Bertz

Do we have confirmation on this? I asked about it a week or two back in the MiLB forum. It seems likely, and I would think Amaya might get one too, but don't have a great way to check (I usually just have to wait for AZ Phil to randomly drop nuggets like this). I do think, more to the point of the article, there are several pockets of depth where I'd expect a trade from in the next ~15 months. Most notably RHH outfielders in the upper minors, the SPs who could reasonably open next year in an ML rotation (Assad, Wicks, Brown, Wesneski), and the entire Tennessee infield from the end of the year.

Yeah the only way we can turn back the clock on innings is if we also turn the clock back on velocity. I love Kyle Hendricks but I don't want to go back to 87 being an average fastball.

Let's put a little finer point on this: - Juan Soto's bat the last three years is approximately 45 runs better than a league average bat over the course of a year - Over that same period, his glove is, depending on how you weight statcast vs. DRS, and whether you consider his positive 2021 germane, somewhere between -5 and -10 - Ian Happ's glove is between average and +5 in LF, again depending on how you weight which inputs - Ian Happ has 11 career games at 1B, and over 100 in the infield more generally. I think you'd expect Happ to be a better 1B, perhaps much better. Certainly in the near term Put it all together, and I think you'd expect the team to be flushing 5-10 runs down the toilet by playing Soto as an outfielder. But again let's return to that +45 bat. Pete Alonso's averaged +27 the last three years. Rhys Hoskins is not quite a +20 bat. Cody Bellinger was +24 this year (and I personally have my doubts that this is his true talent level). Soto's bat is so so so so good. If there are any necessary evils, like keeping a crappy defender at a more valuable position to make him happy in his walk year, it's totally worth it and better than most alternatives.

I doubt the team is going to pass on arguably the best hitter in baseball over it. Like the Astros let Yordan Alvarez play the field ~1/3rd of the time even though he's been a should-be DH since he was a teenager. You sometimes compromise to add otherworldly offense to the lineup.

Yeah more or less. Soto to 1B is cleaner but it is definitely a lot less likely. I'll hope for it but my expectation is going to be for Happ to move.

It's hard to say what the team's preference is around a 6 man rotation since prior to Assad and Wicks balling out to end the year they hadn't had a good 6th starter since Mike Montgomery. I'd expect next year them to do a 6 man coming out of ST. Hendricks and Stroman could use a bit of a breather, and Steele could REALLY use one. You've also got off days almost every week early on. I don't expect it to go much further than that though unless maybe the sign one of the Japanese starters.

Soto's bat is so good that you get him in the door and worry about the defensive stuff later. I'd guess the most likely play is Ian Happ to 1B. It's not ideal, but not close to problematic enough to poopoo the idea.

I'd love Glasnow. I think the durability questions are a bit overstated. The forearm in '19 was probably a precursor to his elbow popping. And the missed time in 21 and 22 was just a standard TJ. Even if you are worried about the durability though, I think with Assad/Wicks/Brown/Wesneski (and Horton not that far off) we're in a position to take 120 stellar innings over 180 good innings.

14 WAR seems a bit high? Like if Jed pulled down: Pete Alonso - 3.5ish projected WAR Yoshi Yamamoto - 3.5 Jeimer Candelario - 2.5 David Robertson - 1 Hunter Harvey - 0.5 That feels like a stellar offseason, filling every hole on the roster, and that's only 11. Similarly, I wouldn't want to take too hard of a line on exactly how many dollars arebeing allocated, knowing how well stocked the farm is. Though admittedly while the farm is deep I do think it's doubtful Jed would dip into it enough to have a good offseason under the LT.

One thing to be careful with is that FG is a little less generous with their FV grades than MLB. So I think if you're doing the FV -> $ conversion I'd stick to Fangraphs or ESPN prospect rankings (since Kiley was there when that analysis was run). That would say something like Alcantara straight up or Brown/Wicks + Caissie.

Curious what Soto ultimately costs. BBTV says something like Brown + Caissie. Even given Soto's salary that feels light. The Betts and Lindor trades are a bit messy as comps since they included Price and Carrasco respectively. Also the Betts trade blew up in the Sox face pretty spectacularly, so while it's a comparable situation AJ Preller is not going to gladly use that as a comp. Ultimately though, Soto is the best player likely to hit the market after Ohtani, and the gap between him and #3 is miles wide. Given that the Cubs have depth and need stars get Soto in the building and figure out the rest later.

I could see what's happened with Urias and Ohtani having changed the calculus for him. I also could see his agent having some back channel convos and getting confirmation that teams aren't especially scared of his 2nd half. His two halves could not have been more different, but on the whole his season wasn't that far off of what you'd have expected going into the season.

