Bertz

Yeah I suspect Assad will go to Iowa to stay stretched out. We're at a month since Brown has gone more than 3 innings. Soroka is obviously not stretched out. Ditto Wicks. Someone has to be ready in case god forbid a SP goes down late here.

Over/Under 3.5 "We have to get rid of him and replace him with someone worse who hits more dongs" articles this winter?

There's unfortunately not a lot of concrete info to go off of because teams have incentive to keep these things close to the vest. But generally some things to keep in mind - Historically the rule of thumb for increasing a young pitcher's innings limit was "your old career high in innings plus 30" - It was shown this was bunk like a decade ago, but around the league teams continued to mostly follow it. My thought was the that teams had pushed back on the specifics not the general idea - The Cubs among other teams have said over the last few years that they use technology to monitor for fatigue instead of simply counting innings. I believe them to an extent, though in practice "career high +30" has been stayed a pretty solid rule of thumb - The Cubs this past winter added pitching guru Tyler Zombro to their front office and also hired a Japanese consulting firm that specializes in pitcher health - Over the last few years, a bunch of veteran relievers have converted back to starting. For these veterans, they have generally ended up around 150 IP their first year back in the rotation. Regardless of how long they'd been relieving, their previous career high, etc. - Last year Garrett Crochet coming off of TJ and having never exceeded 70 innings in a year in his life, made 32 starts and threw a shade under 150 innings. The White Sox pulled this off not by messing with Crochet's schedule but by shortening his outings, particularly in the second half. For the year he ended up throwing just under 75 pitches per start. This year Crochet is leading MLB in innings So take it all together, and my guess is that the current wisdom is that whether young or old more or less any pitcher (at least of MLB age) can be asked to throw at least 150 innings, and the question is just how do you want to finagle things to end up at that target. Shorter outings like Crochet, a fake trip to the IL, shifting to relief, etc. The big question is the playoffs, because between Crochet and all those converted relievers, I can't find any who pitched in October. This year Jacob Misiorowski (about 15 innings behind Cade) and Clay Holmes (about 15 innings ahead) both will. But the Seth Lugos of the recent past did not and so aren't helpful historical examples on this part. I would suspect that Horton will be allowed to pitch once per series. That would give him plenty of rest between each start. So it would add as much as 20 more innings, but doing so over the course of an extra month probably isn't especially problematic?

via The Athletic this AM It would be really fortunate if Hodge basically reverted to being the guy right as Palencia went down.

Yeah I kind of got into it above responding to Squally, but more or less there are two components 1. Playoff Path: How likely are you to make the playoffs, and if you do make the playoffs how likely are you to get a bye? Cubs are more or less locked into that #4 seed. So very simplistically a team that locks up the four seed has odds that are 100% of making the playoffs times 50% of surviving the WC round times 50% for the LDS, ditto the NLCS and WS. So 1*.5*.5*.5*5 = 6.25% 2. Team quality: This is where things can get messy, and where the Mets/Cubs split is likely coming from. Fangraphs has a live depth chart for every team, here is the Cubs: https://www.fangraphs.com/depthcharts.aspx?position=ALL&teamid=17 These depth charts take projected WAR for each player prorated towards playing time that is manually adjusted by a dude who works at FG (Jon Becker). This projected WAR goes into a math blender along with strength of schedule to get a projected winning percentage. And that win % goes then into a different blender to adjust those playoff round %s from being 50/50 by default to like 60/40 or whatever. A team that's 50/50 in each playoff round is 6.25% to win it all like I had above. A team that's only 40% in each round would have 2.6% world series odds. The Cubs' current ROS winning % is only .512 (83 win pace) while the Mets is .588 (95 win pace). A big part of this is SOS, .504 for the Cubs and .488 for the Mets. Another part of that is projected WAR. This doesn't have one culprit but look at that depth chart, a lot of choices on that page are extremely reasonable for the regular season but become ludicrous for the postseason, such as Colin Rea's prominent playing time or Kyle Tucker's lack of playing time. The FG continually fiddles with these depth charts, at this late stage those changes can have huge impacts on the World Series odds because of the chaining effect of the playoffs (the 50/50 vs. 60/40 deal). They'll do a big pass at the end of the regular season and you'll see the numbers look a lot more reasonable (i.e. flatter across the league) from that point onward.

