Matthew Trueblood

I agree with this, I think. There are four bench spots. One has to be the secondary catcher; that clearly needs to be upgraded. Of the other three, two need to be much higher-utility than they were this year. If the last is reserved for the guy who walks into camp as an NRI and goes Tauchman or the prospect who dazzles, that's fine. All four spots were insufficiently staffed in 2024.

He's going to have to quiet the leg kick down, or MLB pitchers are going to eat him for lunch. And once he does quiet it down, what's left is a 5-foot-9 dude who might REALLY struggle to generate consistent power, against the much better stuff of big-league pitchers. We tend to think only about the way big-leaguers can miss your bat or entice you to chase, but they also tend to have better heat and/or deeper arsenals, both of which tend to mean that you also don't hit the ball as squarely or sharply as you can against lesser arms. Shaw will have to find ways to consistently hit the ball hard against much better pitchers, after making adjustments that will compromise the way he's generated power against those lesser arms so far in his career. This is not new information, and it doesn't make him a non-prospect. It's just an important reminder of how great the gap left to bridge is. It's why he was available at No. 13 last summer, rather than being in the top 5-10 conversation. He was a safe pick in the middle of the first round. Expecting stardom from him would be outrageous, especially in the short term. He's much more likely to look the way most mid-first round college bats do, which is to say, he's likely to settle in around average--and that more likely in 2026 than in 2025. I mention this often, but don't think people like to hear it, so it sometimes goes unabsorbed: we have a major problem with prospect ranking creep lately. All the major outlets have gone, stepwise, from one top-100 list per year to two or three full-fledged re-rankings, all of which people treat as equivalent data points to what we had in the past. It ain't so. It's not the same thing to slide up into the top 30 of a prospect list by September as it is to be in that position in March, and the public isn't yet doing a good job of digesting the faster rankings cycle. Shaw is a bit overrated right now, but that's not a knock on his skill set. It's a product of how the minors work right now and of the prospect-ranking industry changing in some fun but sometimes misleading ways.

I think you guys are a little too high on the farm system in general, and Shaw in particular. The way he's succeeded so far in the minors will not work in the majors. Lot of changes left to make, and wouldn't be shocked if he ends up a pretty low-ceiling dude by the time they're complete. I certainly don't think they should wait around and count on his contributions toward winning in 2025, unless it be as part of a broader retooling that I don't foresee.

One way to leverage the advantage of being a big-market team with money coming off the books is to seek out teams with talented players whose salaries are rising while the payroll is not. Image courtesy of © Stephen Brashear-Imagn Images As the offseason looms, there's a veneer of homeostasis around the Cubs' infield. Michael Busch established himself as a strong first baseman in his rookie campaign. Nico Hoerner and Dansby Swanson are signed to multi-year deals with eight-figure annual salaries, and Isaac Paredes is a two-time All-Star acquired just three months ago, who still has team control remaining. In truth, though, there's a chance the team will seek out significant changes to the infield mix this winter, even if none of them come at the direct expense of any of those presumptive starters. Paredes had a very rocky first month with the club. Swanson and Hoerner were almost invisible until the final two months, by which time the season was lost. Based on his profile, it's easy to envision wanting Busch in a prominent lineup position against right-handed pitchers, but not wanting him in the lineup at all against most lefties. Each of these promising and talented players has warts, and even if they didn't, reinforcements would be needed. No team gets through a season without incurring injuries to each unit of their roster, and the Cubs' reserve infielders weren't good enough in 2024. With Miles Mastrobuoni, Patrick Wisdom, and others crying out to be replaced by better options, the team needs to head into the winter planning to upgrade their depth on the dirt. There are players high in the team's farm system who could contribute as the season progresses, but it's important that the team not depend on that outcome. Yet, it's hard to recruit free agents of especially high quality when you don't have a starting job to offer them. Try to fill secondary roles via MLB free agency, and you end up with deals like the Daniel Descalso disaster. So, the creative solution is to look around the trade market and identify players who are good fits for your needs, but who might not be good fits for their own organization--not because they're too deeply flawed, but because those teams have limited spending power and they're due for salary bumps via arbitration that might not be deemed affordable. Here are three lefty-hitting infielders who fit those criteria for the Cubs as the hot stove season draws near. Josh Rojas, 3B, Mariners Two years of team control remaining, est. 2025 salary: $4.3 million, per MLB Trade Rumors A late-blooming underdog, Rojas didn't fully establish himself until his age-27 season with Arizona. Dealt to Seattle in the Paul Sewald trade at the 2023 deadline, he's been an underwhelming contributor for the Mariners. However, he just turned 30 at the end of June, and he still has several features to recommend him as a complementary piece for this infield. A lefty batter, Rojas could be a partial platoon partner to both Hoerner and Paredes, based on matchups and the team's day-to-day defensive needs. He's a fine defender at the hot corner, and a passable one at the keystone. He only batted .240/.318/.370 against righties this season, but that undersells him significantly. Seattle's home park is the only one that played tougher for batters than did Wrigley Field in 2024, but