champaignchris
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Everything posted by champaignchris
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4.29 Hendricks getting knocked around
champaignchris replied to CubinNY's topic in Fred Hornkohl Game Thread Forum
Leiter out of the pen. Don’t think Miley or Mills are ready yet. Killian coming up? -
There are 358 D1 college basketball schools. Not all of them had a full compliment of scholarship players and many of them had more than 13 scholarship players because of the additional COVID year granted by the NCAA. So let’s just assume that it averages out to about 13 players per team. That’s 4,654 players in 2022. In any given year, about 25% of those players run out of eligibility. It’s probably a bit lower than that, but when you include other forms of attrition (NBA, injuries, disinterest, etc.), let’s keep it at 25%, giving us 3,490 returning players. The last update I saw put the transfer portal at over 1,500 players. More than 40% of returning players are essentially putting themselves on the free agent market. Not that I blame them, but I don’t see how this can be sustained. This will basically make it impossible to build a team from year to year. If it doesn’t calm down, the solution will have to be paying the players and then signing them to contracts for a period of seasons, probably with the players unionizing for collective bargaining purposes.
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A lot of what the Cubs hoped would go right this year have gone right…. Suzuki, Wisdom being good, Schwindel being average, bullpen mostly coming together. But they’ve been hampered by injuries forcing them to pitch their #7 and #8 starters 6 out of 15 games and having to put Villar in the middle infield way more than they’d like. If they can weather this rough patch in the schedule and get healthier, I’ll be curious what they look like during the last half of May into June. Probably mostly bad, but not certainly.
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I read somewhere that while commercial breaks are longer, the actual time between last pitch of prior inning and first pitch of next inning is the same. There just used to be more announcer blabbing between innings, which they’ve since replaced with an extra commercial or two.
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Yeah. No one looks more surprised when Schwindel hits a home run than Schwindel.
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Schwindel looking a lot better today. His two singles were both hit very hard.
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Can’t give a guy a 7 pitch inning after that disaster of a first inning.
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2022 Other Games Thread
champaignchris replied to itisallpartoftheplan's topic in Fred Hornkohl Game Thread Forum
Apple+ announcers: Why is Jeff McNeil nicknamed “The Squirrel?” All viewers seeing Jeff McNeil on TV: Because he looks just like a squirrel. -
My hope is that someone - Davis, Hermosillo… someone - plays so well that it becomes too obvious for Ross to ignore.
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Just one game and small sample size, blah blah blah, but Schwindel has not looked good at all in his 3 at bats so far.
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I think he played through a wrist injury in ‘16 that he probably shouldn’t have, and never really got his swing back.
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With the postponement of the Yankees-Red Sox game due to weather, Cubs-Brewers will be the first baseball game of the new season.
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Sure, but he shouldn’t even be sniffing the rotation on a large market team. ZiPS sees basically no difference between Steele's expected production and guys like Tony Gonsolin, Nestor Cortes, and Taijuan Walker, all of whom have rotation spots on Top 3 payrolls at the moment. I'm not particularly bullish on Steele and the back of the rotation is one of the weakest spots on the roster, but is it too much to ask to avoid the misleading histrionics? He's the 6th starter on paper and the worst case scenario is he quickly gets dropped for a different placeholder until Miley and Alzolay are back. Other than the Dodgers, are any MLB teams going to have something other than a Steele equivalent starting when their 3rd (Miley) and 4th (Alzolay) starters are hurt? I mean, they might have more potential as a prospect, but in terms of ability right now, if they were much better than Steele, they wouldn't be the 6th guy in the rotation.
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I’m not as up on the analytics as many here, but the Hendricks pessimism seems like a lot of recency bias to me. He was trucking along having a very typical Kyle Hendricks year through Aug 11 - 13-4 with 3.65 ERA - and then was putrid over his last 9 starts of the year. How heavy should those last 9 starts weigh in predicting what Hendricks does going forward? I can’t answer that question. I can say that the predictive analytics have never liked Hendricks. So I take them with a bigger grain of salt than I do most any other player.
