Bertz

So this whole conversation was just a "Chili's is the new golfcourse" deal?

"Don't worry, he was just bad because he was hurt" is not especially convincing. Especially at catcher, where history is riddled with Jonathan Lucroy types who go from star to schlub overnight because of injury. I would ultimately guess Sean Murphy is still a good player. I would not use our 4 win shortstop to try and find out.

Occams Razor is that there was never any intention from ownership to run a payroll high enough for the tax to matter.

For anyone so up in arms about this, what do you think being slightly over the tax does? What bad thing happens now that would not have happened if they were 280k under?

I saw something making the rounds last week about how baseball series would need to be ~70 games to as reliably move the better team forward as the NBA does (~80%).

The bullpen clock! This is something Ross got a lot of undeserved crap for. Like yeah he can see Cuas and Winkler are struggling too, but if you can get a guy like this going e.g. with Tyson Miller you can really see the value that funk can bring (not to mention he wasn't given a ton of better options to work woth). I think looking more forward I wouldn't be surprised if one of Hollowell or Paredes already have their name penciled into next year's pen. Both have that side-arm funk, and Hollowell especially was a monster at Iowa after he got claimed and you can easily convince yourself he just needed to get away from the Rockies. A comparably funky lefty getting added this winter wouldn't be the biggest surprise either.

So it is not this simple, but Murphy and Soler were combined half as valuable as Swanson this year while having a payroll hit of only $2M less.

Without getting into whether it's luck or some sort of skill that just happens to be especially mercurial (I tend strongly towards the former), you need A TON of evidence to be able to say someone's anomalous homerun per flyball rates are real. Like 500+ innings. In the vast majority of cases groundball rates are a sustainable skill, homerun rates on flyballs are very much not. Despite wrapping year 3, Wesneski is only 190 innings into his career. So just like Lance Lynn gave up an astronomical 44 dongs in 184 innings in '23 and came back fine in '24, our default assumption should still be be that Wesneski's issues are not permanent. And dongs aside, Wesneski's numbers are pretty solid. He misses bats, throws strikes, and keeps the ball on the ground. He's got a wide enough arsenal where he doesn't have a strong TTO penalty to his peripherals (though boy does he to his ERA). There's nothing crazy here, no "he's secretly a star" stuff, but league average starter or 8th inning guy both look very reasonable. Assuming Assad is the fifth starter next year, I'd have Wesneski in long relief and the guys who ended the year hurt opening at Iowa. But honestly I have more faith in Wesneski's dong problems being a mirage than I do in Assad being able to manage an ERA a run lower than his peripherals without inducing a bunch of soft contact, so I'd be totally down if spring training results swapped those roles.

Do we think this makes them more likely to take an "everything must go" stance towards anyone making money or do we think this makes them reluctant to make any waves?

Really depends on ownership/payroll. Their payroll heading into the winter is a bit north of where it was this year. And all they're losing to FA is a couple relievers. So if they are willing to push payroll up $20M or more from where it was this year they can run a pretty similar team out there next year. If Dombrowski already pushed payroll to its (self imposed) limit, they have to make some tough choices. Trade Schwarber or blow up the bullpen most likely? They definitely don't need to do anything drastic like blow it up. They've got a pretty decent amount of young talent, and Walker/Castellanos are their only contracts completely under water.

Matt ShawKevin AlcantaraCade HortonMoises BallesterosOwen CaissieJames TriantosCam SmithJefferson RojasJaxon WigginsBrandon BirdsellCristian HernandezAlfonsin RosarioChristian FranklinDrew GrayJonathon LongCole MathisWill SandersFernando CruzPedro RamirezNazier Mule

It's so hard to say with these things. Miguel Amaya signed in 2015 for instance. So 8 years to debut, and 9 years to (assuming for a moment his second half breakout was real) established yourself as an everyday player? There's a lost COVID year and a couple injuries but still 6/7/8 years is pretty normal. They clearly knew what they were doing the first half of Theo's tenure circa 2012-2015 when they signed Amaya, Eloy, Gleyber, Soler, etc. Conversely, It seems pretty clear they were a mess the second half of Theo's tenure. Unless I'm missing someone Richard Gallardo and Pablo Aliendo are the only guys from '16 - '19 that look like they have any shot at still being big leaguers. But in 2019 we know the front office got shaken up a lot and modernized. So there is reasonable likelihood that a few years from now we will look back at an inflection point in '20 or '21 when the spigot turned back on. Cristian Hernandez, Jefferson Rojas, Pedro Ramirez all look relatively promising. The team traded for Daniel Palencia and Kevin Alcantara after minimal stateside playing time as well, which I think you can give some level of partial credit to the IFA apparatus for (though to be fair, maybe you give them partial blame for the Darvish trade too). Again we're not far enough along to say the issue is fixed, but there's growing plausible evidence that it is.