The majority of the variation in WS odds is basically the odds of making the playoffs chained with the odds of getting a bye, since that removes a more or less 50/50 round. But yeah the Padres and Mets show it's not all that. The rest is driven by that ROS Win %. For most of the year that's a totally acceptable proxy for team quality. However down the stretch here there's SSS wonkiness because of strength of schedule and playing time quirks (e.g Kyle Tucker only playing 45% of the time in RF). tl;dr is that the things FG is doing to make playoff odds as accurate as possible do silly things to the WS odds.

I'm not going to do your trolling work for you. This stuff is very well documented, go read. You shouldn't be using numbers if you don't understand their inputs anyway.

Look at what he specifically said and think about it a little more.

Padres lose. Magic number is 13 with 16 left to play. We're looking pretty locked into that 4 seed.

don't make the joke don't make the joke don't

So you think the team won't add a SP this winter?

If you account for park/league Justin Turner is hitting basically the same against MLB lefties as long is against AAA lefties.

This is awesome, I wonder if any of the other 2016 guys will make it for the ceremony

Whose rotation spot do you think he has a chance of taking?

Beyond the obvious appeal to authority of "they're an MLB team with their hands on him", should be worth noting the Cubs this past winter brought in respected pitching guru Tyler Zombro, and also much more quietly Japanese firm Next Base which is focused on reducing pitcher injury https://asia.nikkei.com/business/startups/chicago-cubs-draft-japanese-firm-to-reduce-baseball-injuries Cade's arm still has a good chance of exploding. All pitchers' arms do, especially guys that throw really hard. But there's clearly some intellectual rigor that has been applied here. And I personally can't help but draw parallel to Garret Crochet last year, which was a smashing success.

Caissie playing CF tonight. I'm sure it's just because Alcantara's up here, but if he can even sort of fake it that's really fun.

Honestly I think for both Wicks and Brown its simple confidence. If we could loan both guys to the Orioles to pitch in low leverage without having to look over their shoulder they'd be all set in like a month.

There's practically no chance Wiggins opens next year in the MLB rotation short of an outrageous rash of injuries.

Kirk got 52 innings at 21. Not even 6 full games. In the last 10 years, three catchers have gotten meaningful time at catcher as a 21 year old (with a fourth on the way) - Francisco Alvarez for a Mets team that lost 87 games - Luis Torrens for a Padres team that lost 91 games - Tyler Soderstrom for an A's team that lost 112 games (and even this one is a stretch on "meaningful" playing time, it's 15 games) - Samuel Basallo will likely end up with ~25 games being the plate this year on an Orioles team that loses 85-90 games Teams just do not trust young catchers to manage an MLB pitching staff at this age unless it's a team playing out the string. You have to go back 20 years to Mauer/McCann/Molina to find 21 year old catchers playing prominently for contenders. Ballesteros might not end up being an MLB catcher, but him not getting handed the reigns to the MLB staff this year really isn't part of that calculus. I also think Jason's point about taking too much off of one picture shouldn't be dismissed, but I'll leave that one be.

The Dodgers are going to parlay this small amount of adversity into the most BS "nobody believed in us" narrative ever aren't they?

He was a draft eligible sophomore last year, so age is a little less of an issue than it would be for a typical college hitter. If he does enough in the AFL that you go "oh yeah he's definitely opening next year at South Bend" this season is still a disappointment but it's not longer a disaster. Also we should talk about how fun South Bend is going to be next year. Mathis, Southisene, Cepeda, Conrad, Kepley, Lumpuy....that's a hell of a lineup right there.

I think what Statcast is calling his Sinker is a changeup and what it's calling a cutter is a slider, but not positive

Averaging 97.9 on the fastball jesus christ

This fanbase is absolutely dumb, petulant, and entitled. I feel completely comfortable saying that, and do so with regularity. This board is the best subset of the community I've found online (hence me being here and quite active), but it's not my only contact with other fans and also not immune to some of the broader fanbase's brainworms (hence the tagline under old ownership of "least terrible Cubs community on the internet"). I think too, if you any sort of regular online presence anywhere you're going to fire off some takes that are duds (like say, today's game being a really advantageous matchup). And if those takes are spicy enough sometimes they're going to draw some pushback. That's the nature of an online community. If you think what I said was out of pocket the social forum here will make you gouge your eyes out.

I called this fanbase stupid when they gleefully began ripping Tucker for slumping. If you felt personally called out by that that's you telling on yourself. Because *that* was incredibly stupid and to borrow a phrase toxic behavior.