Bertz

Dear Lord

For the tank Yeah I think it's this. He's got a lot of funk to his delivery, but it appears going from 90 MPH on the fastball in 2019 to 89 the past two years was enough to take him from effective to garbage. Just goes to show how thin the margins are. I am starting to think we'll need to add a LH reliever to the shopping list for this winter. Because while we seemed flush early this year, that depth has been decimated - Steele was too good and will now hopefully be in the rotation - Wieck is good, but his heart problems are a bit scary, and he's fairly split neutral regardless - Ryan and Brothers are pumpkins again - Marquez and Carraway were not nearly as close as we thought back in March - Bryan Hudson and Brendon Little will probably be factors, but neither is so dominant or so close to MLB that you can pencil them into the April bullpen It's not a tough situation, just bring back Chafin or someone comparable, but just something to keep in the back of our minds as we (rightfully) focus on the big names at SS and in the OF this winter.

Strumpf going on a year would be really nice right now. It didn't get a lot of notice because he was hitting like horsefeathers, but in July he dropped his K rate under 20%, and had as many BBs as Ks. Now in August he's on fire, and the K's are still down. Kevin Made is up to .258/.281/.323. Obviously one of the emptiest batting averages you'll ever see, but from an 18 year old in full season ball that's still exciting IMO. Rowan Wick seems close. He's had seven appearances. There was a disastrous outing outing on 7/28, but in his other 6 he's gone 6 innings, 4 hits, 0 walks, 13 strikeouts. You can't just throw out a guy's bad outings, but given that the MLB team is going nowhere, I'd rather him get some play up here than make 150% sure he's knocked all the rust off at Iowa.

Awesome stuff from Kyle so far. He's been a little light on the groundballs and the K's this year, and 3/4s of the guys he's faced today have done one or the other.

It is a marginal step forward, but, man, I am not ready to get excited about a 26 year old making his debut. MLB.com and Fangraphs have him at #20 in our system, and BA has him at #11. So thankfully this is a matter of him being first up rather than him being the best we can muster. Because yeah Deichman's best case scenario is probably something like Cubs era Chris Coghlan?

He is indeed getting the call. I'm going to guess for Fargas? Hopefully Rivas takes Schwindel's spot pretty soon too.

This is a good objective look at the roster entering next year 4th in the NL Central and 9 games back of the Brewers with all teams only rolling with what's in house. The Brewers and Reds are going to enter the offseason with approximately the same payrolls they're running this year. So they've likely got one decent sized move each, and then merely some tinkering. The Cubs and Cards on the other hand have a lot of money coming available, which should shrink this gap. Obviously there's a full offseason to go (plus any development from these last two months), bit I'd expect going into next year the Brewers/Cards/Cubs to all project at approximately the same level, and then the Reds a few games back.

IIRC Bain has had troubles pitching with men on, which has led to a lot of blow up innings (much like Jensen). I wonder if the idea is to get as many reps as possible out of the stretch to address that, and then I wonder if that's what Jensen is also going to work on on the development list.

Early on Wisdom's strikeouts were outrageous, and his in zone contact numbers were pretty much the worst in the league. The only reason he was able to make it work is because he was murdering every single ball he put in play. He wasn't lucky, but it wasn't sustainable at all. Lately his contact numbers have been trending in the right direction, though to be sure they're still very bad. But they're now at a point where he doesn't need to have the very best exit velo in the league to survive. It's a much more real looking profile. Defensively he's actually really good at third? He's been poor everywhere else, but that's probably just lack of experience. But having a plus glove at third just further raises the floor. If he doesn't crater from here out, I think you go into the offseason with him slated as the starter at 3B. Though you definitely want to be sure to have a good backup plan regardless. Maybe something like a Jake Lamb stashed at AAA, or a SS who you can slide over to 3B (with Hoerner at SS).

I'm of the mind that this kind of coverage doesn't mean your QB is good, but NOT getting this kind of over the top coverage is pretty good early warning that your guy is bad. If everyone talking about a young QB is like "he's handling himself well out there" it's time to panic IMO.

Curious if Jake is getting released in the next week or two or if he stays on literally just to be a guy who can take the ball. Steele is likely getting promoted for the next run through the rotation, and Thompson isn't more than one or two turns behind that. So barring an injury two of these three need to happen in the next few weeks: - Shift to a 6 man rotation - Jake gets cut - Alzolay gets shut down Alzolay is only at 98 innings. I figured they were going to eye 130ish for him so it's probably way too soon for him to get shut down.

Jensen getting shut down for a bit, I wonder if this is merely a breather or a "we have some pitch lab changes we want you to make" thing.

