Bertz

The only coherent argument I've heard for it is taxes. So it's less "the Dodgers do this thing so it must be an advantage" and more "if the Dodgers didn't do this thing it'd be a disadvantage." No one batted an eye when the Nationals were the king of deferred money. Otherwise yeah it's about the vanity of nice round numbers or "record breaking salary for a 3B" which I can't imagine being anything more than a tiebreaker.

Okay yeah I had a chance to read it more thoroughly. Really great find. Some fun things I hadn't thought about - Lovd the callout that MLB hitters are significantly taller than NPB hitters. I'd never thought about that and it does certainly should help any Japanese pitcher who was a high carry fastball like Imanaga or Imai - Really interesting theory that the pre 2025 "command issues" were the Japanese strike zone not being conducive to his high fastball - It's weird to me conceptually to not really have a pitch that moves glove side. I wonder if they do play with a sweeper or cutter with him? That said we just saw Trey Yesavage horsefeathering maul a bunch of playoff lineups with the same 3 pitches...coming from a very different arm angle - I feel like it didn't really belong in this article, and the translation got pretty shoddy at this part, but the idea of Stuff+ basically forcing everyone into two buckets thus killing the utility of Stuff+ as an evaluation tool is a great callout - Not just this article but everywhere I feel like glosses over his splitter, and I don't have a good sense of whether it's a somewhat weak offering, or if there's just this sort of "yeah he's an elite Japanese pitcher of course he has a great splitter what else is there to say" thing going on Really good stuff. Hopefully we come down with him.

FYI those opening day payroll numbers are not the same as luxury tax numbers. You need to add give or take ~$25M per year to get to the LT number. This stuff is needlessly complicated, but the long and short is that in a competitive season the team typically aims to be about $10M under the luxury tax on opening day. Last year was a good bit more than that. I tend to think Jed misread the market a bit and basically there was nothing to spend the extra money on after whiffing on Bregman, but your mileage may vary.

The Athletic guys wrote this. Not a lot of doubt after adding a (very good) LOOGY, but still good to see written.

Bookmarking this to give its full due later, but Eno Sarris came to a similar conclusion about Joe Ryan with an extra couple MPH. And he compared the slider to Trey Yesavage (who I assume didn't make this article because he wouldn't have enough IP to hit the appropriate leaderboard). Seems like premium stuff pretty clearly, the questions are the general Japan -> US stuff plus the worry about his control issues coming back. I'm comfortable with both of those assuming we're talking about $150-200M and and it doesn’t way outstrip that. Yamamoto was supposed to be $200Mish and then we saw how quickly that bidding exploded at the end.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/47265901/mlb-winter-meetings-2025-winners-losers-takeaways-offseason-free-agency

I actually don't think you need another lefty. I wouldn't have been happy with either being the top lefty in the pen, but a Little or a Martin or TBD waiver wire addition can be the second lefty out of the pen.

Yeah I suspect, even if it's someone on the lighter side like a Luke Weaver, we're going to end up with a FA signing who can reasonably be considered a closer. Trueblood's the only one who's indicated they're considering about the truly Spartan "You'll take Ryne Stanek and like it" approach so I don't think that's happening.

Yeah the right balance is IMO 4ish guys who you can say "hell yeah" about from day one and then 4 "let Tommy cook" spots. It appears we're going 3 and 5, which is disappointing considering hoe few holes there were on thia roster coming into the winter.

FWIW the team is now $45M under the luxury tax. So simple math says at least one of these things *has* to be true: 1. Payroll is a little higher than we've been assuming 2. The team is out on FA starters, knows they're going the trade route 3. The team is going to go very cheap (whether that's bad or young) on the position player side 4. The team is going to go very cheap (whether that's bad or young) on the bullpen And even on 3/4 it's still tight on the other side of the coin. We're not talking for example like Alex Bregman and a couple more cheap Hoby Milners as the remaining relievers. We're talking something more like Harrison Bader and then a few relievers on split contracts making like $1.2M a piece.

Good thing you can type 150 words a minute

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