Bertz
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Everything posted by Bertz
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Love Lance. It's extremely on brand for him though to juice every pitcher and fade every hitter
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Realistically there's not a rental around this year that would cost Caissie, and it's not even close. It would take a really extreme example for a hitter to cost that much, someone like Tucker coming available. SPs cost a premium at the deadline so it wouldn't take as extreme of an example, but I still don't see it among current options. Dylan Cease, Michael King, and Framber Valdez are the guys who might warrant it on talent, but their teams aren't selling. When we traded for Jeimer Candelario at the deadline two years ago he was the best rental bat moved, and he cost the Cubs' 14th and 16th best prospects. The equivalent today would probably be something like Will Sanders and Pedro Ramirez. Christian Franklin and Ryan Gallagher would be another comparable package. Caissie seems very likely to get moved, but it's almost surely going to be for someone under control through at least next year.
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- brad keller
- matt shaw
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If there's an opportunity to add one more year to Boyd's contract in exchange for an AAV bump I'd do it. Say replace his 1/$17M with a 2/$40M? I wouldn't want to go out any further though. The biggest storyline for the Cubs this winter is Tucker, obviously. The second biggest story IMO is whether the team can do anything to try and mitigate the post 2026 roster cliff. Extending Boyd would help with that, while obviously being player friendly to boot.
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The Dodgers won the World Series last year with Yoshi Yamamoto and a bunch of scraps. The Rangers won the year before with Nate Eovaldi as their best SP. The Braves in '21 had a formidable 1-2 of Fried/Morton, but neither guy was lights out in the playoffs (Ian Anderson was their best postseason pitcher lol). Having the best SP is good obviously, but doesn't necessarily get you the title, if it did the Phillies would be looking to threepeat right now. And then beyond that, if the Cubs add another good starter, their playoff rotation will match up with pretty much anyone except the Phillies and Tigers (or Dodgers if they get miraculously healthy).
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Looks like this year the 3 lowest whiff rates on fastballs in MLB are Luis Arraez (3.6%), Nico Hoerner (5%), and Steven Kwan (6.4%). So 4% does seem like a tough but not impossible bar to clear. Which is encouraging because if the best MLBer were at like 12% it would be so out of whack as to seem like a useless data point. I don't know what data looks like for amateurs, but looks like the MLB average is 19.5%, AAA average is 21.6%, and Florida State League (the only A ball league with public Statcast) is 23%. So a teenager being that locked in on fastballs seems especially encouraging.
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Trade proposal: Willi Castro to Cubs, Jonathon Long to Twins
Bertz replied to Brock Beauchamp's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
Oh god, as the board's resident Jonny Long fanboy AND the guy who can't shut up about trading for Willi Castro this puts me in a bit of a bind. Ultimately like you say I think Long is too big of a piece for Castro alone. Probably not to a crazy degree, but if you look at rental hitters moved the last few years they have not netted guys with the combo of talent and proximity Long provides. The dream, for both sides I'd guess, is probably Long as the second piece in a deal for Jax and Castro. -
You'll like this too from Keith Law
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I really like the way he articulated this. There's been a lot of "this draft was weird" but I don't think it was. It looked weird at 10 PM on Sunday, but once the Wing and especially Hartshorn picks came down it was like "Oh okay there it is".
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I think you're right that opportunity cost is high enough that it might not happen, but I do think two starting pitcher is both #1 and #2 on the priority list. And this is coming from someone who is still *very* high on Brown. But as we're obviously seeing the team is not a lot of misfortune removed from giving starts to Chris Flexen, and that's before the load management conversations around Horton/Brown/Boyd really come to a head. Two SPs also has the benefit of potentially impacting the bullpen depth. Giving Horton 3 more starts and then downshifting him to short relief is probably a great two birds/one stone move for managing his innings (he'd probably end the year right around 120?) and adding an arm with some oomph to the late inning mix. That's not to say if you can add two SPs it's safe to ignore the bullpen. But if you add two SPs you can shop in the Kyle Finnegan section of the store rather than the David Bednar aisle. On the position player side, I hope the Twins start fading again because Willi Castro is a glove perfect fit for this roster. I'm not especially worried about Shaw (there's a healthy amount of BABIP regression coming his way), but you can't not address 3B at all. Castro would provide some 3B production, but also provide some support everywhere in case of injury. Like god forbid a middle infielder especially gets hurt right now.
