Bertz

Wesneski is one of the MLB starters listed but doesn't get a writeup. Then among the AAA arms Ben Brown gets a nod

I might actually be more interested in Kohl's first AA start than Ferris' encore. God there's just so much fun pitching in the system now

I think one of the biggest factors with this question is Justin Steele. He's already at 49 innings, while his career high is the 119 he threw last year. I'm not sure what the team's thoughts are on handling him, but I'd be tempted to IL him and skip a start or two. That gives you a bit more time to decide if Wesneski needs some time in Iowa or not.

Under my tutelage, the Cubs finally broke their losing streak on Wednesday Now the Cubs head up to Minnesota to begin what might be their toughest road trip of the year Pitching for the Twins is Sonny Gray. He's one of the OG sweeper pitchers, so expect all the lefties including Eric Hosmer and Tucker Barnhart to start tonight Opposing Gray is Drew Smyly, one of Jed's shrewder moves Go Cubs, win two in a row tonight

He's hitting a ton of weak fly balls. FG says he's hitting an astronomical 31% pop-ups. There's reason to doubt that specific number (it's a bit in the weeds, but the tl;dr is that MiLB scorers and MLB scorers differ on the semantics of pop-ups vs. flyballs vs. line drives), but he's clearly not hitting the ball with authority often enough. The glass half full is that this is the first step in closing his hole at the top of the zone. Essentially he's gone from not making contact at all to all those belt high fastballs to making poor contact. He's also hitting the ball to the opposite field too much, which I'm guessing is related.

Yeah this is awesome! I find myself really eying that Iowa pen. I mentioned it in the gamethread last night but I think Keegan could use a breather in Iowa, and Nick Burdi is absolutely shoving. I'd love to make that swap. And then Horn and Heuer are not far behind. I'd like to see Ross start leaning on Merryweather and Rucker more, and not hiding them in garbage time. They're both pitching well (Merryweather has a sub 3 ERA with peripherals to match after his first outing of the year), but if you can't pitch in even medium leverage spots it's largely for naught. Let them sink/swim and move the line along.

Considering he's more or less platooning with Wisdom swapping him for Mastro seems pretty reasonable

Wouldn't be opposed to Keegan going down to Iowa and getting right

If that's true that's huge. 117 is pretty elite slugger territory.

It's a dong party

I see you being dominant in relief Ryan Jensen

Riley Thompson seems to be formally switching to short relief? I noticed he piggybacked a couple times and didn't go very deep, which I attributed to him getting roughed up. But if today is any indication it looks more intentional than I realized prior

Wow Ben did not appreciate me having Wicks ahead of him Also what's with all the Wednesday day games in AAA? Wednesday is my in office day and I swear more than half the time I sit down to eat lunch and there's an Iowa game in progress.

The Cubs have lost 3 in a row and 9 of 12 So we're breaking out the big guns The Cards are throwing out their one good starter, Jordan Montgomery. Our offense is going to have its hands full trying to not do anything infuriating The Cubs are countering with Justin Steele, who has been awesome for going on a full year now Go Cubs

Across '21 and 22, the Rays were 47-52 in one run games while the Dodgers were 40-39. Please, tell me more about how record in close games is something smart teams are somehow able to control.

I like Ross. He clearly takes the long view on the season, and I think that's going to ultimately pay off. Fans are going to hate him because quite frankly a majority of them are so short-sighted I wonder if they lack object permanence. For last night, the bullpen was likely still shredded after Sunday, and as TT pointed out Assad was cruising. He knew just as well as us that he was probably pushing things with Javier. If he'd taken Assad out, his options were Keegan Thompson, Michael Rucker, and a bunch of guys heavily fatigued from this weekend. If/when one of them blew it, my guess is you'd have written essentially this same article.

At all? I'd say before Memorial Day. Rattling off 3 or 4 in a row isn't that wild of an idea. For good? Sometime in late June or July. The May/June schedule isn't as brutal as it looked preseason, but it's still tough through that Padres series the first week of June, and while the Angels and Giants aren't all that intimidating its still a West Coast trip and those can be problematic.

The team has been really bad about stringing hurt guys along before, but with the off day Thursday and the fortuitous timing of bringing up Morel I don't hate it as long as he's either starting or on the IL for Friday's game in Minnesota.

There's a line in The Office: "Not everything is a lesson Ryan, sometimes you just fail." I really wish I could get other baseball fans to internalize this. I'm not sure why we'd weight the last two weeks more than the previous four beyond just being irrational fans expecting the sky to always fall. There's two things going on with the offense, neither's especially concerning. 1st is that the luck with runners on has regressed very quickly. The team was stupid lucky driving runners in the first month of the season, and that has finally corrected and corrected hard. But holistically the team's right where it should be. They've scored 169 runs, while Baseruns (which attempts to strip out luck and sequencing) says they "should have" scored 172. That's essentially a rounding error. The second is power. Power is incredibly streaky, and unfortunately EVERY SINGLE WINTER baseball fans collectively forget this information. It's like that Patrick Star meme. Through the Padres series, the Cubs were 6th in HR/FB rate, about 3% higher than the league average. Since the start of the first Marlins series they're 24th, about 3% lower than the league average. Power ebbs and flows, this stuff happens. Like yes please continue with the plan to play more Morel and Mervis and less Mervis and Madrigal, but really all that's "wrong" right now is the baseball gods decided to cram a month's worth of offensive regression into about 10 days, and it came at a time where we played a bunch of tight games so those marginal runs were really felt. But like there's not any real takeaways that would stand up to much analytical rigor. Sometimes you just fail.

I understand what Longenhagen is going for in trying to break the lists into two parts but still feels like he's not going to finish doing every team until after the draft?

I wonder if part of the idea too is that more and more days off for rest are going to be given to the regulars now that we're a bit deeper into the season and some dings and dents have been accumulated. Hoerner, Happ, Swanson, and Bellinger (aside from his paternity leave) have largely been iron men. Wisdom and Mancini are each currently on pace for damn near 600 PAs as well. There's likely more playing tabs up for grabs than there has been up to this point. That said I'd have probably held out on making this change a bit longer, because I'm a bit worried about Morel getting 4 starts a week as currently constructed.

In the last few years you have the Astros, Yankees, and Cubs going all in on soft skills behind the plate at the expense of offense. You also have the Cardinals zagging where everyone else zigged, and then embarrassingly changing their mind not even six weeks in. I hate the appeal to authority, but there's some pretty real evidence that this is a thing. Add in that Amaya has skipped Iowa entirely, and I don't think there's any harm in sending him back down for Gomes and then re-evaluating dumping Barnhart for good closer to the ASB.

Yeah you have to cheer for him the first time. After that though, anything is fair game. I'll personally still cheer for him, but he leaned hard into his heel turn so if he gets boos then so be it