Bertz

Yeah certainly seems that way. I think I would have liked to see Hermosillo though? Peralta is a guy you want to load up against with lefties, so i wonder if we don't see Hermosillo until Tuesday against Quintana now. Wouldn't be a problem mid-season but not ideal coming right out of ST. Frazier is an interesting decision too. He has struggled against sinkers and changeups in his career, but excelled against fastballs and sliders. So I suspect he will be in the lineup tomorrow in place of one of the lefties.

I missed this on Friday, but that's very fast. You need more sample to build up a true average, but for reference 29.2 ft/s would have had him tied for 33rd in the league last year with Kevin Kiermaier

- Caissie saw 26 pitches in his 5 PAs, he's just so fun at the plate - I know this is damning with faint praise but Howard going 5 PAs without a strikeout is notable. He only had 3 such games last year - Bryan Hudson really ought to be at Iowa

I think Cam got a little spring buzz, so it'd be nice if that turned out to be a thing. At the same time I'm pretty sure he had a fire April last year and did basically nothing good after that so it'll take a little while to get me in on the hype train

no statcast data available for first 2 games though, but might be worth monitoring This is beyond my personal abilities but if this is true it should be *very* easy to scrape programmatically for people who know how to do that sort of thing.

Devoid of any context, 8/230 for Judge is a good offer IMO That said, Judge is in the awkward Carlos Correa zone. Stay healthy for a second year in a row with typical production and you'll get a contract starting with a 3. It's not surprising at all that he'd turn this down. And given that Cashman passed on getting a shortstop with the express idea that he needed to keep long term money free for Judge... yikes.

https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2022/04/08/strumpf-morel-velazquez-return-to-what-promises-to-be-a-loaded-double-a-tennessee-offense/ https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2022/04/08/high-a-south-bend-roster-reveals-one-of-minors-best-rotations-and-is-that-caissie-and-howards-music/ https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2022/04/08/triantos-crow-armstrong-preciado-highlight-fun-up-and-coming-low-a-myrtle-beach-roster/ Bryan Smith's previews for each of the three affiliates kicking off today are unsurprisingly great Overall each team is fairly strong, though Tenn is weird because most of the strong bits are guys that probably ought to be at Iowa. So it feels like the fact that they're not means I should withdraw a bit of optimism from each. The SB rotation...good god. I didn't follow the minors when Prior et al were coming up, but this is easily the best rotation we've had at a minor league affiliate in 20 years. (Unless...am I forgetting some brief point where all three of Archer/Cashner/Mcnutt overlapped?)

Idiot

I feel like when folks were saying "a lot of guys are gonna start a level too low because of all the depth dudes getting stashed at Iowa" I nodded along but you look at the Iowa and Tenn rosters and there's still a lot of dead weight.

Yeah, Heyward is probably going to get the Neifi treatment this year, but a matchup like Burnes is really hard to parse out who the right choice is. I'd have gone with Frazier though knowing what we know

Yeah it should. Tomorrow's is probably gonna get banged, but I don't think it's going to do more than sprinkle today

The Mills thing is new, don't know if this is an "injury" so he can make another start in AZ or something real

The guy reporting this is saying, without saying, that Boras didn't tell Correa about the offer. A lot of players don't want to be told how the sausage gets made, and basically just want to know when it's time to choose between best and finals. If Boras thought 7/220 or whatever was a bad offer, it's not weird that it never made it to Correa.

I don't know hink there's any inconsistency here? We know that Bruce Levine got weirdly specific in reporting that the Cubs were gonna offer something in that vein right when the lockout started. It's also not weird that Correa would say no to that kind of offer. He got a contract that guarantees him 9 figures even if he develops the yips tomorrow, but at the same time if he strings together a second healthy season in a row he can still go out and get a Lindor contract (after having already banked $35M). Of course he wouldn't take the Cubs' deal without it also guaranteeing an opt out after year 1. At the same time I don't know that the Cubs were wrong to not offer the opt out given the lack of strength in the roster (they should however have just offered him a fairly straightforward $300M+).

