Bertz

What? This isn't true at all. The team projects to hit a bunch of dongs. Like there's plenty of real things to complain about on this team without making stuff up.

I'd forgotten about Brown, I love this idea. He's a guy you definitely have to platoon, unlike Conforto when he's right, but he's likely a better bat than anyone else left in FA. He's also a much better athlete than most 1B/COF types, and Jed seems to be placing a premium on that athleticism. And at league minimum you can still do other stuff even if trying to stay under the LT. BTV says Brown + Puk for Madrigal + Kilian is about fair?

Surprised he got a 3rd year, but clearly the Giants are in crisis mode right now

That's substantially more than I expected him to get. I wanted him, but if my options are him or something like Belt + Mancini give me the latter every day.

They were linked to Conforto again tonight by Heyman too, and feels like in this market he'll be at least $12M? Seems at this point that either they're passing the LT, or at least three of the following must be true: - The "big" bat makes max ~$8M - They only add one more bat - The remaining reliever(s) make basically the veteran minimum salary - Essentially zero money gets left for the trade deadline - No extensions for anybody There's also Happ and Hoerner's arb estimates, which we're treating as gospel but could very reasonably be low by a few million. Put it all together and I'd say it's pretty unlikely at this point that they're sticking under the LT IMO. Although they're clearly not blowing way past it.

There might have been something in the water (or more likely the air) in Detroit last year. Doesn't turn Barnhart into JT Realmuto but the guy he was in Cincy is probably still in there.

The Phillies punted offense at both CF and SS in the second half last year Edit: Actually looks like Marsh actually hit post-trade, but they handed him the job before he'd proven he could hit

I preferred the other two guys we were tied to, but the differences between each were so marginal it's very easy to believe the soft stuff they bring to the job is more important. I'm much more interested in the 1B/DH situation. Both whether they come down with Conforto and whether they add two guys or just one.

Jed's going to have to put his big boy pants on for that to happen. I'm just intrigued at what Jed might have told Swanson about future plans to make him feel comfortable about committing. It could just be a nothing 'intro press conference' quote or it could be less about targeting specific names and more about general organizational strategy, but I'm curious Yeah curious if there's something as specific as Heyward being named during the Lester pitch. Even if it's more generalities, there is quite a bit of money to play with over the next few years, and we're at the point where there's plenty of fun stuff on the farm at AA/AAA. Even resigning ourselves to PTR wanting to dip under the LT every 2-3 years, they could add essentially whoever they want. It's really more about what Jed's appetite is for putting out winning bids. At this point I think it's clear he's going to be more concerned with like 2026+ than we'd like, but we're now at the point that he can be a dweeb about that and still add impact talent each winter.

Yeah I think Jed's more likely to play in the end of the pool where he ends up with something like Matt Chapman and Aaron Nola or Lucas Giolito and Manny Machado.

Morel needs to learn to lift the ball more and/or improve his contact rate, even if just from awful to pretty bad. But he's already patient and he hits the piss out of the ball, so the two more innate hitter qualities are already taken care of. And hell with his speed (and impending shift rules) the grounders are okay as long as they don't get worse. The whiffs are bad, but not necessarily disqualifying. If I'm leaderboarding correctly, Morel has the 2nd worst in-zone contact rate among all rookies with 200+ PAs in a season going back to 2010. That's bad. However, George Springer is the #1 guy on that list. And there are several other stars near the top, including Luis Robert (#8), Austin Riley (#13), Ian Happ (#18), Matt Olson (#26), and Cody Bellinger (#29). If you're young (check) and a premium athlete (check), you're not necessarily screwed. Not worried about the defense at all. Like TT said coming up Chris was a 3B who could moonlight elsewhere, and last year played mostly up the middle out of necessity. If he played 80% of the time at 3B and 20% elsewhere as intended I think he'd put up pretty strong defensive numbers too. This analysis is a good reason to not totally abandon Nelly either. I'm actually more discouraged by his dog crap performance in CF than I am the strikeouts. But he is also relatively patient and barreled the ball like a star last year.

OMG if this is about something he's had since he was like 17...horsefeathering hilarious

They've mentioned the plan is to build up the farm and do more of a Dodgers deal, and live within a standard deviation payroll-wise of the other teams. But like fat chance they're going to end up that smart or efficient. My guess is that this kind of thing is an outlier, but that they'll live in the low-mid 300's long term.

Yeah, I don't think we've seen anything like this in free agency before. It's happened several times in the draft, for instance Brady Aiken (and the Astros were very right), and once with Kumar Rocker (too early to tell, but looks like the Mets might have been wrong). But in FA you'd think it'd ultimately lead to way more of a haircut, or at least some of the money being moved to incentives. Great news for the Cubs, as that's one of the main wildcard contenders just dealt a severe body blow.

I assumed this was going to be a whole lot of nothing but the fact that it's still so quiet after several hours feels pretty ominous.