that's just part of the story. Rojas struck out just 20.8% of the time and walked 9.8% of the time against righties, with an above-average hard-hit rate and plenty of line drives and fly balls. Against righties, he's a balanced, average-plus hitter, with below-average power but above-average ability in all other aspects of offense. Rojas just needs to be sheltered from left-handed pitchers. The Cubs would be in position to make 90 percent of his plate appearances come against right-handed ones, and they can benefit from his defensive flexibility, too. If the Mariners don't want to pay an average salary for a player who can't quite hack it as an everyday option, the Cubs should be first in line to nab him. Willi Castro, UTIL, Twins One year of team control remaining, est. 2025 salary: $6.2 million One of the most unlikely All-Stars of the season, Castro blossomed gorgeously in his second season with the Twins, after he was so raw and frustrating that the Tigers non-tendered him in 2022. He flailed and sputtered down the stretch, playing more often and in a wider variety of places than almost anyone else in the league, but the overall picture is still one of a player who does a lot of things well. Castro will only turn 28 next April, and in addition to the dynamism of his offensive game, he brings value with his glove and his legs--although the latter has proved somewhat fickle. After stealing 33 bases in 38 tries in 2023, Castro was caught nine times and stole just 14 in 2024. He also made more bad baserunning mistakes this year, but in general, his speed and aggressiveness are still assets. He's also as versatile a defender as almost anyone in the game, having appeared at least 25 times at five different positions last year: second base, third base, shortstop, left field, and center field. The switch-hitter handles righties better than lefties, but isn't helpless when batting right-handed. He's a slightly better and much more flexible bat than Rojas, and his capability at so many spots makes up for a lack of brilliance at any particular one. The downsides are that he will cost more money, be under team control one fewer year, and perhaps still cost more in a trade than Rojas, but the Cubs can weigh their options and select the superior deal--as long as they're proactive about ascertaining the availability of each. The Twins' payroll has no room to inflate next season, so Castro's waiting payday will be mildly onerous for them, unless they can move him. Luis García Jr., 2B, Nationals Three years of team control left, est. 2025 salary: $4.8 million More so than with Rojas or Castro, getting García might require really ponying up, but he could very well be worth it. A top prospect heading into 2020, García was rushed to the majors rather than have his season wasted, but it's slowed his development into a mature big-league hitter. Just 24 years old even after playing parts of five seasons, he really figured some things out in 2024. Over 140 games and 528 plate appearances, García hit .282/.318/.444, with 18 home runs and 22 stolen bases. He's a left-handed hitter and a fine baserunner, although a subpar defensive second baseman. His bat is so potent--especially against right-handed pitchers, whom he clubbed to the tune of a .469 slugging average--that he'd be a transformational situational upgrade over Swanson (.361), Hoerner (.359), or Paredes (.360), none of whom slugged within 100 points of him off righties. Whereas the Mariners don't view Rojas as a core piece and the Twins need to move so much money that Castro is a tough fit, Washington could plausibly hold onto their second baseman. In all likelihood, García would require a trade package rich enough to leave the team feeling an obligation to play him nearly every day. He could find some of that time at designated hitter, some as a bench bat, and some in place of Paredes, but he'd have to heavily cannibalize Hoerner's playing time to rack up 550 or more plate appearances. These are three distinct player types, but they would all functionally take up the same roster spot for the team next year. Rojas would be a platoon player and defensive specialist. Castro would be a super-sub and chaos creator at the bottom of the lineup, keeping everyone fresh and catalyzing an offense that often lacked that very ingredient last year. García is the one with the star-caliber upside and the power so many fans crave, but he'd also be markedly more costly than the others--with a hefty arbitration-driven price tag over the next three years, plus an acquisition cost much like those of Paredes and Busch. Maybe none of these three come to fruition, but each represents the kind of upside the team needs to seek as they round out their roster for 2025. Whether or not they successfully upgrade any of their nominal starting positions, they have to be deeper than they were this year, when Craig Counsell increasingly stuck to his trusted nine every day over the final two months--not because they were world-beaters, but because no one on his bench was a credible alternative even when his weaker starters faced bad matchups. Jed Hoyer's job this winter is to make a roster that overflows with talent, and these three trade targets are exemplars of the player type the front office should be pursuing: overqualified role players or perfectly adequate regulars, should the need for that arise. That they're all available as much for financial as for baseball reasons should only make the Cubs more eager to pounce. View full article

