Bertz

Honestly it feels like he's been snakebit by the dong so much that he nibbles way more than he ever has in his career previously. I feel like I'd rather he just live with the dongs but keep them 1 or 2 run shots. Instead like today he pitched around Olson and the next guy hit a three run homer. The stuff is the same as ever, so it's wild to see the results so much worse.

Uh oh, GameDay had Herz's day ending after a lineout to the pitcher with 2 outs in the 3rd. Haven't seen anything on Twitter about what happened though

Even though I look at their catcher situation and don't see a ton of need, the Padres keep getting mentioned with Willson Contreras. If they are in on him, I'm curious how gettable Luis Campusano is. Any team but the Padres I would assume not very, but Preller's always willing to push his chips in. Willson probably doesn't bring him back on his own, but I would think additionally sending Robertson and/or taking back Myers' contract would be in the right neighborhood? Because of the positional versatility from Hoerner, Morel, and Wisdom, having catcher already settled going into the winter would make the offseason very straightforward. Just bring in players you like. One SP would still be an absolute necessity, but otherwise there'd not really any imperative for addressing any specific positions. That's usually a recipe for making the best decisions.

Riley Thompson's return was inauspicious, but Clarke did really well in relief. He now has 4 walks and 33 strikeouts in 33.1 AA innings. Oh and a 55ish percent groundball rate. Kohl Franklin was okay, which by his standards is a huge win. Hopefully that can get him on a bit of a roll.

So as things look right now, going into the winter we'll have four consensus top 100 guys in Brennen, PCA, Alcantara, and whoever we end up with at 7 (assuming we don't do a signability play). And then another four guys will probably not be consensus but likely each end up on a list or two: Caissie, Triantos, Herz, and Hernandez. Add in whatever we end up with for Willson and Robertson, and that's a hell of a top end for a farm that was already really deep coming into the year.

Devers is getting really fun. A groundball rate north of 50% and nearly 5 Ks for every BB is hard to ignore

Don't pitchers occasionally get dead arms when they are moving around between being a SP and a reliever? Feels like he didn't have his usual command and stuff in those games. Yeah that's the hope. His velo was down a bit too those two starts and seemed back up today, so fingers crossed. I would definitely keep running Steele and Thompson out there as SPs for the foreseeable future. Feels like each of them is ~50/50 to be a legit SP, which isn't great but would mean ending up with one is pretty likely. If we can use these next few months to find out one of them is really worthwhile as a SP and also let Kilian work through his growing pains, it should pay dividends next year.

I'm hopeful that the disastrous outings in Baltimore and New York were just bad outings and not tied to the SP/RP thing. After all it was the first time through the order that things went to hell

Young or Maldonado IMO. Let's cycle through these guys so that we know if we've got anything.

I think looking at something like XBH rate can be a bit misleading. You can get an XBH from a 78 MPH bloop just as easily as a 114 MPH screamer can be an out. With the limitations we have on minor league data, I think the first place I look is HR/FB rate, and Made's has increased 4x from 2.6% to 11.1%. Now maybe it's less strength and more better decision making, but in the absence of Statcast data I think that's the most compelling data point we have.

Oof that doesn't look great. I do wonder if being able to spend the rest of the year on strength and conditioning isn't the worst thing in the world. You don't have to look any further than Kevin Made for a guy who shows the difference an offseason of physical maturation can make.

Would like to see Wicks throw up some zeroes tonight. The peripherals all day "ready for Tenn" but he's gotten BABIP'd quite hard and has a mediocre ERA to show for it. There's probably some luck in there but he's probably also not managing contact as well as he should.

when i'm in town, i usually park near belmont or montrose harbor and walk to wrigley. Yep, also anything west of Ashland is typically free. Last game I went to I found a free spot just south of Addison and Ashland and made the 10 minute or so walk. If you don't mind walking its not that difficult to find a free spot, especially because the Cubs blow and the park isn't full most nights. Yeah this is the play. I used to live right over there by the Whole Foods and it's basically the perfect distance to be close enough for the walk to be reasonable while far enough for parking and traffic to not be too bad yet.

Your periodic Owen Caissie update after getting on base 4x last night: .244/.319/.401, 104 wRC+, 8.9% BB, 29.3% K Since May 1st: .293/.374/.496, 144 wRC+, 10.1% BB, 25.2% K Still the 2nd youngest guy in the Midwest League (and the guy younger is hitting .077 through his first 7 games). He's not being quite as productive in June as he was in May, but the peripherals are all better so honestly I'd still chalk it as MoM improvement. Speaking of guys from the Darvish trade, Yeison Santana is super interesting. He's actually been kind of great at SB, but there's just absolutely zero power there: .323/421/.369, 11.5% BB, 14.1% K It is early and power is streaky, so it might come, but he didn't hit a single dong in his repeat of MB either. He's reportedly fairly fast and pretty good at shortstop, but I'm not sure how playable it is to have zero power without being elite at something else.

Agreed. Like I get the math of paying for an extra half-season costs resources you don't need to burn, but why aren't there more deals for guys with 2+ years of control where that half season isn't super meaningful. I'm kind of eying the Royals SPs. They as an org appear to not be one of the ones who "get" pitching in 2022. But they've got a bunch of guys who have pretty strong pedigrees and fairly mediocre to bad early results. Now their Statcast numbers aren't amazing either, so it's not as much of a slam dunk as like when the Kevin Gausman got traded, but feels like there's some low-hanging fruit for a Tommy Hottovy to work with. Get a guy in, spend a half season getting him acclimated, and hopefully he hits the ground running next April.

