Bertz

I've been pretty adamant about Keegan in the rotation, but I think I'm actually moving towards Wesneski starting the year in MLB and Keegan indeed being in the pen. No idea what to do with Sampson this winter. I'd love some confirmation he does in fact have minor league options. Fangraphs says he does but sometimes this sort of stuff gets wonky with the guys who went to Asia for a few years and came back.

Yeah, I'm generally of the opinion that there's essentially no predictive value in rookie QB performance. But there's no shrugging off these kind of year 2 struggles. I believe Josh Allen is the only QB in the modern era to be straight up bad in year 2 and then go on to be an impact guy. One of the Ringer guys, I think Kevin Clark, suggested a few years back that a team in the QB desert should start just taking first or second round QBs every year until they get it right. I think that's an overcorrection, but I'm perfectly happy to do every other year. You have like an 80% idea on who your QB is after year 2. If you don't love what you're seeing at that point, you don't have to wait until the end of year 3 or 4 when you're 100% sure to finally make a move

I have some quibbles, but I think this is in the neighborhood of what I'm expecting this winter. The big one, and I know I'm in the minority, but I kind of hate holding onto Smyly. I also am pretty unfazed by Morel's issues in the second half here, but I don't think there would be anything too egregious about getting him a month at Iowa. The team's at ~$140M for payroll going into the winter if we assume the Franimal is non-tendered. Correa adds ~$30, Senga another ~$20, plus another $15-20M for Narvaez and the bullpen. We know Jed likes to have money to throw around at the deadline, so even if spending up to the LT is on the table this year, you've probably only got another ~$15M to spend in the offseason. Probably a pick two scenario with Smyly/Choi/Kiermaier. That's the tough choice this offseason, you probably have to just ride with internal options at one of C/CF/SP#2. I personally am very comfortable with the internal SP depth, and that's the way I'd go, but I think there's good arguments for and against not addressing each of the three.

Insane luck to get Morel out right there. It's like MLB the show how wild pitches always magnet their way right back to the catcher

Would love to know what the FO is thinking about Mckinstry. At first glance, the bat has been pretty uninspiring, and it doesn't seem like he's been unlucky. His wOBA is .278 and his xwOBA is .281. Minor difference, like a single base hit. However, I think he's probably been unlucky is his BB and K numbers. Coming into tonight he had a walk rate of 7.4% and a K rate of 25.7%, both numbers worse than league average. But he's 45th percentile in chase rate, 40th in swinging at pitches in the zone, and 80th in contact rates. Those numbers don't scream "poor at both walking and striking out" to me. Quite the opposite in fact. There's not exactly thunder in his bat, but I think the batting results are supposed to be closer to like Rafael Ortega. From a very good defensive infielder that's actually a pretty valuable bench piece.

That's 100% what's gonna happen. They should trade Hendriks and potentially even one of Giolito/Lynn and lick their wounds a bit for a year before coming back strong in '24. Instead they're just gonna re-sign Abreu, add another modest piece (a LH bat for OF?) and assume everything will be fine.

Leiter's been sneaky good out of the pen

The way they've been trading homers presumably the next Mervis dong is now imminent

Are we assuming they are bringing Smyly back? If so, we already have Hendricks, Stroman, Smyly, Keegan, Steele, Hayden, Alzolay, Mills and Sampson before signing anyone. I'm assuming Smyly makes it to FA, and Mills definitely gets cut. But even still yeah I'm very happy with the depth and think the team just needs another guy you'd be happy with starting a playoff game. Like if we end up here Stroman Big Offseason Add Steele Thompson Hendricks + Alzolay and possibly Sampson in long relief + Wesneski, Kilian, and Assad at Iowa That feels like plenty? Especially since getting a second SP probably means foregoing on either adding a catcher or adding another LH bat.

Hayden's now started his career with 20 strikeouts to 2 walks IMO the biggest question this offseason is whether the team thinks we need to add one SP of substance or two. I imagine Jed will go with the latter but personally I feel very comfortable leaning on the youths.

