squally1313

The immediate veer into gender affirming care is such a tell. This makes me uncomfortable and therefore I'm going to label an entire political party as nuts.

Hoyer ended up with a pile of unspent cash at the end of last offseason because there was no one left to sign and then acquired no one of real substance (please do not make me get into a semantics argument about kittredge) at the trade deadline. I liked the tucker trade as much as anyone, but when you go out in game 5 of the NLDS because drew pomeranz and Colin Rea gave up home runs in the first four innings while coming nowhere near the first luxury tax, it’s real hard for me to say he made the best, or even a good, use of his budget.

If I walked into a party where an established group of people had been hanging out all night (slash most of the last couple years/decades), and like, ten minutes after I showed up, I was like 'alright, now we're going to play a game, and I'm going to be in charge of the game, and I'm going to constantly tell people to stay within the rules of the game'....I wonder how that would go over.

I mean…this could be a horsefeathers disaster.

I would like to put in a request for the cubs to, in the future, make the big move first, and not do the weird, disappointing-compared-to-the-alternatives move where the best we can do is like ‘well, this must mean a big move is coming’

This isn't really directed at you but since you started talking about 'maybe they have enough money'. I feel like we've all been using that first luxury tax threshold as the number because it's an easy benchmark, but at this point I think it's more just....is Jed willing to get a little rash on actual needle moving players or not. We reset the luxury tax penalty last year, and even if we somehow add like $40m in 2027 money between now and March, that only puts us at, per FG, $95m for 2027 going into next offseason. I don't know about you guys, but the idea of Hoyer adding $140m in AAV next offseason, even setting aside the potential strike, is highly, highly unlikely. So you're at a 20% penalty on any overages with a near-zero chance of falling into the repeater penalty, which is just not a significant enough penalty. Hoyer just needs to spend as much money as he can.

Jed Hoyer is really good at certain things. He identifies players, particularly pitchers, that are undervalued, that can be improved internally, that play better in front of an elite defense, etc. I think the Swanson conversation is another component of that. It's probably too pro-Hoyer to say that he uniquely happened to identify that Swanson was going to age the best and also be the cheapest, but I think it's very plausible that he looked at all of them and saw far less of a difference between the players than other teams did, and was content waiting it out and getting the one for the least money. From what I can recall, it was pretty similar to the Bellinger signing with the rest of the Boras Four. The Ian Happ/draft pick complaint doesn't hold weight for me either. The only player drafted after Happ who has outperformed him career to date is Austin Riley, and that's by 0.1 bWAR. No one drafted after Matt Shaw has outperformed Matt Shaw. Ditto Cade Horton. It was really bad for a stretch at the end of Epstein and the beginning of Hoyer. It's much better now. That skill set would play well at a midmarket organization. Someone like the Cardinals, or the Twins. Guys like Shota or Boyd or even Taillon scream the type of pitchers who show up and beat us twice a year while we complain about losing to crap pitchers. That skill set should, in my head, play EXTREMELY well at an organization with a stated budget of the first luxury tax line. Because being that good at the work around the margins and the middle market should let him throw his financial weight around on the top end. And he just refuses to do so, to my rapidly growing frustration. If he wants to stand on his ability to sign non-elite pitchers that are going to outperform their contracts, then maybe be less worried about what 2030 Kyle Schwarber is going to look like, because 2026 Kyle Schwarber would look pretty horsefeathers amazing in front of Suzuki and Busch. And maybe this is more of a Ricketts thing ultimately. We'll never know, and I don't trust the media reports on how active/close they are as much as some other people here. But...come on, just do something stupid once and see how it plays out.

Hey man, I've mostly stayed away from whatever this all is, but I will say that the combination of stating opinions as if they were facts: And then being like 'come on, debate me bro' just comes off as very grating. Based on what I've read, you're a high school student who has been interested in baseball for....a year, two years? And yet you constantly make it seem like you understand the business/economic side of this better than the rest of us, and then wonder why no one wants to engage with you.

I know it's still mid December...but....

The issue with, thus far, missing out on anything of substance on both the rotation and the offense is that you can't then fix the rotation with the spare offensive parts because you don't have as many spares. I'm less worried about filling a top slot in the rotation if I have Caissie and Ballesteros sitting around with no defined role on the 2026 Cubs. When they both have key roles, you're basically creating new problems with any major trade. Go do something.

Or, to reverse it, Hoyer and team NOT talking to any above average free agent is pretty close to malpractice. It's one hotel complex and there's like 8 agencies total.

Nico is probably my favorite player since the championship era. That's my irrational take for keeping him. My rational take is that we're very much in a win-now mode, and Nico is a very good player not making a lot of money, and it would be next to impossible to make the 2026 team better in a trade/series of moves where he gets moved. And, probably to a fault, I'm really pretty focused on the 2026 team and not the future teams. Having said that....he's a hyper athletic guy who derives essentially all of his value from elite quickness defensively, high quality baserunning, and elite bat to ball contact skills. Is that, rationally, the kind of player we want to pay free agent prices for for his age 30-35 seasons? Less sure about that than I am about like...Ian Happ remaining a 120 wRC hitter and passable in the outfield or Seiya remaining a very good hitter.

lol. It's why I put zero weight into 'X team has been in discussions with Y player'. There's like less than 300 free agents and all of these front offices are like 20 people deep. What else are they doing all day.

