Bertz

That "we're in the endgame" gif has been getting a lot of mileage during the whole Ohtani saga. Is the tweet from the PA announcer going to be our "on your left"?

So Morosi's officially relegated to Nightengale status at this point, right?

This is basically the Jake Peavy saga but if all of MLB cared about it not just Cubs fans

This is presumably going to be the physical, not sure if anything else needs to be done? Have to assume we have details by at absolute latest lunchtime tomorrow.

The Dodgers rotation is a bunch of sophomores and rehabbers, they are competition on pitching regardless of what Ohtani does

Passan retweeted this which I take as agreement

If Ohtani truly signs this afternoon I would absolutely expect the dam to break and a bunch to immediately go down this weekend

MLB Trade Rumors model, which is extremely accurate, has him getting a 40% raise even after his 1 WAR year last year. That's how the system works. Guys get substantial raises every year of the cycle barring more or less catastrophe.

He's already projected at $20M for 2024, and rule of thumb is a ~50% raise each time through arb unless performance is pretty extreme in either direction. That's sort of the trap we fell into with KB, he got top of the scale arb salaries throughout his entire time here because of his monster first three years.

Even with his down year, Vladito projects as the 5th best hitter in baseball next year by Steamer. They are not trading him to free up space for horsefeathering Spencer Horwitz lol

Agreed. Any team that signed Ohtani was going to have to give assurances they were putting the best team around him. Like they might move some of the guys like Biggio or Jansen or Schneider who don't have an iron firm grip on a starting spot and now don't have DH as a fallback, but their existing stars are not going anywhere.

If it is the Blue Jays, curious what they do in LF. They are really sad in the outfield behind Springer and Varsho, and I'd think Ohtani on top of their current payroll commitments would mostly tap them out. Something like Canario for Pearson and Biggio would make sense in both directions.

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.