Bertz

Every time James Triantos hits a hard fly ball an angel gets its wings

If Mo wants to keep winning ABS challenges at such a high clip he can more than make up for any physical deficiencies he has behind the plate.

So Boog is doing WBC stuff, he did the USA/Giants game yesterday for instance. I think he does a good bit of CBB this time of year as well. Can't/won't really excuse anyone else involved.

Pretty fun lineup considering none of the regulars are in place

One thing I wonder about is if the insane run environment in the International League makes a high contact / low power guy like Triantos look a little artificially worse. A hitters park/league is going to juice the value of well hit fly balls. If you have a guy who hits the ball on the ground a lot he's not getting as much benefit. But on the flipside when leaving Iowa and going to Chicago you'd expect the groundball guy to lose less of his production? That's not to say Triantos was secretly good last year, but more to say that like you said if in 2026 he's rocking a modest 110 wRC+ that's probably enough for me to feel like he can survive in the big leagues? Overall there's still plenty to like in Triantos' profile. He's going to play this full year at 23, so despite being around for what seems like forever he's still a positive age relative to league guy. The contact numbers also create a pretty reasonable floor, I'm seeing only three hitters last year with a K rate under 15% and a wRC+ under 80. He's also a modest plus with the glove and major plus on the bases. It's probably a bench profile, but I wouldn't write that in stone. The raw power is actually decent, so if he can add some lift and pull to his profile without sacrificing contact there's ceiling with the bat. And even if he can't an Adam Frazier or Amed Rosario type bat that can actually play defense is probably a viable everyday starter, at least at peak.

Ethan Roberts velo not quite as hot as his previous outing but seems pretty clear he's got his pre-surgery juice back. That's fun I'd mostly written him off.

Yeah I think there's three ways the lack of pitching in the system doesn't hit a full on crisis by this time next year 1. The widespread velocity spikes we're seeing in big league camp is also happening in minor league camp. So a bunch of Nick Deans and Ethan Flanagans see their stock rocket up next year 2. We find out that the team nailed the pitching in last year. The two guys you flagged, Coppola, etc. 3. The team goes all in on pitching on the next draft. Something like yhe 2022 draft where 9 of their top 10 picks were pitchers Honestly you need one of those to avoid a crisis and probably two to actually feel good about the situation.

Just brutal spring training for the Braves good lord

How is this the first I'm hearing about a 3rd Southisene brother named Tee? Good list, love MLB's thorough writeups. I'd probably order it so more of the fresh IFAs were in the 20s and the Myrtle Beach crew were in the teens, but what they have is not unreasonable.

So I'm not buying in on it yet, but I just noticed that Dylan Carlson is making a ton of contact this spring. His contact rate is 92.9%, which for comparison last year would have been the #2 mark in the league afger Luis Arraez. Nico Hoerner's an elite contact guy and has never crossed the 90% line. Carlson for his career has hovered around 80% Like it doesn't matter much yet, but contact rates are a spring stat that do have some signal to them. So if he keeps this up the whole spring it's something that's probably pretty meaningful.

109 MPH line drive from our 20 year old shortstop prospect

I'm glad that Taillon is going to pitch in the WBC because him pitching in a game that matters but doesn't matter for us should help me set my appropriate level of alarm. I'll say he is, by an order of magnitude, the guy I'm most worried about this spring. And the majority of that is that he was a guy I didn't feel great about a month ago. But in a spring where everyone's come in throwing gas, or at least relative gas, it looks like he's lost a MPH off of his already pretty bad fastball.

One of the nice things about him is that even if he ends up being a bit of a disappointment offensively it feels like he's a pretty different style of hitter compared to anyone else we have on the roster.

Taillon’s fastball that inning

Mo Baller catching! Game is on Marquee and is also the MLB.tv free game of the day

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7077301/2026/03/02/bears-combine-caleb-williams-dj-moore/

I still like Sanders, I think the insane run environment at Iowa (~4.80 league ERA, and Iowa's a hitters park on top of that) made some normalish promotion lumps look catastrophic. The fact that he can throw plenty of strikes as well as miss bats in the zone gives you hope there's just an optimization problem at play here. That said if he can be one of the small army of guys who came to Cubs camp with extra velo this spring that'd be really clutch. He seems like a guy where the difference between 92.5 and 93.5 would be pretty huge. Risk around a second TJ is pretty bad. It's getting slowly better, but I've mostly written Birdsell off as a SP. He might have a shot as a reliever but I'd probably have Brandon a lot closer to 20th (30th?) than tenth. Mathis is tough. On the one hand for a bat-first college hitter you want to see him DESTROY low-A. Him rocking a 120 wRC+ last April was frankly more disappointing than the HS/IFA kids who were in the 70's and 80's. On the other the elbow injury feels like a fairly valid excuse: Bryce Harper and Corey Seager are prominent examples of TJ sapping a hitter’s power the first year back. He was also drafted as a sophomore, so despite the mostly lost year he's going to open at South Bend still at a very appropriate age.

Shota's velo is still up he could give up 30 dongs and today's a good day

My guess is he will be in real honest to goodness games before the end of April, but given that he missed an entire year we're talking 5+ rehab starts in full season ball.

Yeah Rojas alone probably can't show Nico the door. That said if Shaw has a good year in MLB and Rojas rakes in MiLB it's a bit hard to argue for keeping Hoerner around. Ditto Shaw plus Pedro Ramirez. The team is currently about $100M under the LT heading into 2027. And while the CBA almost certainly bumps that number up, inflation will keep it close to $100M in 2025-2026 dollars. So I assume the team will sign a FA SP of substance, a FA OF of substance (probably re-signing Happ or Suzuki), do a bullpen spending spree similar to this winter, and have room for one more big move. Whether that's Hoerner, the other of Happ/Suzuki, a second FA SP, etc. depends a lot on who does/does not have a big year in 2026.

The way I'd reconcile this is: 1. Spring training results are noisy but measurables (e.g. Rojas' impressive exit velos) are usually very real 2. The biggest argument against results mattering is the wildly varying quality of competition. But for a 20 year old with just a quarter of a season at AA there's no worry that he's just beating up on pitchers beneath him on the minor league ladder

Assad another guy whose velo is way up. Curious gow much of that sticks as he stretches out. And man Ben Brown