Brock Beauchamp

It took me a minute to spot Fried, I thought your dream team was just a new backup catcher.

Testing copy.

Awesome, thanks!

Who should I remove from the bullpen when I add Morgan?

As an early-offseason cover your ass move in case the market prevents you from reasonably upgrading, this is fine. If the Cubs roll into Opening Day with Thaiss on the 26-man, it's probably a failure.

The middle finger?

To avoid ridiculous complexity, we just went with MLBTR this year. Top 50 free agents and top 35 trade candidates. Obviously, the actual pool of players is much larger than this, it just becomes a massive undertaking to add all those players and come up with dollar amounts that feel right.

New Mexico is very pretty.

Every offseason, we offer our You’re The GM! tool (formerly the Payroll Blueprint) to build your ideal Cubs roster. This year, we’ve updated and streamlined the tool a bit to improve the experience. The idea behind this feature is to give fans a chance to play the role of General Manager (or CBO or PoBO… you get the idea) for their favorite team, the Chicago Cubs. It’s meant to give fans the opportunity to discuss (and, let’s be honest, argue) how they would approach the long, dark MLB offseason. This tool is intended to be informal and fun, so we’ve left it as open as possible. There is a payroll “budget” that loosely resembles the Cubs' 2024 payroll, but there is no penalty for going over that number. It’s a guideline, nothing more. Second, you can submit as many blueprints as you like throughout the offseason. As the offseason landscape changes, users often return multiple times over the winter and create new blueprints. Before we get into the breakdown of the tool, you can save your blueprint and come back to it at any time. The only restriction is that you must register an account on the site to create a blueprint (so we can save a draft for you and also post the blueprint for others to discuss). Let’s get into the tool itself. It has four quadrants that work best if addressed in a counter-clockwise order (this tool works much better on desktops due to its complexity but will work on mobile devices if need be). Top Left: The 26-man Roster We have created a rough guideline of what the Cubs 26-man roster looks like today. The roster is flexible; any player can be added or removed as you see fit. We’ve also included either guaranteed salaries or, in the case of arbitration and contract options, the recommendations of MLB Trade Rumors. This section is where you build your roster and make changes based on the following two sections. As you make changes to players and salaries, the total payroll number (right side of the screen) will change, allowing you to track your budget on the fly. The bottom field in both columns is for any dead money you assume during the course of your offseason. Acquiring dead money should be rather uncommon but we want to present users the opportunity to take on dead salary if it suits their purposes. Bottom Left: Arbitration & Trade Decisions Here, you will find a selection of arbitration options and internal options (usually from the 40-man roster or minor leagues) to assist in building your offseason roster. On the right-hand side of this column, you will see Trade Candidates, a list of the 35 players most likely to be traded this offseason, per MLB Trade Rumors. To help you get up to speed with these candidates, we offer a direct link to the MLBTR write-up on trade candidates. Bottom Right: Free Agents Here, you will find the top 50 free agents, again per MLB Trade Rumors. These are sorted by position to facilitate quickly finding your desired free agent and include the recommended salary for that player. Because this is a blueprint for a single year, we only include their projected salary for the coming season, not the number of years or anything else. To help you get up to speed with these free agents, we offer a direct link to the MLBTR write-up on the best 50 free agents available this winter. Top Right: Dead Money, Your Total Payroll, & Commentary The only unalterable field on the page is Dead Money; it is players to which the team has committed money but has no reasonable way to get out of the contract. Below that, you will see the recommended budget, your current total, and the percentage you are over or under that budget. Again, keep in mind the budget is only a guideline, and you can go above it as much as you like… But defend your choices, coward! The following field is Title, which gives other users an idea of what to expect with your blueprint (e.g. Sign Juan Soto, Damn the Consequences). When your blueprint posts for other users, it will read “Your Username’s 2025 Payroll Blueprint: Sign Juan Soto, Damn the Consequences”. The following field is Your Comments & Explanation, a long-form field meant to type out the rationale behind your decisions. Here is the place to fully explain your trades (including which players are leaving the Cubs to bring in new players), why you targeted specific free agents, and, any promotions from the minors you advocate or any options you declined to extend to a specific player. This is often multiple paragraphs, you can write up as much detail as you desire. That’s it, you’re done! At this point, you can either publish your blueprint to the forums or save it for later if you feel it’s incomplete. Thank you for joining us at North Side Baseball. I hope you enjoy playing the role of general manager, at least for a moment! Start Your Payroll Blueprint Now

It's something I'm considering for next year. I've never been happy with how this presents and I feel like I'm just barely getting it to a satisfactory point this year (its second year of existence). Before two years ago, it was a spreadsheet we just shared with users and I've been working backward from that template, figuring out how to improve it. And it never gets enough of my attention for me to really fix what bugs me about it.

