squally1313

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/calculating-war-using-re24/ Fun article on what WAR would look like if they brought context into play. No specific mention of Cubs players, though the data was linked so you can peruse at your leisure. Morel was the only Cubs-adjacent name, on the top 10 for guys whose WAR decreased significantly if you added in context.

This is separate from the 4 v 12 debate (would have preferred 6 but happier with 12), but I've always thought this argument was unique to college football and honestly bad. If Jokic and Jamal Murray (or Aaron Jude and Juan Soto) bang knees and they both explode in the last game of the regular season there's no committee to yank them out of the playoffs. If we're just going to go by the standard that it should be the teams playing the best going into the playoffs, A. that's just an argument to continue throwing it to the blue bloods, and B. stop trying to tell me anything that happens in September actually matters. Not only was Florida State perfect and didn't get in, but another team wasn't perfect and did get in.

I remember being very drunk in college and trying to argue that the best player of the team that just missed the playoffs was actually the least valuable player in baseball because all they ultimately did was cost their team a better draft slot while still giving them zero chance to win in the playoffs. Basically claiming Mike Trout was the least valuable player of our generation. I was very wrong, but it was still fun.

Shaw has pretty much outhit Happ at every level besides AAA, where Happ got 26 games in 2017 and tore the cover off the ball to the tune of 298/362/615 and a 407 wOBA(compared to Shaw's current 379) before getting called up, so it's probably a fair comparison. A few things to note/words of caution: Environment is different then when Happ came up (2017 league wide OPS was 36 points higher than 2024), so making apples to apples comparisons there is probably going to paint Shaw in an unfair light. Happ came up in 2017 and put up an 842 OPS and that was only good for a 114 wRC, which is basically with Paredes has this year Happ's development was far from linear. His power disappeared in 2018 and he spent the majority of 2019 in AAA (not performing well). His 2019 in the majors was also pretty poor until he blew up in the last 5 games to bring himself from a 91 wRC to a 126 wRC. From there he basically settled into what he's been, always above league average hitter, generally in the 115-120ish wRC range. While I think it's reasonable to expect stretches of output that exceed what Happ consistently delivers, I would certainly take the under on 17 fWAR (Happ's career total).

Yes and no right? Obviously his first 100 PAs weren't a definitive sign he was going to lock in at a 24.5% rate. Obviously encouraging though,

Fun read catching up on this thread where we never trailed and are now up 7.

Is there a technical term for making up a hypothetical situation and then using the hypothetical to attack the person involved in the hypothetical

It's literally August, can we not do seven months of this.

Yeah I generally lean to the side that you shouldn't care much about where your production comes from (offense, pitching, defense), and so a significant update in your rotation equals a significant update in your offense. I think it's harder to point to specific options, and I think people generally think that offensive production is more reliably projectable? Given injuries, BABIP, etc. On the free agent side, there's Burnes (small gap) Snell Fried (gap) Flaherty. And then from there, for me, you run into a bunch of flawed and/or old options (Bieber, Eovaldi, Montgomery, Wacha) where you're probably still looking at multiple year commitments (with an implied multi year commitment to a starting role) with a pretty limited ceiling (basically: more Taillons). And yes, pitchers don't stay healthy, but that's multiple years committed to Steele/Shota/Taillon/new guy with only "one" real spot for Horton/Brown/Wicks/Wes/Assad/Kilian/Birdsong/etc. Odds are most of them end up sucking, but makes it hard to give multiple of them that extended you look you need to see if we can produce another top line starter or two. Trade options are more interesting. Empty the farm for Skubal? Swap offense for pitching with Seattle? Few ways to play that.

Projected fWAR end of season totals (using FGDC, mainly because it's the top one listed): Happ: 3.5 Swanson: 3.3 Suzuki: 2.9 Busch: 2.6 Hoerner: 2.9 Steele: 3.4 Imanaga: 3.1

I'd say by far the closest thing we have to a Javier Baez is our current starting center fielder. Bryant was special, but if we can current Ian Happ production from a couple of these guys at 5% of the cost, then you could go get/pay the guy who can give you KB production.

I think it's fine to simultaneously say that Javier Assad is perfectly in line with average to above average production from the 5th starter spot around baseball and also strongly prefer that we sign someone better or some internal option pushes him to the bullpen where he can face 9 hitters once.

Fair point, don't disagree on this one. Think baseball is a tough sport for that because it's pretty unlikely outside of an injury situation that a team knowingly has like, two very solid second baseman because there's only so many ABs to go around and if one guy is producing he's going to maintain the majority of the ABs. But agree when those situations pop up it would be nice to see those trades materialize. Disagree on 'cheap labor doesn't produce'. 5 of the top 10 offensive fWAR producers (Witt Jr, Soto, Henderson, Duran, De La Cruz) are still in their team controlled years. Skubal, Christopher Sanchez, Ragans, Kirby, Cease, Hunter Greene on the pitching side makes up 6 of the top 10. And those are just the stars. Cubs best pitcher this year makes $4m, Michael Busch and PCA have combined to give you more production for $1.2m than any other single player on the roster. If you need a (insert position) these days and you don't have a prospect ready to fill that slot, you're spending at least $10m a year to fill it if you have any post season aspirations. Spending $30m/year (and committing multiple years) on projected for 2.8 fWAR Cody Bellinger seems pretty dumb right now when PCA has equaled his performance in 150 less PAs and whatever chance we have on signing Soto probably hinges on Bellinger's option decision.

