Bertz

The article doesn't really get into the availability of Pete Alonso, which is what I was sniffing around for. But if they're willing to move him that wishlist lines up really well for Jed.

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He and his staff in Milwaukee took some of the crappiest defensive catchers in the league and routinely turned them into borderline gold glovers. He might view turning an athlete the caliber of Morel into a viable 3B as a project he could knock out in a weekend. And the urgency on the offensive side of the ball goes WAYYYYYY down if you can put Morel at 3rd.

I don't think Morel would have been in play at all. The equivalent from us is something more like Assad and Canario. Maybe even drop from Assad down to Wesneski.

I am starting to wonder if the not playing Morel at 3rd thing was a Ross decision and that Counsell is down to try it.

The team's 500Ish right now with 4 glaring holes at 1B, 3B, DH, and one SP. I think if Jed adds more than 10 WAR and fills at least 3 of those holes in the process that's right around a 90 win team I'll say as someone pretty vocally out on Bellinger and Chapman if Jed manages to play the market so that he pulls either down with a deal that's only 8 figures that'd be huge.

I've liked Imanaga all offseason. Pretty much every iteration of what I'd want to see involved him or Glasnow. So if Jed ends up with him as the main SP I'll be plenty happy about how that box is checked. The problem is that pretty much every iteration of an offseason I liked involved getting one of the monster bats available. With that ship having sailed feels like you ought to come down with Bieber and one of the lefties, and with how many teams are about to descend onto this part of the market after missing on Yamamoto why would we expect Jed to successfully pull down two of them?

Via Sharma and Mooney this AM

This also applies to pursuing Ohtani IMO.

Just seems weird to post a point while actively pointing out why it's a dumb point? Glasnow's not Livan Hernandez, he's not going to throw 230 innings, but you're dinging him for a global pandemic and coming back quickly from Tommy John surgery. I swear if he had dragged his feet and not pitched at all in '22 people would be way less worried about him. But they see those 6.2 innings and lose their horsefeathering minds. Justin Steele topped 170 innings last year after never crossing 120 in a season prior. Michael Lorenzen threw 150 innings after being a reliever for nearly a decade. Guy's mid career can add plenty of innings, this isn't some 20 year old following the Verducci 30 inning rule. If Glasnow had shoulder issues (or something shoulder-adjacent like Alzolay's recurring lat issues) there'd be reason to worry about him. But he's had three injuries in his career, two of them tied to his now surgically repaired elbow and one of them being non-arm related with his oblique. Pretending he's like Jacob deGrom or Rich Harden doesn't hold up to frankly any scrutiny.

Do...do you think he has a good chance of ending up back in the minors?

Old friend

Pretty important context to any rumors around Bieber and Naylor. Cleveland might need to shed that ~$20M

I think I've seen some stuff from some of the pitch design guys on Twitter that Wacha's last two years are not as smoke and mirrors as they look at first blush. That said I don't understand what the point is unless he's backfilling for a chunk of pitching depth going out the door in trade. With Soto and Glasnow spoken for and Cleveland/Seattle looking more at bats I'm curious what that trade would be? Because if we have all of Assad/Wicks/Wesneski/Brown in hand still adding a mediocre veteran to block them seems needlessly conservative. And if Wacha's the #1 SP added this winter...woof.

It just feels like a lot to accommodate a what by most estimations looks like a good-not-great bat? I'm probably overstating how likely it is that one of PCA, Canario, Alcantara, etc. are a first division starter within the next 18 months. But even if you want to pick apart the internal options, it's just not that hard to find a CF on the market currently. Tyler O'neill, Manuel Margot, Cedric Mullins, Mike Yastrzemski, and Trent Grisham all hit the FA next offseason or the offseason after (and thus potentially the trade block before that). I'd prefer Bellinger to any of those guys, but not by enough to lock into 2027-2029 Bellinger. Mainly I think you're just more bullish on Bellinger's bat than I am. The juice is worth the squeeze for a ~125 wRC+ where it's just simply not for a ~110. The argument for the former isn't crazy. You've laid out some good points previously, and there's also the Isaac Paredes pulled flyballs stuff. But the totality of what I've seen has me expecting the latter.

Bellinger is a great fit for the 2024 Cubs, and maybe the 2025 Cubs too. Being able to jump between center and 1st is extremely valuable here in the short term where we have fun kids at both spots. If PCA is going all Corbin Carroll on the league Bellinger can play 1st, conversely if he struggles while Caissie is hitting 119 MPH nukes at 1B Bellinger can cover center. The problem is that while 2023 Cody Bellinger hit enough for you to happily play him anywhere, 2024 Cody Bellinger is probably going to have a bat that's fairly uninspired at 1B. To be a quality starter at 1B you need to be 20+% above average at the plate. Bellinger's bat going forward looks like it'll come in right there, probably a bit south of there. For as long as he's needed to regularly cover CF that's fine, but I don't want to give him Dansby Swanson money for what should hopefully only be a couple months of coverage. Even if you're bearish on PCA, CF isn't a situation like shortstop last year where if we don't grab a guy then we are resigning ourselves to it being a hole for a while. We have internal CF's behind PCA and the market's not totally barren over the next 15 months either. If Happ and Suzuki weren't locked down it'd be totally different. Bellinger moving to a corner is a bit of a waste but not enough to lose sleep over. But as it is, I just can't look at paying market price for Bellinger as a good idea unless PCA gets dealt. And I can't really get behind that unless Jed goes really big game hunting.

