Bertz

I was wondering this as well, so I checked on a bunch of other good hitting prospects around the league. Crazy small sample size of course, but the vast majority of them came out of the gates hitting much better than the Cubs' guys. K rates look to be pretty high across the board though. That's disappointing to hear. That said just about all of the guys of consequence are well in the black for ARL. Even the Tennessee guys who I was annoyed with repeating the level are (except for Strumpf) among the 25 youngest in the Southern League. I'm not going to get beyond a little annoyed unless we get more than a month in without guys being able to pull themselves off the mat.

I think I've seen elsewhere pretty compelling evidence for guys swinging a lot more at the first pitch. So there's definitely some count specific nuance here. Maybe hitters should almost treat it like counting cards? Have a couple +/- criteria to throw around based on the count, the score, the pitcher's propensity to throw strikes, etc. I'm sure they have implicit stuff like this internally, but really game it out with R&D.

It's super early, but I kind of wonder if something might be happening. For background, check out this FG article Now it's early and all that jazz, but let's look at some Cubs' hitters swing rates YoY Contreras: -8.4% Happ: -4.6% Heyward: +4.9% Ortega: -13.1% Wisdom: -0.8% Hoerner: +7.3% Schwindel: +3.5% Madrigal: -2.1% Frazier: -3.7% While Seiya's new, his 29.2% swing rate would have been the lowest in baseball by nearly 3 points. (Yasmani Grandad at 31.9%). Put it all together, and the team is currently tied for the second lowest swing rate in baseball. Might this be a way to get a collection of mediocre hitters to punch above its weight?

I'm curious how far the story of our farm extends league wide currently. For us just about every pitcher is whooping ass and just about every hitter is getting worked over. Does that extend outside our walls? Is pitching just generally ahead of hitting right now? One pretty quiet bit of good news on the hitting front is Bryce Ball. The strikeouts are down, which is nice, but my guess is that's because the walks are also down. Given that it's happening together they'll probably both drift back to normal levels. What's not normal is his ground all rate, which is down 10 points. As a hulking left handed 1B, keeping all else equal but cutting the groundbal rate would probably be worth bumping him up a grade. Definitely something to keep an eye on to see if it's more than a 5 game thing.

As rough as the line is so far, I think I'm more encouraged than not with Wisdom. Still hitting the hell out of the ball (prior to today), while making more contact and chasing less. If those three things hold he'll be good. Less enthused with Schwindel. I appreciate that he's walking more but contact is down and everything is on the ground. Those are huge red flags

It's a clunker for sure, but he's getting a solid number of grounders and whiffs. So he's been bad, but not in the ways he was last year, which has me worried less than I might be otherwise.

I just love the PAs Frazier works. More playing time please.

Happ is so locked in. I'd guess we can count on one hand the number of times he's had a multi-hit game right handed?

There's a lot fewer secrets at this point. Current FOs have all the Statcast, video, etc. That they'd have for any domestic player. If Suzuki isn't bullied by MLB velo (so far so good there) there's not much to worry about. There's not gonna be "one weird trick" to get him out that gets discovered in two months. Also he's five years younger, that helps a lot.

Reinforcements! (I'll hold off on complaining about Felix Stevens hitting cleanup)

Video

He had a similar play the last week of ST. It's obviously not Javy's arm but I don't understand all of the negativity towards him being a viable SS on more than a backup basis. That's clearly enough arm.

Smyly looks really good. Another guy on the staff too already nearly bumping his mid-season velocity, which is encouraging (though weather is clearly not an issue today).

I don't normally do "Player X to hit a home run" prop bets but Quintana is a really great matchup for Wisdom.

Brewers got shutout by the Orioles, and it wasn't John Means day. That offense is going to be a problem

Some SSS stats from this weekend that may be vaguely meaningful: - Kyle Hendricks had a swinging strike rate of 20.5% in his first start. That's his first time being north of 20% since 2016. Last year he was at 8.9% for the year, and topped out at 13.5% in a single game. One game cannot tell us he's fixed, but this one did as much as possible - Seiya Suzuki swung at one pitch out of the zone all weekend, good for a 4.2% rate. For reference Juan Soto chases 10-15% of the time, and Mike Trout chases 15-20% of the time. Suzuki's average exit velo was 91.8 MPH this weekend, tied with Teoscar Hernandez and Willson Contreras last year, above Matt Olson and Joey Gallo. Only one of his balls in play was on the ground, a 20% rate. Austin Meadows had the lowest GB% in the league last year at 28.7%. Seiya is obviously going to give back ground in all of these areas, but man even after regression the comps are super fun - Collectively the team saw 4.32 pitches per plate appearance, and is in the early going leading the league in walk rate. They have the lowest swing rate in the league by a couple of percent, and the 3rd lowest swinging strike rate. They have taken the fourth highest rate of called strikes though, so I do imagine they'll at some point need to try to jump on some pitchers early to keep them honest - Patrick Wisdom's plate discipline and contact numbers were up across the board. Not great still mind you, but with his power and defense being bottom 10% in the league in contact rate rather than bottom 10 overall likely has him pushing 3 WAR - Velocity was higher than you'd expect nearly across the board. Usually, guys are ~1 MPH lower in April than you expect them to be for the year as a whole. It's some combination of still ramping up and cold April weather. Well given the weather this weekend, you'd not really be alarmed by guys being down as much as 2 MPH. But that wasn't the case, at all. The starters were each down a couple tenths of a MPH from last year's numbers. Martin, Effross, Robertson, and Roberts were all up. Norris and Wick were down about a mile. Keegan Thompson was the only guy down multiple MPH, and it's very easy to think that's because he was pacing himself to take that game to the house. Small sample and everything, but all else equal the team being collectively a MPH north of expectations would lead to 3-4 more projected WAR

I'm starting to think we're not gonna like Villar

It's the right thing to do from a team building perspective, particularly when you're not putting your foot fully on the gas to win games, but yeah the next six weeks or so while they sort out the bullpen are gonna require some Pepto

You'd have preferred he given up more home runs? His xERA and xFIP were fine last year too. It's completely unsustainable. His xFIP WAS 3.69, nearly double his era. His Siera was 3.58. Yeah its not awful, but coming off two awful years prior, I'm not aching to give a guy like that a roster spot. Those are very good numbers. Lucky does not automatically mean bad. You can be good AND have luck make you look great, and that's exactly what happened for Chavez last year.

LOL

We're presumably getting Cousins-Williams-Hader some would be nice to get to Suter this inning

I know it became clear very quickly that Palencia was the primary piece in the Chafin trade, but what the horsefeathers happened to Greg Deichman? Riley Thompson had a rough first but settled in really well for innings 2 and 3. Haven't seen a velo read yet but he was a guy we heard some buzz about being way up in the spring