The 2024 Cubs needed a better relief ace, or at least to find their way to one sooner. But as the postseason has reminded everyone, the next-level challenge is to build a bullpen that contains several reliable hurlers with versatile skill sets. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images With each passing year, the postseason becomes more about pockets. Cubs fans who have watched years of Joe Maddon, David Ross and Craig Counsell know what those pockets are: stretches within one team's lineup that their opponent believes they can exploit with a particular pitcher, based on handedness, arsenal, and swing paths. Teams increasingly lean into the strategy of getting their starters out of games before damage can be inflicted once the postseason comes, and that means that successfully finding and creating favorable matchups decides games and series. However, if you only have one or two relievers you trust against a given pocket of a lineup, you quickly run into a problem in series longer than three games: the repeat-reliever effect. As closely studied by David Gordon and explored at length by Ben Lindbergh last fall, the more times a pitcher works within a series, the more danger there is of the same exposure effect that makes starters less effective as the lineup card turns over within a single game. It's a real effect, and a significant one, and teams who have tried to bullpen their way through the Division Series this year have run into it, already. Building great bullpens is a difficult business, fraught with volatility. Building ones containing six or seven pitchers capable of getting out multiple profiles of playoff-caliber hitter is downright vicious work, and because the Cubs currently lack either a starting rotation or a lineup sufficient to the task of reaching the postseason, it can't be their top priority. However, it also can't be neglected. Teams like to collect relievers who give hitters a wide array of different looks, and that's a valid approach. If a club leans too much into its favorite profile of hurler, they risk being exposed if they come up against a hitter or two in the opposing lineup who handle that set of release points and pitch shapes well. The Cubs, for instance, like to have guys like Tyson Miller, Jose Cuas, and Luke Little, who have outlier arm slots and release points as wide of the center of the rubber as anyone in the league, but that makes the counterbalances of Julian Merryweather and Drew Smyly important: they give hitters very different, over-the-top looks. Obviously, though, it can't just be about creating varied looks. First of all, the pitchers have to be good--better, if we're being blunt, than Smyly or Cuas are, and ideally more consistent and durable than Little or Merryweather. Secondly, if we embrace the concept of the repeat-reliever effect, we also have to admit the importance of having more than one pitcher who can attack each important pocket. You don't want to have to turn to the same relievers over and over within a series, but you especially don't want to have to use the same relievers against the same sets of hitters over and over. The Tigers' Beau Brieske struck out Guardians slugger David Fry in the ninth inning of Game 2 of the ALDS on Monday. He struck him out again in the fifth inning of Game 3 Wednesday night. In Game 4, though, with the tying run on base and two outs in the seventh frame, A.J. Hinch went back to Brieske to face Fry--and Fry hit a game-winning two-run homer that eventually forced a Game 5. Hinch doesn't trust regular-season closer Jason Foley very much against the key hitters in the Cleveland lineup. He hasn't turned to him at all in this series. Foley's pitch mix consists primarily of a sinker that favors arm-side run over sinking action and a tight, gyro-style slider. Fry struggles more against sweepier right-handed breaking balls, so Brieske was (all else equal) the better matchup against him. All else wasn't equal, though. Fry got his third look at Brieske in four days, and the dynamic changed. Hinch was worried that if Foley didn't get Fry, he would have to face Jose Ramirez and Josh Naylor, against whom his mix is an even worse, downright disastrous matchup, so his choice to try his luck with Brieske was defensible. But it underscores the fact that what the team really needed, in that moment, was one more pitcher akin to Brieske on whom Hinch could call instead. You can't collect doubles of every good pitcher you have, but throughout these playoffs, we've been reminded of the fact that it's vital to have relievers who throw both left- and right-handed, and who have a wide variety of pitch types and shapes at their disposal. It might even be valuable to seek out more hurlers who have unusually deep repertoires, for that role, so that more of them can be called upon against more pockets of a good lineup. If you have a reliever who relies on just two pitches, he has only a fair chance of matching up well against a given hitter. If your pitcher throws three different offerings with some confidence, there's an exponentially better shot of their fitting nicely. They might need to leave one of their pitches out of the mix against a given hitter, but they should be able to work off two of them. Maybe it's just one pitch they can turn to against one batter, but they have two or three that work against the hitter on either side of them in the order. All of this needs to be in the forefront of Jed Hoyer's mind as he and his staff set about building a great bullpen for the 2025 Cubs. Balance, depth and dominance all matter, and while the relief corps will surely need to be refueled and reinforced on the fly--that happens to every team, every year--starting with a foundation of all those things will be critical. After all, during the regular season, there aren't even the extra days off that dot the postseason schedule. Using the same relievers every game isn't even a hypothetical option. You have to have more than one guy who can do everything that might need doing. The Cubs didn't meet that standard for the first two months of last season, and it torpedoed their whole campaign. To first get to and then thrive in the playoffs, they have to take a more comprehensive and aggressive approach to bullpen-building this winter. View full article

