Bertz

Yeah, the Reds finishing 3rd in the division is one of my hot takes/bold predictions for this year. In June when Senzel is up they will have a playoff caliber group of position players, and I think their pitching staff is still well below average but will no longer be the tire fire it has been recently.

This signing is so weird. It requires you to make three pretty big assumptions. 1. He is legitimately good, and this being 'bad every other year' nonsense he's done for most of his career is done. 2. They're much further along than it looks like from the outside. In my opinion, buying a guy a year early is fine if you're convinced he's the right guy. But are the Padres only a year away? Their team is still a disaster and aren't most of their prospects slated more for 2019-2020? 3. There's very real value to Hosmer's intangibles, and that value will definitely transfer to a brand new clubhouse. I'm sympathetic to each of those three assumptions in isolation, but operating as if all three are true is a big leap of faith. If Hosmer was a shortstop maybe you just have to pull the trigger because they don't come around as often, but 1b are so plentiful in the game right now. I feel like it would have been better to sign LoMo and tried to get those intangibles elsewhere. Maybe something like Greg Holland + Miguel Montero?

Unfortunately I think Hendricks falling apart is the most likely by far. He's my favorite of our returning guys to watch pitch, but guys with well below average velocity are always walking a tightrope, and we saw him lose his velocity for much of last year already. When Hendricks goes bad, it's gonna happen really fast. Otherwise I took the optimistic Darvish/Lester/Chatwood scenarios. I don't think any of those is very unreasonable. If not for my general distrust of pitchers, I'd take the over on the expectations for all three of them heading into this year. For the hitters I expect a few of those to happen, but I have zero feel for which ones are actually most likely. Schwarber or Almora probably?

I assume in terms of roster composition Bryce would likely be a one for one swap with Heyward. How good Heyward is in 2018 determining how painful the process of getting him off the roster is. I can see two situations where it doesnt work like that though. First is if our rotation is in a bad place going into next year. Lets say one of our top guys needs TJ and Montgomery sucks as a fill in. I would think the FO probably needs to trade one of Schwarber/Happ/Almora for a starter at that point. The other scenario is if Heyward is good this year, but not quite good enough to opt out. Like let's say he's a 4 win guy, and shows every indication of that being who he is going forward. You want that guy starting in the outfield, even if he's got slightly negative contract value.

So the spreadsheet has us letting those guys go and replacing them with league minimum guys, and we're still over in 2020 because guys like Bryant and Russell and Hendricks are getting more expensive through arbitration. If we sign Harper, it's likely that we won't get under the tax for several years, probably not until the new CBA when (presumably) the limits have been significantly raised. The new TV deal is the silver bullet here. We'll see when we get the details, but it's likely that it will allow us to spend at or near the Yankees/Dodgers level. That means that we should be able to blow past the luxury tax number. At that point the "real" cap is likely $40 million above the tax, because at that point the tax is nearly dollar for dollar AND it starts hurting us in the draft.

I imagine that, even with perfect health from everyone, Montgomery starts 15 games or so. I'd guess the plan is 30 starts each for Quintana, Darvish, and Hendricks, 25 for Chatwood, and the full 32-33 for Lester (purely because he'll be a real crab ass if he doesnt get his 200 innings). I mainly wonder how they'll do it. Maybe open up the season with a 6 man rotation, cut down to 5 around Memorial day, and then bring it back in late August?

Here's the Cub's payroll outlook for the next few years with Darvish. I assume Gimenez will make more than the league minimum if he's in the majors, but haven't seen any details, otherwise 2018 should be pretty much locked in. To me the big takeaway is how well set up the team already is for 2019. Horsefeathers will happen for sure, but as of right now we'll be walking into an insanely loaded FA class with money to burn and no holes that need to be filled.

Astro's are probably still a little higher, and Dodgers are probably still about equal to us. Here's the ZiPS projection for Yu in Chicago [tweet] [/tweet]

This is perfect. It's a good deal, but not so good that I feel guilty. Depending on how the incentives are structured this is pretty comparable to the Johnny Cueto deal, but swap an opt out for some cash incentives. Yu's better than Cueto was, but Cueto was younger and never had TJ. Also, Yu is one of the half dozen coolest players in the league, regardless of talent. This is going to be so fun.

'Best' is not always cut and dry. With Heyward for instance, we (reportedly) offered the 3rd most dollars, but the Cards didn't include any opt-outs and the Nationals' offer included a crazy amount of deferred money. The Brewers offer may similarly be the highest without actually the best, like say we're offering 5/125 and the Brewers are offering 6/130. There's also the chance that their offer is better, but only nominally so, for example if we're offering 5/125 while they're offering 5/130. That negligible difference probably isn't enough to outweigh the soft factors where we'd come out ahead. The likeliest version is simply that this report is pure bunk, as many (most?) are.

They also have the Cubs defense being pretty bad, which seems...doubtful

It's probably the right play, especially for the pitchers. Yeah there's not a ton of demand right now, but there will be a couple of starters who go down with TJ when camp opens. If like Luis Severino went down, the Yankees would blow past the tax to sign Arrieta or Darvish within a few hours.

ZiPS looks to, on a per inning basis, really like Alec Mills and kind of like Rob Zastryzny, which is good news for our rotation depth.

