Bertz

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

1. PCA <gap> 2. Wicks 3. Brown 4. Horton 5. Alcantara <gap> 6. Davis 7. Canario 8. Amaya 9. Caissie 10. Mervis 11. Ballesteros <gap> 12. Ferris 13. Made 14. Hernandez 15. Triantos <gap> 16. Estrada 17. Palencia 18. K. Franklin 19. Hodge 20. Herz The 20's would basically be McGeary, Kilian and a bunch of current or about-to-be relievers (e.g. Little, Horn, and Jensen)

The Marlins bullpen is pretty shredded right now. Nardi and Floro are good to go, but everyone else today would either be their 3rd game in a row or 3rd in 4 days. For the Cubs everyone but Keegan should presumably be in the table.

He gets Mikolas and Flaherty the next two days! With Kyle about to have his 3rd rehab outing, Decent chance this is Wesneski's swan song for a little bit. Probably good timing, he could stand to work on things at Iowa and get back to missing bats.

Looks like one more!

Wowza! That'll play. He's going to be a nice add to the bullpen in a month when he's eligible to come off the IL.

I know Alcantara's been pretty mediocre this year, but it'd be really nice to win this one and lock up a series W before he has an opportunity to shut us down.

I think the most striking thing watching Kerry Wood's game is how the stuff would still be outrageous today. You look at like Mark Prior or Carlos Zambrano, and it's almost quaint because they'd they'd be like vaguely notable #3 starters in today's game. Ben Brown probably has better stuff than either of them, and he's at best a fringey top 100 prospect. The octane level of stuff around the league has just taken a huge leap forward in the last 15 years. But Wood? He had a sweeper and curve with huge break, he had a fastball with lots of run that sat 96-98 and regularly touched 100. If he was around today he'd absolutely be in the conversation with Hunter Greene and Shohei Ohtani for best pure stuff in baseball.