These are generally kinder to the Cubs than the Steamer projections already live on Fangraphs. On the position player side, it's a lot higher on Swanson and Wisdom, but lower on most of the young guys (including Morel and Mervis unfortunately), and most of the marginal/depth guys. The latter I expected as anecdotally Steamer seems to think essentially everyone in organized baseball would throw up at least 1 WAR in full playing time. On the pitching side, ZiPS is much higher on the top of the rotation. Stroman and Steele get fairly soft inning projections, but their rate numbers are super strong. The depth guys, including Wicks and Brown, generally all look fairly decent as well. They all project to between 1-1.5 WAR if given 120 IP. Smyly is an exception, he gets a VERY horsefeathers projection. The reliever group is relatively strong. Alzolay, Thompson, and Leiter all are projected as swingmen who put up 1+ WAR in 80-100 IP. Dan also notes in the writeup that Leiter projects to a 3.07 ERA if he codes him as a pure short reliever, have to imagine Adbert and Keegan would get similar bumps. Wick, Heuer, Hughes, Leeper, and Boxberger all project as solid but unspectacular 7th inning types. Jeremiah Estrada gets a very strong projection, easily the best of the pure 1 inning guys. Overall promising stuff. I think from looking at this you'd probably want to add two more bats to the 1B/DH mix rather than just one, and stretch to add a late inning reliever even if the price is somewhat prohibitive. But this is a team that's likely to project right in the middle of that 5th/6th seed scrum after the rest of the expected offseason moves are made.

One of the things that helps too is the three guys with the biggest question marks (Mervis being a rookie, Conforto/Bellinger for injury) are all lefties, while the team has RHH bats coming out its ears. You obviously can't tenably manage three concurrent platoons every day, but it does raise the floor on each of those guys significantly. I also wonder if, thinking through the above, the rumors aroundMancini would be in addition to Conforto rathwr than instead of. Mancini-Wisdom-Other Catcher-Mastrobuoni is a pretty killer bench paired with the lineup you laid out above. Obviously that would require passing the LT though.

I think that's a bit overstated, particularly with the Yankees who also explicitly punted offense at SS last year. Of course having an Aaron Judge papers over a lot of ills. That said I don't disagree with the thrust of what you're saying. A few things to consider though: - The league average OPS at C was .672 last year with a .295 OBP. The bar is so low that Yan Gomes actually projects as an above average hitter for the position, as does Curt Casali. Perez and Barnhart project below but only to an extent that nets out to -5ish runs compared to an average catcher. Their lines look so egregiously bad because we're benchmarking off of Contreras, not because they're actually all that bad. We're not talking Austin Hedges - Speaking of Contreras, a common refrain among the fanbase is "the offense already sucked last year even with Contreras." It did, but something to keep in mind is the Cubs also had some of the worst 1B production in the league last year. Schwindel and Rivas combined for nearly 600 PAs of hitting like a below average catcher last year, that basically cancels out the boon from our catcher hitting like a good 1B. There's a legit 3 WAR swing from Schwindel and Rivas' actual production last season to what Mervis is projected for this upcoming one. The offense was likely improved a bit year-over-year before the offseason even started - After they add a DH, the Cubs will have eight guys on the projected OD roster who project as average or better hitters, plus a couple more in Iowa. And Wisdom and Bellinger are only a smidge below that line. Though Bellinger is clearly an extremely high variance guy offensively at this stage The lineup doesn't look that great because there's no monster hitter to serve as the linchpin. But they're deep, likely to be average to good offensively everywhere but catcher and CF. And those two positions, by virtue of that depth, have several contingencies built in if things go sideways. There's a pretty hard cap on how good this offense can be by virtue of how little offensive star power there is, but given the number of fallback options I'd say it's very unlikely to end up bad even with a pretty blah duo at catcher.

A number of teams are all in on the soft stuff catchers provide. The Astros with Maltin Maldonado and Yankees with basically everyone they've run out post Gary Sanchez are the prime examples. The Dodgers before Will Smith were leaning on Austin Barnes a lot more than anyone thought they should have too. It's en vogue for a lot of smart teams right now. And like even in our own back yard check out how Cubs pitchers performed last year with Gomes behind the plate vs. with Contreras. It's a stark difference. There's obviously a huge appeal to authority happening here, which isn't great, but at least the Cubs aren't alone in making it. I would very much prefer Perez (who does more of the obvious catcher defense things very well) or Casali (who's a pretty good offensive catcher) even going down this route. I think the only thing Barnhart does well that's quantifiable is hit left handed. One ray of sunshine on the catcher front is Miguel Amaya. Even after missing most of two seasons, he projects very well. He's likely an option in the second half.

I'd guess the sacks and don't forget two fumbles. I'm hoping/assuming it's not opponent adjusted, because those things are bad but against the Eagles some of that's just gonna happen.

Given the competition, that was pretty clearly the defense's best game of the year right? Between that and Fields chalk up another tank win, though I obviously don't love all the injuries.

I'm just imagining Poles running to midfield waving his arms frantically yelling "Stop the show!" like he's Uncle Leo

Apparently Mooney threw out Casali and Roberto Perez as guys the Cubs are also looking at. Perez is the best easily by publicly available defensive stats. Casali is easily the best hitter. Barnhart is a switch hitter. All three guys have a lot of NL Central experience.

I'm cool with Barnhart but you've gotta go harder at DH. No horsefeathering Trey Mancini. Bring me Conforto or Brantley. But like this is a real lineup: 2B - Hoerner (110 projected wRC+) DH - Conforto (117) LF - Happ (114) RF - Suzuki (128) CF - Bellinger (97) SS - Swanson (104) 1B - Mervis (122) 3B - Morel (105) C - Gomes (92)/Barnhart(77) I'd take the under on Gomes' offensive projection while being the primary C, and the error bars are obviously quite wide around all three lefties. But that team projects quite well on both sides of the ball.

He was first with Swanson yesterday so I guess give it some credence.