Actually, I think I've found a way to improve the format of this, should have it updated tomorrow some time.

You add free agents to the 26-man list with a salary and the payroll adjusts accordingly. Then type up your reasoning on the right in the comments box. Fixing the dark mode stuff today, hopefully can finish it.

Yeah, picking a payroll number is always hard but in this system, there is no penalty or reward for going over/under, it's just a baseline number. Fixing Shota now, thanks.

Hey all, could you give this a look over and see if there are things that should be changed or added? We're way behind on this tool and the person I delegated to was struggling quite a bit to come up with the right placeholders and options. If you have any suggestions what to fix, please mention it here! https://northsidebaseball.com/payroll-blueprint

Oh yeah, no offense taken, I just wanted to be clear on our reasons. And to be frank, for personal reasons I'm less a fan of Twitter by the day for the very reasons many others are. And given that I started by disliking Twitter back in 2010, my personal opinions on the platform are rock-bottom.

Nailed it.

Agreed. From day one the platform was flawed and no one seems particularly interested in fixing its problems.

To be clear, we didn't move there for ideological purposes and we're still on Twitter. But boy, Twitter has become a real mess over the past few years, both from a tone/vibe standpoint and a technological one. To peek behind the curtain a little bit, Twitter was always a "meh, whatever" for us (and many others). On average a Twitter user click is worth 30-40% of the same Facebook user click. Twitter has always been crap at monetization and engagement for businesses and it has only gotten worse with time.

Thank you for your support!

I was blissfully ignorant of this way of reading it, now I doubt I'll ever unsee it.

The stadium is old and the weather is horsefeathers?

North Side Baseball is proud to announce the release of the Chicago Cubs Players Project! This project endeavors to collect as much information about past and present Cubs as possible, giving fans a repository of high-quality data about their favorite players. This isn't meant to replicate the great work done at more staid publications like Wikipedia or Sabr. This project is meant to be by Cubs fans for Cubs fans. Have fun with it! This is a public, community-driven project… which means everyone is encouraged to participate! Like any public project, there are some ground rules to follow to ensure the Players Project remains accurate with quality information. Let’s run through the basics: You must have a North Side Baseball account to participate in the Players Project. Before creating a new player, please hit our Players Project index page, search for the player in question, and ensure he doesn’t already exist in the database. Any duplicate entries will be automatically deleted. Sorry, this project is first come, first serve. To edit an existing player, to the right of the player's name on the player page there is a button "Edit Player". Click that it brings you to the edit screen. While we encourage everyone to add unique information to existing players, do not delete others’ work. Feel free to add to their work and move elements of the content around if you add information, but refrain from deleting previous work unless it is inaccurate. If you see something that violates our guidelines below, scroll below the player’s information and look for a small grey “Report Player” button. Click that and let our moderation team know about the issue, and we’ll take it from there. If you upload images, please limit yourself to only high-quality imagery. Any uploaded photo should be at least 600 pixels wide. When adding personal experiences, please keep them short. Write no more than one paragraph, and after the paragraph, hit return and add your name (real name or screen name, whatever you’re comfortable sharing). We are not averse to sharing negative information on a player but reserve the right to curate any inappropriate or unsubstantiated content. Please be as accurate as possible and cite references where possible. When adding to a bio, please use the hyperlink tool to insert your reference links into the biography. If you have questions about what to enter in a field, there is small grey text under each field explaining how to use each field and what to add to it. Unless you are a Players Project moderator, you do not have the option to upload the primary player image. If you create a new player, feel free to add any relevant information and a moderator will loop back and add the featured player image for you. Moderators: when uploading a featured player image, the format MUST be 1:1 (square) and a minimum of 800 by 800 pixels. Please choose the highest-quality image of the player you can find. That’s everything you need to know! If you have questions about the project, please private message me anytime! Players Project Moderators: if your account has access to moderating the Players Project, you can view all recent revisions created by users using the ModeratorCP, accessed by clicking your name at the top of every page. On the left, you will see Database Revisions, which brings you to the Players Project's recent revisions. Or click here.

I talked that over with our lead dev a few days ago and it's an easy fix that should be coming in the next week or so.

@northsidebaseball.bsky.social on Bluesky BSKY.APP Easily the least terrible faction of Cubs fans on the internet.

Huh. I guess not? This is a wiki-style offering so I guess however you get there is fine with me. I hadn't even thought of it before, to be honest. Obviously, we take a hard anti-AI stance on front page articles but I don't see a real reason to take that same approach here.