Bertz

Oh god, as the board's resident Jonny Long fanboy AND the guy who can't shut up about trading for Willi Castro this puts me in a bit of a bind. Ultimately like you say I think Long is too big of a piece for Castro alone. Probably not to a crazy degree, but if you look at rental hitters moved the last few years they have not netted guys with the combo of talent and proximity Long provides. The dream, for both sides I'd guess, is probably Long as the second piece in a deal for Jax and Castro.

You'll like this too from Keith Law

I really like the way he articulated this. There's been a lot of "this draft was weird" but I don't think it was. It looked weird at 10 PM on Sunday, but once the Wing and especially Hartshorn picks came down it was like "Oh okay there it is".

I think you're right that opportunity cost is high enough that it might not happen, but I do think two starting pitcher is both #1 and #2 on the priority list. And this is coming from someone who is still *very* high on Brown. But as we're obviously seeing the team is not a lot of misfortune removed from giving starts to Chris Flexen, and that's before the load management conversations around Horton/Brown/Boyd really come to a head. Two SPs also has the benefit of potentially impacting the bullpen depth. Giving Horton 3 more starts and then downshifting him to short relief is probably a great two birds/one stone move for managing his innings (he'd probably end the year right around 120?) and adding an arm with some oomph to the late inning mix. That's not to say if you can add two SPs it's safe to ignore the bullpen. But if you add two SPs you can shop in the Kyle Finnegan section of the store rather than the David Bednar aisle. On the position player side, I hope the Twins start fading again because Willi Castro is a glove perfect fit for this roster. I'm not especially worried about Shaw (there's a healthy amount of BABIP regression coming his way), but you can't not address 3B at all. Castro would provide some 3B production, but also provide some support everywhere in case of injury. Like god forbid a middle infielder especially gets hurt right now.

I've been told repeatedly that can't happen

This is really really great. I know Greg Z mentioned at one point yesterday maybe not a ton of savings on the seniors. I'd guess that's specifically or at least especially referring to Snell, based on how Kantrovitz raves about him. Also pretty shocked that he didn't just plead the 5th on Barnett.

I think the elbow fracture takes about as long to rehab as a TJ. That said in most of the instances I can think of it's usually done on guys with multiple TJs. Codi Heuer for instance. Maybe it's not as bad if you've only got one TJ already? But my default assumption would be he's not pitching next April, and maybe not til closer to nowish next year.

I think the team should just be comfortable moving on from guys like McGuire and Chris Flexen when their time is up. There's no reason to expect either guy is actually good now, so thank the baseball gods for the free production and move on. It does suck with McGuire that you can't just stash him at Iowa, but it'd suck worse to ham fist him onto the roster just in case. There are always Reese McGuires or Christian Bethancourts floating around.

I mean the timing is mainly around doing something you're probably already planning to do in October now so that the uncertainty doesn't have any negative impacts on the trade deadline. But the why is that the Cubs have been the best team in the NL in the first half, have enough young talent on the roster to feel comfortable this isn't going to be a one and done situation, and enough financial flexibility and farm system muscle to continue supplementing in spite of the miserly payroll situation.

This bears out if you look series by series too. We have the rest of the AL East left, both series against the Braves (far enough out that they might be healthy by then), @ San Fran, and the Mets at Wrigley. That's the scariest stuff left. Everything else is either bad teams or the NL Central.

I mentioned this upthread but if you shake up the order it looks a lot different. If it went Conrad Hartshorn Kepley Wing Reid Snell And then went chalk from there, it'd feel like a pretty normal draft. Though I'm still a bit surprised there wasn't a couple hundred more K in the couch cushions for someone fun in the 11th.

Welp lol So yeah Wing and Hartshorn each took a pretty penny. Presuming they're each 7 figure guys.

I'd be surprised if we get to Friday without an announcement that Jed's been extended

Cubs legend's younger brother? Or no relation?

I wonder if this combined with the time crunch means we're going to see a run of hail Mary's in the 19th/20th

Since the 5th pick in the 13th round, only one player ranked by MLB.com has been taken.

I'm still wondering if the fact that other teams aren't taking these guys either doesn't mean there's a simple logistics issue of only having an hour to work through the discussions instead of overnight as in year's past.

Oof, that would be a well deserved own goal on MLB's part Looks like the Angels just popped one at least, so fingers crossed

Interesting that none of the remaining top 100 guys have been popped here in the 11th, not just the Cubs. Is there some new Meta strategy that makes the 11th no longer the place to do that? Or maybe teams need more phone working time?

I think a few things: - The Cubs' farm currently is very top-heavy heavy, so Conrad not becoming their new top prospect (and I'd argue not even in the top 5) doesn't do him as many favors with the fans as adding the same exact guy to a much crappier farm - Also, more broadly, picking 17th you're likely done with all the Wow guys in a draft unless you accept a healthy dose of risk (the health of Gage Wood's shoulder for instance) - The team's Top 30 prospects is going to likely have 5 or 6 new names on it. For a system that has become pretty thin (and will probably get thinner over the next few weeks) there was some need to go quantity over quality - The Cubs are *HEAVY* into using Statcast data in their draft model. The problem is for amateurs that's only out there in pockets, not in some nice central database like BaseballSavant. So it's been kind of inevitable the last two drafts for some random Twitter account with 600 followers obsessed with Tennesee Baseball or whatever to chime in that such and such guy has 98th percentile contact and 85th percentile power to help explain the "Why" behind a 6th round pick. It often takes the Twitter sleuths like Greg Z time to find these nuggets of info (and the state of Twitter certainly isn't helping here)

Also pretty logically consistent with the Reid pick where you take a guy with good feel and try to juice his velo.

So Stransky is just Ariel Armas again? I do not hate the idea of doubling down on that profile.

Given that you said he really wants to go pro right away, I'd guess even if its not us he's not going to last past the 11th round And selfishly for you hopefully it's us!

Yeah I'm expecting someone nearly as fun as Hartshorn. Via MLB.com's rankings there are 12 HS seniors ranked between 50-100 who have not been drafted, would suspect we get one of them.

Wanting to be book...is not book