I don't remember which podcast it was now, but Eric Longenhagen mentioned this and how some analysts with other teams were trying to "reverse engineer" the lineups the Giants were assembling to figure out what they were doing. It's interesting and I'm sure the Giants were doing some cool P/B matchup analysis, but I also think having strong years from their vets (Posey, Crawford, Belt and Longoria) and some random luck were a big part of their success last year. The fun brain bendy part is wondering whether their surprisingly strong years were *because* of this. Or was it just that the shortened 2020 season gave their legs some rest like we all thought at the time?

Roberts reportedly sat 93 last year. If he's sitting 95 now that levels up his ceiling considerably. In terms of stuff you're looking at a profile like Ryan Pressly, a legitimate 1st division closer.

I don't have a BP sub but sounds like this article gets at some of the ways the Giants used data to help their hitters last year If the Cubs end up surprising, it's going to be because the eclectic group of hitters is able to be leveraged in a similar way

I'm gonna cheat and post a ST highlight Nwogu is gonna open the year in SB, right? Have we gotten confirmation of that? Because frankly him staying in MB the entirety of last year already seemed a little silly.

It says a lot about how down his stock is that with our needs for LH offense and CF coverage this is still a hard pass

I don't think thats necessarily true. I suspect that Iowa is simply not at liberty to list someone on its roster while they are still on an active MLB spring training roster. Until they are optioned or reassigned. Oh interesting. Looks like Rucker is starting the ST game today so yeah maybe it's just a timing/roster management deal

Bryan Smith brought up the good point that this confirms Rucker and Rivas made the MLB club Where the hell is Morel though? Most of the guys a level too low I'm ultimately fine with, but Morel at Tenn would be needlessly annoying IMO

Yeah realistically any "mistakes" in assignment will be fixed by Cinco de Mayo, so it's not the end of the world. And like you said if they don't go out and immediately show the assignment was a level too low, that's somewhat damning. I think from a trade value perspective, it probably doesn't matter for pitchers? For hitters, age relative to league is maybe the single most important piece of info available. Eric Longenhagen actually had a funny quip in like mid August last year, where he said something along the lines of "get ready for a bunch of unwarranted teenagers getting bumped a level to make opposing team's models horny." The Padres for instance seem to be gaming the system quite a bit in this regard. But pitchers? ARL is barely in the top 10 of things I consider. If you show me a 21 yo and a 25 yo who are identical, I'd barely prefer the 21 yo.

For Kyle it's a real mixed bag, he's not definitely horsefeathed but he's not definitely fine either. The good: - His Velo was fine, actually up a smidge from 2018-2020 (when he pitched at a 3.7 WAR/180 Inning pace) - He didn't throw a bunch more hangers, his Meatball % (balls right down the middle of the plate) was again a smidge lower than his 2018-2020 levels - His overall exit velocity and hard hit rates were largely unchanged from prior levels, and still pretty elite - Beyond velocity, his pitches were largely normal save for a bit of lost curveball movement The bad: - Statcast does NOT think he was unlucky. His expected ERA based on batted ball data was 4.99. This is because while several stats say he was the same guy, the barrel rate against him nearly doubled - Contact rates against him were up quite a bit, both in zone and out of zone, this led to the K rate dropping to a pretty terrible 16.7% - He had two terrible stretches, one early one late. If this were a one-off, he'd likely have stayed fine once he righted the ship The generous read is that he was tipping pitches for a while there and/or he fell too in love with the belt high sinkers and changeups that he used to throw every once in a while to trick guys into swinging and missing. Both very fixable, though show how thin his margin for error is. The negative read is that he's been kind of figured out. He did sort of reinvent himself from '17-'18, maybe this version got him 2.5 years of kicking ass and now he needs to do it again or settle in as a #4.