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champaignchris

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Everything posted by champaignchris

  1. champaignchris
    I think Cutch is my all time favorite non-Cub. That thread also has a great one of Doc Ellis.
  2. champaignchris
    This is almost guaranteed to happen.
  3. champaignchris
    Expansion is inevitable. It’s a win for both players and owners. Owners get that sweet, sweet buy-in money and players get ~60 more MLB jobs.
  4. champaignchris
    I know this is putting the cart before the horse until they can figure out the financials, but are they really going to try to play an 82-game season in about 86 days?
  5. champaignchris
    Re: Floyd. That was an incredibly weak draft. Only 2 of the next 10 picks after Floyd were starters for the team that drafted them in 2019. The guys that were clearly much better picks than Floyd - Prescott, Michael Thomas, Tyreek Hill, etc - were picked so far after Floyd, it’s hard to blame the Bears for mis-scouting them when everyone else did, too. Was Floyd a great pick? No. But he isn’t a “traded up for Mitch when they could’ve gotten Mahomes or Watson” type of disaster.
  6. champaignchris
    1. Maddux 2. Hendricks Yes, I have a “type.” 3. Javy 4. Aramis 5 and rising fast. Yu So many others... Rick Reuschel - maybe the first Cub I remember, Jody, Lee Arthur Smith, Hawk, Sutcliffe, Kerry, GlenAllen Hill for the random monster bombs, Big Z, Bryzzo, Schwarbs, God-mode Jake, Wade Davis. Random player I loved that wasn’t any good, but I loved him anyway: Steve Buechele, decent glove, no bat third baseman. Ambiguous feels: Aroldis Chapman was one of my favorite non-Cubs and then the DV occurred and I put him on my “pay no mind” list, and then the Cubs acquired him and won the WS. I have mixed feeling about that, at best.
  7. champaignchris
    I got to Ty Cobb in 7. In only about 10 minutes of trying. Could probably get down to 6 with some research. Ty Cobb 1928 A's > Jimmie Foxx 1944 Cubs > Andy Pafko 1959 Braves > Spahn > Niekro > Henderson > Jackson
  8. champaignchris
    Lukewarm take: the Bucs pass for less yards and TDs under Brady than under Winston. But turn over the ball 25 fewer times and have a winning record.
  9. champaignchris
    I think Winston is now the front runner for the 2021 XFL MVP.
  10. champaignchris
    “Marmol-ian” is an adjective that needs to be used more often.
  11. champaignchris
    i hate how Nolan starts to make me feel ok about losing Bryant. Then I think about Bryant providing many many bombs in CO, and I hate it even more I think the whole point for Colorado is to flip Bryant for prospects at the deadline. He has a far easier contract to trade than Arenado, and unlike the Cubs, Colorado won’t necessarily be looking for major league ready prospects.
  12. champaignchris
    I see the Rockies’ motivation to move Arenado for Bryant. I don’t see the Cubs’ motivation. With Arenado’s player options, it’s the same two years guaranteed as Bryant at basically twice the salary for a marginally better player, with the risk that he underperforms and puts the Cubs on the hook for $30+MM a year for five more years of a declining player. Would the Rockies be taking Heyward, sending prospects to the Cubs, what?
  13. champaignchris
    Verdugo and Maeda for Bryant and Heyward?
  14. champaignchris
    I know what I hate and I don’t hate this.
  15. champaignchris
    I don’t like the DH. I don’t like that the two leagues play by different rules even less. It was easier to ignore before inter-league play. I think a designated pinch hitter hybrid approach would be more fun and interesting, but I don’t think baseball’s top people are creative enough to make that work.
  16. champaignchris
    What’s he going to say? “My boss ambushed me?” But then, if the financial handcuffs were a surprise, I don’t see why Theo wouldn’t just walk.
  17. champaignchris
    Turns out he wasn't actually tipping his pitches. He was tipping his pitches in that he was nodding when he agreed with the catcher’s signal.