Can I interest you in a trade that would bolster the Cubs' rotation by drawing from the Twins' bullpen, and upgrade the Twins' big-league outfield while also giving them payroll flexibility? The first thing you need to know about this potential trade is that it's just a sketch, meant to bring light to a couple of more important issues affecting each team. While I would find this specific trade proposal compelling, it's unlikely that either side would actually pull the trigger on it, and that itself is part of the story. The second thing you need to know is that Griffin Jax wants to be a starting pitcher again, after spending the last two seasons becoming increasingly dominant at the back end of the Minnesota Twins bullpen. The third thing you need to know is that Kevin Alcántara is blocked in Chicago and in need of an outlet to the big leagues. Let's stop counting, now, but here's some other vital information about these two teams and their fit on a potential trade this winter: The Twins continue to face self-inflicted, self-destructive payroll constraints, making it functionally impossible for them to keep both Christian Vázquez and Ryan Jeffers, whom they've deployed in an unprecedentedly even timeshare over the last two seasons but who will cost roughly $15 million as a duo in 2025. The Cubs enter the offseason with money to spend on a big bat somewhere in their lineup, but they also need to get creative about improving the front end of their starting rotation. Specifically, they suffer from a lack of sheer velocity and overall stuff from their starters, and the problem runs much deeper than Kyle Hendricks. Chicago helped Miguel Amaya unlock his offensive upside last season, but he's a subpar defender behind the plate, and the Cubs front office is unlikely to accept below-average work from that position--arguably the most important on the diamond for run prevention, other than pitcher. Ok, enough throat-clearing. Let's lay out the trade I think would help both of these teams quite a bit, and then expand on the reasons why I think so. Cubs Get: Griffin Jax, RHP: Will turn 30 years old next month. Three years of team control remaining. MLB Trade Rumors projected arbitration earnings for 2025: $2.6 million. Christian Vázquez, Catcher: 34 years old. Entering final season of three-year, $30-million deal. Will make $10 million in 2025. Twins Get: Kevin Alcántara, OF: 22 years old. No. 27 overall prospect in baseball, according to FanGraphs. Already on 40-man roster, but can be optioned for one more season. Got a cup of coffee to close this season. Brody McCullough, RHP: 24 years old. No. 13 prospect in Cubs system, according to FanGraphs. Has made only a very brief appearance at Double A, but also doesn't need to be added to 40-man roster for protection from Rule 5 Draft until after 2025. This trade would clear as much as $13 million in expected salary for the 2025 Twins, and it would immediately fill a critical role for them. Alcántara is a right-handed hitter who's essentially ready for the majors, and is a plus defensive center fielder. He's not currently ready to be an average-plus hitter in the big leagues, but he has All-Star upside and six years of team control left. He would be the fallback plan for Byron Buxton in center field, a platoon partner for both Trevor Larnach and Matt Wallner in the corners, and an important step toward making the brutally slow, unathletic Twins a more dynamic team. He's a premium piece, despite his lack of offensive refinement. McCullough is a throw-in, but an interesting one. Knee surgery ended his 2023 season, and after a late start, his 2024 season had an abrupt, premature end with another injury. When he's been on the mound, though, the 2022 draftee has been very impressive, and he could fall in line with the rest of the flowing Twins pitching pipeline, if he can just get healthy enough to benefit from the team's superb pitching development system. That's what the Twins stand to gain: a role player with humongous upside and flexible team control, a 40-man roster spot to play with, and some serious spending power. For the Cubs, it's a much more present-focused move, but no less variable. The key to this proposal is that Jax wouldn't come in as a prospective relief ace for next year's team, alongside Porter Hodge. Instead, he'd convert back to the starting rotation, taking with him much of the velocity he gained when he first moved from that unit to the bullpen in 2022. That's because that bump isn't all about his compressed workload since becoming a reliever. He's also made major mechanical improvements over that span. Chris Langin, the director of pitching for Driveline, laid out the case for Jax as a starter earlier this year, in a compelling YouTube video: Jax is already 30, but his arm isn't. Because his service in the Air Force kept him away from the game for stretches throughout his ascent through the minors, and because of the move to the pen upon reaching the big leagues, he's thrown fewer than 600 total professional innings--despite not having notable injury problems at any point. Even if you bake in his collegiate work, he's thrown fewer than 1,000 innings of competitive baseball through the end of his 20s. That doesn't mean Jax will be good until he's 40, but for the three seasons of team control he has left, there's good reason to hope he could be the next Garrett Crochet, Reynaldo López, or Seth Lugo. He throws five different pitches, including both a sweeper and a changeup that can be devastating. Even if his fastball shrinks back from sitting 97 and touching 99 to sitting 95 and touching 97, he has the profile of a starter with elite upside. In this scenario, the Cubs would give up one of their top prospects, but they'd do it with the idea that they can slot Jax in alongside Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, Jameson Taillon and Javier Assad in a fully-stocked, top-tier rotation for the next two or three years. There would be injuries and failures, but Jordan Wicks, Cade Horton, Ben Brown, and Brandon Birdsell would be available to backfill when those breaches took place. The team would also solve its catching conundrum, because Vázquez is the perfect complement to Amaya. Since Amaya is still making the league-minimum salary, he and Vázquez would represent a reasonable investment in the position, and Vázquez is a good enough all-around defender--good framer, fine thrower, excellent handler of pitchers both in terms of game-planning and in terms of managing difficult innings or outings--to justify more playing time than a true scrap-heap pickup like this year's Christian Bethancourt and Tomás Nido experiments could. His contract has negative value, especially to the cash-strapped Twins, but the Cubs could take it on easily. Unlike the Twins, they can win without efficiently spending every remaining dime. The Twins could just keep Jax, but they don't need him as a starter, and