Bertz

Essentially every signal we've gotten from those connected to the team is the opposite.

If you were reading tea leaves you'd probably say that Arizona is about to spend a little money and not on Zac Gallen

This team *really* values soft skills behind the plate. They thought Yan Gomes walked on water and he stopped being a good defensive catcher by the public metrics 4-5 years before he got to Chicago. If Mo's a -5 catcher on paper but a +10 catcher in Craig's heart they'll gladly let it rip. Also seeing how some catchers have drastically improved their defense with new orgs (William Contreras?) makes me wonder if the catcher equivalent of jugs work isn't in fact viable. I'm sure getting ~20% playing time in MLB is not the optimal way to improve Mo's defense, but I'm not sure it's suboptimal enough to A) go with a less desirable option at DH and B) counterbalance the fact that Mo's bat continuing to hang out in Iowa is suboptimal for that half of his development.

I think catcher is the one position where there's as much (maybe even more?) to learn off the field as on. Like we have an example on hand in Miguel Amaya. He missed playing the field in most of '21 and all of '22. Then in 2023 he had a month in the minors, and after he came up in early May was mostly just Kyle Hendricks' personal caddy. I'm hoping Mo gets to be personal valet to one of the vets (Boyd ideally), and then he can just pick up scraps from there when one of Kelly/Amaya is banged up.

Valdez is a better player, but when you look big picture I'm glad we did Bregman: - Pitcher attrition is a horsefeathers - The trade market was way better on the SP side than the pitching side. Bregman + Cabrera is likely a lot better than Valdez + TBD Hitter - The way that Bregman pushed Shaw to the bench was a savvy way to add middle infield depth. With how good and durable Swanson/Hoerner are you'd be scraping the barrel for any veteran backup this year regardless of what money you offered. Now Shaw insulates us from injury and also Nico's impending free agency - Bregman's got a reputation as a top of the scale off the field guy. Framber...very much does not

If I was 60% sure the Bosox/Shaw stuff was dead after IKF I'm like 90% sure when this goes down just a few hours later.

I assumed the Skubal arb case was impacting the pitching market but didn't think this directly. Have to assume Gallen goes somewhere by this weekend.

I don't think it's insane to hope for something in the vicinity of Tommy Edman, Bryson Stott, or Jeff McNeil from Ramirez. That said Ramirez 4th is largely an indictment of the system in Kiley's POV rather than gassing up Pedro. He did rank the system 25th after all.

bahahahaha

Nick Martinez the last three years, as a reliever: 3.05 ERA, 3.74 xFIP, 15.7% K-BB Nick Martinez the last three years, first time through the order regardless of role: 2.77 ERA, 3.81 xFIP, 16.3% K-BB I don't love the idea of adding a SP that doesn't either A) slot ahead of Taillon or B) have minor league options. But if we're going to add a guy like that I agree Martinez is about as good as you can ask for.

Yeah I think if you swap Alcantara and Ramirez that's probably something approaching the consensus rankings.

Keith Law had him at 41, Longenhagen sounds like he hasn't soured on him either and will likely place him similarly. It looks like he's just becoming divisive, with IMO the driver primarily being impatience.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/47684227/2026-top-10-prospect-rankings-all-30-mlb-teams-kiley-mcdaniel#chc Kiley's Top 10 1. Ballesteros 2. Wiggins 3. Rojas 4. Ramirez 5. Conrad 6. Long 7. Alcantara 8. Kepley 9. Hartshorn 10. Wing

I know you can never have too much pitching but Gallen/Taillon/Rea all on the roster does feel suboptimal.

Sounds like a good year to have a late first rounder and 4 picks in the top 100

👀

I think the Boyd thing is instructive. He averaged about 50 MLB innings per year from '21-'24, but give him a new UCL and suddenly he's right as rain. Cade Horton threw almost as many innings last year (147) as he had in his college career and first two minor league seasons combined (176). On the flip side Zack Wheeler (#3) and Corbin Burnes (#4) were top 5 in innings pitched from '21-'24, and both went under the knife. Aaron Nola was #1 and missed three months with a leg injury. I don't want to go quite as far as to say we have no insight into injury and risk, but I think it's clear that everyone is high and it's just a matter of degree. Like let's say the baseline level for "this guy is gonna go under the knife this year" is 15%. I'd be surprised if a risky guy like Cabrera is north of 20% and I'd be shocked if a 'safe' guy like Logan Webb is south of 10%.

