Bertz

I think it depends on what's going wrong vs. what's going right. Like right now the starting pitching has been a huge disaster but the rest of the roster has, in aggregate, exceeded expectations. If in July the club has 4-5 black holes while otherwise things look good, that's something Jed can turn around in a winter. But if it's just 1-WAR putzes as far as the eye can see, yeah buckle in for a real rebuild. Seems like the offense in general is trending downwards big time. .228/.319/.333/.652 slash line during this 2-8 stretch and that's including the 21 run outburst. Yes the sample size is too small to say anything definitive but its trending towards the offense not being great either, unless you are seeing something upon digging deeper. Pirates aside, some pretty killer pitching during this stretch. I think with the offense it's also a matter of sorting through those 1-WAR guys to see which ones are worth holding onto and pairing with the unequivocally good guys like Seiya, Happ, and Hoerner (are we comfortable locking this one in yet?). At the moment I think we'd give the thumbs up to Wisdom and the thumbs down to Schwindel and Ortega.

I think it depends on what's going wrong vs. what's going right. Like right now the starting pitching has been a huge disaster but the rest of the roster has, in aggregate, exceeded expectations. If in July the club has 4-5 black holes while otherwise things look good, that's something Jed can turn around in a winter. But if it's just 1-WAR putzes as far as the eye can see, yeah buckle in for a real rebuild.

Chris Clarke with 5 innings of one-run ball, and given the pitch count he might not be done. His numbers aren't as eye popping as Wicks and Herz, but might also be ready for Tenn sooner rather than later too.

Nelly with another dong. Also running a 17% groundball rate now, which is *insanely* low. Only a few guys a year run groundball rates under 30% each year.

I'm okay with it, I'd probably be more unequivocally happy if they'd done a WR instead of Brisker. I'm curious if there's any immediate next steps in free agency from here. Or is the plan is just to see what guys shake out during camps and be opportunistic? Or door #3 of just continuing to roll as much cash over to next year as possible.

I thought it was weird coming into the year that we never affirmatively heard that Hermosillo was a plus CF given his speed. It's starting to seem less weird.

Amazing news hopefully he's at Iowa within a few weeks. Honestly I'd love to have him, Hudson, and Hughes all hanging out at there, hopefully then at least one would be ready to see Wrigley in the second half.

Ja'Tyre Carter - 77th

Speed specifically. If you look at all of these guys on Mockdraftable they're almost uniformly elite speed for their position V. Jones - 96th percentile in the 40 Yard Dash B Jones - 93rx Robinson - 73rd Thomas - 94th Ebner - 86th Kramer - Not listed

Well this is just made up nonsense, he was a mess last year. Kyle had two problems last year: he basically stopped being able to miss bats, and while he still was a soft contact guy a higher proportion of the hard contact he did allow was in the air. Combine those two factors and he got donged into oblivion. This year he's missing bats again, but his groundball rate is evaporating and he's giving up hard contact at a little more than a league average rate. IMO the former is more encouraging than the latter is discouraging, but not by a lot and I was already really worried about him coming into the year. With all of the teams needing pitching help and signing and/or trading for pitchers with arm problems and lesser success, I can't believe someone wouldn't have traded for him. Taking a flyer on him because he can at least give innings and giving up something good for him are two very different things

If the FO office would have admitted that we were rebuilding instead of retooling, we could have gotten something pretty good for him during the off season. Well this is just made up nonsense, he was a mess last year. Kyle had two problems last year: he basically stopped being able to miss bats, and while he still was a soft contact guy a higher proportion of the hard contact he did allow was in the air. Combine those two factors and he got donged into oblivion. This year he's missing bats again, but his groundball rate is evaporating and he's giving up hard contact at a little more than a league average rate. IMO the former is more encouraging than the latter is discouraging, but not by a lot and I was already really worried about him coming into the year.

Thompson relieved Leiter's last start so my money would be on trying to get 4-5 out of him before Kilian. But Kilian's last start did line up with Leiter's so it's not impossible. With off days Monday and Thursday my guess is they're just skipping the #5 spot this go around. From there I believe Miley's set for a rehab start, maybe they think he only needs one?

Newcomb that inning threw 24 pitches that inning, 17 cutters. Including 14 of the first 17 pitches. Clearly that's the pitch Hottovy is eying for him to work on.