therefore, they don't need to take the risks that still exist if he does try to move back into that role. He could anchor their bullpen and they could trade Jhoan Durán, who actually projects to make anywhere from $1 million to $1.5 million more than Jax, but Durán's diminished velocity this year will have teams asking careful questions before turning over top talent for him. Nor will any team trade as much for a pure reliever, like Durán, as they would for a player they would view as a starter. If you doubt this, note the surprise that met the deals signed by López, Jordan Hicks, and Lugo last winter. Those free agents had been considered relievers, so when they signed for guaranteed amounts ranging from $30 million to $45 million, fans were briefly shocked--until each team announced their intentions to move those players into starting roles. Now, two of those deals look like bargains. The Cubs could shop Alcántara for starters who have already proved their ability to stay healthy and succeed in that role. Jax hasn't yet done that, which is why he should be available for a prospect package starting with Alcántara, rather than Matt Shaw. However, this move is perfect for them, because it allows them to leverage their wealth advantage without plunging into free agency and locking into a long-term deal. Thought they would receive Vázquez, taking on his salary would effectively be a benefit to the Twins, like throwing in another prospect alongside Alcántara and McCullough. Each side would be accepting significant risk, because that deal is a loser for the Cubs if Jax doesn't make it as a starter, and it's a loser for the Twins if Alcántara doesn't figure out how to lift the ball and/or make more consistent contact. Each side also faces difficult constraints and/or substantial risks associated with inaction, too, though. The Cubs don't have the available playing time to give all their intriguing position players enough run to prove themselves, and they need to win now, not wait around. The Twins need to clear Vázquez's salary so that they can address other needs on their roster, and they need to turn away from the plodding, pull-and-lift, defensively limited player profile they've clung to for the last few years. Again, I really like this framework, but it's only an outline. The idea is to illustrate the creative options each side needs to ready themselves to pursue this winter, and the way their respective needs and surpluses might overlap. It's not designed to be a done deal, as-is. I'm posting this piece at both North Side Baseball and Twins Daily, in a rare bit of cross-posting to get both of our communities talking. If you don't think your side comes out well enough in this trade, you might be right--but check out the other version of the article, where you might see fans of the other team saying the same thing. View full article

Unlike his more famous fellow up-the-middle youngster, the Cubs' backstop did a lot of things you figure will last en route to a brilliant second half. Alas, unlike his teammate, he also has dubious defensive value, and that's a problem. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports After his brief benching for a reset and a mechanical adjustment in early July, Miguel Amaya got a whole lot better, in a way that figures to be sticky going into 2025--at least to some extent. Whereas Pete Crow-Armstrong's torrid August gave way to a September that reminded everyone how much he still has to work on, the remade Amaya is capable of some very impressive things in the batter's box. In August, I wrote about Amaya's changes, and the way they followed a logical, almost linear pattern: At the behest of his coaching staff, he ditched the leg kick in his load phase. He struggled for a while to generate the same bat speed or exit velocity that he'd shown with his old mechanics. Over time, though, he rediscovered that explosiveness, and was able to integrate it into a better overall setup, with less swing-and-miss. Nothing stays exactly the same over a stretch as long as the one we're talking about, especially for a young hitter, but Amaya would continue his impressive hitting over the final five weeks. It sure looks like he can be consistently above-average at the plate with his altered mechanics and a cleaned-up approach. Span PA AVG OBP SLG In-Zone Swing % Chase % Contact % LA > 2 deg. % wSSEV Through June 187 .189 .253 .260 71.8 33.1 74.7 59.8 84.8 July-Sept. 176 .277 .326 .459 77.1 33.8 80.6 65.5 93.1 Amaya is an aggressive hitter, but well within the realm of average or normal--as opposed to Crow-Armstrong, whose free-swinging tendencies are as extreme as almost any hitter in the league. Once he tweaked his swing to simultaneously emphasize loft and make more contact, he really took off, and it didn't require anything crazy to happen. He ran a sub-.300 BABIP even in his strong second half. To explain the rightmost columns above quickly: the truly calamitous batted-ball outcomes are on low-hit grounders--balls hit not only on the ground, but actually downward or on a straight line off the bat. There's merit in both line drives and fly balls, and even in the high-trajectory grounder, since those get through the infield considerably more often than others. Amaya was fairly extreme in his tendency to hit low-trajectory grounders in the first half of the season. Thereafter, his launch angle distribution got much more healthy. That's also reflected in my homespun weighted sweet spot exit velocity (wSSEV), which correlates with real run production as well as almost any metric you could cook up. It's the hitter's average exit velocity on batted balls with a launch angle between 10 and 35 degrees, weighted according to the per-at-bat frequency of generating such batted balls. A good wSSEV is in the high 80s or low 90s; Amaya went from subpar to excellent in this regard. All of the offensive adjustments are encouraging, even if the real Amaya is most likely to be somewhere between his disastrous first half and his stellar second. It's not unreasonable to envision using him as a major part of the catching corps next year, in terms of getting offensive jolt from that position. However, we have to talk about Amaya, the defender, too. Of the 59 catchers