Bertz

I haven't seen any numbers but I believe Made was one of the guys who Bryan Smith said looked jacked when he was there in ST. .300/.440/.500 from a young for his level, plus defensive shortstop is quite something.

Some context here for some of the higher walk rates at Tenn

If Kilian pitches well tomorrow, you'd think he'd be the favorite to take the 5th starter's turn in Miami.

Really great to see Davis with a big game. The swing and miss has been way down, hopefully that stays true while he gets hot.

I feel a little bad that the pitch clock has made it harder for the sideline reporters to do their segments, but like you can't spend a whole horsefeathering half inning in split screen talking to some douche in a pink jacket

It's far from the best story in the early going here, but Madrigal appearing to be fixed is a lot of fun. That's a fun, unique, and most importantly leveragable skill to have on the bench.

I assumed that Amaya would be up for the job offensively at Tenn but yeesh. I assume he'll be at Iowa once he's knocked enough rust off on defense that they'd be comfortable pressing him into MLB service if there were an injury. And wowza Ben Brown

Former 2nd rounder who stalled out as a Quad-A guy that the Cardinals gave up on. Cubs took a flyer on him before the pandemic, he mashed at the Alt Site in 2020 and got a chance once things started going sideways for the big league club in 2021. He used to be completely helpless with anything in the top 1/3rd of the zone, but demolish pitches low. Over the last 15 months he's gone from "worst in the league" to merely "pretty bad" on pitches up. But he's still just as much of a monster on pitches low as ever so we appear to have a legitimate 1st division starter now. tl;dr we finally got our own Max Muncy

The Cubs are currently 2nd in position player WAR behind the Rays. They are 4th in pitching WAR. There's some luck on both sides of the ball (BABIP on the position player side, dongs on the pitcher side), but even if you strip that out it's probably been a top 10 team on both sides of the ball despite a pretty tough schedule to this point.

No that's Jesse Rogers

28.9% strikeout rate I don't get your point here? Because his cutter/slider is in the 80's he's soft tossing now? You know how silly that is right? Is Justin Verlander soft tossing because his curveball is 79? Fulmer had a 3.38 ERA and a 3.09 xFIP before last night's blowup. He had a disaster outing, and we're early enough in the year one of those can nuke your numbers, but he's been quite good.

Fulmer averaged 96 last night and has a Wipeout slider

I'm sure the answer is no, and it probably should be, but I wonder if there's any thought to calling up Thompson with Taillon out. If you piggybacked him and Assad and kept each guy to 10-15 batters I bet it would be pretty effective. And like Thompson's not going to have a ton of bullets available this year anyway, probably topping out around 100 IP? There's not really much opportunity cost if you think he'll be effective.

Swanson's always been good about not chasing too much, but his aggressiveness in the zone has meant that doessn't lead to as many walks as you'd think. The other thing about Swanson right now that feels related is how much lower his launch angle has been so far. Is his swing a little horsefeathered up right now, and as you alluded to the extra patience is a sign he's uncomfortable swinging so much despite the great results so far? Is he intentionally trading power for OBP on a temporary basis, knowing how tough it is to hit dongs in Wrigley in April? Or is this intended to be a permanent change? There were some whispers pre-signing that the team had some swing changes they thought they could make with him, is this all related to that?

Rain should be gone within an hour-ish, and looks like once it's gone it'll stay gone.

Not playing for a week appears to have had no impact on Nelly?

I don't love starters making back-to-back starts against the same team, so I'm pretty okay with this for tonight. I just hope he's not out for too long after. Just 4-5 starts I hope?

