Bertz

Milner is the new Thielbar. He's always effective against lefties but only periodically effective against righties. Does it with funk instead of spin though. The best part of this is that he's clearly not the capstone reliever. When/if the team signs Stanek there's gonna be a little bit of nervousness that he's looked at as *the* guy but that's clearly not going to happen here.

Start a new thread when actual moves happen this sort of thing is why the last megathread got nuked

I think the question for the Cubs is whether the 3rd year is the sticking point or whether the issue is committing these healthy AAVs before the SP has been figured out.

I'm not super worried about the farm and org depth. On the one hand there is a pretty big talent gap around AA. To use Theo's "waves of talent" metaphor there's currently a wave on the MLB/Iowa border that is fantastic, the wave behind that is sad and pathetic, and then it's a pretty healthy farm again from there. You don't love using "sad and pathetic" about any portion of your org, but I think the strength and depth of that Mo/Alcantara cohort should likely mask it. There's only so many roster spots open on a competitive club and it will take time to fold everyone into the big league roster. That should hopefully take enough time and allow the lower levels to matriculate up before we feel that talent gap. On the position player side at least. What I'm most curious about is what the team can even use 9 (!!!) spots for. Before yesterday I assumed 5-6 spots on actual named players and then 3-4 spots on hijinks to stockpile some Gavin Hollowell types. But not adding a live arm in the Rule 5 draft is a weird non-move if you're planning to be so heavy on those roster-fringe moved. The only things I can think are A) some of this space is already accounted for even if nothing public or official has happened or B) the team thinks that the caliber of arm you can get on a split contract or via waiver wire roulette is materially higher than you can get in the Rule 5. The latter isn't unreasonable but it is surprising.

I really wanted him last winter, and Steamer projects him to a 122 wRC+ against lefties. It's very much a backup plan but it's one I like quite a bit.

Legitimately more upset about this than any of the stuff that went down at the meetings. He should have come home.

There's an episode of Friends, one of my favorites, where Joey has to write a character reference letter for Monica and Chandler's adoption. Joey feels self conscious about his intelligence and his writing ability. So what he does is he writes the letter straight up, then gets a thesaurus and randomly replaces a bunch of words in the letter with big 'smart sounding' words, not realizing that not using them correctly just sounds silly and unnatural. Anyway, I don't know why I'm bringing this up right now.

Free agency this winter basically

My takeaways from the meetings: - Imai seems to be holding up their acquisition of a SP. Whether that's because Imai is their top choice (my guess) or because their actual targets don't want to move yet is TBD - The team is talking SP trade pretty heavily. This always made sense logically but IMO it's notable because the last few weeks we almost exclusively heard about FA targets. I suspect the pref list is Imai > Trade Option(s) > King > Gallen - The Bregman stuff feels real. And generally I think they're shopping for a higher caliber of bat than I expected. I suspect even if their SP add prices them out of Bregman they're still adding an 8 figure salary on offense, and it's the bullpen that will pay the price - None of the bats that have been rumored besides Bregman feel real. Based on the team's needs and type I suspect Okamoto is the fallback but there's a striking lack of clarity here - I'm going to be disappointed in how much gets added to the bullpen, the only question is of degree - The team made a very concerted effort to talk up Shaw after a string of 3B rumors. It genuinely seems to be more defending their guy (like when Jed reemed Nightengale over Morel a few winters ago) rather than a trade negotiation through the media. I suspect Craig gave away the game when he talked up Shaw's versatility

Also I'm not going to complain but some team should have popped Connor Noland. Not having minor league options obviously kills a lot of his appeal but looking at what teams like the White Sox and A's have on hand SP wise and I feel like Noland would lift a few teams' pitching staffs.

Would also indicate the plan with the bullpen is not as spartan as what Trueblood heard. If the plan is going into March with ~4 spots filled and then just throwing out a small army of relievers in ST to compete for the last four there's no reason not to take a live arm here and just cross your fingers and hope he learns to throw strikes in the next four months.

Yikes

Elite is a strong word but if the team signed Bregman they'd be looking at this lineup? Steamer projected wRC+ in parentheses. Hoerner (107) Busch (122) Suzuki (121) Ballesteros (108) Bregman (120) Happ (114) Kelly (100) PCA (108) Swanson (98) With Shaw (107) as the 10th man. There's not a 150 wRC+ monster anywhere but that's a lineup that will do some bludgeoning.

I've been pretty all in on Cabrera since July, so I hope this makes it across the finish line. I also assume the sudden cacaphony around Alex Bregman is tied to an increasing belief from the FO that they're going to address SP via trade. Bregman is not where I'd personally throw my cash after addressing SP on a shoestring, but it's hard to argue that something like Cabrera, Bregman, Keller isn't a significant infusion of talent this offseason.

I can't imagine in 2025 thinking pitchers, especially those in their mid 20's, are a cast die.

I think there's going to be less certainty than I'd like but I'm becoming less and less worried that Trueblood's article will come to pass.

He'd be an interesting conversation point for how to weight playoff performance, because by regular season performance I'm not even sure he would warrant making the ballot.

I don't have any specific names, but I think there's a good argument to pick a defensive minded infielder

Worth noting that the Nats are/were one of the handful of teams who haven't really properly modernized their pitching dev.

Two guys the Cubs added last offseason made the all star team and Kelly came damn close to making it three

Okay yeah consider that dam busted What a terrible 10 minutes for Mets fans lol

Hopefully the dam breaks now