Bertz

I'm going to be extremely annoying if one of Merryweather or Estrada doesn't make the bullpen. If I ruled the world they both would, but we damn sure ought to have at least one monster stuff guy on the roster at all times.

The bullpen is going to shove this year

What are they going for with the emojis? Orange juice? I get orange because he's got red hair but still haven't heard any nicknames in that vein for him.

Honestly I'm pretty comfortable if Jed doesn't pull the trigger on any extensions. I'd definitely let Happ walk. Cool dude but I just have no interest in locking up a pure LF unless they have enough bat that I'd be comfortable making them the full time DH in a few years. Particularly with what we've got on the farm. Hoerner's it really depends on the pricepoint. He's very good but then again do I want to be on the hook for a batting average + defense guy five years out? There's some budding power there, but if that doesn't manifest any further then I would probably like to bid him adieu once his defense starts veering back towards average. Odds are that process starts before his team control runs out. The rookies are a little problematic as well. Davis and Canario have major health red flags, while Mervis and Wesneski are old enough that you've already got them locked up into their 30's. While not a rookie Steele is also in the "probably too old" camp. I'd maybe go to some of the guys in AA like PCA, Wicks, and Brown and see if they want to work something out. I'd also be interested in going long with Bellinger depending on what internal evaluations have looked like this spring. But then again if it was worth it Scott Boras would never do it.

Minor league ST games started yesterday, so my guess is we'll get news on that front soon since it'll be more obvious who's not taking the field.

Yeah I'm good with things so far. Feels like they should have stretched for Dre'mont Jones if DT is sooo important to Eberflus' system, but there's nothing inherently wrong with ending up with inevitably ending up with a mid-tier DT like Sheldon Rankins instead. And with 5 holes (DT, RT, Edge, Corner, RB) left to fill and $40Mish left in his pocket, my assumption is that's the plan. Mid tier FAs at each position, leaving enough money for a couple extensions as well. Then you've got a full formed team heading into a draft where you have a horsefeathers-load of ammo. Not a bad plan, even if I would have preferred to grab a star knowing it would leave one or two items unchecked on the to-do list.

Whether it's Davenport specifically or another edge guy in that tier, I am hoping that this is the other side of the coin if we do punt on signing a big RT. Something like Dre'mont Jones and Marcus Davenport as the last two big FA adds, make sure to grab a corner among the day 2 picks...suddenly that defense is pretty damn fun.

BJ Murray had looked great in the WBC, definitely understand the sleeper buzz he got this winter

Lucas Patrick is still under contract, right? Yeah, my assumption is that he'll be the primary backup for the interior portion of the Oline but I wouldn't be shocked if they intend to have him be the starting C.

Are we assuming its more likely we see Whitehair head back to center or that it's likely he is an eventual cut?

Tangentially related conversation I just saw on Twitter. Absolutely gotta lock down the interior of both lines pre-draft though.

IMO DT is the only place where you've absolutely got to get a top of the market option Poles can go more mid-market at RT, it just means he ought to take one of the top guys with #9

If we just take the rumors as gospel, adding McGlinchey, Seumalo, Okereke, and one of the top DTs to Edward's would use up most of the Bears' cap space, while emphatically filling every glaring hole on the roster except Edge Rusher. I would absolutely buy that being plan A.

So here's an attempt at a little Monday morning math. From FG, I grabbed every pitcher with 50 IP in both '21 and '22, and looked at their velo, ERA, xFIP, and Stuff+ numbers. I also removed dudes who don't throw a traditional 4 Steamer, e.g. Emmanuel Clase. This left a list of 206 dudes. First off, only one of the 206 added 2.5+ MPH year over year. Griffin Jax, who transitioned from starter to reliever. So unfortunately we should probably assume a good bit of Assad's bump was a one-off, maybe adrenaline coming from national pride like TT mentioned. If Assad permanently added a full 2.5 MPH, especially being able to hold it as a starter, he's a unicorn. Something like 1 MPH is far more realistic though. 21 guys saw a bump between 0.7 and 1.3 MPH, and several of those are pure SPs. The performance lift for those 21 guys is substantial. They saw an their ERA drop by over a run on average, and even if we want to look more process rather than results their xFIPs dropped by 0.59 runs, and they added 5 points to their Stuff+ marks. As a point of reference that 5 points is the difference between Javier Assad and Lance Lynn. So step one is seeing how real this increase is. And we probably won't have a great sense there for another 6 weeks, but potentially we have a fundamentally different guy on our hands.

I think the big question is how much of this velo bump was the starter -> reliever conversion and how much is the offseason velo training you mentioned. A 3 inning outing is an awkward amount for having any sort of strong opinion there. But in the roster scenario where he can sit at 95 with his sinker for 5-6 innings not only does it raise his profile enough to be a sure MLBer, it probably raises it enough to be a mid-rotation starter. As bad as Sampson has been this spring, I'd not drop him from the roster short of injury or someone (presumably quite desperate) offering value in trade. I feel a lot better about both Kilian and Assad than I did a month ago, but I'd like to see them prove it out in Iowa for a month before I bump Sampson down to #9 on the SP depth chart where it's pretty safe to DFA him for the roster spot.

But wait, there's more

For a team that's not historically a baseball powerhouse Mexico's team is pretty loaded. Columbia's up but this feels like a very precarious lead.

Absolutely criminal if Wesneski isn't the #5 to start the year. And he's set up for 150+ innings this year, so it's not going to take especially complicated gymnastics to manage his innings.

Yeah I think if Tyree Wilson is gone by 9 (more likely than not, but not definite?) this is the way I'd go. Let's make the offense around Justin just absolutely absurd.

Bears no longer on the clock, someone change the thread title I do like that this got done pre-FA. I think that makes it easier to know what needs to be done on that front.

This is really really cool stuff. I found PitchingBot over the winter and glad to see it's going to be somewhere more easily accessible. The tl;dr is that both of these models try to break down pitching into its component parts, and granular enough to be at the specific pitch level. And because these are very process oriented metrics rather than results ones, they apparently reach a stabilization point WAY earlier than most of our other metrics. So we can start feeling more confident in some of the early season pitching storylines than we have historically.

I'm terrible at analyzing swings, but Mancini might get significantly more juice just from moving ballparks. I'm counting 14 outs last year that were on the Wrigley warning track or farther, and MIL/CIN are even kinder to him. The offense in general I don't worry about it being bad. There's just too much depth on the bench and at Iowa for that to happen. We do need some fortune with veteran bouncebacks or the youths for the offense to be really good though. Suzuki and Bellinger are the easiest and most straightforward to see, but Mancini putting up another 2019 would have a similar impact.

Starting to sound like Memorial Day is a fair expectation for him being back at Iowa. If he thinks he'll be doing baseball stuff in a week it probably means closer to end of the month in actuality. But even still let's call it 6 weeks in EXST and two weeks of rehab games from there and that still has him at Iowa before the end of May.