Bertz

I'm not sure I agree with you on not having an actual directive to be under the LT. If there wasn't a directive, Theo wasted this whole offseason by not signing players or trading for players that would have made this team much better. Why would he spend all of this time hinting at trading KB and infuriating fans if he didn't need to? The idea is that PTR is giving Theo $X per year, and not kicking in any extra for penalties/taxes/whatever. So because of the escalating nature of the penalties, Theo's choice is something along the lines of: $208M in 2020 and $250M in 2021 vs. $220M in 2020 and $210M in 2021 The plan has clearly been the former, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're still locked into it if the right opportunity arises.

I'd buy that. I also really wonder at what point the team closes up shop on a Bryant deal and makes their backup move. I can't imagine they go into the season slightly over the tax, so they've got to at some point. Theo said something during the presser about being close to turning the page, so this weekend when position players report?

On the Cubs end I think it really depends on the finances. The team already as it stands needs to cut ~$5M to safely get under the luxury tax. Arenado makes $14M more than Kris, so let's call it an even $20M? That is really hard to do at this juncture, for instance dumping Chatwood and Descalso is only $15M, so the Rockies would need to throw in money on top of that. If the mandate from ownership is more flexible, where this season or next are options, it's a lot easier to see. The FO would need to be fairly creative in patching the back of the rotation, but it wouldn't have to be as ridiculously austere as this offseason has been.

Three Cubs on the FG top 100 prospects list: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/2020-top-100-prospects/ Hoerner at 46 Davis at 50 Amaya at 65 Marquez was also a 50 Future Value guys (meaning top 100 caliber) and slotted in at 114. I'd say this probably tracks closest to my own internal view, probably bumping Nico down a bit and Marquez up a bit.

Extensions almost always happen after the team has their roster for the year set, so they don’t cost themselves flexibility they would need if plans had to change. That makes sense, but we know they've been working on this a while. Extensions don't generally just get knocked out in a couple weeks or in a relatively quick manner (Bote one being an exception). Cubs have been trying to do some of these extensions for years now... Just seems like there is more expediency around this time in MLB for some weird reason. I wonder how much of it is finally getting face-to-face time. Like teams and agents work through the broad strokes of a deal throughout the offseason, but it doesn't get finished until the player and team are in a room together. Another thing is that most players cut off negotiations at the start of the season. Baseball execs love nothing more than doing jack horsefeathers until the moment before they absolutely have to.

Yeah, I don't like him because he doesn't actually do anything particularly well. No huge platoon split that can be leverage, not a great defender, etc. That being said he seems like he might be the most likely to bounce all the way back of these third tier 2B options. The difference between Kipnis in 2017-2019 and 2014-2016 appears to basically just be BABIP. He was a .324 guy earlier in his career and a .260 guy the last three years. It doesn't look like luck, as he's popping the ball up basically twice as much, but maybe there is some fairly black and white mechanical thing that can flip the switch back?

If it's your work comp it's likely because you're sharing an IP with folks who actually are being targeted. That, or you're flagged as interested in politics, and the Trump people are content spraying ads at politically motivated people even knowing full well that they're wasting half of them. Many display ads are based on the content on the page. This board can’t go like 3 pages without mentioning Trump so that’s probably impacting it. True. Especially with the new California privacy law I'd guess that's becoming even more of a thing than it already was.

I always figured it was because of the politics thread. HuffPo and CNN are really the only other politically related things I go to on my work comp. If it's your work comp it's likely because you're sharing an IP with folks who actually are being targeted. That, or you're flagged as interested in politics, and the Trump people are content spraying ads at politically motivated people even knowing full well that they're wasting half of them.

FWIW PECOTA released their standings today and have the Cubs winning WC2 at 85 wins. They've also added some fun features like this for win distribution: Ultimately I still think PECOTA is broken, for instance they have Richard Gallardo projected for more WAR than Jon Lester this year, but Jonathan Judge took it over and is a really smart guy. They made a number of under the hood changes that should start bringing it more in line quality wise with what's on FG, but with a completely different methodology. That will be a valuable extra perspective.

I need to sit on it more, but I think I dislike this but don't totally hate it. For positives, I like encouraging a team to be the best in its league above and beyond winning its division. I also like giving teams a little more incentive to fight for a wildcard. On the negative end, the biggie is that we're removing two guaranteed winner-take-all games. I also don't like going from 10 to 14 teams, we're diluting the talent pool too much there IMO. I'd probably be okay doing 12 (give the 2nd best division winner a bye too)? I also wonder what the plan would be for this new format after expansion, since we're probably looking at that during the CBA after this next one.

