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Bertz

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Everything posted by Bertz

  1. Bertz
    Rare palehose W
  2. Bertz
    Maton said something about his mechanivs veing out of wack and it's tough to fix those on the fly while pitching in games that matter. So I assume this is very much a phantom IL stint. Carlson makes sense to me. With the starts to the season Shaw/Conforto/Alcantara are having probably safe to cut him loose. Kingery has slightly more utility because him being around lets Counsell be aggressive with moving Shaw in/out of games.
  3. Bertz
    Wonder if Webb's being put out to pasture
  4. Bertz
    Also worth noting they also turned their defense into a disaster just to squeeze in these modest offensive improvements.
  5. Bertz
    Mlodzinski was a bit of a monster out of the pen last year in long relief, so I'm honestly a little worried he's the goods. Pirates are still a team who I'm not especially impressed by on the position player side. They've improved substantially year over year but they were horrific last year so that's still probably not enough. I think the difference YoY is last year games against them were usually "first team to 3 runs wins" and now it’s likely more like "first team to 4".
  6. Bertz
    🤞Throw strikes Naz!
  7. Bertz
    As you'd hope with a top round college guy Reid appears to be too good for MB. Hopefully he moves up to SB as soon as the weather turns.
  8. Bertz
    Eli Lovich, who had a Morel-ian contact rate at MB last year, is a hair under 95% (Arraez-ian) through 15 PAs. THAT won't continue, but it'd be cool if he's got a decent hit tool now.
  9. Bertz
    Obligatory Pizzacutter note about how the stabilization point is not hey this is this guy's true talent now but instead when you can definitely say something has changed. Put another way thr stabilization point is where you someone like me should stop condescendingly being like "it's April" but the goalposts still move pretty slowly even after that point.
  10. Bertz
    Random and mostly meaningless, but Shaw is grading out well in the outfield so far. DRS has him as a +1 RFer, and statcast has him at 0 but says hes 64th percentile in range, so I assume that means hes on the positive half of the ledger even if he hasn't accrued a full run yet. He looked awful at Wrigley, but to Trueblood's point it didn't cost him any plays. And I'll say in Tampa he started looking pretty solid. If he can fake his way through April before actually being pretty good from there that'd be a wonderful outcome.
  11. Bertz
    So that....doesn't sound great. On the flip side Sharma wrote this yesterday in an article about all of the SP options the Cubs have in house in the wake of the Horton news. It's not impossible that was wrong or something happened in the 24 hours since but it feels like an injury would have come up in talking to folks for that article. Hopefully this is about the weather or maybe it's semantics and he's going to be the piggback for one of the doubleheader games tomorrow.
  12. Bertz
    I like Brown where he is for right now too. IMO his primary issue is between the ears. I think he's gotten snakebitten with BABIP enough times that when he faces some adversity he turns into the CJ "ah horsefeathers here we go again" guy. We saw it on Sunday where a cheap double and a walk and things started spinning too fast for him. I'd probably try and keep him in the role he's in for another ~month, then I'd keep him in long relief but try and push him into higher leverage (come into messy innings, close out a 1 run lead in the 7th, etc.) and then look to move him back towards the rotation.
  13. Bertz
    The only thing Giolito has on Rea at this point is name recognition. I'd take each of Brown/Assad/Wicks over him too. To 1908's point the fact that the Braves haven't signed him (down 3 SPs with a 4th looking pretty diminished) is as much of a tell as you can find.
  14. Bertz
    Depends on exactly how much he loses but yeah averageish. Caple threw 2 innings and 38 pitches in that breakout game, so in the same way I don't want to assume he can hold that for 5-6 innings I'd assume he can go a bit higher in pure short relief. 92 RHP threw 100 innings last year. The median velocity was 94.2. Will Sanders has lost about 1.5 MPH since being stretched out from his Breakout appearance. If you assume the exact same from Caple it'd put him at 94.1, just a smidge below average. If he loses closer to just 1 MPH he'd be a smidge above. Caple seemed to have good movement too, 17" of IVB. All told I'd assume a 55 grade fastball until someone tells me otherwise.
  15. Bertz
    His fastball averaged 95.6 during the spring breakout game. He probably loses some stretched all the way out but I'd still assume 94 and change.
  16. Bertz
    He hit a liner in the 8th too that pulled a little closer to the line would have been a double. Maybe he can get that ISO up into at least the 60s or 70s. The guy not only has more walks than strikeouts, he has more walks than swings and misses. Like even over just a week I've never seen anything like this?
  17. Bertz
    I'm a little torn between enjoying the domination and being a downer and noting that there's not really a good reason for Southisene and Mathis to still be there. But yeah the (hopefully brief) period where all these guys and Conrad are together is going to be like that Braves squad from a few years ago that just made every pitcher they faced want to cry.
  18. Bertz
    Just caught that Cole Mathis is finally playing 3B tonight. That's fun.
  19. Bertz
    Hartshorn is up to 8 BB's and 1 K. Honestly if those were flipped you'd correctly be like "look, the jump to full season ball is harder than ever." I don't even fully know how to contextualize this even with SSS caveats.
  20. Bertz
    🚨 Ty Southisene XBH Alert 🚨
  21. Bertz
    Who the hell is Eric Yang?? Is this going to be an every year thing where Iowa has some nobody catcher who is an RBI machine and I check like 11 run box scores all excited only to find out he's responsible for 8 of them? It was damn Carlos Perez last year.
  22. Bertz
    I think we've had this part of the conversation prior but on the spectrum of opinions I tend to be about 90% of the way towards "WAR is just WAR." There are probably some edge cases where like Nico Hoerner is your best hitter and the offense breaks down, but broadly I think 3ish good (120 wRC+) hitters and no dead weight in the lineup is just as viable as a more extreme stars and scrubs deal. I would also be worried about getting tunnel vision for a fearsome middle of the order bat. I think from a skill standpoint the difference between a Happ/Suzuki/Bregman 120 complimentary type bat and a 150+ guy you'd rightfully call a star is thin.
  23. Bertz
    Yeah Alcantara's nearing the Caissie "horsefeathers or get off the pot" deadline. I think you either move him in July or you, barring something unforeseen in August/September, need to commit to him getting one of Happ/Suzuki's spots handed to him on a platter going into '27. Broadly though yeah 100% aligned. We have five guys at or reasonably close to the majors with a lot of redundancy between them and realistically no more than 1500 at bats a year that can be allocated their way. You should probably plan on moving two of them by this time next year, and I'd plan on it being one of the big ones (Shaw/Rojas/Alcantara) and one of the smaller ones (Ramirez/Triantos).
  24. Bertz
    So I would say it's definitely not the most efficient use of resources. Moving guys up and down the defensive spectrum usually doesn't exactly cleanly align with the value of their respective position. Like if say Rojas is a -5 shortstop but a +5 LFer that's still half a win that went poof in the transition That said I think Shaw and Rojas each have a pretty reasonable chance at being bats you'd be happy to have starting in the outfield, even in a corner. So maybe there's some annoyance that you're not maxing out that guy's value, but a homegrown <25 year old outfielder that looks on track for 3+ WAR would be a gift horse we wouldn't want to spend too much time looking in it's mouth.
  25. Bertz
    Even with Hoerner/Bregman/Swanson locked up I think you can fit two of Shaw/Rojas/Ramirez/Triantos on the roster, especially if you make one of them a full time-ish outfielder. I think it'd be reasonable to cash Rojas in this summer or fall. That said given his timeline (probably wont reach AAA til around the deadline) and that his bat seems like it has the juice to be a corner outfielder, I think you don't go into the next few transaction cycles necessarily looking to spend him.
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