I really think their approach to pitching is maybe the thing that sunk it all post-2016. I mean, yeah, I get "horsefeathers pitchers" because of the especially inherent unreliable nature of trying to focus on developing them, but man, you just cannot bomb out THAT horsefeathering bad in terms of developing ANY pitchers, period. They had, what, Carl for a couple of years? It's brutal. And the high velocity/fireball thing seemed to really catch them off guard. Clearly I pay next to no attention to the minors, but with the relatively pitchers they were trying to develop, were any of them projected to be power arm-type guys? It felt like so much of their focus was on trying to develop or sign pitchers that weren't going to be able to blow anyone away. Yeah they went horsefeathers pitchers for a couple years, which made sense given how unreliable they were and how barren the system was on both sides of the ball. But then it seemed like they tried to course correct after, and speed up the timeline, by just grabbing a bunch of "guys who know how to pitch"....college arms that threw 90 mph but had a 5% chance of turning into Hendricks/Davies/etc, and in theory more quickly than the 17 year old walking everyone but throwing 96. Seems like the only real shortcut to pitching is just to pay for it, but who knows what focusing on actually developing high velocity arms would have cost us offensively (see Appel, Bryant). The Cubs appear to have figured out pitching, or at least gotten comfortable enough with their findings to let it drive their decision making, during the 2018/2019 offseason. That's ahead of the curve, but a good 2-3 years behind the Dodgers/Rays/Cleveland. If the Cubs had been one of those super cutting edge teams, that probably is the difference between what we got the last five years and what the Dodgers have had.

I think the Cubs' system is a good Rorschach test for what you value in prospects, as they have a couple guys each of several different archetypes: - The blue chip teenagers murdering baseballs in AZ (Preciado, Caissie, Alcantara) - The slightly older blue chip teenagers who got pantsed for the first 6 weeks at Myrtle Beach, but are now adjusting (Howard, Made, Hearn) - The pitchers who will probably be pretty good but aren't super exciting (Wicks, Kilian) - The injured guys (PCA, Brailyn, Amaya, K. Franklin, Roederer, R. Thompson) - The guys who strike out a ton but will get really exciting really fast if they suddenly didn't (Strumpf, Morel, Canario, Ball, Nwogu, C. Franklin) Now obviously not every name above is interchangeable, but like I think for instance the order you have Made and Morel is probably pretty telling of your broader prospect preferences.

I think ultimately he won't be able to be a first division 1B with his lack of power. I do think he's going to be our favorite bat off the bench though (e.g. La Stella back in the day).

Not sure why they aren't calling up Deichmann. Maybe they feel like he still has some things they want to work on with him before they expose him to big league pitching, or maybe they are trying to prevent his clock from starting (lol), but I'd rather see him getting ABs every day than Johns5sdwtk6y Fargas Yeah I assumed that Fargas, Schwindel, and Romine (not that one!) were called up instead of Deichman/Rivas/etc. because of their expendability and the need to do some roster manipulation around the deadline. But we're nearly a week in so....?

Do we see Nwogu to SB and Caissie to MB as backfills?!

Obviously the offseason will change this a lot, but that looks like a very balanced schedule. Late April into early May is gonna be kind of rough, as is the first half of July, but even those have plenty of home games and some Pirates and Orioles mixed in. Very different from this year where May was kind of a joke and June was BRUTAL. There are a couple spots where it's like Good Team - Cardinals/Reds - Good team, so if either of those teams has a huge offseason it could change the complexion of the schedule significantly.

This is a really good update primarily on guys who have been in the org for more than a month Didn't realize what Maldonado was doing. He actually now projects as a league average bat according to Fangraphs. That doesn't really play at 1B, but if he can slide over the 2nd a little further out from his surgery, suddenly that's kind of interesting. And yeah, please move up Caissie and Nwogu.

Yeah, Hoerner's obviously valuable. I mean the genesis of this convo is how similar he and Madrigal are, literally four days ago Nick brought back a Hall of Fame closer in the midst of maybe his best season. I don't like the idea of trading Hoerner though. I'm among the most optimistic about next season, but even I think next year's team is probably going to be light on starpower. I think we need to get back to the days of having 11 guys fighting for 9 spots. Let Hoerner backup 2B, SS, and CF, kinda like Javy circa 2015 (I know Javy barely touched CF).

Caissie had a 1.210 OPS before a single and a dong (so far) tonight. Not sure why he's not at Myrtle Beach.

"On the active roster" is doing some pretty heavy lifting. The Cubs sent Rizzo and Baez's full salaries with them, and did a big chunk for Joc. They also offered with other teams to send cash with Kimbrel and Bryant (the Sox and Giants were among the few teams that didn't want it). The Ricketts got their full year of cheapness in when they entered the season with a horsefeathering $170M payroll.

I think we kind of assumed he was only at Tenn until Manny or Leeper got the bump to MLB, but still good to see

I don't want to succumb to shiny new toy syndrome, but this might be dead on