A. I don't think he was being condescending. B. This 'for whatever reason' thing people keep obliquely mentioning is....pretty condescending towards the players themselves? Like, man, why aren't the Cubs tricking these players into signing a billion dollar deal like everyone else? That's very clearly not how it works.

Just by way of context, going back to the 2021 offseason (the offseason after covid), there have been, per fangraphs, 25 free agent contracts signed that were more than 5 years. Dansby is one of them. The only teams with multiple deals over 5 years during that stretch are the Yankees (4), Toronto (2 including Cease), Texas (2), the Dodgers (3), Phillies (2), Mets (2), and Giants (2). Not saying that everything is fine, mostly just saying that your premise made it seem like these are more common than they are. Now, obviously this doesn't include signing a team controlled player to a long term deal, which is another thing we haven't done. But that, to me, speaks more to the system falling apart at the end of the Epstein era than it does anything else.

It's technically $46m but substantially the answer to your question is the second option. The point I was trying to make is that if we had signed a player to a 10 year/$460m deal that same offseason, we would be committing the same amount of money on the same date as the Dodgers are, and the player would be making, in present value, the same amount of dollars.

I'm personally of the opinion that the deferred money thing is a big nothing. The players can go to any bank and get a cash advance for the present value of the contract, the team is maybe not explicitly putting the present value in a lockbox and letting it accrue interest until the bill comes due, but is absolutely doing sufficient planning along those lines. Big numbers are shiny and cool I guess, but it's not like these players (and their financial wizards agents) are under the impression the inflated deferred numbers are a bigger contract.

I'm not trying to be unfair. If we can and are teaching pitchers to do this, then it really shouldn't impact the offseason decisions made by the front office. I'm less confident than you are that this is a super repeatable skill, but that's fine, we don't have to agree. If you think it's just another way for the Cubs to outkick their projections, that's not really a reason to not get the best projections possible in my ind. Being difficult one last time: Justin Steele has been below the 2025 league average in IFFB every one of the last four years, and the part of the paragraph you left off included that he would improve their pop up generation (11.4% last year), and that he has been a very reliable pop up getter. You can't really call me unfair and leave off half the paragraph, right? Bigger picture, none of this is meant to be a personal attack or anything like that. Love your work. Just...picking nits.

Maton, Palencia, and....better-pitcher-than-Milner-to-be-named?

Yes

Eh. It turns out that when you had prime Devin Williams and Josh Hader sticking to the wall, your wall looked a lot better. Craig Counsell's Cubs wall? Over the last two years, 19th in fWAR, 11th in ERA, 24th in WPA.

Re: Hoby Milner. He's fine. He's another guy who should be a bullpens 4th-5th best pitcher at best, we have two guys slotted above him, better guys are getting signed on a pretty much daily basis while PTR gets 4% interest on the $45m he's supposed to spend. He gets groundballs, he stays healthy, whatever. It's $3.75m. Candidly, I thought your arguments on why the pitching staff is fine were a little (uncharacteristically!) weak. Pointing to the defense was irrelevant to me, they're going to help every pitcher. The pop up thing I'm not sold on. Like, using Justin Steele and saying he was 71st out of 360whatever qualified pitchers over a three year stretch and then having that be a counting stat where he was like 40th in baseball in innings pitched over that stretch isn't a thing. Here is his IFFB by year since 2022: 9.8%, 8.5%, 6.5%, 4.3%. The Cubs were 19th in IFFB in 2024. If this is a Zombro thing, and we can just teach dudes to throw pop up generating pitches, then shouldn't we just get the best ones and then make them better with this special trick of ours (a la our defense)? If we need to or have been targeting them, why are our two relief pickups so far either exactly league average over his career (Maton) or markedly below (Milner). But, bigger picture, is this even really a repeatable skill set? Steele's numbers are above, Taillon has gone 9.5%, 6.8%, 14.2% in his years as a Cub. Maton, because I have his page up and it supports my argument, has gone 12.3%, 6.0%, 21.3%, 9.3% over his last four years. I don't know...I just don't see it as like, some plan to outsmart the market. Bigger picture: I've made my frustrations known with how the front office has approached the last...12 months or so now (basically everything post Tucker). And I'm generally pretty positive. But I've been told all the offensive options are bad for one reason or another, and now I'm being told that defense and Zombro are basically going to take an average pitching staff and reliably turn it into top 5 production and....it kinda sounds like a hypothetical future Hoyer press conference where we introduce Zac Gallen as our third starter and justify the lack of any other legitimate moves. Overpay for someone, risk taking on a bad contract. It's fine. Exciting even.

Like, the act of reading itself? Or specifically your words?

I mean....are you maybe a little constructing a set of arguments that lets you talk positively about any Cubs pitching signing? Robert Suarez has been at 12.2% and 14.1% for IFFB the last two years.

Below average IFFB rate....just saying.