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horsefeathering Dodgers press all the right buttons all the time. Great trade for both teams. Agree. But I like it more for the Sox than Dodgers. Put aside that position players are better than relievers, I think it’s more likely they get about 120 good games from Pollock than the Dodgers get about 65 good innings from Kimbrel. Besides, anything that gets Eloy out of left field is good for Eloy, the Sox, the fans in left field who might be in the way, the structure of the ballpark, and any other bystanders or witnesses to Eloy’s attempts to field.
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Is there any chance - despite their public remarks to the contrary - that the new Bears brass aren't sold on* Fields and are positioning themselves to get their chosen QB of the future in the 2023 draft? Because if that were the case, they'd be behaving exactly as they have thus far. * And by "aren't sold on" Fields, I mean don't believe that he's good enough to be able to take advantage of the best team they'd be able to surround him with over the course of his rookie contract.
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Is Conforto gong to do the Kimbrel thing and wait to sign until the QO penalty expires?
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In the last 38 years, Arizona has made the Tourney 33 times and Illinois has made it 24. If seeding is completely random, they’re going to be in the same quadrant 1 out of every 4 years.
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Right. There’s no particular reason why the Cubs couldn’t have signed a couple more players like maybe Canha and Synergaard, still have a payroll in the $170s, while not materially affecting their future ability to rebuild. Instead, they’re going to lose a winnable division by 7 games while carrying a league average payroll $100 million below the luxury tax threshold.
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Charlie Moore on Miami is the same JCL has one more year because he had a medical redshirt while at DePaul. He was a big time recruit at Illinois. The first player signed out of Indiana in ages and something of a palate cleanser after the whole Eric Gordon fiasco. It was really disappointing when he transferred out, but not a huge surprise because of the coaching change. These things happen. Moore was the same class as Mark Smith who just finished season 6 at Kansas State. I don’t remember the timing, but Moore was also an Illinois recruit that didn’t sign with Illinois, which left a roster spot for Smith. Smith played one unremarkable year at Illinois and then was one of at least three former Illini signees to go play at Missouri after Cuonzo Martin got hired there. Martin just got fired at Mizzou while Underwood has about as much job security as a college coach can ever expect.
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Curbelo was supposed to be an All Big 10 level point guard this season. A complete lost season for him. In the 2 Tourney games, he played 40 minutes, shot 1 for 11 and turned the ball over 8 times. Nothing to do but get healthy and regroup for next year.
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I hope you’re right, but this feels more like stockpiling trade deadline fodder to me. It seems to me to be what you do when you are trying to mask a weak overall roster and try and make them a .500 team that stays in the race. If I’m reading the new draft order rules correctly, the team with the best record that misses the playoffs is guaranteed the 7th pick of the draft at worst, with a chance for better in the lottery. So gunning for 80 wins isn’t the worst rebuilding strategy. When Epstein was hired he said (paraphrasing), “Baseball gives you nothing for winning 75 games instead of 65 games.” It doesn’t look like the Cubs front office believes that anymore.
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Chavez is in there, too.
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As it currently stands, the Cubs have the 17th highest payroll in MLB. They’d never been below 15th in opening day payroll (2001) for as far back as I looked (2000). Without taking inflation into account, this would be the lowest opening day payroll since 2014. Taking inflation into account, this would be the lowest opening day payroll since 2003. The Ricketts bought the team for just shy of $850 million in 2009 and most sources now value the franchise at about $4 billion, the 4th most valuable franchise in MLB. Not saying anything anyone here doesn’t already know. Just venting.
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They’re just not consistent enough to string together four wins against good teams. Unfortunately, I don’t see them getting to the second weekend. As fantastic as Underwood has been in turning this program around, he’s eventually going to have to go on a tournament run. He’s 0-5 in getting to the second weekend of the tournament for his career. If he doesn’t alter that trajectory, discontent is going to start creeping in. Do you really think it’s instructive to hold his time at Stephen F Austin against him not having a sweet 16? His tourney performance 2nd round as a 12 1st round as 12 2nd round as 14 1st round as 10 2nd round as 1 It’s literally last years flameout you can hold against him Not holding anything against him. Just saying that if they fail to make it to the 2nd weekend this year, and then next year is a step back, people will start a narrative about how Underwood hasn’t had any success in the Tournament. It won’t be fair, but it will happen because college sports fans and college sports media are stupid and insane.