I would be surprised if everyone is healthy and Assad makes the roster. All indications coming from the team are that they are being, frankly, fanatical about stockpiling depth. Even if there are a couple of spring training injuries I think you should assume no pitcher with minor league options aside from Horton and Palencia is breaking camp with the team. I suspect Alcantara's not making the team either. Whether it's also for depth concerns or because the team lacks confidence in him, the team adding both Carlson and McCormick feels telling. One guy in that mold is just insurance, two feels like a signal. That said Carlson's probably washed and McCormick can be stashed at Iowa, so Alcantara's got a better chance of breaking through than any of the Cubs' young pitchers.

Typo obviously, he means Pirates pitchers, but this is a fun idea. Look out if the Pirates can get their offense to even average before their pitching starts to break down.

Jed & Dana Brown texting Breslow roght now

This is a good set of questions on a fairly complicated subject. Some things I'll note: - ZiPS calculates a players underlying numbers (Ks, BBs, HRs, etc.) and then calculates FIP and estimates ERA from there. The fWAR you see on various player pages is based entirely on that projected FIP. HOWEVER, when you read the big hefty ZiPS projection article it uses a variation of WAR that attempts to include contact quality. Ben Brown is a great example, he's projected at 1.0 WAR above and 1.6 WAR on his player page - This is a bit confusing and annoying, but the flip side would be every projection system on a player's page following different rules which would be even more confusing - The Cubs' defense is stellar, but we have to take care to not double count that. If the Cubs defense saves 50 runs in a season that's 0.30 runs of ERA. So you can't give PCA/Swanson/Hoerner their defensive runs and then also give Boyd full credit for beating his FIP by 0.40 runs - I do not use bWAR much. I believe it takes a pitcher's ERA, strips out the impact of defense, and then gives the pitcher the rest of the credit. I philosophically do not agree with this. IMO there's far too much luck even in a full season for that to be a reasonable approach. Over larger samples I'm less opposed (e.g. I'd use bWAR for Kyle Hendricks' full career but not for an individual season) - The magnitude of the contact management stuff isn't huge on a team level. The Cubs last year had a 3.81 ERA, 4.04 xERA, and matching 4.16 FIP/xFIP marks. That xERA/xFIP gap is what you'd potentially consider the soft contact skill to be. 0.12 runs of ERA even over a full season is 20ish runs total. Add in roster turnover and regression and the effect is small enough that it's not going to significantly move the needle. I also don't blame someone for just throwing it out with the bathwater entirely - I do not have the citation for this, it was in a chat years ago, but Dan Szymborski has said you need hundreds of innings to confidently say someone is a FIP beater. It's basically a situation where it takes so long to establish that someone is a FIP beater, by the time you can say it definitively looking backwards you have to start worrying about whether the talent level will hold up looking forward And then I know this is way too long already, but a few tangentially related thoughts on evaluating pitching: - I tend to look at xFIP first when evaluating a pitcher and also give it the most weight. It is focused on only the things a pitcher can control, and isn't an overengineered black box like BaseballProspectus' stats.And IMO - xERA is the ideal compliment to xFIP. There is a good bit of luck to contact quality, so I do think xFIP carries a good bit more weight, but all of the reasonable counterarguments to xFIP are handled by xERA. If you use xFIP and xERA as brackets you are almost certainly capturing the range of how a pitcher actually performed IMO - This is a little reductive, but for the sake of nice round numbers half a run seems to be the extent to which someone can under or overperform their peripherals at a true talent level. Anything more than that and you should credit/blame the defense or assume it'll smooth out with more time

I really didn't want Suarez but that's a nifty deal for Cincy.

Raiders are looking to dump him and I bet they'd be happy to get back anything for him if the trade involved some salary relief. Even guys that play a different sport.