Bertz

YES!

I'm wondering if we should read anything into Flexen getting warm in the 8th when it looked like the team was gonna play screw the closer. Even if Sunday's a bullpen game you'd expect 2-3 innings of Flexen, and thus wouldn't want to use him today. Is Brown coming back up or something?

Man Hartshorn must be getting paaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiidddddddd

I really liked Turnbull over the winter. He's a great guy to sign and stash at Iowa. I think you can hope that better health gets his fastball back to the 92-93 range and with it bring back some effectiveness. It's also good to make a signing like this now because they're likely going to lose Flexen entirely in a few weeks when he presumably gets bumped off the MLB roster for a trade acquisition.

A Sunday starter hasn't been announced yet but I'd presume Flexen

Wind blowing in today, though not heavily. Giolito's better than Rea (though at this point not by a ton) but this is still a game the Cubs should probably take.

Something to keep in mind with the A's broadly is their new park this year has been the second most hitter friendly in the league after Coors. And park factors at places like Fangraphs aren't perfect at accounting for that (they use 3 or 5 year averages typically). Severino certainly hasn't been *good* by any stretch of the imagination, but I think in that ballpark average is probably an ERA north of 4.50. He's probably been roughly Colin Rea quality when you account for park and defense. That said, unlike someone like Gallen or Alcantara who I really liked coming into the year, I wasn't high on Severino to start with. So even if getting him out of Sacramende turns him back to normal, I don't love his normal. And what I wrote above about park factors needs to color how you look at Urias. Ultimately while I'd do this trade in a vacuum, I suspect there are other overlapping deals I'd rather pull the trigger on, like a Keller/Bednar deal.

It's close but I'd probably take Alcantara too. You're starting with an advantage of something like 15-20 runs due to defense/baserunning, which is huge. And until about three weeks ago Caissie's never shown that elite offensive production which would make you think he's likely to overcome that gap. I think Alcantara has a much higher chance of busting than Caissie, but because he has more ways of impacting a game I think Alcantara's probably going to end up a better player.

If you look at the last round of prospect voting, the most common #10 prospect was Cole Mathis. For those keeping score at home, that's last year's second round pick who has played less than 30 games since being drafted around injuries (and not been crazy impressive games on the field).

You probably need glasses then

For anyone who's not a Prospect Sicko, a less inscrutable way of thinking about those rankings is this 40 FV - A guy who would make a typical team's Top 30 list 45 FV - A guy who would make a typical team's Top 10 list 45+ FV - A guy who is a borderline league Top 100 type. These are usually guys with clear Top 100 talent but extra risk. So a lengthy injury history or a teenager in the Complex Leagues 50 FV - A guy who would make a league-wide Top 100 Prospects list in a typical year 55 FV - A guy who would be in the top 30-40 prospects league wide in a typical year 60 FV (or higher) - Elite prospects, usually Top 15 or so. If you see a 70 or higher they're usually generational talents So Lance's video is great, but where it falls apart a bit is that a lot of the prospect grades aren't realistic. Long's an easy 45 at this point. Pretty much everyone on Earth except Keith Law would have Caissie as a 50, etc. Rojas is especially egregious because Eric Longenhagen himself moved Rojas up this spring.

Love Lance. It's extremely on brand for him though to juice every pitcher and fade every hitter

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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".

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.

I've been told repeatedly that can't happen

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.

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.

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.

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.