Bertz

I love that they're doing a Statcast broadcast for this. Honestly I think more events should have more alternate broadcasts. Alternate languages (and not just radio over the English broadcast, but like full productions), Nickelodeon broadcasts, do it all.

People are dunking on this, but Senzatella has been really good since the start of last year?

There's a chance that our O-line is decent and we just had the misfortune of seeing Aaron Donald and Myles Garrett in two of the first three weeks?

I think that's the most likely. That said, when they brought him back part of the states reason was that he worked with KB/Javy/etc. when he was minor league coordinator. I wonder if with them gone they want to go in another direction too? I believe Justin Stone was hired after Iapoce, so now might be the opportunity to bring in someone more closely aligned with him?

I assume this means no one from South Bend made it into that league's list? It's not surprising, I could maybe see one Jensen, Velazquez, or Canario making the very back of a 20 but none of them are cracking a league top 10.

There's definitely value beyond just the raw production from each role. This article does a food job trying to quantify it, with the tl;dr being somewhere between 0.5 and 1.0 WAR

Things looking good but not great on the game 163 chaos front. Blue Jays and Red Sox are doing their part, while the Mariners are choking and the Yankees/Rays are tied

If they overturn this I swear to horsefeathering god

I bet the over, so I'm pretty okay with this Also we were gonna just run it straight up the middle every time if it stayed a 3 score game

It looked like he threw it at the 5 and it was caught at the 50. Might have been the 10 though That's awesome. I wonder if Mitch managed any that far or if we have to go all the way back to Cutler to get a pass that long from a Bears QB.

I still wanna see an answer in terms of air yards though

That's gotta be the longest Bears pass in terms of air yards since like 2018, right? Wowza!

I don't think it's just those three. They were the first but not the only. Last year they found Tepera and Adam, and this year doubled down on Tepera and added Chafin. Plus ancillary guys like Winkler and Brothers who were actually pretty successful in limited roles early in the year (before getting blown up when pushed into everyday duty). The Cubs pretty likely belong in the club of teams who can build a pen on the fly. Like hell, it's still been okay since the trade deadline. Now maybe that's less about the investments in technology and more about the change to a portfolio style "bring in a bunch of interesting guys and it'll eventually work out" approach? But I do believe it's both. It won't truly be proven though until we see the randos accentuated with some fireballers pumped out by the player development team. Reports from Iowa and Tenn make it sound like that's imminent, but we do need to see it.

I have a gut feeling this is our annual game where we score 40 points, and that it's enough of a laugher to buy Nagy til at least midseason.

I would consider that more of a kickoff than a culmination, but YMMV. It's not worth throwing a parade over, but since the start of 2019 the Cubs are 14th in bullpen ERA despite investing in no one of note except Kimbrel (who ironically was the worst part of the pen for the first half of that period) and selling off all the best parts this past July. There's also some obvious wins on the PD side, but those take longer to pay off. But like, that's where the edges are at this point. There's no longer low hanging analytical fruit ready to be discovered and completely take the league by storm. It's "buy millions of dollars of radar equipment and commit four full time analysts to trudge through the data and then you can reliably buy a pretty good bullpen on the cheap." Before that it was catcher framing. That's where Moneyball is when there's only one truly dumb front office left. And the Cubs specifically are no longer cutting edge obviously. Probably still top 3rd of the league?

I think it's two parts. One is being smart and the other is being cheap. The smart part is obvious, they've been an analytically savvy org for like 15 years now. But one of the biggest things about today's cutting edge analytics is that there's not a great way to accelerate the R&D process for teams already way behind. In like 2008 if you had the will and the brainpower all the info you needed to run a bunch of analysis could come from Baseball Reference. But now it's just enough to just go buy some Rapsodo machines, you also need a bunch of data to analyze. And for everyone outside of your org that horsefeathers is proprietary. So like the Cubs IIRC started buying all this tech in 2017, but didn't really generate results out of it til 2019 (when they added Wick, Ryan, and Wieck from the scrap heap). The most cutting edge teams had a ~2 year head start on the Cubs, and a lot of lagging clubs have just started buying the equipment in the last year or two. More of these principles and concepts are hitting the public sphere, which surely cuts down on the timelines, but for like the Rockies there's just simply not a way to catch all the way up this offseason. The other big thing is being cheap. The Dodgers are probably just as smart as the Rays, and always have been. But the Dodgers have expectations and pressure. The Rays don't make significamt win-now moves. They "exchange assets," but never make those "we're gonna regret this in two years" types of moves. The Dodgers have traded for Darvish and Machado and Betts, the Rays just hoard and hoard and hoard. We are seeing a bit of a breaking point, as they're facing some serious 40 man roster crunch this winter, but they'll still likely have a top 5 farm this winter to go along with this current team. Given that it's the Rays though, the big question is whether they've already found the next thing.

Jason Adam not only making it back so fast from his gruesome injury but looking as good as he did last year is horsefeathering WILD

I think you leave one spot for those three to fight over, and fill the other two with vets. I hate what seems to be already crystalizing as the conventional wisdom that we need 3 vet SPs. I don't want to hear any more whining about not developing starters if we're not going to give any starters an actual opportunity to develop. Alzolay's dong problem is probably a fluke, while Steel (prior to yesterday) and Thompson haven't really looked like viable starters. I think you go into ST expecting Adbert in the rotation but keep an open mind. Steele and Thompson are both already 26, Thompson will be 27 by opening day next year. Neither of them were top 100 draft picks, or have really shown anything in the upper levels of the minors that would lead you to believe they can turn into quality starters. Maybe if they had a full year last year to show something, but they didn't. Alzolay will also be 27 by opening day next year, has shown some success, but still holds a FIP and xFIP above 4 as a starter (FIP above 5) and continues to not be able to get lefties out. Finding three MLB quality starters to sign with us is pretty difficult, so I'm sure someone is going to get a chance, but these are not guys to build around. Assuming between 3 guys they can competently fill one spot is hardly "building around" them. Though I'll say Alzolay is probably worth building around. Among pitchers in baseball this year with 100+ innings, Alzolay is tied for 28th in xFIP with Walker Beuhler and Luis Castillo. Honestly, if he wasn't ours I think he'd be the most obvious buy-low candidate in the league. Dong problems are rarely sticky year to year, hell look at Corbin Burnes or Yu Darvish in 2019 and since for super extreme examples. But I can bet you other canvases are looking at Adbert the same way we looked at Kevin Gausman and Jon Gray for years. "I hope they're stupid enough to let him go." The Cubs need two guys you'd feel comfortable starting a playoff game. But the back of the rotation? We've got enough guys in house to cover it.

This is really surprising to me at least. The league feels much less stratified than it was a few years ago. I guess the difference is that the bad teams have been spread out into separate divisions? There's no longer an AL Central with awful Royals, Tigers, and White Sox, where the unbalanced schedule is the only thing preventing all three from losing 100?