Bertz

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

I'm finally reading this year's Football Outsiders Almanac, and there's some good nuggets in here: - FO only gives the Bears a 27% chance at the playoffs. They're the 21st ranked team overall, so bad but not terrible, but they're expected to have the toughest schedule in the NFL by A LOT - On the topic of Pace's proclivity to give up draft picks, Pace has given up the equivalent of 3.2 first rounder since he took over based on the Chase Stuart draft model (the one that gives more value to mid round picks). By the traditional Jimmy Johnson chart it's 2 first rounders. Unfortunately they don't show what the numbers would be if you back out the Mack trade, which I'd be very curious about - A big portion of the Bears section is recapping how much Trubisky and Files sucked last year, which I didn't need advanced analytics for? They do confirm that both guys sucked about equally, and their difference in traditional stats was mostly schedule - "Chicago opponents threw 36% of passes in the middle of the field, the highest figure in the NFL. Chicago's DVOA on these plays matched league average". This was something that has bugged me for a few years. Feels like the Bears get shredded up the middle, turns out it's a yes and no kind of thing - They're pretty high on the offensive line all things considered, especially since they were really bad (particularly against the run) prior to the bye last year. Ifedi especially gets more love than I'd have guessed - The advanced numbers are not nearly as high on Robinson and Mooney as the traditional ones, though the author's are quick to acknowledge how hard it can be to decouple QB play from WR stats, even advanced ones - Conversely, the advanced numbers are much higher on Montgomery than than the traditional ones, primarily because of how bad the line was his first 1.5 seasons as a Bear And here's the full blurb on Fields:

Yeah I don't think either gets anywhere close to $200M. Honestly though there's a lot of that with this FA class. I think as of right now I'd only expect Carlos Correa to top that amount, but there might be like a dozen $100M deals. Yeah, when I was working on my plan I saw a lot of good to really good players, but no great ones. Even Correa's been too up and down for me to be super comfortable giving him that $200M deal, though I'm guessing someone will do it. I was most shocked at how little production Seager's had since 2017. My perception was that he never really stopped playing at a 6+ WAR pace when he was on the field. Instead it appears to very much be a KB situation.

There was a Tweet on Friday that had when everyone we traded for last pitched that I really wish I had saved. But most of the guys pitched mid week last week, so we'll see them all get starts likely in the next 2-3 days. I think the exception is Bailey Horn, who I believe got put on the Development List. (Basically it's like the IL but instead of being hurt you go hang out in the Pitch Lab for a few weeks.)

Yeah I don't think either gets anywhere close to $200M. Honestly though there's a lot of that with this FA class. I think as of right now I'd only expect Carlos Correa to top that amount, but there might be like a dozen $100M deals.

I look to the Blue Jays and the Padres last winter for what I think makes the most sense for the Cubs' offseason. More the former than the latter. The Blue Jays had basically a blank slate for payroll, and used that to fortify their team with one superstar and a bunch of 1-2 year deals for talented guys who had down a down 2020. The Padres also threw some money around, but mainly leaned on their epically farm system. They gutted the middle tier of their farm, but were able to bring in 3 TOR starters while only giving up one of their top 5 prospects. The Cubs have a similar payroll blank slate, and a similarly deep farm (though without that top tier like SD). It's a little early to get hung up on specific players, or even specific positions of need, but broadly I'd like to see. 1. Sign one of the big boys at shortstop 2. Sign a RH OFer to help balance out the VERY lefty crop of OFersalready in house (Tommy Pham?) 3. Bring back Rizzo 4. Bring in a #2/#3 starter who will be around for multiple seasons. The rotation will probably need more love than this, but how well Mills/Steele/Thompson do from here out will determine exactly how much I think all but the cheapest permutations of the above result in the Opening Day 2022 team being better than the OD 2021 squad. And unlike this year, the pen won't be the only part of the roster that can reasonably expect reinforcements from Iowa. It's not a world-beater of a team, but a solid wildcard/bad division contender. And with the arrow pointing up given the youth.

Burl Carraway with only one walk in his last four outings, covering 5 innings. 8 strikeouts over those outings. It is not particularly impressive, but with his stuff we all knew that when his command got up to "adequate" he was gonna start moving fast. This might be a sign that's happening.

I honestly have no idea why you think that. They traded away everybody and will stink next year. They got what they could get to field a team. How does one witness this trading deadline and think it’s just a retooling? They gutted the roster and have garbage left. We don't need to stink next year. Jed has implied in his comments that they want to be competitive again as quickly as possible. Hence the "reload" phrasing as opposed to "rebuild" that the team has been very specific about. Yeah, there's no reason to think they won't be trying next year. Jed said it publicly during his "we're sellers" press conference, he's been saying it on background to the writers all month since, and the Kimbrel deal backs it up. If they're bad next year it'll be because they make a bunch of bad bets this winter. But they're gonna make those bets.

Relevant: Brandon McCarthy remains the best. Why isn't he hired by someone to produce some content? I think he's the hands-on part of an ownership group for a soccer team? Sort of like what Jeter is to the Marlins.

Canario getting the bump is a good sign. I assume PCA is a procedural thing?