Bertz

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.

In Keith Law's rankings Amaya came in at 91 and Hoerner came in at 110

If you trust Ian Happ as the backup CF, Heyward for Cueto makes a ton of sense for both teams (Cubs would likely need to pay down Heyward's salary a bit in 22/23). I’d only do that trade if the savings led to Bryce. But agree that swap makes some sense. Let Cueto rehab all year and he’s a rotation option over the next 2-3 years as guys become FA’s. I trust Happ in CF but wouldn’t love the OF going in to the year if it was just that trade and no Bryce or any other FA OF added. With that trade specifically, it's mostly that it effectively shortens how long you have that $20m/year albatross as round your neck. And like you said helps out the pitching depth in 20/21. But given LT considerations for both teams, I doubt either one throws in more than a couple million for 2019. So I think it's a deal that is only likely in a no Bryce scenario. But yeah we'd need to add an OF. I'd guess like ~3m on like Adam Jones, Cam Maybin, or Curtis Granderson, depending one what skillset you're looking to have added to the bench.

I'd think rangy and young OF Jason Heyward would look great running down balls in that huge outfield. (except that one time last year that ball hit off his head and he got injured or whatever.....) If you trust Ian Happ as the backup CF, Heyward for Cueto makes a ton of sense for both teams (Cubs would likely need to pay down Heyward's salary a bit in 22/23).

I wonder where he's going. I kind of hope ESPN, because IMO that would imply good things about how Sam Miller's been doing there. Also I assume ESPNers get compensated the best amongst their peers, and these guys deserve it.

This is from Rosenthal's latest article in The Athletic. If this is true, why aren't Owners screaming it from the rooftops? It would indicate, that at the most macro level, things are fine. Yes, the specifics (e.g. minor league salaries) are broken, but it's a different dynamic from "greedy owners not giving the players their share." Do we think the issue is a some horsefeathers'd up definition of revenue? Because if this is actually true and not just shady accounting, I would guess this info would quell most of the people who are currently upset. I for one would drop my pitchfork. I'd still be pissed about minor league salaries and PTR specifically, but not baseball's labor issues more broadly.

If 240 is the line, that ought to be pretty easy to make work. Trading Zobrist and Kintzler would get payroll down to ~208, which ought to be plenty of room.

Wow, I didn't realize how many of these guys we had until they were all listed together. While it sucks that it still lacks a blue chipper, this is actually pretty good depth. And that's really important because we need, at minimum, 3 of these guys to show enough that we feel good about them heading into next offseason. Otherwise prepare for more of this same nonsense we've been dealing with this winter.

Even at his best Kontos wasn't that special, he was basically just a Brandon Kintzler type whose superficial numbers looked nice because of AT&T park. Even if the velocity thing is real I'm not sure it'd mean much. But hey, there's no such thing as a bad minor league signing, so cool.

I would have preferred this to Brach, but not enough to get worked up over. Brach has a much higher floor.

There's going to be a competition. Question is if Parkey is part of it or if it's someone like Folk vs. a draft pick.

We don't currently have the roster spots for that. So if true that means either a pitcher is dead that we don't know about, a pitcher is being traded, or we're going hard on the Dodgers' "shamelessly DL guys who aren't actually hurt" strategy. Edit: Didn't realize how bad Kontos has been lately. Bruce could just be talking about minor league signings.

This is exactly like the Kintzler trade. He's fine, this helps, but it's a real "way to aim for the middle" kind of move. I'm also annoyed that it looks like we're tied to him next year if he sucks. Glad the FO learned nothing from Duensing and Kintzler. The whole horsefeathering point of playing in this end of the reliever pool is to not tie up money going forward. If you can't do that with Brach you just keep going down the list until you find someone who's down for a 1 year deal.

I like Madson a lot. I worry about his big FIP-ERA gap with the Dodgers because it came with wholesale changes to his pitch usage, but he's probably a very solid setup guy in the Strop/Cishek tier. I also like Ollie Perez on a one year deal. He was a horsefeathering monster last year, but even in a more down year he is always good for LOOGY duty.

Cole Hamels is good and easily worth $20m in a broad sense, but for our specific case with less than $30m (maybe less than $25?) available to spend it was dumb to pick up his option.

Yeah, if the team doesn't develop some pitching soon or significantly bump up payroll, the next few offseasons are going to look a lot like this one. Arb raises eat up most of the money that's coming free from expiring contracts If payroll stays flat, next offseason there will likely be ~30 million (40 if we let Morrow go) to play with. However, we need to replace Hamels, Zobrist, Strop, Cishek, Duensing, Kintzler, and possibly Morrow. During the 2020 offseason another ~20 shakes loose (excluding Morrow), but Lester, Hendricks, Chatwood, and Quintana are all FAs. The year after that as mentioned is basically position player armageddon. This coming year is really big for the Iowa bullpen shuttle. Hit on 2-3 guys and next offseason should be fun again. Don't and we're looking at a couple of third tier relievers and a Tanner Roark type for the rotation.