who played at least 250 innings this season, Amaya ranked 40th in Baseball Prospectus's Deserved Runs Prevented. Prospectus rated him as 2.7 runs below average as a pitch framer, and while he came out as the best blocker of errant pitches in the majors, that skill is relatively low-value: he only saved an estimated 1.5 runs that way. He also cost the team that same amount, per Prospectus, as the third-worst throwing catcher in the league, better only than Jonah Heim and Yasmani Grandal. That tracks, because Statcast pegs Amaya with the fifth-slowest pop time on steal attempts among 83 qualifying catchers. If you believe in both his bat and his intangible skills as a game-caller and partner to pitchers, Amaya can still be a productive player with this relatively mild defensive deficiency. However, as the league adapts to the new rules of the pitch timer era, Amaya's inability to control the running game will only get more glaring. If he were a plus framer, it would be easier to work around that weakness, but he's settling in on the wrong side of average there, too. Defensively, the future doesn't look especially bright for him. Given the market they'll face this winter, the Cubs probably can't and shouldn't move on from Amaya. While they further groom Moises Ballesteros and hope he sticks at the position, though, they should bring in a stout defensive partner for Amaya in the short term. If he was as well-liked as he appeared to be within the clubhouse. Christian Bethancourt would be a fine re-signing. He has the very thing Amaya lacks: an excellent arm behind the dish. He could come in as a catching relief specialist, which would also give Craig Counsell an excuse to take Amaya down for left-handed pinch-hitters in some good situations. That would be a creative and novel use of a roster spot, but Bethancourt isn't a fully qualified timeshare catcher, so the plan would need to be to start Amaya a lot and counteract his early workload by phasing in either Ballesteros or some external acquisition during the season. The catcher's spot is still a question mark for the Cubs this winter, but the tone of the question is a bit more hopeful and a bit less resigned than it might have been a few months ago. Amaya has earned some form of extended opportunity. Unless there's a very eager trade partner out there, that will mean starting the season as the Cubs' primary catcher. It just leaves a lot of important work to do in filling the secondary catcher's role. View full article

With the softest-tossing starter in the league on the way out the door, the North Siders have a chance to turn a new page and get back into the velocity game. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images From Aug. 1 through the end of the season, the Cubs' average fastball--as a team--hummed in at 92.1 miles per hour. A decade ago, that would have been acceptable, and two decades ago, it might have made them one of the more formidable staffs in the big leagues. This season, though, and specifically over that stretch to end it, the team not only had the least hot average heat in the majors, but lagged 29th place by a full mile per hour--or the same amount by which that team, the Rangers, trailed the 11th-place Milwaukee Brewers. You can do a lot without velocity, even now. Kyle Hendricks is delightful proof of that. Then again, though, the team is likely to part ways with Hendricks after the season, and for good reason. His ERA was just under 6.00 for the campaign, and that largely because everyone treated the penultimate game of the season as a getaway day before a getaway day, allowing him to slice through the Reds for 7 1/3 scoreless innings. Having Hendricks around for the last decade has been a good reminder of the value of movement, deception, sequencing, and location, but at plenty of times, he's also been a reminder of what it looks like to pursue outs against the huge, powerful hitters who make up the modern game, without the ability to overpower them. Nor will the problem leave along with Hendricks. If you simply take him out of the equation for that final two-month stretch--if you take the slowest thrower in any MLB rotation out of the Cubs' sample and leave everyone else's as is--the team still had slower fastballs than every other club, albeit by a smaller margin. That can't continue. It's just too important to throw hard, in the modern game. Velocity explains about 40 percent of variation from one pitcher to another in whiff rate on four-seamers and sinkers, and there's no correlation between velocity and exit velocity--meaning the old saw that harder fastballs get hit harder, too, is just false. It is a bit harder to throw strikes for harder throwers, but they also benefit from more chases on non-fastballs outside the zone, setting other things equal. As I've written a few times this year, the Cubs are cognizant of the problem, except that they don't necessarily view it as one. Their goal is to minimize injury risk and maximize pitchability by prioritizing traits other than velocity, and it's a noble cause, if those ends are attainable. Just as often, lately, they haven't been. Rather than erratic, injury-prone hard throwers, the team has had... erratic, injury-prone soft-tossers. The bizarre weather patterns at Wrigley Field this past season partially cloaked the issue, but the pitching staff simply wasn't good enough in 2024, and that was partially because they didn't throw hard enough. Eighteenth in MLB in strikeout rate on the season, they were fifth-worst in that crucial category from Aug. 1 onward. They traded one hard thrower (Hunter Bigge) and one distinctly non-hard thrower (Mark Leiter Jr.) at the deadline, and collected two hard throwers, in Nate Pearson and Jack Neely. Nonetheless, they were unimpressive. Happily, the team can easily address this with some offseason shopping. No fewer than six impending free agents threw at least 400 pitches at or above 95 miles per hour last season. Signing any of them could be a superb move, at the right price, and a few are sufficiently interesting as reclamation projects. The group consists of: Corbin Burnes, well-known ace Blake Snell, very much the same Nathan Eovaldi, aging stalwart fireballer Luis Severino, the Mets' wildly