A pitcher with a 6-something ERA struck out PCA

Lol Bears Twitter is gonna self immolate

Also I haven't seen video yet but it looks like Riley Thompson shoves again. They only let him go 3 though, I wonder when they start stretching him out more. Though obviously caution is fair after last year.

For me I think you move down if one of the extra picks is high enough to still be today, otherwise yeah I think there's enough on the board to just play it straight and make the picks as they lie.

So I was trying to look into stuff about Nelly Velazquez, and I found some data that's relevant to the Caissie and co. conversation. Fangraphs actually has for minor leaguers Swinging Strike rate. It's not on actual player pages, but it is on their minor league leaderboards. You'd love MLB quality data of in/out of zone plate discipline data, but this is a big piece of context I didn't know we had at our fingertips. Here's where some of our notable prospects rank in terms of swinging strike rate among the guys at their level (percentile here is with 100% being good at contact and 0% being bad, not 100% being most swings and misses) Iowa Brennen Davis - 13th percentile Tennessee Chris Morel - 39th Nelly Velazquez - 15th Chase Strumpf - 27th Yonathan Perlaza - 34th Bryce Ball - 56th (this seems notable?) South Bend Alexander Canario - 13th Ed Howard - 22nd Owen Caissie - 48th Yohendrick Pinango - 53rd Jordan Nwogu - 61st (!?!) Myrtle Beach Reggie Preciado - 3rd (10th lowest overall) Kevin Alcantara - 29th James Triantos - 95th PCA - 95th (they're right next to each other on the list) I don't think there's a ton to take away from here. Davis/Nelly/Canario's K numbers are probably a little higher than you'd expect from these swinging strike rates, but they're still quite bad. Caissie is the big outlier here (and I swear I didn't know this going in). This makes it seem like he's been super passive at the plate right now, not really unable to make contact. Preciado doesn't get the same silver lining unfortunately. And yet another data point that reinforces how amazing PCA has been. Ball and Nwogu I think outright shocked me. This is something to keep an eye on for them.

https://theathletic.com/3279476/2022/04/29/what-were-hearing-about-cubs-prospects-pete-crow-armstrong-riley-thompson-brailyn-marquez?source=user-shared-article This athletic article doesn't have as much as you'd think from the title, but some good stuff On pitching in the system broadly: On Riley Thompson (also confirmed elsewhere he's hit 100 MPH): On PCA:

He hasn't done it in super high leverage, and maybe because it's so predicated on funk it'll dry up quickly as the league sees him more, but Effross has been nothing short of incredible so far in his career.

maybe pessimistic/skeptical is a better word than adamant, but yeah for sure, i underestimated his otherworldly tools to help allow him to survive a broken approach my hot take here is mostly that it's probably not good that most of our top hitting prospects are aspiring to be Shaq Thompson Would you rather have Caissie demolish the ball in the Arizona backfields, put up a good not great ~110 OPS+ at MB, or get his ass handed to him at South Bend? The former are certainly better for us all throwing around high fives on here, but do you think they are actually better for his development?

I'm not bored enough to comb through gamelogs, but Javy had some real rough stretches, I believe Soler too. You also won't see me throwing out any silver linings on a case like Howard. His entire career has been dreck, with a ~25 game BABIP fueled stretch at the tail end of last year being the highlight. He's more than used his mulligan. But if Caissie or any of these guys have a 2022 like Nwogu's 2021, 6 absolutely abysmal weeks and then generally kicking ass, I'll worry very little about it given their ages.

I'd normally agree with you about this sort of thing being spin, but they 100% said these exact same things about Rizzo et all and were proven to be absolutely correct. Speaking of which, weren't you super adamant that Javy had no chance at being a decent hitter because of similar rationale?

I really doubt it. Like you said they didn't really do it at all last year except with Santana (who got about twice as much runway). Plus in the Athletic this AM Sharma made it sound like the org was unconcerned, echoing the "we like to see guys go through a little failure" talking points from back when the core was developing. I think between the DH and regular rest days they can make all four guys work, and it'll be one of the non-specials that gets edged out. Then maybe Canario getting an aggressive bump up when Roederer is ready? Is it that aggressive to promote Canario when he’s already at 249 PA at high-A and is on the 40-man? Yeah I think those are the reasons he'd be the one most likely to get it. I was thinking aggressive because he's currently running a 40% k rate, although we saw a couple times last year (Nelly being the one who jumps fastest to mind) where guys who did not seem ready from our vantage got promoted and immediately produced at their new level. There's a massive information assymetry at play here.