Bertz

If they hold on to finish off the Braves, Wheeler and Nola are set to start the first two games of the NLCS. That should make even the Dodgers nervous.

Hang that Rhys Hopkins bat slam in the Louvre. God damn!

Really fun to see the guys showing out in front of the national prospect folks. Curious to see if the needle moves significantly on them in the next few months as prospect lists start coming out.

I think this is the big inflection point on gaming out potential offseasons. We're assuming there's 80-something million to spend and the team doesn't want to go hog wild on dumping prospects. So there's enough resources to do anything you want, but not everything you want. Correa or one of the other shortstops use up enough resources right off the bat that you are essentially forced to skimp elsewhere. I chose to skimp in CF and SP. CF is an easy choice IMO, as the over/under on Davis or Canario being ready is something like May 15th. SP was a bit tougher, my preferred "other" SP is actually Andrew Heaney, but I wasn't able to fit him into this scenario. If you pass on the shortstops though, as you showed you can go pretty much hog wild filling the rest of the holes on the roster. I still think grabbing a star SS to anchor the lineup is the right call, but it's easy to see the benefits of skipping there. It kind of sucks Dansby Swanson had such an amazing year. He'd probably be looking at 5/$90 or something coming off a normal year, but now the SS market is Jose Iglesias and four guys who will each get at least $150M. No mid range options at all.

I'm honestly much more encouraged by the clear improvement in decision making than discouraged by the (very very silly) physical mistakes. Gordon building off of last week's momentum is good to see.

Ugh that sucks. Fantastic drive up until that point too

Mariners fans right now

This is probably mostly small sample weirdness but still holy crap

Lots of good stuff in here, but two things that stood out especially

Thinking through a full offseason, trying to keep Jed's comments from earlier in the week in mind, maybe something like this? - Do TT's deals for Marquez ($15M) and Jansen ($3.7M) - Trade with the A's for Seth Brown - Sign Correa to something a bit higher AAV to avoid going 10 years ( 8/$280) - Sign Brett Phillips (1/$2M) - Re-sign Drew Smyly (2/14M) - Sign Taylor Rogers (1/$10M) - Sign Carlos Estevez (1/$5M) Payroll is in the $215M-$220M range, so there should be room to extend Hoerner and leave room for deadline moves. Lineup RF - Suzuki LF - Happ DH - Brown SS - Correa 3B - Wisdom SS - Hoerner 1B - Mervis C - Jansen CF - Phillips BN - Morel, Gomes, Madrigal, Mckinstry This team is good defensively everywhere except maybe 3B and good offensively everywhere except definitely CF. People are going to hate Phillips, but he is a monster defender and actually a decent hitter against righties, so platoon him very strictly until Davis/Canario are up and push him to his rightful bench spot. Pitching Staff SP - Stro, Marquez, Steele, Smyly, Hendricks CL - Rogers SU - Estevez, Hughes MR - Heuer, Wick, Leiter, Estrada (or other Iowa reliever du jour) LR - Thompson, Alzolay It lacks the true Ace or monster closer you like to have anchoring your staff, but this group of pitchers has a chance to be pretty sick. Hottovy needs to work his magic with the new guys, but Estevez was the 15th hardest throwing reliever in baseball this year (min 50 IP) and Marquez the 21st SP (min 100 IP), so it's no longer like we're asking him to spin straw into gold. Taylor Rogers had an ugly ERA but everything under the hood looks fine, to the point that I'm not sure even this fairly hefty 1 year salary will get him in the door. There's also quite a few quality arms at Iowa, so when some of these guys wash out we can "next man up" pretty well. It wouldn't make the Dodgers nervous, but I think this squad compares favorably with any that played on Wildcard weekend. It does so without skimming too much talent out of the farm, and only adding one long term deal. So Jed's still in prime position to add more talent at the deadline and next winter.

I like hearing this about Bain a lot, but after buying into Jensen's changes way too quickly I'm gonna try to stay patient

Yeah I actually think Ron Washington is not a bad idea. He's player-friendly, has actually stayed around the game (so he presumably gets 2022 baseball), and he's old enough for the Reinsdorf seal of approval.

A guy I've started eying is Seth Brown with the A's. He's a pure platoon bat, and despite some solid athleticism a bit of a clod everywhere he plays defensively. But there's some very real power there and the cost should be minimal, probably a few of the 40 man fringe types. Also I was very anti-Jansen at the deadline but I'm coming around on him. Something like Correa, Jansen, Brown, and Kevin Kiermaier would lead to a pretty killer lineup, and leave $30Mish to throw at the pitching staff.

I hate Bob Costas so horsefeathering much

WOW That ball was demolished

Assuming they don't have an amazing comeback, absolute disaster by the Braves to lose today. Now you've got to try and split the Wheeler/Nola gauntlet and sweep the other two games. Really tall order. Similar story with the Yankees later, you *CANNOT* lose the Cole start today.

The "we'd love to have Wade Miley back" talk felt like platitudes but this combined with a lot of comments from both sides the last two months seems pretty real. I wonder if they'd do something like 2/$14M rather than 1/$10M. Smyly gets significantly more guaranteed money, the Cubs lower the cap hit and ensure they will still have an adult in the room in '24 (Hendricks and Stroman both have options rather than guarantees for '24).

Always love these from Bryan, even he does tend to have a few things that are silly (Adrian Sampson is not going to be in the horsefeathering bullpen). It does a great job of visualizing the depth (or lack thereof) in the org. I think specific to this thread rather than the minor league forum is how horsefeathering loaded the outfields and rotations are for both Iowa and Tenn. If you're looking at areas with surplus to trade from, you've got them. They're also places to keep in mind with Jed's remarks about moves that make sense for 2023 but maybe less so beyond. For example, it's pretty obvious that CFer is going to be on a 1 or 2 year deal rather than someone like Brandon Nimmo.

That's interesting. He also pretty implicitly called out adding a shortstop with this remark He said something similar when he was in the booth that last weekend of the season, and combined with the power remarks it really does seem like he wants one of the star shortstops. I wonder if the thought is getting Correa/Turner to take something more like 7/250 instead of 10/300, or if he's got his sites set more on Swanson/Bogaerts, who inherently are looking at sub $200M contracts.

The Bears currently project to pick 7th in next year's draft so a 1st is a complete non-starter