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- brad keller
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I've been told repeatedly that can't happen
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This is really really great. I know Greg Z mentioned at one point yesterday maybe not a ton of savings on the seniors. I'd guess that's specifically or at least especially referring to Snell, based on how Kantrovitz raves about him. Also pretty shocked that he didn't just plead the 5th on Barnett.
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I think the elbow fracture takes about as long to rehab as a TJ. That said in most of the instances I can think of it's usually done on guys with multiple TJs. Codi Heuer for instance. Maybe it's not as bad if you've only got one TJ already? But my default assumption would be he's not pitching next April, and maybe not til closer to nowish next year.
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I think the team should just be comfortable moving on from guys like McGuire and Chris Flexen when their time is up. There's no reason to expect either guy is actually good now, so thank the baseball gods for the free production and move on. It does suck with McGuire that you can't just stash him at Iowa, but it'd suck worse to ham fist him onto the roster just in case. There are always Reese McGuires or Christian Bethancourts floating around.
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- reese mcguire
- miguel amaya
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I mean the timing is mainly around doing something you're probably already planning to do in October now so that the uncertainty doesn't have any negative impacts on the trade deadline. But the why is that the Cubs have been the best team in the NL in the first half, have enough young talent on the roster to feel comfortable this isn't going to be a one and done situation, and enough financial flexibility and farm system muscle to continue supplementing in spite of the miserly payroll situation.
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This bears out if you look series by series too. We have the rest of the AL East left, both series against the Braves (far enough out that they might be healthy by then), @ San Fran, and the Mets at Wrigley. That's the scariest stuff left. Everything else is either bad teams or the NL Central.
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I mentioned this upthread but if you shake up the order it looks a lot different. If it went Conrad Hartshorn Kepley Wing Reid Snell And then went chalk from there, it'd feel like a pretty normal draft. Though I'm still a bit surprised there wasn't a couple hundred more K in the couch cushions for someone fun in the 11th.
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Welp lol So yeah Wing and Hartshorn each took a pretty penny. Presuming they're each 7 figure guys.
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I'd be surprised if we get to Friday without an announcement that Jed's been extended
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Cubs legend's younger brother? Or no relation?
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I wonder if this combined with the time crunch means we're going to see a run of hail Mary's in the 19th/20th
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Since the 5th pick in the 13th round, only one player ranked by MLB.com has been taken.
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I'm still wondering if the fact that other teams aren't taking these guys either doesn't mean there's a simple logistics issue of only having an hour to work through the discussions instead of overnight as in year's past.
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Oof, that would be a well deserved own goal on MLB's part Looks like the Angels just popped one at least, so fingers crossed
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Interesting that none of the remaining top 100 guys have been popped here in the 11th, not just the Cubs. Is there some new Meta strategy that makes the 11th no longer the place to do that? Or maybe teams need more phone working time?
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I think a few things: - The Cubs' farm currently is very top-heavy heavy, so Conrad not becoming their new top prospect (and I'd argue not even in the top 5) doesn't do him as many favors with the fans as adding the same exact guy to a much crappier farm - Also, more broadly, picking 17th you're likely done with all the Wow guys in a draft unless you accept a healthy dose of risk (the health of Gage Wood's shoulder for instance) - The team's Top 30 prospects is going to likely have 5 or 6 new names on it. For a system that has become pretty thin (and will probably get thinner over the next few weeks) there was some need to go quantity over quality - The Cubs are *HEAVY* into using Statcast data in their draft model. The problem is for amateurs that's only out there in pockets, not in some nice central database like BaseballSavant. So it's been kind of inevitable the last two drafts for some random Twitter account with 600 followers obsessed with Tennesee Baseball or whatever to chime in that such and such guy has 98th percentile contact and 85th percentile power to help explain the "Why" behind a 6th round pick. It often takes the Twitter sleuths like Greg Z time to find these nuggets of info (and the state of Twitter certainly isn't helping here)