The Padres last winter traded their uber elite inner circle hall of fame caliber bat for metric ton of young pitching. This year their best offensive player is more or less tied with Seiya Suzuki, and yet they're the current favorites to win the world series. Get more good players, reduce playing time given to bad players. It's as simple as that. The matter of fact way it's talked about that the Cubs specifically need a "big bat" is not couched in much (any?) evidence.

Just spitballing what this could look like as a complete offseason - Bellinger opts in, so offseason payroll is $50-55M - Trade Alcantara, one of our pre-arb SPs, and one of our non-Hodge pre-arb RPs for Jax, Jeffers, and Castro. Adds ~$13M in Cubs salary, bringing us down to ~$40M available - Sign the best lefty masher 1B/DH you can to replace Wisdom. Sounds like Ryan Mountcastle is gonna get DFA'd, which would be perfect, let's call it $5M for this guy - Sign your favorite non QO SP, i.e. one of Eovaldi/Flaherty/Kikuchi. All three probably get AAVs around $20M, with the difference being contract length. Let's say Kikuchi just to lock in on a name. There's $10-15M of payroll left - Sign the best one year FA SP you can with the money left. David Robertson at 1/$12M? Lineup: Happ/Swanson/Bellinger/Suzuki/Paredes/Busch/Jeffers/PCA/Hoerner Bench: Castro/Mountcastle/Amaya/TBD Iowa player of the week Rotation: Steele/Imanaga/Kikuchi/Taillon/Jax Bullpen: Robertson/Hodge/Pearson (Late Inning) Thompson/Merryweather/Little/Wesneski (Middle Inning) Assad (Long Relief) This team, especially with how much talent is hanging out down at Iowa keeping warm, would absolutely whoop ass. A bit light on pure dong power, but very well rounded and absurdly deep.

Funny you post this, this got retweeted this morning and combined with some thoughts last night about Betts/Freeman being in their decline phase now is what set off my post.

This is probably going to come off as sour grapes, but are the Dodgers in trouble? And i don't mean in the series, I mean as an org. The Dodgers this year ran a $333M payroll, the highest they'd ever done by a good margin. A good bit of that is Ohtani's deferral nonsense, but even still I think it's $260-something in real dollars, in the vicinity of the highest they've ever gone. They have, depending on option and non-tender decisions, about $40M coming freed up this winter? And they have to replace Teoscar Hernandez and half their bullpen, that's not even to say anything about upgrades. Pitching injuries HAMMERED them this year. Yoshi Yamamoto, who only made 18 starts this year with a mid season elbow injury, is their only SP of consequence who is not A) a pending FA or B) ending the year on the IL. Even though they had a first round bye, they have to go bullpen game in an elimination game tonight. Their team is getting older. Betts and Freeman are in their mid 30's and more All Star than superstar at this point, and nearly certain to decline from here. Max Muncy is old. Miguel Rojas is old. Ohtani, Smith, and Edman will all be 30 this year. That's not old but like we've talked about with some of our guys it's certainly the point where you expect some level of decline each year going forward. Their farm is ranked highly! Their farm is always ranked highly though, and aside from what now appears to be a fluke 2023 season from James Outman has not produced any sort of impact players since Will Smith in 2019. They're almost certainly not bad at player development, but seems clear their prospects get the Yankees/Red Sox treatment from national pubs. They were the best team in baseball this year, and they're about to get Shohei Ohtani the SP back next year. Plus there's probably a ~30% chance they get gifted a Roki Sasaki making the league minimum this winter. But for the first time in a long time this looks less like a perpetual dynasty and more like a Dave Dombrowski team two to three years before things go boom.

I actually really like the broad strokes of this plan, but Vazquez just doesn't hold up his end of the deal. His offense is disqualifying. His 60 wRC+ is the same as Amaya's pre ASB number. You would be *needing* something like an 80th percentile outcome out of Amaya to not just totally be punting catcher offense again. I'd probably rather just run it back with Bethancourt, and I really do not want to just run it back with Bethancourt, meaning this is pure salary dumo. Jax too is fun, and I'd guess about as high probability of a Relief -> Starter conversion candidate as we've seen in a while. That said you really can't expect bulk innings out of him. I can think of 5 recent conversion candidates: Lopez, Crochet, Lugo, Lorenzen, Hicks. None topped 150 innings in year 1, and Crochet had to spend half a season topping out at 4 innings per start. Given that the Cubs targeting a SP is in big part about innings uncertainty, it feels like Jax would have to be part of a 2 SP offseason. His salary makes that very doable, but it's an extra consideration. I would wonder about sending more the Twins way and doing Jeffers + Castro instead of Vazquez. The money is about the same as the initial proposal. And from an outsider's POV, the Twins' having Lee ready to go would seem to make Castro primarily an OF going forward? That would seem to neuter a lot of his value, whereas the Cubs could desperately use some LHH at bats in their IF mix. I think if you sent the Twins some plug and play live arms that should make up for a little more immediate talent going out the door on their end?