Is there a strong R/L correlation w/r/t lucky/unlucky? Off the top of my head, it would make sense to me for the lefties to lag , because even if they're fast, if they're hitting it hard they're hitting it to the pull side where there's a shorter throw. Looking at this data, the guys this analysis are adjusting in a positive direction compared to MLB.com's raw xwOBA are primarily lefties or switch hitters (7 of the top 10) while the guys it's dinging are righties (7 of the bottom 10). I would have agreed with you and expected the opposite. What's even more interesting is that the extremes in both directions are slow guys, catchers and sluggers. I'm not sure what to make of that.

It's wild the parallels between him and Harper

I thought this was interesting: Basically, the idea is that xwOBA via statcast can routinely over/underrate certain guys A) because they're notably fast or slow or B) because their lateral launch angle is bad (e.g. you hit the ball really yard but are very easy to shift against), and this is an attempt in correcting for the latter. The rightmost column is essentially how lucky guys were based on launch angle (vertical and lateral) and exit velo. I threw this table into excel and calculated standard deviations, and found that of the 337 guys on the list 17 of them were more than 2 standard deviations from the mean. That's a good rule of thumb for what is sufficiently outlier-y. Of the 17, 3 will be in the NL Central next year: Keston Hiura and Phil Ervin on the lucky end, and Justin Smoak on the unlucky end. Hiura in particular stands out, as he was the second luckiest guy on the list, and as an average runner you can't just chalk the delta up to his ability as a runner. If you lower the bar to 1.5 standard deviations, Yelich, Kolten Wong, and Kevin Newman get added on the lucky side. That being said, unlike Hiura all three guys are pretty fast, so you expect that they should overperform this metric by a decent bit. For the Cubs, nothing stood out too much. Contreras and Bote were both at 1.3, but as above average runners that's not super alarming. Bryant and Baez were at 1, but again given their speed that's about expected. Schwarber was the biggest laggard on the team at -1, and he's an average runner. So maybe bake in a little bit of extra good fortune for him going forward.

From Sharma's piece in The Athletic this morning: If the team can not only dump Chatwood's whole salary this spring, but get a little value for him, that would be phenomenal.

Weird. Well LAA goes back to being the most logical landing spot for Q.

I think I like this deal a little more than the previous deal. We have to see how good the 3rd piece is before we judge it. I think both Verdugo and Downs can be solid players for the Red Sox. Probably not superstar talents, but Verdugo was on pace for a 4-5 WAR season before he got hurt I believe. Graterol could be a good high-leverage reliever, but I have zero confidence he could hold up as a starter. You don't accrue a ton of WAR as a reliever, but they do have a ton of value in the playoffs and at the trade deadline. I think I'd rather have Downs over Graterol, but it's close. Yeah, this seems like a pretty clear upgrade for Boston. I wonder if Boston was kicking in less money in the original deal? Or maybe they just valued Graterol that much more than the industry (possibly because he's ready to contribute immediately)?

The Padres are likely more pretty good than great, but man having probably the best bullpen in baseball and a Pham-Tatis-Machado middle of the order is good way to put yourself in the best position to receive some Brewers devil magic and win a bunch of really close games.

Fell down a Yu Darvish rabbit hole this morning. Looking at the 2nd half league wide, here are Yu's ranks among starters with at least 50 IP (109 pitchers): K% - 3rd (37.8%) BB% - 1st (2.2%) ERA - 10th (2.76) FIP - 7th (2.83) xFIP - 2nd (2.37) GB% - 51st (43.1%) HR/FB% - 104th (19.7%) % of Balls in the Zone - 26th (50.2%) Opponent chase rate - 3rd (40.4%) Contact % - 11th (70.2%) Those are legit, true ace numbers. Basically Cole and Verlander are the only guys who were consistently above him. I'm a bit torn. Historically 1st Half/2nd Half splits are meaningless. For every guy who makes a permanent change that carries forward there's three for whom it was just a hot streak. However, Yu made a number of significant changes over the course of the season, so I want to believe they're real and permanent. It's also possible he was just knocking the rust off for the first month after missing so much time in 2018. On the other hand, it's somewhat rare for extreme HR/FB numbers in either direction to be more than dumb luck. And Yu's full season numbers still have him as the 15th best starter in the league by xFIP. So as much as regression might take away K and BB wise from him it's likely to give back dong-wise.

I don't think this changes anything, but still interesting

From an Eno Sarris article in The Athletic about pitchers who changed in September: