Bertz

This is one of the reasons I'm pretty okay with a host of 1 year deals. If Owen Caissie is slugging .600 at Iowa and Brandon Belt has a .600 OPS in MLB, you give it a month or so but you can probably swap them out in early/mid May. If Matt Shaw is OPSing 1.000 at Iowa and Matt Chapman is OPSing .600 in MLB, the team's going to give it til at least the ASB before they do anything drastic. On the pitching side, while I won't go as far as to say the durability questions around a guy like Glasnow are more feature than bug, I will say that you'd much much much rather have 100-150 stellar innings rather than 180 solid innings. This is very much a Pizza by Alfredo vs. Alfredo's Pizza Cafe situation. Last thing, and this is very much on a horizon longer than 6 months, but the ugly side to the "yay all our good prospects are in the upper minors" coin is that all our good prospects are in the upper minors. Myrtle Beach looks like it's going to be pretty weak next year. So I think the need to strengthen that weaker portion of the organizational talent pipeline gives Jed even more reason than normal to hold draft picks and not pay the tax for a Qualifying Offer FA. I'd pretty much have it as Ohtani or bust on that front?

Post Ohtani, I'm really all in in one beefing the hell out of the pitching staff. Something like Glasnow, Imanaga, Robert Stephenson, and Tanner Scott. You'd be looking at a pitching staff of: SP - Steele, Glasnow, Imanaga, Hendricks, Taillon RP - Adbert, Scott, Stephenson, Merryweather, Leiter, Smyly, Cuas, Assad That is a fairly monstrous pitching staff, particularly when you think about how much talent is down at Iowa ready to step in for injury. Eyeballing it that would project to 18ish WAR, which would be 3rd on Fangraphs behind the Phillies and Braves. And between the youths and the conservative estimates on innings for Glasnow/Imanaga there's plenty of additional ceiling. The above is $55-60M, which might limit you to only one bat of consequence. So maybe swap Stephenson out for more of a Hunter Harvey type? But regardless I don't think it takes a ton to keep the offense flat-ish with last year, and there is more than enough quality pitching available to put together a staff that will absolutely embarrass any non-Braves lineup.

Brett Taylor mentioned this on Twitter this morning but the like baseball version of the Overton window is way out of whack on Chapman. I don't really want him at the cost he's going to require, but he's still a really good player at a position where we ideally could use one. We bemoan that Madrigal had the glove for 3B but not the bat while Wisdom has the bat but no longer the glove. Chapman is more or less those two guys Frankensteined together. I tend to think Jed won't go for Chapman though. He has a pretty clear reticence to sign QO guys, and with Chapman's warts I don't think he's going to be one of the exceptions.

The Cubs outperformed their BaseRuns expectation on offense by 0.15 runs per game. They underperformed their BaseRuns expectation on defense by....0.15 runs per game. So the team's a smidge better balanced than their RS/RA would indicate but it all mostly washes out.

It's only ~25M in salary, so you'd still be able to do e.g. Glasnow and Hoskins on top of that

Zoomer Michael Wuertz

The Candelario move is weird because I had no interest in him at 3+ years or especially 4 years, but I also know there's a decent chance in two months I end up like "well horsefeathers I would have preferred that to ____". I still like Jorge Polanco as a guy from a similar archetype but with a little more oomph in the power/speed departments. He'son successive club options at a similar salary too which is super nice.

If they think Gleyber would take to 3rd Jed bringing him home and backfilling some of NYY's lost pitching would make a ton of sense all around.

This is a good article you probably should have back-pocketed for a less angsty day lol Morel's bat is the goods. One of the things you didn't mention here is the groundball rate. He made only modest gains in his contact numbers between years 1 and 2, but he did that while cutting his groundball rate substantially. If you want optimism about him improving his contact I think the fact that fixing his launch angle is successfully completed means there might be more bandwidth for those contact rates now. The defense is the sticky point. We've had this argument around here a good bit recently but feels like if the Cubs thought his 3B defense was fixable they probably would have had him focus on the position last winter like Madrigal did. That said if he can magically clean things up there he significantly improves the prospects of the 2024 team. His bat is okay for a 1B or DH, for a 3B it's clear cut 1st division starter material. I'm curious if he makes it to March in the org. He's not going for Soto obviously. The Glasnow thing never passed the sniff test and then Jed reamed Nightengale over it. And if Ohtani's not happening I don't know that Morel needs to be traded for a young SP. Plus with the two special bats out of reach I'm not sure there's a clear cut better DH option on the market. The guy who two weeks ago looked like a sure goner suddenly doesn't seem that way any more.

Rays might not be ready to pull the trigger (waiting for Cease or Yamamoto) or maybe Jed wants to get the official rejection on Ohtani (at $25M Glasnow is potentially an "instead of" rather than an "in addition to"). Or any number of things. We've seen stuff get held up without it necessarily being an issue. For instance there was a ton of smoke around Swanson last year and then it died down for a week because of his wedding, and then he signed during his honeymoon.

I would guess he means specifically at the meetings and the Hoskins/Glasnow discussions that have pretty clearly happened were last week. I don't think we have a lot of instances of Jed outright lying (he's more of a lie of omission type), and the Glasnow/Hoskins stuff has come from a lot of directions including some generally reliable ones.

Yeah but Amaya is way way more valuable than Higashioka. Tauchman is a little closer as a pre-FA guy in his 30's that you'd pencil in for ~1.5 WAR if he started every day But yeah there's not a perfect parallel for several of these guys. Like King has much better stuff than Assad but less starting experience and less team control.

We don't have perfect parallels for a lot of these guys but something more like Wicks, Assad, Wesneski, Thompson, and Tauchman? I probably still would have done it but that's a BIG bite out of the young pitching cache. I think it's probably an overpay which is why the Padres aren't waiting around for Ohtani to sign.

He visited LA on Friday, San Fran on Saturday, TBD on Sunday, and the Jay's FL facility on Monday. Given that Jed was late to the meetings pretty decent chance it was Sunday.

I mean you yourself have been saying it doesn't look like losing out on Ohtani is due to lack of effort? So it's hard to say right now but isn't the difference here just who looks like they're going to happen winding up with the guy based on softer factors? You also mention 4ish WAR being more good than great. Yamamoto projects to 3.7 next year. And he's tracking towards the 2nd largest contract for a pitcher ever. I think there's a "fine well if no Ohtani you must get the next best thing" and I think one of the things Friedman does that's helped keep that franchise so strong (and what Jed is trying to emulate) is not throw bad money after good.

Funny you mention the Dodgers, because they don't actually play in these waters that often. They jumped on Betts and Freeman, and appear to be doing their damndest for Ohtani, but otherwise they keep it short term. Like they passed on Harper, Machado's FA, all the SS's last year. They're very judicious with long term contracts and instead do a lot of trades, short term FA deals, and lean on their farm. Jed's clearly trying to do something similar, we'll see if he can pull it off.

I would say too, the team was 6th in runs scored last year and 16th in runs allowed. I think the preferred aesthetic around here (including myself) is clearly for as much offense as possible. An offseason around Ohtani or Soto likely brings the team into "best non-Braves offense in the league" territory, but the opportunity cost probably means run-prevention has to stay roughly average. A Glasnow/Imanaga/two good-not-great bats type of offseason probably puts the team into the top 10 in both directions. I prefer the high octane offense as well, but I think a more pitching-heavy offseason is still a path to a really strong team.

https://twitter.com/jonmorosi/status/1732449035657609660?t=4A0bINWkXxPFE5i258Dsmw&s=19 More or less done it sounds like

Chicago's great but there's a world of difference between living in a somewhere as someone making like $50k a year and living somewhere making $50M a year. Chicago does not have anywhere near the same caliber of super-high-end amenities to cater to the ultra rich that New York, San Fran, or LA does. It also, if this matters to Shohei, does not really have much of a concentrated Japanese community. And of course our winters are awful. Like it's very reasonable that he looks at Chicago and goes "nah I'm good."

Yeah yesterday when Dave Roberts started blabbing it really started to feel like this was just about over. Teams probably submitted their formal offers when they did their in-person meetups. There'll be a day or three of Shohei sleeping on it and a day or three of additional haggling but it should be pretty close to done?

I'm not that worried about it unless Jed pulls down all of Glasnow, Hoskins, and Soto. When I looked at payroll at the start of the offseason, it looked like the team was $80-90M under for next year. And right now the team is slated to lose 34 year old Kyle Hendricks, 36 year old Yan Gomes, and 35 year old Drew Smyly. That's 5 WAR at 3 fairly low leverage spots on the roster. If you add Hoskins and Glasnow, that's ~6 more WAR at higher leverage spots. Now you're at 11 WAR total, and that's a bit tough to do in FA alone. But with the farm system (both via straight production and trades) does still feel very doable. Glasnow and Soto though...you're talking north of 15 WAR just to hold steady. That's suddenly a much tougher beast, and I think would likely require the team to stay above the LT or highly leverage the farm to make up. I would hope Jed would kick the can down the road and look at resetting in '26 or '27.

Based on the Sharma/Mooney latest this...does not look far off

I kind of wonder about that. They're waiting for the firm no from Ohtani's camp and then pull the trigger here

Leverage is always always always other teams. A GM could come out and say "our owner has decreed we absolutely must trade this player" and if at least two teams want that player at more or less market value there is zero loss of leverage. Conversely no amount of "we totally still want him we swear" matters if you're holding a distressed asset. Soto's amazing. The market's a little limited by his $30M+ salary but there will probably be 4-5 teams on him heavily. My guess is Preller's just asking for the moon hoping someone does something stupid before Ohtani signs and he has to buckle down and get serious.