Even for folks that hate Jed, isn't his villain origin story Tom horsefeathering him and Theo back in 2019? I don't think any sort of "Jed's leaving money on the table that those benevolent Ricketsses are providing" passes the smell test at all. I do think we have to adjust our expectations downward on how many bidding wars Jed is going to win. Though like TT says I don't know that I'd say never. If Rafael Devers had hit FA or if Corey Seager had hit FA when the team was already in position to be a contender I think we might have seen Jed let his hair down. We know he was in on Ohtani beyond the Rangers and Red Sox, so obviously there are situations where he'll throw $400M plus at someone.

I'll say I don't care at all about vibes or mentality or any of that stuff. Also you don't get extra WAR for acquiring a guy in November vs. doing it in January. What I do care about is wins, and the options for adding a lot of them are quickly becoming limited. On the offensive side, this winter was always going to be either an awesome Soto/Ohtani party or something fairly boring. Hopefully someone like Alonso or Bregman is more available than we think, but much more likely we're probably looking at two bats in the 110-120 wRC+ range. That would be fine if Jed goes hard on the run prevention front. That's even getting tenuous though. Setting aside Yamamoto (and assuming the Glasnow trade goes through) there are four arms we're pretty certain are available that project to 3+ WAR: Snell, Montgomery, Imanaga, and Cease. Bieber has some durability questions but is probably at that level on a rate basis. Given that Jed whiffed on doing anything fun on offense, he kind of needs to pull down at least one, ideally two of these guys. Maybe the trade market is a lot more robust than we realize, but things do not look great right now.

Our best guess is that Jed has $70Mish to spend, so assuming that's correct I don't think putting $45-50M into the rotation is a good idea. So *if* Jed's concurrently doing another $20M+ deal on a multi-year free agent then I do get it Bieber does make more sense. Because that extra $15M is the the difference between something like this: Glasnow/Imanaga/Hoskins/Solano/Suter vs. this Bieber/Imanaga/Hoskins/Polanco/Stephenson So there are still reasonable scenarios where it just doesn't make sense to go for Glasnow. But like TT said the number of iterations of this offseason that make me happy are dwindling quickly. In my mind Glasnow was very much the lynchpin to most of the successful non-Ohtani offseasons.

I'm pretty blase on Jed not pulling down one of the big three. The costs on Soto and (seemingly) Yamamoto are pretty dumb, and Ohtani clearly just wanted to be a Dodger. But this one would irk me. Glasnow was a tight fit with Soto or Ohtani, but Jed's already passed on those guys. I buy that he also doesn't make a ton of sense with someone in the Snell/Montgomery/Imanaga tier, and Jed probably shouldn't spend 2/3's of his resources on SP. But if he isn't pretty far down the road with one of those three down this is a baaaaaaadddddd look. I am largely aligned on most of Jed's team building philosophies. Getting a mega elite talent (Glasnow's probably the #3 SP in baseball on a per inning basis) on a one year deal by swallowing a little extra risk is exactly the kind of thing he is supposed to do based on the ideas he espouses.

This is the crux of things IMO. This is a MUCH taller order in my mind than yours I think. If I'm dashboarding correctly, there have been only 25 guys since the start of the century to amass 30+ WAR in their age 25-34 seasons https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/major-league?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&type=8&ind=0&startdate=&enddate=&season1=2000&season=2023&qual=500&age=25%2C34 I just don't think his age does that much work. Pitchers will break your heart, and the extent to which a 25 year old is safer than a 30 year old is pretty nominal IMO. Yamamoto is a great starting point, he certainly gives you better odds than most of achieving something like that. But he's also 5'10", switching to a new ball, and going to lose a day of rest in between every start. So he's also go elevated risk beyond just being a pitcher. There's a reason no one before or since Cole has sniffed $300M, and it's because things have to line up pretty much perfectly for that to not be a terrible investment.

This feels like it might be a savvy signing, weird that it was the Royals.

These are the top MLB starters age 24-25 from five years ago in 2018. https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/major-league?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&type=8&ind=0&startdate=&enddate=&season1=2018&season=2018&age=24&age=25&qual=100 Today 6 of the top 9 have been devoured by the attrition monster. Though to be fair on the other hand #s 10-13 are better today than they were then. Yamamoto is probably something like a Luis Castillo or Kevin Gausman caliber starter? That's awesome! Those tend to top out around $150M though. Why would we pay Yamamoto as much as two of those types combined? What are the odds he's twice as good as e.g Jordan Montgomery over the course of their next contracts? It's pretty unlikely if you ask me. Again this all feels like wanting to do something almost as big as Ohtani as a statement and trying to will Yamamoto into being that guy.

Feels like everyone is talking themselves into Yamamoto being a super-ace but I'm not actually sure that he is? The projections are more all star than Cy Young, and I'm not sure age for pitchers is enough reason to jump him up into the $250-300M range? Giving Yamamoto the reported money feels very "well we've gotta do something big" and not something that would hold up to even a little bit of scrutiny.