Bertz

Remember when most of the fanbase wanted to take Ian Happ out back and shoot him? You should it wasn't even two weeks ago.

Also since this got published this morning Bretty Baty got sent to AAA and Omar Narvaez got DFA'd We talk about how it takes another team willing to sell to be able to buy, and with the Mets' drama this week maybe they're ready to sell early

This is a great point. A lot of these teams are probably telling guys similar things, and the failure at one stop might be extremely necessary for the message to sink in and the changes to take hold at the next one.

Arizona Phil is great for minor league roster management minutiae and the in person looks he gets at ACLers and Spring Training backfielders. His opinions on MLB matters are about as valuable as any other rando on Twitter.

I wonder if we see Shaw to Iowa soon. The progression the org likes to see is for someone to hit a deep slump and come fully out of it before getting promoted. It's only been a week for the coming fully out of it but looks like mission accomplished for Matt. I'm also just generally curious how teams are viewing the Southern League's offensive environment. They aren't doing the slicked balls anymore so what the hell is the explanation for the deadball era level offense

The last two weeks have....not gone great and the boo birds are coming out Others have resorted to apathy The last place Reds come to town today! Cubs better win today, because they draw Greene and Lodolo the next two days Go Cubs?

On it boss

Someone on Twitter said they were looking at his hand, so you hope for a blister

Sounds like one more

With their current injuries I think the Brewers lineup is a lot scarier vs. RHP than LHP. I do have the same gut feel that this is of course the day Shota finally puts up a stinker, but it should be fine?

Like a lot of your declarative statements this is not at all how things work.

I think runs are runs and in that sense WAR is WAR. Where I do think there is some wiggle room is where there are synergies between groups. This year's Cubs are a great example. I don't think it's a coincidence that the bullpen got its act together right around thr time the SPs started more regularly going 6 or more. 4.1 IP and 1 R isn't actually a good outing, especially in the middle of two weeks without an off day. I also think there are some synergies to be had on offense when you have no holes in a lineup. Like last year's Braves (or the 2008 Cubs) where everyone collectively had a career year all at once. I don't think that's entirely coincidence.

We can acknowledge that the Brewers are good at what they're doing without pretending they're omniscient. There's zero reason to believe Rea or Wilson aren't getting lucky, much in the same way there's zero reason to believe Assad's not getting lucky. They problem is you can't just point at a guy and yell "j'accuse!" and have their numbers immediately start evening out.

As someone who generally likes Jed and isn't prone to jumpiness, I'll say even I'm pretty worried about Jed's passivity for this summer. This team has jumped the market exactly zero times since Theo left. And one of the prominent examples during the Theo era is one of the few moves where we know Jed and Theo weren't aligned (Quintana). We also know the current regime really values intangibles at the catcher position. We also know teams hate changing catchers mid-season. But the team is clearly in need of some additional reinforcements, and I think catcher is clearly the spot on the roster least likely to just work itself out naturally. I think the obvious solution would be to pay a bit of a premium to jump the market, run with three catchers on the roster for much of June, and then barring a miraculous rebound dump Gomes from there. But like pointed out above that just goes so far against MO for Jed I don't see it happening.

I like PCA, I would not have a problem with him still being up, but what about this screams "nothing left to learn at AAA"

Really great stuff from Cristian. I'm curious how much longer he hangs out at MB. I don't hate him hanging out a while and continuing to build confidence and good reps, but with him repeating the level it also wouldn't be crazy to move him up soon. Maybe he gets moved up right after the draft?

I think the issues with Swanson are relatively modest, yellow flags more than red ones. The arbitrary endpoints game is stupid and something I thought we were smart enough to collectively move on from over the last 5 years or so. His xwOBA this season is .324, above league average in the 54th percentile. He's underperforming his xwOBA by 51 points, for his career coming into this year he'd underperformed his xwOBA by 10 points. So you would say he's luck-neutral been a roughly league average hitter, which is not all that far from where we expected him. I don't love the elevated groundball rate, though he did that early on last year so I wonder if it's a thing meant to combat the April conditions at Wrigley. The defense is down. but I'd pump the brakes on getting worked up over that. Largely because 1/4 a season of defensive metrics is little more than an RNG. But also I'd be curious to see what it rates at since he came off the IL. He had a rough few weeks there in April, but I feel like he's been largely back to normal since? I'd also love to get splits on his running speed, that's down YoY and also something I wonder if we blame on the knee injury. Like I get the hand-wringing because Swanson's line is ugly, but looking under the hood there’s just not much to be alarmed about. Certainly not enough that I'd be doing take backsies on his nearly 5 WAR last year.

I'm curious why coming into the series Sunday was a TBA and then after the rainout they went with Assad. I would think the rainout makes doing something creative on Sunday that much easier? Was getting a better alignment for the Brewers series just more valuable than whatever else they had planned previously? Is Assad dealing with a little something and Thursday he wasn'ta sure thing for Sunday? Is the club starting to do some dumb Bill Belichick style "refuse to be transparent even when there's no advantage to be gleaned" style horsefeathers?

Daniel Palencia was dominant including 10 (!) pitches over 100 MPH and 2/3s of his pitches in the strike zone. Have to assume he joins the big club in Milwaukee on Monday

I believe Sunday is currently slated as another bullpen game, so have to imagine Smyly giving 2-3 innings is expected to be part of that mix.

I am unfortunately not aware of one.

He probably gets two rehab starts, which puts him back with the team pretty much right after the next off day on June 3rd?

Also even if you could say the team hasn't been super gung ho in chasing velocity (like 1908 says I don't think that'sfair), they've certainly been very big on coaxing additional velo out of guys in hand. Like Wicks, Assad, and Wesneski are all guys who have stepped forward in the last two years due in part to velo increases. Hell it hasn't worked clearly but even Hendricks has his best velo since 2016 right now.

I wouldn't go that far, but I would caution 2 things: 1. Statcast's numbers are pretty bulletproof for outfielders where it's mainly assessing range, there's a little more grey on the accuracy with infielders 2. If we could look at the accumulation of those negative plays/runs day by day, I believe 80-90% of it came in the first week of the season. I think Morel's been within a stones through of average since the Dodgers series. So if we're worried about the team going forward, his horrific play against the Rangers and Rockies probably isn't too meaningful. It's totally fair to include it looking back and assessing value of course

This is such a good and succinct way of putting it