Betts and Smith still out, really gotta win this one

The Cubs have talked a lot about how their Pitching Infrastructure, led by Tommy Hottovy and Craig Breslow, provides a competitive advantage on the pitching front. However the results the past two years have not been especially strong. There have been a lot of individual success stories, but because of the lack of investment prior to this year there hasn’t been a full pitching staff meant to win games as opposed to a collection of individual pitchers meant to be flipped in July. 2023 is year four since the pitching group within the front office was overhauled. There’s now been some time to develop pitchers and have them matriculate through the farm. There have also bee. some significant trade and free agent resources invested in the MLB staff. The team also, finally, seems to have at least some urgency for raising the W flag more often than not. Now that we’re roughly 10% into the season, sample sizes are starting to get closer to meaningful. Particularly on a team-wide level, samples are no longer tiny. And we’re really seeing how the Cubs are generating the results they’ve gotten to this point. It’s a nuanced answer, but if you wanted to boil it down into one word that word would be “Sliders.” The Cubs have had the best staff in baseball utilizing the slider, both in terms of process and results. In terms of results, the staff has been +15.3 in Slider Run Value via Pitch Info on Fangraphs. That’s the top mark in baseball. This is not just a volume play either, as they’re 12th in MLB in the rate of throwing sliders at 25.3%. So they’ve derived the most slider value in the sport despite a fairly average rate of usage. Maybe that’s just luck though? What about the underlying aspects of the sliders they throw? We have data on that as well. Fangraphs has two different models that measure the effectiveness of specific pitches based on the underlying aspects like spin, movement, velocity, etc. These models also have methods for attempting to measure pitch command as well. There are nuances to Stuff+ and Pitchingbot, but both have pretty sophisticated math behind them. The good news is both agree that the Cubs are #1: Pitching Bot: #9 in Stuff, #4 in Command, #1 Overall Stuff+: #3 in Stuff, #4 in Command, #1 Pitching+ So the story is clear, the Cubs as a staff have good sliders in terms of stuff, though the extent of how good is up for a bit of debate. What’s not up for debate is an elite level of slider command. And they’re doing this up and down the staff. This isn’t just one or two elite arms. Wesneski (#10), Taillon (#21), and Steele (#24) are all Top 30 amongst MLB starters this year for Pitching+ with the slider. Thompson (#14), Adbert (#46), Fulmer (#58), and Rucker (#59) are all Top 60 amongst relievers (for reference, 244 relievers have thrown a slider in a game this year). There’s potentially more reinforcements on the way. Javier Assad has a 133 Stuff+ on the slider, but the command isn’t there yet. Jeremiah Estrada had a 126 when he was up last year. Bailey Horn purportedly has one of the best sliders in the org. The list goes on and on. The sweeper has been one of the stories league-wide this season, and the Cubs are at or near the forefront in terms of implementation. It’s looking like the Org’s big talk about being one of the smartest pitching orgs in the league is starting to have some evidence backing it up.

This just reinforces how cool what the Padres are doing is. They saw the Chargers leave town and said "Don't let the door hit you in the way out, we're just gonna own this horsefeathering town."

Interesting, and I'd definitely buy it. The team's faced a lot of velo in the early going. It'll be interesting to see if that balances out when the schedule evens out a bit and they face a less impactful slate of pitchers.

In a world without Luis Arraez you'd probably consider Nico the favorite for the batting title at this point. His progression is fun. Last year he added a little juice to his bat, which combined with his amazing contact skills made him an above average hitter. This year I think we were all hoping for even more juice, and that hasn't happened. Instead, he's leveled up his plate discipline, added EVEN MORE CONTACT, and kept the strength gains from last year. He has dropped his launch angle, so he's probably not getting back to 10 dongs he hit last year, but it's still a recipe for a ton of hits. Statcast's expected batting average, which does not account for speed mind you, says he should have a .334 BA right now. So the .347 Nico's currently rocking isn't really being propped up by much luck.

I wonder if the Dodgers will get Will Smith back for this series. We saw last weekend how ordinary their lineup is without him. With the Dodgers injury woes and the way the pitching is lining up for the Padres series what looked like a really tough 7 game stretch a few weeks ago might actually be something we can go 4-3 during.

I'm not super worried about Mancini yet. His swing rates and in zone contact rate are pretty flat with prior years. He's hitting a lot more groundballs, but I don't think that means a ton over the course of 3 weeks. He's been ass, but I think it's just a deep slump rather than anything systemic. Hosmer has the similarly elevated groundball rate, but his chase rates and in zone contact rates have gone south as well. That feels more likely to be real. But even if his woes are also just a slump (very possible!), the existence of Mervis means he still ought to get the boot. The other things working against Hosmer are that Mancini offers some nominal positional versatility, and that Madrigal's rebound means we do have a contact oriented bat on the roster. Hosmer made total sense in January, but for reasons both in and out of his control just doesn't anymore.

I feel better, but not by a ton. That said I was amongst the more positive folks here from the jump so I had less to move than most. Locking in some wins is good, but I don't think much has happened that impacts the medium to long term outlook. Bellinger's contact rate improvements are the only thing that feels like it definitively means something. Steele's 3rd time through the order effectiveness passes the eye test for me too (especially since it started last year). Everything else I'm cautiously optimistic about at best.