Bertz

It's not crazy. The Phillies rotation is good but it's thin. Most indications are that they're a little more focused on the outfield but it wouldn't be way outside of the Dombrowski playbook to say "horsefeathers it we're adding another ace." I'll decide to focus on the positives which is that it almost certainly means Imai has started doing his visits.

Yeah I'm on the same page. I struggle to see a scenario where the return for Hoerner blows my socks off (though devil's advocate, Hoerner's not much worse than Tucker?). And I need my socks firmly on the other side of the room to not be irate about dealing Hoerner away. But after this year? I have little interest in extending Hoerner and I'm reaaaaallllyyyy hoping Jefferson Rojas and/or Cristian Hernandez make it an easy decision (on paper at least) to let him walk.

Compounding it too is I think too Jed's philosophy is to at least check in on everything, and that's before considering the idea of a source or a writer just outright lying. There's things that writers can do to raise the bar of how serious to consider something (I feel like the Bregman stuff is the most recent example) but yeah like you say if you're not casting a really wide net you're not doing your job.

Sharma and Mooney put out a podcast this morning. Most of it was kind of commiserating about how boring the winter meetings were. But they did address this report and it was kind of fascinating. I loosely transcribed what Mooney said "We don't write every single thing we hear. There's lots of stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor. In order for us to write something it has to clear a pretty high bar in terms of who we're hearing it from, where we're hearing it, and how frequently we're hearing it. And the Nico rumor cleared that." They bookended it by saying the team loves him, he's probably not going anywhere, etc. But I thought that was a notable bit of throat clearing. My guess is that the Cubs are not shopping him but that there is a team or two that is pretty seriously trying to make a run at Nico.

Just listened to Sharma and Mooney's podcast. It's kind of funny, they frankly seem exasperated like a lot of fans because of how many disparate places they're hearing the Cubs involved but that none of them has gotten super concrete yet and also how many times we've been burned before. I think the main concrete thing is they seem pretty convinced Jed likely won't do a three year deal for any of the remaining relievers. $15M AAV sure but not three years. Take that for what it's worth.

Not the most important thing but its $46M rather than $42M But to the main point the deferrals lower the worth of the contract. So the Dodgers are paying penalties on 46, but that's because Ohtani's contract is only *worth* 46. No one is getting away with anything, no one is at a disadvantage (well...except California taxpayers), it's just simple accounting. The confusion is for all of history if we said a contract was "ten years, $700M" it meant that three things: - The player would play with the team for ten years - The team would pay him $700M - The team would pay that $700M while the player was playing for them With deferrals 1 and 2 stay true and 3 goes out the window. But we'reconditioned on all three being true so it creates sticker shock. Thankfully though his is math is VERY EASY and VERY COMMON to account for. It's stuff you learn before the first midterm in a 100 level college finance class. No player's agent is getting bamboozled here. No rival teams have to Google "how to do a deferral".

With all due respect this shows that you still don't understand deferrals

The only coherent argument I've heard for it is taxes. So it's less "the Dodgers do this thing so it must be an advantage" and more "if the Dodgers didn't do this thing it'd be a disadvantage." No one batted an eye when the Nationals were the king of deferred money. Otherwise yeah it's about the vanity of nice round numbers or "record breaking salary for a 3B" which I can't imagine being anything more than a tiebreaker.

Okay yeah I had a chance to read it more thoroughly. Really great find. Some fun things I hadn't thought about - Lovd the callout that MLB hitters are significantly taller than NPB hitters. I'd never thought about that and it does certainly should help any Japanese pitcher who was a high carry fastball like Imanaga or Imai - Really interesting theory that the pre 2025 "command issues" were the Japanese strike zone not being conducive to his high fastball - It's weird to me conceptually to not really have a pitch that moves glove side. I wonder if they do play with a sweeper or cutter with him? That said we just saw Trey Yesavage horsefeathering maul a bunch of playoff lineups with the same 3 pitches...coming from a very different arm angle - I feel like it didn't really belong in this article, and the translation got pretty shoddy at this part, but the idea of Stuff+ basically forcing everyone into two buckets thus killing the utility of Stuff+ as an evaluation tool is a great callout - Not just this article but everywhere I feel like glosses over his splitter, and I don't have a good sense of whether it's a somewhat weak offering, or if there's just this sort of "yeah he's an elite Japanese pitcher of course he has a great splitter what else is there to say" thing going on Really good stuff. Hopefully we come down with him.

