Bertz

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.

Don't forget extending Hoerner. My hope is that there isn't much plan to leave a few mil for the deadline, the Padres showed you can do a lot and still stay under, and if they're competitive and wanting to add maybe that's the motivation to push over the line. The best version of this is probably Madrigal for a reliever, Smyly, a bat for ~10M, and whichever catcher you end up with(none of the options should be > 5M). Yeah good call, there's essentially no way to fit a Hoerner extension in at this point if we're looking to stay under the LT. That's a good sign, Jed laid it on pretty thick that he'd like to accomplish that. I guess something like this would technically work but doesn't feel very realistic? Smyly ~$7M Hoerner ~$8M Catcher ~$2M DH ~$8M RP ~$2M

Smyly is aiming lower than I would have liked after Taillon was the top guy. That said Smyly is obviously solid, he took well to the team's systems and coaching, and I'd imagine it's a fairly efficient signing. If signing Smyly instead of someone a little better is what lets Jed get Conforto at DH instead of e.g. Matt Carpenter that's a win. Still really curious about the LT. Smyly would be another ambiguous sign about how they're approaching it. After Swanson the team has just under $30M to the tax. Smyly likely eats up $8-10M. On the one hand, that's technically enough for a bat at <$10M, a very cheap catcher, a cheap reliever, and leaving s few mill for the deadline. But on the other Smyly seems like a weird splurge if you're going to be running so tight everywhere else?

Really strong ZiPS projections for Swanson. 4+ WAR the next two years, 3+ the two after that, and even in year 6 he'd still prorate out to just over 2 WAR on a per 600 PA basis.

I've been wondering about this too. Lots of guys I've looked at this winter play left side of the infield and have noodle arm grades. Justin Turner was another I noticed recently. I kind of wonder if outfielders wreck the grade curve a bit here? They get a lot more running start 100% effort throws. Like Javy by this measure is also only 70th-80th percentile, and we know he's got a mega elite arm. Swanson's good enough at SS right now that he probably stays there for most of his deal. Probably the last year or two though we should assume he'll be at 2B. Which I wonder if that impacts any Hoerner extension talk? Probably not?

He sounds very confident in the Conforto thing

Didn't make the connection til I saw it on Reddit but the two biggest contracts in Cubs' history have now been given to guys traded for Shelby Miller.

Cubs need a big bat, but as a pure DH and a righty I don’t think Martinez was a great fit for the Cubs.

Just from 20-21 he was 34th in WAR, still ahead of Trout and Devers, also ahead of Nolan Arenado, Sean Murphy, Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez, Brandon Nimmo, Trevor Story, etc. yeah he had anomalously high value from baserunning & fielding efficiency, pretty reminiscent of a former Braves standout our offense is still very likely quite worse than an already pitiful offense from last year despite now spending pretty significant money from an artificially tight budget 3 years in a row? Quite the anomaly!