Bertz
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Everything posted by Bertz
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Aside from this I think the most interesting thing from the presser is that the Astros called after the Paredes trade before the trade deadline and tried to get Jed to flip him then. Otherwise Jed's answers all seemed to affirm the state of things that the beat writers are generally putting out there.
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Jed just shut down Michael Busch to 3B talk. He leaves himself outs in most answers but that was pretty definitive.
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Yeah I think Lindor, Judge, and Seager are all good comps. There's unfortunately not a perfect one. But I think mid to upper 300's is probably what it takes as an extension. If he makes it to FA, I think you're looking at low 400's. I don't think he tops Trout or Ohtani unless he has some silly like 8-9 WAR walk year.
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I kind of wonder if the urgency on this trade ties back to Bellinger. If you address SP, and do it this cheaply, it becomes pretty easy to back into how much money you need to round out the roster. Like let's say it's this SP - $6M RP1 - $10M RP2 - $5M Backup IFer - $4M Backup 1B - $8M So if we've got $15M available, and the above costs $33M, you need to net $18M in a Bellinger trade. You should of course haggle for more, but you can have some confidence in your floor number in negotiations with Cashman.
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Usually during the playoffs. Once the regular season wraps the guy can run his model. A quick and dirty rule of thumb is last year's arbitration salary times 1.5. It doesn't work in edge cases where a guy breaks out or gets seriously hurt, but it's usually not that far off. If it's like July and I am looking ahead to the next offseason that's what I tend to roll with.
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Yeah MLBTR's numbers are super accurate, to the point I've heard teams/agents now use it as a starting point in negotiations at times.
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I'm hoping we can add two relievers. And if the team trades Bellinger, even if they eat more money than we'd like in the process, that feels pretty doable. If you ended up with say Yates and Minter, this is probably the bullpen to open the year: CL - Yates SU - Hodge, Minter, Pearson MR - Miller, Morgan, Merryweather LR - Assad/Wicks That's a group you can feel good about, with quality reinforcements at Iowa as well.
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- kyle finnegan
- aj minter
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Not even close. Ian Happ had 0.7 WAR on June 1st. Chris Morel had -0.2 WAR the day he was traded. Catcher and 3B were, by orders of magnitude, the biggest problems for the Cubs this year on the position player side. Catcher got better in the second half but in the 1st half was basically the worst position for any team in MLB.
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The Athletic confirmed the pursuit of Luzardo this evening.
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The Cubs' lineup has 5 guys who had 3.5 or more WAR last year. plus PCA who paced north of that mark on a per 600 PAs basis. I think it's pretty appropriate to approach 3B from a standpoint of raising the floor rather than chasing ceiling.
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I would do Josh Rojas most likely. I view RHH who can help out at 1B/OF/DH as a separate to-do list item.
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Sure, but the team's lack of production at 3B is part of the big three reasons why they missed the playoffs last year (joining catcher and bullpen). I think setting aside ~$5M for a high end backup at the position is one of the more important investments the team can make from here.
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I'm trying to decide if having such a left handed rotation makes it more or less necessary to have quality lefties in the. bullpen. Lefty starter means a more RHH opposing lineup. But it also means more lefty pinch hit opportunities. But also the pinch hit penalty is pretty severe. But they are also some of the highest leverage PAs of a game.
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NL Central 2024 wRC+ figures vs. LHP Brewers - 99 Pirates - 93 Cards - 92 Reds - 84 I'm even sure if another team in the division mashing lefties would make me consider a 4 lefty rotation as a problem, but certainly the Cubs are well positioned to roll one out there.
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Not a surprise I'm sure but I will be pretty thrilled with the rotation if we end up with Luzardo. The Fangraphs projections are going to be pretty middling, and that's not unreasonable. But I think this is a situation where it's worth keeping in mind the range of outcomes for each player rather than focusing on the median. Luzardo, Boyd, Wicks, Brown, and Horton are all guys who have "fat tails" on the bell curve of their outcomes. There will certainly be a point or two where like 4-5 guys are on the IL at once, but broadly having so many options should allow you to heavy up on the guys getting good outcomes and optimize off the guys having bad outcomes. We won't get lucky enough for it to work out like this, but we would have five guys with star/impact level talent in Steele, Shota, Luzardo, Brown, and Horton.