successful turnaround man in the rotation this year Frankie Montas, who retains something like ace upside but has only tapped into it in spams during his career Yusei Kikuchi, whose velocity is often underrated. Most of these are aging arms, as players tend to be when you get ahold of them via free agency. Jameson Taillon has already lost a tick on his fastballs since joining the Cubs, though he's been effective, anyway. It wouldn't be wise to put all the team's velocity-upgrading eggs into any of these baskets. They need to maintain their balance of softer-tossing players with extra funk in their arsenal or delivery with flamethrowers like Daniel Palencia, and eventually, they need to have more guys like Palencia. However, in the short term, any of the above starters could help the team climb the fastball velocity and strikeout leaderboards for next season. So can internal options, of course. Of the 178 starters who threw at least 200 four-seamers last year, Ben Brown ranked 11th in velocity. Alas, there's not yet any evidence that Brown can hold up over a long season, but for as long as he's around, he can help the team throw more heat and enjoy the benefits thereof. Pearson was an intriguing pickup in July and could certainly play a role in reversing this trend. Triple-A live arm Michael Arias touches 99 with his sinker and could matriculate to MLB next year, if his command improves. Cade Horton, the team's top pitching prospect, throws hard--just not freakishly hard, the way a prospect must in order to garner much hype these days. Still, the team needs to replace innings in their rotation this winter, and they need to sign at least one reliable veteran to do that job. They might as well kill two birds with one stone. Many of these pitchers will be enviable bargain buys, anyway--not in that they won't get paid handsomely, but in that the market is likely to bear less than they're truly worth, Throwing hard will probably never be the top criterion by which Tommy Hottovy or Hottovy-led coaching groups will judge a pitcher, but it needs to take on a larger role in their evaluations than it has had for the last several seasons. These six names fling open the door for that kind of change. View full article

No, not at all! Just riffing. Yeah, the number of variables involved in this kind of question is one of the fun things about baseball, in that it makes it so inscrutable--unsolvable.

And to do that, you'd have to capture God in a birdcage and make him tell you what they all are. 😄 Yes. My method is not the end-all, be-all. Just a way of breaking things down to gain a clearer sense of what was going on, however imperfect that sense remains.

One secondary cost of signing a free-agent manager at the last moment, last winter, was that the Cubs didn't get to build the coaching staff their new skipper might want in the long run. Now, they've cleared their path to doing so. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images On the day after the end of the season, the Cubs dismissed coaches Mike Napoli, Jim Adduci, and Darren Holmes--among others. Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported that the firings also included strength coaches, on the heels of a season in which injuries were a significant hurdle to success. The early indications, ahead of Jed Hoyer's season-summarizing press conference Tuesday morning, are that the rest of the staff is likely to remain intact. If anything, it might be more surprising that there haven't been more dismissals, but the team believes strongly in--and Craig Counsell worked well and established rapid rapport with--Ryan Flaherty, Tommy Hottovy, and others. Last November, the team surprised everyone--including, in some senses, itself--by firing David Ross and replacing him with Counsell. It gave them what they viewed as a newfound competitive advantage, because Counsell is arguably the best skipper in baseball. However, changing managers relatively late in the game's annual hiring cycle made it difficult for the team to make more than cosmetic changes to the staff working beneath Counsell, and the positions they did turn over had to go to whoever was available. There will be more time, more latitude, and more leverage for the team this time. They might or might not pry away some of the coaches with whom Counsell worked during his tenure with the Milwaukee Brewers, like Chris Hook, Ozzie Timmons, Jim Henderson, Quintin Berry, or Walker McKinven. Even if they can't or don't want to do so, though, they'll be able to chase the best possible coaching talent. The market is not as dried up, not as constrained as it was last fall. Coaches, of course, are not wizards. The Cubs' problems this year--maybe even the ones that aren't explainable by their talent shortfalls, the ones that seemed to come from maddening failures of approach or preparation--can not necessarily be solved even by superb coaching, and since hiring coaches is an inexact science, we can't even really know whether the Cubs will end up with a better staff than they had this past season. That said, they never believed they had the right, final, permanent mix in the coaching staff they pulled together for Counsell's first season. And while it's important not to oversell the extent to which their underachievement on the field was attributable to coaching, it's equally important to understand that great coaching is a force multiplier, helping teams get more out of their talent, rather than less. Organizationally, the team has viewed a few changes to this staff as a critical step in an offseason that will need to include a lot of change, and this barrage of dismissals lays the groundwork for the transformations they've been envisioning. A manager is an extremely valuable member of a big-league organization. Some fans and analysts don't believe that, but plainly, the Cubs do. That's why they ponied up for Counsell. However, in the job title of the manager, you can sense what's really going on. A manager's effectiveness and their impact are bounded by the talent with which you surround them, including player talent and coaching talent, and by their familiarity and ability to work with all that talent. The Cubs will have a manager who's had more time to get familiar with and more chances to shape his own staff next season, and that should be substantially valuable. It doesn't diminish what they need to do to upgrade their roster, but it's still an important development at the front end of their offseason. View full article