Alfonso Rivas really sucks

The contact rates for Canario improved substantially, and stayed improved even during his initial struggles at Iowa. I tend to think it's genuine development and not just a hot streak. I think you deal one of Canario/Davis this winter and assume the other will get 400+ PAs in CF next year.

Welp, we got an explanation

Really enjoying this Sosa/McGwire dynamic between Mervis and Canario

He hasn't hit for much power yet since he got back, but Brennen's been good since he got off the IL. I think his contact rates are way up too. FG doesn't show batted ball data for minor leaguers in their game logs, but his swinging strike rate at Iowa is now 14.9%. I believe before he went on the IL it was like 18-something percent, which would imply it's been 12ish since he got back. 11-12% is typically average, which for Brennen is about as good as we can expect for contact. Whether it's at Iowa or in the AFL I'd love to see him go on a dong binge soon to prove he's fully healthy, but I'm increasingly comfortable with him being in position to win the CF job out of ST. Don't plan around it happening, but I think they should let him take his shot.

Yeah he's not a guy you cut at this point. While his ERA is certainly flukey low, he's now at 124 innings of pitching with adequate peripherals going back to the start of last year. With minor league options like he has there's a little bit of value there. The Cubs are thankfully in a place where they can and should lean on the youths instead of holding onto Sampson, but not every team is. The Rangers seem like a great fit, Dbacks too maybe. Teams that need like 3-4 SPs this winter, Sampson could be the 3rd or the 4th.

The bread eating guy IIRC

Awesome drive. That flea flicker deal especially was real fun.

I'm sure it's just early season weirdness but it would be hilarious if the Bears end up with a better o-line than the Bengals

This fastball shape stuff ties into my Hodge comment in the last post. Separating those fastballs and breaking balls is a must! This point isn't universally agreed upon by teams. Right now there's a common sentiment that vertical movement is second only to velocity, but it's definitely more nuanced about it. The Cubs, in particular, are a team that believes in incorporating fastballs with relative (or actual) cut to them for certain pitchers. Part of that is that when used well in pitch design, these pitches produce softer contact on balls in play. The relative cut added to a four-seam tends to keep it out of the true dead zone, which is where fastballs have equal horizontal and vertical movement numbers (like if a pitch had 10 inches of horizontal and 10-12 inches of vertical movement). Also we need to consider that a lot of Stuff+ calculations tend to be based on whiff% (or heavily based on that). But there's some good research and commentary- that I personally agree on - that we should be looking at run value (RV/100) since what pitchers are ultimately trying to do is prevent runs, not only generate whiffs. It's why sinkers look terrible in most Stuff+ calculations, but they aren't all bad pitches. I haven't gotten an update on Hodge's data for a few weeks, but his horizontal movement cuts the ball in a similar way to Justin Steele's. If you compare his fastball to Driveline's "Blob", Hodge's fastball is outside the dead zone here due largely to the cutting action (approx -1 inch horizontal movement and an average of 92.5 mph which was from earlier this year). And he throws this fastball from a low release height. Obviously the velocity is different, but Hodge's release height is low like Edwin Díaz. If I had to guess, I'd say the Cubs try to still get Hodge's fastball to generate more ride so it's a cut-ride fastball similar to Leeper's. Additional ride on the ball along with his release height and a mph bump or two would be pretty deadly. This is great. The bold kind of fascinates me, because incorporating whiff rate into a stuff metric seems really dumb? It feels like "Stuff" should purely be about inputs. Velocity, spin, movement, approach angle, any sort of metric you can put around deception, etc. And then concurrently, we need to improve pitcher run values. Strike %, whiff rate, exit velocity and launch angle allowed, etc. Including whiff rate in stuff+ makes it a weird in-between for a process metric vs. a results metric. It'd be like including batting average in FIP. You learn more from FIP and ERA being separate than you do by trying to take the best parts of both.

Wild that a team with such a good supporting cast let their hopeful franchise QB take so many unnecessary hits