FYI those opening day payroll numbers are not the same as luxury tax numbers. You need to add give or take ~$25M per year to get to the LT number. This stuff is needlessly complicated, but the long and short is that in a competitive season the team typically aims to be about $10M under the luxury tax on opening day. Last year was a good bit more than that. I tend to think Jed misread the market a bit and basically there was nothing to spend the extra money on after whiffing on Bregman, but your mileage may vary.

The Athletic guys wrote this. Not a lot of doubt after adding a (very good) LOOGY, but still good to see written.

Bookmarking this to give its full due later, but Eno Sarris came to a similar conclusion about Joe Ryan with an extra couple MPH. And he compared the slider to Trey Yesavage (who I assume didn't make this article because he wouldn't have enough IP to hit the appropriate leaderboard). Seems like premium stuff pretty clearly, the questions are the general Japan -> US stuff plus the worry about his control issues coming back. I'm comfortable with both of those assuming we're talking about $150-200M and and it doesn’t way outstrip that. Yamamoto was supposed to be $200Mish and then we saw how quickly that bidding exploded at the end.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/47265901/mlb-winter-meetings-2025-winners-losers-takeaways-offseason-free-agency

I actually don't think you need another lefty. I wouldn't have been happy with either being the top lefty in the pen, but a Little or a Martin or TBD waiver wire addition can be the second lefty out of the pen.

Yeah I suspect, even if it's someone on the lighter side like a Luke Weaver, we're going to end up with a FA signing who can reasonably be considered a closer. Trueblood's the only one who's indicated they're considering about the truly Spartan "You'll take Ryne Stanek and like it" approach so I don't think that's happening.

Yeah the right balance is IMO 4ish guys who you can say "hell yeah" about from day one and then 4 "let Tommy cook" spots. It appears we're going 3 and 5, which is disappointing considering hoe few holes there were on thia roster coming into the winter.

FWIW the team is now $45M under the luxury tax. So simple math says at least one of these things *has* to be true: 1. Payroll is a little higher than we've been assuming 2. The team is out on FA starters, knows they're going the trade route 3. The team is going to go very cheap (whether that's bad or young) on the position player side 4. The team is going to go very cheap (whether that's bad or young) on the bullpen And even on 3/4 it's still tight on the other side of the coin. We're not talking for example like Alex Bregman and a couple more cheap Hoby Milners as the remaining relievers. We're talking something more like Harrison Bader and then a few relievers on split contracts making like $1.2M a piece.

Good thing you can type 150 words a minute

Milner is the new Thielbar. He's always effective against lefties but only periodically effective against righties. Does it with funk instead of spin though. The best part of this is that he's clearly not the capstone reliever. When/if the team signs Stanek there's gonna be a little bit of nervousness that he's looked at as *the* guy but that's clearly not going to happen here.

Start a new thread when actual moves happen this sort of thing is why the last megathread got nuked

I think the question for the Cubs is whether the 3rd year is the sticking point or whether the issue is committing these healthy AAVs before the SP has been figured out.

I'm not super worried about the farm and org depth. On the one hand there is a pretty big talent gap around AA. To use Theo's "waves of talent" metaphor there's currently a wave on the MLB/Iowa border that is fantastic, the wave behind that is sad and pathetic, and then it's a pretty healthy farm again from there. You don't love using "sad and pathetic" about any portion of your org, but I think the strength and depth of that Mo/Alcantara cohort should likely mask it. There's only so many roster spots open on a competitive club and it will take time to fold everyone into the big league roster. That should hopefully take enough time and allow the lower levels to matriculate up before we feel that talent gap. On the position player side at least. What I'm most curious about is what the team can even use 9 (!!!) spots for. Before yesterday I assumed 5-6 spots on actual named players and then 3-4 spots on hijinks to stockpile some Gavin Hollowell types. But not adding a live arm in the Rule 5 draft is a weird non-move if you're planning to be so heavy on those roster-fringe moved. The only things I can think are A) some of this space is already accounted for even if nothing public or official has happened or B) the team thinks that the caliber of arm you can get on a split contract or via waiver wire roulette is materially higher than you can get in the Rule 5. The latter isn't unreasonable but it is surprising.

I really wanted him last winter, and Steamer projects him to a 122 wRC+ against lefties. It's very much a backup plan but it's one I like quite a bit.