Dan Szymborski did his ZiPS Top 100 prospects, and Aramis Ademan came in at #18.

I don't think he's going to get seven years so much as I think there's no way in hell he only gets four, short of an undisclosed injury. The top guys almost always get their money in the end. Chris Davis, Max Scherzer, Justin Upton (2 winters ago) all got theirs, and I know it was a while back at this point but Prince Fielder got his too. I can't remember a top guy ever really falling short of expectations, even when they've gone past MLK day without signing. Yoenis Cespedes is probably the closest. Last year he was supposed to get around 5/125 last winter and signed for 4/110. Although he signed that deal fairly early, he wasn't waiting around for two months, so it's possible that he just liked shorter term/higher AAV. IT makes a little more sense for a position player, and as a team that is not at all concerned about the luxury tax it worked out well for the Mets too. There's a lot of smoke coming out of Darvish's camp right now. My guess is that it's more about them trying to wrap things up rather than that them being desperate. I wouldn't be surprised if he has his 6/150 offer in hand, and his agents are basically doing a lap around the league once more to make sure they're not leaving any money on the table.

I'd say 7 years is far far more likely than 4. This winter's been weird, but everyone who has signed has more or less gotten what they were supposed to, or even a little more. The over/Under on Darvish's contract coming into the winter was 6/150 or so, Jon Lester money. I still think the absolute low end of what he'll sign for is Johnny Cueto money: 6/130 with an opt out. Yu's the top guy on the market, he's going to get his. The guys who should really worry are the players who play at a position where there's only 1-2 teams looking for someone: Lucroy, Moustakas, Morrison, Frazier, Holland, and Hosmer. Hosmer will do fine, because for some reason both the Padres and Royals love him, but I'd guess 2-3 of the other names I mentioned are the ones who are going to suffer. Everyone else will be fine, teams and agents are just playing chicken right now.

nah Yeah, I have no interest in Cobb (or Arrieta or Lynn for that matter) anymore. Our rotation needs depth, and it would be realy nice to have another guy I feel comfortable having start a playoff game. For me, Darvish is the only guy left who checks that second box. Cobb is depth, but he's not a guy I'd be happy to have start a playoff game. Realistically, he's Jason Hammel, a league averagish starter who can look like he's a lot more than for a stretch or two each year. There are a few nuggets of Statcast data that suggest there's something more there, but if they were all that compelling he'd have $80 million in hand already. If we're signing a guy who I'm going to scream at Joe Maddon to get a reliever up for any time a guy gets on base, why give him multiple years? Give me the best third tier starter willing to settle for a one year deal. In the regular season, the difference between that guy and Cobb isn't going to be more than about a win, because even if you choose wrong and that guy is running a 5.50 ERA, you can trade for someone boringly competent like Brandon McCarthy to stop the bleeding. My choice for that guy is Jaime Garcia, but maybe you like Chris Tillman, or Andrew Cashner, or Jason Vargas, or Clayton Richard, etc. Darvish is appealing because he's a legit star. The rotation's actually in decent shape though, so if we're not adding a star, I think the play mostly revolves around minimizing downside risk. Get a decent backend type and let our all world defense make them look good. Cobb and Chatwood were an either/or proposition for me this winter. Both have upside, both look like solid 3rd/4th starter types, and we needed to sign at least one guy to a multi-year deal so that we don't have to worry about turning over 40%+ of our rotation again next winter.

A glass half full read of what's happening with all this might be that Yu and the Cubs are really close to putting pen to paper and Yu''s reps are trying one last time to get someone else to swoop in and blow them away with an offer.

I'll believe Darvish isn't getting 6 years when I see it. For all the worry about this year's FA market, all the guys who have signed have gotten what they're supposed to have gotten. As the best guy available I doubt Yu will have to settle.

I put zero faith in this guy but I would guess that at this point this is the kind of thing they're haggling over. I kind of took the Duensing signing as a signal that the FO knew what the upper bounds of Darvish's price would be (e.g. Darvish's camp was asking for $25 per year). I could see the two sides having a rough agreement in place, say 6/150, but still needing to figure out things like a NTC, when to place any opt-out(s), get a physical done, etc. That would also jive with that Brewers insider and the sudden pessimism coming from Twins folks.

Yeah I think Santana gets you someone nice, but a tier below the Duffy/Salazar/Fulmer types. I think an Odorizzi or a Kendall Graveman or someone of that ilk. Actually the A's in general make a lot of sense. Santana for any non-Manaea starter they have looks about right.

I apologize of this is too NSFW (I assume since it is just a link to Deadspin it's fine?), but has this board been made aware of this little number yet?

I actually, before these moves, felt like the Brewers were closer to .500 than Fangraphs' projections gave them credit for. However, even if/when they sign Cobb or trade for someone comparable, I think they're still a little worse than the Cardinals, who themselves are probably 5 games worse than us. I think we'll have to go cheap in the 5th starter spot AND there needs to be a major SP injury for me to actually get nervous about the division. If we sign Darvish it's over short of some Homer at Bat caliber series of unfortunate events.

This news in a vacuum sucks. This news, in the context of that Brewer's insider saying pretty definitively that this would happen and that we were getting Darvish, is good news.