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If Bellinger stays it means you need to do everything else on the cheap. That said it's not that dire, and simply making Luzardo your other SP does most of the heavy lifting. - There's we expect ~$15M to spend right now - Bellinger staying means you don't need CF/1B for the bench, so really all you need is an IFer - Luzardo costs $6M - $9M for a late inning reliever likely means you either need to trade for that reliever, or alternatively use Workman as your bench IFer and then you can sign someone like Finnegan at about market price to close It's tight but it's doable. I'd also imagine it's all academic. If the Yankees and Cubs can't work it out, once the Cubs start eating more money and/or taking on contracts it will open up a whole new set of teams.
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The Yankees are currently about ~$50M south of last year's payroll, and if you add Bellinger and Bregman they probably project as the best team in the league (until the Dodgers inevitably add Teoscar and Sasaki). I'm curious how much of this is about 2025 dollars and how much is about 2026. Because if it's about 2026 the simple solution seems to be sending along some conditional money based on Cody opting in. For example pay Cody's $5M buyout if he opts out, pay $10M if he opts in. 2025 dollars feels a lot stickier to work through.
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I would think even conservatively Mathis could DH by Opening Day, play 1B by Memorial Day, and play 3B by the ASB
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Potential Landing Spots For A Cody Bellinger Trade
Bertz replied to Brock Beauchamp's topic in Chicago Cubs Talk
I think you *could* hold onto Bellinger and it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world In practice I imagine there's a focus on exploring all avenues with the Yankees because that's the one option for getting most/all of his deal offloaded. If you're resorting to eating/offsetting money another round of teams likely enter the fray such as the Phillies, Mariners, and Royals. -
I think a few things are true - The Cubs probably overpaid for Tucker. You'd hope that's because they have every intention of extending him, it might also be because Jed's seat is hot. But they overpaid. That's fine though - Because of the limits on roster spots and playing time, one 5 WAR player is worth more than a 3 WAR player + a 2 WAR player. The degree to which this is true scales with how well rounded your team is (the Cubs' depth made a star particularly valuable) - The value of a player is simply what the market will bear. If the market has decided Paredes is worth X, even if he's such a good fit in Houston that he'll specifically be worth 2X there, you're still only getting back a little more than X in trade. The corollary to this is that saying you're not going to trade a guy to try and preserve leverage is meaningless
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As of either today or tomorrow the 2024 period closes and there's a moratorium until Jan 15 for 2025 signings. So at this point I think he couldn't sign anywhere even if he wanted to. That's good news because if he had signed early he'd 100% have gone to the Dodgers (they had the most money remaining by a ton), next year it's down to like 80%.
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I'm glad you hit in the Marlins pitching development. They don't have especially great pitching development, they just sink a lot of resources into pitching. Like they're not the Royals a few years ago banging rocks together hoping to make fire, but this isn't a team like the Guardians where you go "well surely there's nothing left untapped." Of pitchers reasonably avaliable right now, I expect with Cubs' pitching dev Luzardo to be as good on a rate basis is as good on as good as anyone outside of Burnes and the Padres pair. The tradeoff for having to qualify the above with "on a rate basis" is we get a second cheap year (~$10M?) of Luzardo that does not come with any of the others. But the beauty of having 8-9 other viable starters is you can prioritize 120 good innings over 160 okay innings.
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Sasaki will likely make his decision in early to mid January. Money doesn't matter, whatever team gets him will use their entire international bonus pool on him, part of the reason for the timing is those reset on January 15th (he might agree shortly before that but wait until after the 15th to sign). The recruiting for Sasaki is going to be entirely soft stuff. How competitive your team is, how much he likes the teammates, pitching development prowess, geography, etc. The team that signs him is also probably going to need to utilize a 6 man rotation, or at least set things up so Roki is on a 6 day schedule. So teams will just do their shopping, and if he picks you he picks you. You need 5 non-Roki starters either way.