Not at all scientific, but honestly feels like Cam's got the swag of a late inning reliever, and that might be where he's best suited.

Really encouraging signs from Kyle. Can't put too much stock into one or two spots as we've seen from him, but he's rarely had both the swing and miss and the groundballs working. Hopefully he just needed the rest.

Hopefully actually a week or two and not the week or two Brennen's deal was supposed to be

I believe this is something that Cleveland has led out on across the league, and it was hypothesized that Hawkins would bring over. Speaking of things Hawkins potentially brought over... https://twitter.com/drivelinebases/status/1536522037698605056?t=41QkGkbNnWkbe5hPq188Tw&s=19

I think most encouraging to me is the times through the order penalty is getting less stiff for him. 1st time through the order: 2.79 xFIP 2nd time through: 4.14 xFIP 3rd time through: 2.81 xFIP The fact that his 2nd time through numbers are now perfectly fine and his third time through numbers are great is encouraging. While those 3rd time through numbers especially won't keep up it hopefully shows that he has the repertoire necessary to stay a legit starter. On the other hand the velo loss within starts kind of terrifies me. He didn't crack 91 his last two innings last night. If he was 93-95 the first few innings and 91-93 at the end of the night that'd be fine, but he drops down as low as 87 at points. The results aren't as horrible as you'd expect, but it sort of feels like a matter of time?

I mentioned this a while back in the minor league forum, but I think 40 Man roster considerations are going to have a significant impact on the next six months of transactions. There are so many prospects eligible for the upcoming Rule 5 draft that even with all of the dead weight on the roster there's a pretty significant crunch coming up. Right now, the 40 man roster is obviously at 40 names. With 6 guys on the sixty day IL, and 9 impending FAs, that means the roster will be at 37 at the start of the offseason barring any trades or cuts. From there, 4 prospects absolutely have to be added to the roster: Brennen Davis, Bryce Ball, Kevin Alcantara, and Yohendrick Pinango. Another 6 probably should be added: Chris Clarke, Cam Sanders, Ryan Jensen, Riley Thompson, Bryan Hudson, Kohl Franklin. On top of that I count another 8 names that you probably wouldn't add today, but have a pretty reasonable path to getting there over the next three months: Darius Hill, Cayne Ueckert, Chase Strumpf, Cole Roederer, Eury Ramos, Brendon Little, Yonathan Perlaza, and Danis Correa. That's 55 (!!) names you could reasonably argue onto the 40 man roster. That's before any trade deadline acquisitions, and precludes any free agent signings. Several of those names, particularly from the last group, are going to wash out over the next three months. But even still we're likely to need to free up 8-10 roster spots. The good news, well not really it's why the team sucks, is that there's a lot of dead weight on the roster. I can see 12 potential/likely cuts: Leiter, Swarmer, Rivas, Hermosillo, Heyward, Schwindel, Rucker, Stout, Higgins, Wieck, Mills, and Bote. I'd probably dump all 12 today, though odds are a few play themselves back into being worthwhile components to a roster. Given all of the above and knowing that the trade deadline is fast approaching, there's two things I'd like to see the Jed do: 1. Eschew quantity and focus on highest possible impact pieces attainable. The most obvious way of going about this is packaging guys together. Like if the Mets would trade their #3 and #7 prospects for Contreras and Robertson respectively, could you get #1 or #2 for both together? Alternatively, Jed should throw in prospects relevant to the 40 man crunch (e.g. Anderson Espinoza) along with the rentals to increase the return 2. Make an actual buy move this deadline. My thought is a pre-FA SP, but it doesn't particularly matter the what. While obviously the hope is it improves the competitive outlook, the immediate-term goal is to in essence trade four quarters for a dollar bill to abate the roster crunch. The org has a lot of outfielders and a lot of quality pitchers (though they certainly over-index in multi-inning relief), let's use some of that surplus Jed did #1 to a tee with Javy last year, so while I'd prefer some nearer term impact it does seem to be something the FO is comfortable with. I'm hoping they make an attempt at #2, rather than just doing a couple of small deck-clearing moves in late November like the Rays and Guardians tend to do in this situation.

Two fun Matt Mervis facts: 1. He has an 1.154 OPS against right handed pitching this year 2. Steamer thinks he's already a league average hitter At 1B more broadly, I would like to see the team be pretty aggressive in cycling through the 1B prospects in the org. Rivas is done, good to know. Now let's see Jared Young. Similarly it won't take long after Maldonado gets going that I'd like to see him come in for Schwindel. And so on. It's a good but not great 1B FA class coming up, which makes me nervous investing there. If we have the possibility of a ~115 wRC+ from internal 1B options next year, you don't even glance at the FA market. Let's find out if we can plan for that!

Like Menez a month back presumably a guy they can get 2-3 innings out of if a starter goes short again in the next few days and then DFA without worry.

Was one of the other three PCA? Yeah, Jackson Chourio (he's gonna be a problem), PCA, and Marcelo Mayer.