Bertz

They're saying he's fine and still on track to start opening day but everything coming out about Clayton Kershaw this past week has been pretty ominous.

There it is

When looking at both frequency and quality, Jeff was probably the best baseball writer out there aside from Grant, and he works in a very different lane. This is a pretty huge loss.

For some reason the Aramis one against the Brewers is still my favorite by a pretty wide margin

Joe's inability to admit a mistake is almost pathological at this point. This would have been such an easy one to go "yeah we want to look for opportunities to get him a little more rest in the first half this year" and be done with it.

Did we know that Edward's had the best fastball spin rate in baseball? Also, does Carl not have a dedicated thread?

Paraphrasing myself from another thread earlier this winter, but Tyler Chatwood the reliever might look an awful lot like Cubs era Wade Davis: - Both are big time spin rate guys (Chatwood's actually better) - Both guys can't throw strikes (Chatwood's Zone% last year was 43.3%, Davis' was 43.4% with us in 2017 - As a reliever, Chatwood probably drops the sinker & change to go Fastball/Cutter/Curve, same as Davis - I doubt Chatwood's cutter would be as good as Wade's. but he'd likely have more fastball velocity and he already has more spin on the fastball and curve - Both seem to be legit soft contact guys The thing that gives me doubt is that Chatwood would lose the zone for like 10-15 pitches at a time last year. That just can't fly as a reliever. Hopefully dropping a few pitches and/or the mechanical work this winter prevents those long droughts. But if he can avoid those I really think this can work.

Generally I agree, but sometimes it works, look at Vladito.

Good Stuff - The pitching is really good, top 3 by ERA and top 5ish by more advanced measures. It's basically the staff we thought we were going to get last season. - Darvish in particular shoves, but Cubs Twitter continues to irrationally hate him because of some high profile blowup against like the Cardinals in May - Bryant's awesome again, but doesn't top 25 homeruns. We constantly argue whether it's the shoulder or a tradeoff from his improved K/BB numbers - Tyler Chatwood is a good reliever. Not quite worth his salary, but a strong Justin Wilson/Carl Edwards type - Happ takes a huge step forward at the plate Bad Stuff - Rizzo's no longer a star. He doesn't fall off a cliff or anything but like last year the slumps get a little longer and the hot streaks a little shorter - Javy gives back most of what he gained last year -Zobrist is trash, but the team has a really hard time pulling the plug - Harper's a horsefeathering monster for the Phillies - We continue to have a weirdly hard time against the Reds. They finish a little under .500, but win ~12 games against us

pecota is big on framing right? i bet if we swapped out contreras for grandal we'd just to first Sort of. Their framing boner says the Brewers are ~two wins above average and the Cubs are ~two wins below. That still leaves a five game gap between the Cubs and Brewers. The two bigger factors are that BP thinks the Cubs' defense is pretty much exactly average outside of Framing, and that it hates the rotation (projecting our 5 guys for 8 total WAR). The latter IMO is harsh but reasonable, while I can't even really devil's advocate my way to the former. I think generally and more simply the system does not like the Cubs' core players. It projected the team at 89 wins last year going into the year. And while the team underachieved it a) still cleared that bar by six games and b) that modest projection wasn't worried about KB, Darvish, or Quintana, who are the guys who drove the team to underachieve.

Based on how this winter has gone it's probably more like Darvish has late stage leprosy and they're scrambling on a containment plan

I'm willing to be shown wrong, but I don't remember his really bad off the field stuff being a known when he was signed. There was stuff like an altercation with an umpire and some fights with teammates, but I think the DV stuff came out at the end, possibly when he was already on the Mariners.

Yeah, I didn't think they were going to, but a pretty big relief to have it confirmed.

EVERY. HORSEFEATHERING. TIME. https://twitter.com/maxrieper/status/1095017661652783106?s=19

The more I look at this team the more I am able to talk myself into the pitching staff. The starting staff isn't sexy, but it looks solidly above average. There's upside there too. Darvish obviously, but Quintana too. For as bad as he was last year, his velocity was fine, and he threw strikes and missed bats at his normal rates. Pitchers break constantly, but most of the time it's because one of those three things went south. That those underlying skills are still in tact makes me more optimistic about a rebound than I typically would be. The bullpen would ideally have one more established frontline guy, but I LOVE the depth. It might take until Memorial Day to figure out which guys really ought to have the last couple spots, but I see big things once they do. And with Strop/Cishek/Carl out there anchoring, I'm not too worried about it being some dumpster fire in the meantime. What I am worried about though is the outfield. I can see a situation where Schwarber's a liability with the glove, Heyward and Almora are liabilities at the plate, and Zobrist and Happ are just plain liabilities. It'll *probably* be fine; Schwarber's probably the guy he was last year and odds are at least two of the others will be worth playing. But if I'm looking for an area where things might go awry that's where my eyes keep going. If only there was someone out there who could flip the outfield from a potential weakness to a big strength.