I know none of us like AJ Pierzynski, and for good reason, but I think he's become a very good broadcaster

My hope is that because it's his throwing motion they want to overhaul it's a lot more feasible to do in the offseason than in-season. But yeah like you said he put in plenty of work this year because it was a gaping hole on the roster before Candelario got here. My expectation is that he's either a DH for us or shipped off somewhere he can play 2B more or less every day (Tigers or Mariners?).

I liked the 1 game wildcard round, but understand that teams didn't find that to be enough incentive. My main gripe with the current format is the nonsensical off days. Why the horsefeathers was the NL off yesterday knowing they're off again for the travel day tomorrow? I have no love for the Braves, but one of the major selling points of the new format is that a team like the Phillies was going to have to burn their top 2 guys in the wildcard round. Now though they can let Wheeler start games 2 and 5 of the DS on normal rest even after starting in the Wildcard round? I assume they wanted to limit the number of games going up against an NFL Sunday, and also build in some buffer for a rainout, but there's got to be a better way.

Have we gotten any sort of confirmation on whether Canario and/or Amaya got a 4th minor league option? I know there is a carveout for guys who suffer major injuries, but I don't know the exact parameters. I'd think particularly with the way the team treated Canario in September the org expects he'll get one, but I'm wondering if/when we'll get confirmation publicly.

I wouldn't move Nico again personally. I think the team needs to be really honest with themselves about whether they think 3B can work, and if they don't then yeah trade him. I love Morel as a dude but I don't love him as a player if he's locked into DH or 1B

To me the biggest wildcard is Morel. Can he be a viable everyday 3B if he just focuses there instead of also having to practice 5 other positions? It's IMO much more likely than shifting Madrigal over there was at this same time last year. But if Morel can just be your everyday 3B, the roster fits together better since tou don't have a dedicated DH. Then you can afford to have more specialized fits like Madrigal and Wisdom on the bench. If Morel's the 3B and we go get a 1B as expected, I think a bench of Madrigal, Wisdom, Amaya, Tauchman, Mastro checks pretty much every box except LHH power. And that could potentially be addressed by swapping in Mervis or someone else for one of the guys above. Morel at 3rd also has the added benefit of only needing to add one bat this winter, freeing up resources for the other holes on the roster. The other "if the season started today" scenario I'm curious about is Owen Caissie. It is very unlikely he cracks the roster out of ST, but given how much he dominated at AA and the PPI, if he comes into ST and balls out how willing are they to roster him? If Morel is no longer locked into the DH spot there's some potential runway there.

Yeah this was the biggest takeaway from putting this together. My guess is that the median offseason is one long term deal, one trade of major consequence, and then bench/relief help on 1-2 year deals. Something like Nola, Alonso, Robertson, and Candelario (if he can be had for two years, someone like Urshela if he can't). There's probably a plan or two where Jed does two long term deals. Like Yamamoto and a Soto trade/extension would be pretty hard to pass up. As would essentially anybody with Ohtani. But I'd guess Jed wants to be able to add someone substantial every winter while still leaving an avenue to reset the tax in '25 or '26.

Yeah if you look at Cots or RR he's already in there. That's part of why I did the exercise like I did because I wanted to build payroll from the ground up and not have to try and keep someone else's assumptions straight while making my own. Correct, from a luxury tax standpoint it's more or less considered that they already paid that money.

Definitely good call on budgeting several extra MLB salaries to account for people on the IL. Maybe call that another $5M? I think you're right about the buyouts too. I wonder if that changed with this CBA, because I swear it used to go the other way. But regardless browsing a couple Roster Resource pages I don't see them added, and it certainly helps so can't complain. I did remember the Player Benefits money, so we don't need to add that again. So we're looking at something a little closer to $30M under the tax. And yeah I think trying to put on my Jed hat I can see him reasoning his way to a pretty wide range of payrolls. I do imagine like you hit on it's player specific? E.g. he'll pass $277M but only for Ohtani. $257 but only for two of the primo guys or if he's able to nab several guys on 1 year deals. etc. Looking at it more and more I do think there's a pretty good chance Stroman gets dealt. He should still have modest surplus value, and freeing up his salary makes a lot of the scenarios we could dream up a lot less tight to pull off.

Assuming Stroman opts in, I'd be very surprised if they add someone from the Giolito tier of FAs. I think with how well Assad and Wicks showed out in the second half, plus having Smyly and possibly Wesnesky in the bullpen, there's not a ton of need for pure depth. I think Jed takes a swing at one of Yamamoto/Nola/Montgomery and if he fails there turns to the trade market. But the goal is certainly a playoff caliber starter IMO. On Yoshi specifically, he'd be my top target in free agency this winter by a wiiiiiiidddddeeee margin.

Some immediate reactions/takeaways: - It seems pretty likely the team exceeds the LT this year. $34M is not a ton to play with given how much action is being floated. If Stroman gets traded early in the offseason though, that'd be a canary in the coal mine for Jed planning to stay under - The threshold where payroll starts directly impacting the draft is $277M for '24. For this reason, I'd say that the max payroll you should reasonably expect heading into this season is ~$265M (Jed, and Theo before him, likes to leave $10Mish for in season and TDL moves) - Based on where '25 and '26 net out right now, I'd be very shocked if there are more than two long term (i.e. 3+ year) signings this winter. If Jed commits more than $50-60M in long term deals this winter, doing a luxury tax reset in the medium term gets really tough, and unfortunately based on PTR's history we know the team is not going to be a perennial luxury tax payer - I wonder if we see any attempt to extend Steele this winter/next spring. He's the only guy on the current roster slated to make all that much in arb over the next few years. If you lock him up, even without buying a ton of FA years, you mostly insulate yourself from rising arb commitments locking down your payroll like what happened during the last window

This morning, MLB Trade Rumors released their arbitration projections. These are historically extremely accurate, so we now can put together a good snapshot of the team's payroll ahead of what we expect to be a very active winter. A few notes before we lead off: - I sourced data primarily from Roster Resource, with 2024 arb #s from MLBTR and some details on Hendricks/Gomes' options from Cot's contracts. I'm just one dude though so I may have fat fingered something along the way (edit: TT also caught a few process errors I initially made and have now fixed) - I'm only looking at luxury tax dollars. Now that Marquee is fully stood up and attendance is back at pre-pandemic levels I assume LT dollars matter much more than actual cashflow like it did from 2015-2019 - I'm not assuming any non-tenders, even if they may seem obvious - I used the aforementioned MLBTR arb projections that just came out for 2024, and then assumed a 50% annual raise for each guy's subsequent turns through arbitration (its a rough estimate, but works well in the aggregate) - I also looked ahead to 2025 and 2026. It seems very likely that the team is going to pass the luxury tax this winter, however based on what happened at the tail end of the last competitive window it's almost a certainty that Jed won't be allowed to exceed the luxury tax three years straight. Given that 2026 is also the last year under the current CBA, I think it's likely that Jed will plan to dip under in '26, so you want to be mindful of how many dollars you add to that year this early Without further ado: 2024 Payroll 2024 Players Definitely under contract: $100.8M (6 players) - Dansby, Seiya, Nico, Taillon, Happ, and Smyly are all written in stone 2024 Players in Arb: ~$16M (9 players) - No one is slated to make a ton, though I do wonder if Steele's projected number is a bit low. Guys who do well in awards/all star consideration tend to get paid handsomely Filling out the Roster: ~$34M - 11 league min guys at ~750k each, 7 IL spots at ~750k each (i.e. when you put someone on the IL, you have to call up a minor leaguer. Both guys are making MLB salaries during that time), 14 minor leaguers on the 40 man getting ~150K each, player benefits at ~$17M, and ~$1.7M to the pre-arb bonus pool Additional commitments: $13.3 - Paying Mancini, Barnhart, and Bote to stay home All told we are looking at a total of $164.1M before option decisions on Stroman (player, $23.7M), Hendricks (Club, $15M after the buyout), and Gomes (Club, $5M after the buyout). Since all three of those guys look likely to be retained, our estimated total before trades or non-tenders is about $207.8M, leaving $29M in payroll room before the first Luxury Tax threshold of $237M 2025 Payroll The club has a ton of commitments coming off the books prior to 2025: Stroman - $23.7M Hendricks - $16.5M Smyly - $9.5M Mancini - $7M Gomes - $6M Barnhart - $3.5M Bote - $3M Total - $69.7M Arb raises for guys already in arb for 2024 shouldn't be crazy, maybe with the exception of Steele if he keeps it up. Using my 50% arb estimate and subtracting out the FA's and dead money above puts the starting 2025 payroll at approximately $145-150M, plus whatever multi-year commitments Jed makes this winter 2026 Payroll Codi Heuer is currently the only FA heading into the 2026 offseason (and frankly given his gruesome injury I'd be surprised if he's not nontendered well before that point). That means payroll opening the 2026 offseason will be more or less 2025 payroll plus/minus any changes to arb commitments. The arb bill in '26 currently looks pretty hefty, probably something like $15M on top of where the 2025 nets out? That'd put the projected the payroll to open the 2026 offseason at something like $165M plus whatever multi-year commitments are made between now and then, though obviously the error bars are super wide this far out