What was the point? You called out those that 'parrot' Fangraphs, which is a statistics based website where multiple substantial contributors have ended up in MLB front offices, and your counter is that of a paid team employee/announcer. I'll try to summarize my thoughts on this as succinctly and without snark as possible, but with a couple caveats. Caveats: I wish the rules were different, I wish the teams were ran as public investments (a la the Phillies owners comments) vs ROI for billionaires, Ricketts and other owners should spend more than they do (and/or make games way more affordable), etc along those lines. Having said that: the reason teams hoard prospects so much is that the 5-6 years of team control at league minimum or severely depressed salaries is so uniquely advantageous in terms of team building in a quasi-salary cap era, especially when young players are showing up the majors as finished products (and hitting the downward slope of the aging curve) more frequently than ever. Yes, prospects fail more often than not. But even the slim likelihood of getting significant contributions from a guy making $650k (for multiple years) opens up so many options. I maintain that the reason the Cubs are seemingly capped at this slightly above mediocre level isn't because of missed elite FA signings or Hoyer being too cowardly in the trading market, but because for years (roughly 2017-2022) we produced very few legitimate contributors that you could plug into your lineup without taking out a serious chunk of your budget. The team is loaded with $15m-$25m/year guys, largely giving us the type of contribution you'd expect from players getting those salaries on the open market. In an era where 85 wins gets you fighting for a playoff spot through September, it makes some sense to pay the $20ish m/year premium to go from a 0 WAR homegrown kid to someone like Taillon or Bellinger or whatever. But if you're capping out at $250m a year, you can only do that so many times. And so you value prospects, ideally a bunch of them (because they generally fail), in the hopes that three or four of them turn into regular starters (and that's putting aside the slim chance they turn into stars) for 1/20th of what you'd pay for them on the open market. As mentioned at the top, it's a dumb system, but ignoring the realities doesn't do any good.

It’s 22 games

Having this discussion about dumping the farm for established players right in the middle of PCA and Amaya establishing themselves as legitimate pieces is certainly something.

There's a few things here, and I'll lean a little optimistic because that's typically where I fall out here so bake that into all this: 1. 'At least a league average hitter' is probably optimistic at this point. He's a career 95 wRC hitter in his age 30 season and his expected numbers are down in addition to his actual numbers being definitely down. 90-95 wRC is a reasonable hope for the next few years. 2. That's still plenty valuable. 4th best defensive player in baseball this year even with the early weird mishaps. Everyone of the ROS projection systems has him comfortably over 3 fWAR for the year. At roughly $8m/WAR and with a little under 5 coming in last year, we are still far off from this contract being some disaster and it's still coming in at least even, if not ahead of, the other SS contracts handed out last offseason. 3. In terms of home runs specifically, while there's nothing to say he's been very unlucky specifically on the HR front, he's got the 7th biggest gap between his slug and his expected slug. Even the expected slug still isn't 'good' (.428), and put whatever stock you want into those numbers now that we're into late August, but it's above his career average and higher than his actual slugging last year, so probably fair to say the hard hit skill is still in there. As an aside, hilariously, Juan Soto is 2nd on the biggest slug/xslug gap, with his .603 underperforming his xslug by 81 points. Please go get him.

Dansby dong

Why do we know they care?

1. Ohtani took a decade long deferral for the benefit of the Dodgers and by all accounts only ever really wanted to go there 2. If the argument for 'Jed Hoyer doesn't have the guts or permission to give out a big contract/he's not creative/whatever else' is 'He didn't land probably the biggest free agent in history, but certainly of his tenure as GM' then he falls into a group that is 'Everyone Besides Andrew Friedman and their massive outlier TV deal'

Counterpoint: there's probably a pretty reasonable occam's razor argument that they've run the numbers and simply don't care that much about it (nor should we).

It's so tiring how Hoyer has missed out on like...maybe 3 large (>$100m) free agents that we wouldn't have regretted since he took over but people here just assume there are these self-imposed restrictions in place and then use these (made up) rules as justification to make the same criticisms over and over again. There were 4 contracts over $100m last offseason. We were never getting Ohtani, Yamamoto has been hurt multiple times and hasn't thrown a pitch in 2 months, Nola resigned and Jung Hoo Lee is out for the year and might also suck. It's basically just retroactively wishing we would have signed Seager or Semien 3 months after going through a total sell off.

Wrong it's actually because Jed Hoyer is stupid and doesn't have creativity.

This literally describes 2015-2016 javy.