a career .282 OBP. Giving him 20+ games with 3+ PAs just to carry a 9th bullpen guy seems to be significantly more creative than it's worth.