Agreed with this and would argue that the pitching, while not obvious yet, is moving in the right direction with more physical talent in the system than at any point under this FO. It’s probably more complicated than an outright inability to develop pitching - a mix of priorities, spending limits, and the perrenially very short supply of actual high quality/impact pitching in existence at all levels combined are probably big factors. Absolutely. I think priorities is a great way of saying it. Lange and Little are the highest picks they've used on pitchers by a fairly wide margin. And most impact starters come through the very top of the draft. Also agreed that the pitching in the system now is moving in the right direction. I think 2019 is the year we start getting legit help in the bullpen from the farm, and 2020 for starters.

I find it hard to complain about McLeod when the totality of his drafts and signing periods has been pretty stellar. More balance would obviously be nice, but dumping him because he can't develop pitchers would seem to be a real "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" situation.

7-10 is a little jumbled. Here's the full list: 1. Miguel Amaya 2. Nico Hoerner 3. Brailyn Marquez 4. Adbert Alzolay 5. Brennen Davis 6. Cole Roederer 7. Matt Swarmer 8. Aramis Ademan 9. Oscar De La Cruz 10. Erich Uelmen 11. Alex Lange 12. Tyson Miller 13. Yovanny Cruz 14. Justin Steele 15. Keegan Thompson 16. Brendon Little 17. Thomas Hatch 18. Michael Rucker 19. Duncan Robinson 20. Nelson Velazques

Yeah ZiPS has been mostly broken since Nate Silver left. The issue du jour IMO is that they're overstating the predictive power of their proprietary statistics, as cool as they are. That being said the overall point still stands that the Cubs are super vulnerable. All five teams in the division are at least as good as the Brewers looked at this time last year, and no team is within probably 5 games of where the Cubs were. And as we plainly saw. even that margin isn't always enough. Overall though the Cubs clearly have the highest ceiling in the division, and in terms of floors the Cubs and Cards well beyond the three small market teams. So it's pretty hard to not see them as the favorites, even if it's by a modest margin.

I feel like "he went to Driveline" is going to be the new "best shape of his life." There are going to be a handful of guys who totally break through each year and you will 100% be able to trace it back to the work put in there, but for every success story there will be like 3-4 dudes who end up being basically the exact same guy once the calendar flips over to April.

I'm not worried about them getting their money. This is just the new normal. The modern ivy league front office is so far up its own ass that it can't get anything done (FA or trade) without a deadline. You will see teams fill holes in November/December, but luxury items are going to be a Jan/Feb thing until something pretty fundamentally changes. Boras has been playing this game for years, and while there have been a few misses, he's come through like 90% of the time. And those misses have been on MUCH lesser talents, we're talking like Matt Wieters and Greg Holland.

Speaking of that I was kind of hoping we would be the ones to grab Matt Davidson, but the Rangers signed him yesterday. He's going to be a fun Michael Lorenzen type for somebody. I like the approach to the bullpen. I feel like there's enough veteran talent in the main group that it has a decently high floor (as much as that can actually be true of a non-Yankees bullpen) and the Iowa and shuttle is so stocked that it's actually the Iowa/Tennessee shuttle. The sheer volume of guys says that they'll get lightning in a bottle somewhere, probably with a couple of them. My guess is Norwood and Mekkes, but if you told me Chatwood and Clifton I'd be like "yeah I could totally see that."

It was probably safe to assume Barnette had minor league options but good to see confirmation

I think the issue here is that if you just pretend to go after him and miss the fans believe you have $30m that you're able to spend. "Rolling it forward" like we did with Tanaka is acceptable during a rebuild, but not right now. I do sort of wonder about that rumor that we can go up to 240 for Harper. Trading Zobrist and a reliever would be easy, and get payroll down below 210, giving the team the flexibility needed for a Harper signing. That would also make them picking up Hamels' option less confounding.