Bertz

His spin and velo both spiked in limited action last year. Even still, this provides a hopeful piece of evidence for this market not being a total horsefeathering disaster.

A few less talked about teams that I think make sense for Kris Bryant: Mets - JD Davis is about as much of a 3B as Ryan Braun was. Jeff McNeil can play it but I think they like moving him around a la Ben Zobrist. Acquiring KB for primarily $ and keeping the farm intact is exactly the type of move they've said they're looking to make Giants - Longoria is still fine so it wouldn't necessarily be for 3B. They're looking to add but might be a year early, so getting KB on a 1 year deal for mostly money improves them while keeping the powder dry for next winter Tigers - Same exact deal as the Giants Padres - This is admittedly a long shot, as it would require Wil Myers coming back our way to make the money work for them. You'd lose the ability to reinvest KB's salary in the FA market, but you'd actually be getting a good prospect return back for taking on the rest of Myers' deal. This sort of buying prospects move deprioritizes 2021 more than I think we expect the FO to

Okay this is actually pretty cool. I think she's been in the league office the last few years.

I'm not clicking the link because I don't want to reward him, but BPs stats thought deGrom and Nola were better than Bauer: https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/62195/cy-young-awards-in-2020-the-problem-of-opponent-quality/ So if you're going to say "BP told me to do it" then explain Bauer at #1.

As a team that might be sneaky buyers this winter I hope they do something dumb.

Sadly, I don’t think they do in this market. True or false, the owner will all be PTR this year. Most of the insider types have indicated that they expect the stars are still going to get paid, and it'll be the middle class of players that are going to get worked over. Darvish is only owed 3/59, and Kyle 3/43.5 with a club option. Those are ludicrously team-friendly contracts against the backdrop of Trevor Bauer being expected to get 4-5 years at 30+ million per.

Unwarranted "Don't you know who I am" is one of my favorite flavors of douchiness. Like even at the height of his powers I'm not sure he warranted that reaction outside of St. Louis.

Good piece, though it's striking to me that Brett is quickly transitioning from absurdly optimistic to be much more on the dour end of things. I think he underrates how good of shape the pitching is in. The team desperately needs a mid-rotation starter, but this is not a bad offseason to need a short term patch for the middle of your rotation. This pitching staff is good enough, and this division is bad enough, that you can probably slide a Mike Minor into the rotation and be decent favorites next year even after losing some real talent on offense. IMO that's how you "thread the needle." I know it's not this simple, but it seems to me like the obvious path forward is to trade KB and Willson. KB to net the $ for other moves, and Willson to get you that real infusion of talent for 2022+. It also works out that we have solid in-house replacements for both, so you can allocate your resources to the best available players rather than being locked in to specific positions of need. The exception is if there's a mandate to cut additional payroll. The ~$25M that trading KB and Willson would save is enough have an adequate offseason in this market. But if PTR says you need to cut like 10+ before you can begin reinvesting anything, then salvaging this offseason quickly becomes untenable. Go full bore, trade Yu and Kyle who will each bring back massive Quintana-esque returns.

When PTR and Theo confirmed he was coming back, they couched all of their statements in language like "We expect...." or "The plan is for..." Theo's so careful with his words, there was clearly an "unless" involved and this makes by far the most sense.

I'm a bit worried this is because he's been beating up on guys a few years younger than him in Instructs, but still nice to see

I think the Mets are an underrated option here. JD Davis is about as much of a 3B as Ryan Braun was, and they seem to like using McNeil in a Zobrist style super utility role.

My wishlist for this offseason is: - Vet #3 starter - RH OFer who can at least fake CF - LH IFer - Young near MLB-ready SP who can hang at Iowa with Abbott - Young MLB-proven bat-first position player The latter two obviously come via trade, but the first three probably can be knocked out via FA. I'd say Paxton/Grossman/Wong would be my top choices respectively, but I'd be perfectly fine with something more like Minor/Pillar/Profar. With how big of a question mark payroll is though it's hard to get too attached to specific names.

Food for thought, though I don't actually agree with this take. I actually thought Gausman getting one was a somewhat encouraging sign for this winter. If he'd done what he did over a full season, total no-brainer, but over only 60 innings that's actually somewhat aggressive. And Semien not getting one is slightly surprising, but his 2019 was very clearly juiced ball aided. And here in 2020 Statcast backs up the idea that he declined in all phases. It's not good news certainly, but I thought the QO decisions were one of the first signs the bottom isn't going to completely fall out from the market this winter.

It's interesting how many high end pitchers were briefly Cubs before going elsewhere and blossoming. Like I saw in Sharma's latest article that Liam Hendriks was a Cub for like 10 minutes in 2014ish. Reading between the lines, this seems part of why the FO pushed so hard to go from Maddon/Bosio to Ross/Hottovy

I lean towards this being Cleveland being Cleveland during the Pandemic. Them not being willing to pay a reliever $10 million should surprise zero people, even less as a result of the pandemic, and then when you notice he's lost alot of velocity the past two years despite relative health and the shortened 2020 it just seems like them making a tough call I think it's bigger than Cleveland. It's them coming to the conclusion that he has no/negative trade value at that dollar amount. Exactly. Thought this was interesting though. Teams might be incredibly austere early in the offseason and then open it up a bit in Jan/Feb depending on how much better things look?

https://twitter.com/lindseyadler/status/1321883110708051970?s=19

I don't think one gif is enough for this one

This is really bad. Wong you can argue would have happened anyway because of how flooded the 2B market is going to be, plus the fact they already have Edman. And everyone else prior to this was certainly going to happen regardless. But in a normal market Hand would be due 3-5 years at 15+ a year. Hopefully this is just Cleveland being Cleveland, and this offseason is more bad than apocalyptic.

I guess from a business sense, I don't get the downside here for the Cubs. You partnered with Sinclair to get your network up and running and to get carriage as wide as possible. Check and check. I believe most of the people managing the day to day operations are CSN and WGN castoffs, not people Sinclair would take with them. The carriage deals are locked in now except for Hulu and YouTube. Shouldn't the Cubs be ecstatic to kick Sinclair to the curb at this point?

This article is almost comically vague, but a few things stand out - They're not spending a ton of money this winter, it sounds like it may even be a dollar in/dollar out kind of situation - The team seems to be very confident in the pitching infrastructure. Expect most of the pitching changes to be either from playing waiver wire roulette like last winter or from development of the cache of power arms they now finally have in the minors - They seem to be setting us up for running back mostly the same horsefeathering offense. Probably see one high profile guy sent out (KB?), and a handful of lower profile names brought in - The team sees some Tommy Hottovy in Chris Valaika. They're hoping that as a young, smart, recent major leaguer he can work up to doing similar things on the offensive side