Bertz

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.

7 losses in a row now, 2 games back of the Rockies Not gonna lie makes it me nervous for next week, I hate coming up on teams deep into a losing streak, feels like they're about due to come out of it with a vengeance

He's looking like a DFA candidate at the end of the year, which is absolutely wild considering where he was a year ago at this time

3 Ks and a walk in Ferris' first inning. I'm firmly in the "age is just a number" camp for pitchers but if we have a high pedigree teenage pitcher continue to perform in full season ball....holy horsefeathers

Amaya already stealing a strikeout via framing

Sorry, I see now my wording is misleading, what I'm saying is Mervis at Iowa has the essentially perfect peripherals of those guys as MLBers. Ironically though, Tex is the only one of those guys who hit as prospect like he did in MLBGuys who walk a lot, don't strike out a lot, have power, and put the ball in the air. The latter were all Flyball Revolution guys. But putting some numbers around it, since 2010 there've been 22 seasons of guys with a BB rate greater than 10%, a K rate less than 20%, a GB rate less than 40%, and pulled 50% of their batted balls Pujols Asdrubal Cabrera (the only wRC+ less than 117 on this list) Brian Dozier (x2) Edwin Encarnacion (x5) Jose Bautista (x5) Jose Ramirez (x2) Mark Teixiera (x3) (+3 more times before 2010) Max Kepler Paul Konerko Steve Pearce (his insane out of nowhere 2014) As you'd expect from me calling these peripherals perfect, these seasons averaged a 141 wRC+. Mervis has to continue it in MLB obviously, but short of having a time machine and doing it younger he's done as much on paper at Iowa as one could possibly do. I think the plan was to call him up Tuesday but then Gomes got concussed and made additional roster machinations more complicated.

I love Morel, I believe over the offseason on here I threatened to throw myself into an active volcano if anything ever happened to him, but he's still swinging and missing A TON down at Iowa. This isn't Mervis, there's still some pretty fundamental development stuff for Morel to work on. I think it's correct to wait until either he closes some holes in his swing or someone goes down with an injury to call him up.

I think this is two separate things: One Run Game luck and Cluster Luck The one run game thing is clearly the issues from the last two weeks. Fulmer's issues in the Dodgers series and basically the entire pen's issues from the past week. They are frustrating but really IMO it's a several bad dice roles in a row. Most of the pen has experience pitching and pitching well in close games, so aside from maybe Rucker I don’t think there's actually any reason to think it's more than a temporary run of bad luck. The losses are banked though, and it doesn't always even out in the end. The cluster luck, the team was actually on the positive side of the ledger as of a ~week ago. The offense not coming through with men on over the past week was basically a reversion to the mean from earlier in the year. Now the team is slightly unlucky on the pitching side, but not egregiously so. This is more or less a wash IMO.