The longer his hair gets the more Nick Castellanos looks like Nandor the Relentless

I very explicitly remember hearing field mic Greg Maddux f bombs on WGN so can we not?

Those numbers are very much giving Christian Walker. Walker's last three years: 24% chase 85% in zone contact 76% overall contact 12% Barrel Rate .403 xwOBA on Contact Walker's run a healthy 120 wRC+ with those numbers. I will say that Long's 79% in zone contact rate doesn't quite jive with a lot of the rest of the data we have. 79% is pretty crappy, that's about 10th percentile, in line with guys like Dansby Swanson, Kyle Schwarber. and Giancarlo Stanton. His overall contact rating is a lot healthier, more like 30th percentile, in line with e.g. Ian Happ or Trea Turner. I wonder if he has a hole in his swing? Or maybe he was very beatable in zone early in the year at SB, and then when he went super saiyan at Tenn his contact improved but not enough to salvage his full season numbers? His swinging strike rate and his K rate both dropped quite a bit at Tenn (and were very healthy), so maybe that's it.

Bullpens aren't *total* dice rolls. Kenley Jansen has been pitching since Obama's first term and has never had an ERA worse than 3.71 (and that was the rabbit-ball year). David Robertson is pretty similar sans the two partial seasons bookending his TJ. On the team level, of the teams fangraphs projected with top 10 bullpens coming into the year, 5 of them did indeed end up in the top 10 (and a sixth, St. Louis, was 12th). But it's all directional at best. Try to pull together a quality top 3-4 of the bullpen and flank them with live arms, ideally live arms with minor league options. It's all you can do really.

Yeah i was surprised he stayed in the game after that. Also offensive players need to be called for helmet to helmets. Yeah like 95% of the time it's on the defender but that was a textbook example of the defender doing nothing wrong and the unnecessary collision still happening.

I'm not especially worried about Amaya's defense, though that's me thinking it's fine not liking it. It's pretty clear TJ surgery killed his arm. There might be a bit more he can bring out heading into year 3 post surgery, but it's not going to be marginal not magically take him from bad to good (especially with bad pop times on top of it). That said, we're finishing year two post rule changes, I don't think SB volume is going to climb much more. We got a massive 41% increase in SBs in year 1, and just a 3% increase in year 2. Magnitude-wise this stays as a 4-5 run problem. The framing is tougher to say. He had a good reputation coming up and was good last year. I wouldn't take him being bad as settled. On the flip side I never watch him and go "Wow, what are great block!" but he graded out exceptionally there. My guess is these both pull back closer to average. Hell there might be some direct push/pull between the two skills based on how he sets up. Amaya's value is really going to come down to that bat. It is encouraging that he was better essentially across the board after that breather, that said it was less than 200 PAs and there was some good fortune that he received as well. In the first half he had a .207/.271 wOBA/xwOBA, in the second half it was .331/.313. Clear and obvious improvement but I think the raw results overstate the magnitude. My best guess is his bat ends up above average for a catcher but below average overall, something like the 96 wRC+ he had as a rookie. Combined with the glove and his profile screams "Second Division Starter." Given the attrition at catcher that's fine, especially at pre-FA prices. But he's got to be paired with a better counterpart than the Christian Bethancourt's of the world.

There's certainly a lack of top end talent but I think the depth in the pen is actually pretty strong. After all the only losses to FA from a pen that was fairly lock down in the back half of the season are Smyly and Lopez, and Smyly is frankly not much of a loss at all. - Pearson was very good after coming over, has clear closer caliber stuff - Keegan Thompson was very good this year, didn't get a ton of leverage opps but excelled when he did and of course proved his mettle in '22 on that front - Tyson Miller is a matchup guy, but a premium one - Little, Almonte, and Merryweather are all coming off of injury but each looked like late inning arms pre-injury. You don't expect all three to come back right but you also don't expect that all three are cooked - Wesneski and Assad have both pitched well when asked to pitch in relief. Brown is one of the most obvious Starter -> Closer candidates in the league - None of Palencia/Neely/Roberts has established themselves yet, but all have primo stuff, all have more or less conquered AAA, and all have minor league options remaining in '25 The team *needs* another reliable late inning option. And honestly I'm hoping for two (re-sign Lopez?). But this is not a team hurting for 7th inning help.