  18. champaignchris
    Hopefully their tight assness keeps them from adding him. They’re paying $103MM to six players all over 31 years old this year. I don’t think it’s their tight-assedness that is going to keep them from trading for Arenado.
  19. champaignchris
    The Cubs are doing a solid impression of the Hawks trajectory, minus two championships. The highlight of my sports year was the 6-7 Illini Football team. The basketball is 10-5 and has a solid chance of making the NIT.
  20. champaignchris
    Exactly, the CBA has been in place for 3 years, the consequences of spending from that perspective are not a surprise. So either we have to believe that Theo was confident that the team would be so good that they'd be fine just taking an offseason to trim payroll(even as late as *this June* when he committed 37 million to Kimbrel), or ownership pulled the rug out from under them. I strongly lean it was a kept in the dark/rug pulled out situation and/or business side horsefeathering up so bad with renovations and TV deal they didn’t or couldn’t keep money promises on future payrolls. I don’t believe he would’ve put himself in a spot to entirely sit out offseasons that included Manny, Bryce, Kershaw, Cole, Strasburg, Rendon, Arenado and some of these other clearly elite players. This seems like the most likely course of events. The only thing that makes me wonder about this possibility is that if ownership wasn’t being straight with Theo, there really wasn’t much reason for Theo to stick around after the 2018 season, when we presume the news came down that the purse strings were tightening. He could have said, “I did what I came here to do,” had a great retirement ceremony, gotten a laurel and hearty handshake from the owner, and then within a year walked into pretty much any new project he could conceive of taking on. No one would have blinked at that.
  21. champaignchris
    Trading him now so that they don't have to look cheap for not paying him in 2 years. Also some nonsense about how they tried really hard to get him to sign an extension but they couldn't so they had to try to make the team better by trading their best player. Yeah that's the part I'm mad about to. But this whole league wide collusion thing...I assume the team that would trade for him is planning on paying him, right? League-wide collusion except for the Yankees, who are some $50MM over the threshold. But then the Yankees have been a useful bogeyman for the small-market teams for nearly 30 years.
  22. champaignchris
    idk...the heyman tweet makes it seem like the door might at least be somewhat open (he mentioned him for a reason) if the nationals don't get donaldson. it also is almost literally saying nothing, like most of his tweets, so whatever. i wouldn't call it a giant hole, tho. bryant makes them better the next two years. then they're stuck with worse-hitter-than-Albert-Almora in CF barring other major moves The solution is obviously to include Almora in the trade!
  23. champaignchris
    You can almost squint and see a way in which a Robles-centered deal makes some sort of baseball sense.
  24. champaignchris
    Oh I agree it was insane what Himes did and should've kept Maddux. I know how good he really was with the advanced metrics as a Cubs, but those stats weren't available or didn't exist back then like they are now so you can really compare or evaluate players these days. I was more curious on how he viewed in those days since all you went by were the numbers/stats which doesn't tell the whole story as we all know. If people (scouts/reporters/players/etc) were saying like what jersey said, then yeah it looked as bad as it did. I was just curious if anybody threw out the whole "contract year", "he wasn't as good as what '92 suggested", etc like I was saying at the end of my post. Fair enough. He was coming off 18, 19, 15, 15, and 20 win seasons on mostly terrible teams... So I'm pretty sure he was viewed quite favorably. I was 19 years old and remember it quite clearly. Maddux was considered the best starter in the NL at the time and the Cubs’ handling of his free agency was considered an unmitigated disaster. I remember Peter Gammons reporting on it on ESPN, completely agape at what was going on.
  25. champaignchris
    Was it Maddon making the best roster he could? Or was it Maddon making a “You put this crap on my roster” type of statement by leading off the position player with the worst OBP on the team? Do we know where the organizational Almora fetish comes from? Do we know why there’s been a... shall we say... disparate treatment of Almora’s and Happ’s development?
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