The fault was not in the air of the (pitcher-)friendly confines, but in the thing flying through it. Image courtesy of © Stan Szeto - USA Today Images If you tuned into any Cubs games down the stretch this season, you probably heard an allusion or two by Marquee Sports Network play-by-play man Boog Sciambi to the weird weather patterns and drastic splits for the team at Wrigley Field this year. Behind the scenes, members of the Cubs themselves believe this was a real factor in their frustrating inability to consistently score runs at home this year, too. As a pivotal offseason looms, the team needs to properly evaluate its own players before deciding where to make key upgrades, and that means testing and fully comprehending those theories. The basic math backs up both the seasoned observers and the cloak-and-dagger team apologists. Only at T-Mobile Park in Seattle did teams score fewer runs per game this year than at Wrigley, and at only four full-time parks--Oakland Coliseum, Busch Stadium, Kauffman Stadium, and Oracle Park in San Francisco--did a lower percentage of plate appearances end in home runs. That's all very unusual for the century-old ballpark, the offense-friendly reputation of which has sometimes been overstated but which has always played at least fair. It's drawn plenty of concern, because it would seem to distort the real production of players like Seiya Suzuki, Cody Bellinger, and Ian Happ. It even risks leading the team to give up too soon on hitters who go through periods of deep struggle, the way Pete Crow-Armstrong, Miguel Amaya, and--gulp--Christopher Morel did. Without getting to the bottom of the issue, it's very hard to figure out what the team should do to improve a roster that fell short of the playoffs for (in all important respects) the seventh straight season. Let's try to do that, then. We've taken a surface-level measurement of the reality of the effect, but now, let's interrogate the nature of it. If the weather--temperature, air pressure, some funky interaction between new construction in the neighborhood and prevailing wind patterns or an overabundance of night games--were at fault, we would expect to see a wide gap between expected and actual results on batted balls. We would expect to see long fly balls die shorter, leading to long hits turning into loud outs. That's somewhat in evidence, but only very imperfectly. As a test sample, let's take all batted balls at 95 miles per hour or harder, within a launch-angle band of 10-35 degrees. We're not using Baseball Savant's reverse-engineered formula, here, but we can call these Barrels just as credibly. If a ball is hit at least 95 MPH and is on a medium line or is a non-lazy fly ball, it was barreled, and it fits into a bucket of batted balls worthy of study for these purposes. On such batted balls, this year, batters at Wrigley Field enjoyed the 19th-highest home-run rate, the 22nd-best BABIP, the 22nd-best OPS and the 20th-best ISO in the league. The park was, in other words, unfriendly to balls hit hard in the air, but they were closer to average than to the true bottom of the barrel. That doesn't mean it was the air quality or the wind knocking the ball down, though. The league's average exit velocity on those barreled balls at Wrigley was just the 24th-highest of the 30 parks. Using the specific speed and trajectory of each batted ball, Wrigley yielded more home runs and more triples (and fewer doubles, but by a smaller margin than the homers it added) than should have been expected. In total, 40.8% of barreled balls at Wrigley went for extra-base hits, whereas only 39.4% were expected. No, the problem with the barrels at Wrigley was, there were radically few of them. No other park in the league saw fewer hard-hit balls in the air. The median number of such batted balls at a park, league-wide, was 736. At Wrigley, there were only 661. It's hard to blame the weather for the fact that hitters never generated the kind of batted balls weather hurts, in the first place. You could make the case, if you wanted, that the frigidity of April--there were 679 plate appearances at Wrigley that month in games in which the temperature was below 50 degrees, over 300 more than at any other park in the majors all year--made it harder for hitters to access their 'A' swings and blast the ball, but it's a bit of a reach. And even in those games, the park played essentially neutral, when the ball was well-struck in the air. It just didn't happen enough. Let's consider another possibility, then. What if the Cubs themselves are driving this? This is a key thing to consider about the whole topic, by the way: If you're eager to excuse the Cubs hitters who didn't create enough home offense, you have to also reckon with the fact that the team's pitchers benefited from this phenomenon. Or else, maybe an underpowered Chicago batting order and a wily Chicago pitching staff helped create an environment that mirrored their own habits--a game with fewer truly zapped baseballs? In short: it didn't happen that way. We do still need to think about the way these park effects quietly made Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon, and Shota Imanaga look better than they were, but it's not just about the Cubs being involved. As proof: the Cubs and their opponents combined to generate a Barrel Rate 4.8% higher on the road than the Cubs and their opponents at Wrigley. By far, that is the widest differential in MLB. So, it's only fractionally weather that made Wrigley such a tough place to hit this year, and it's not the Cubs themselves, at all. What, then? We know it's not the ball. After all, the league now standardizes pre-game care for the baseballs, including providing a humidor in which the balls are stored before use. It's one safeguard put into place to blunt the differences between parks in terms of what was possible offensively. My response to that is: Maybe the humidor sucks. Maybe the clubhouse staff are bad at using it, or Craig Counsell leaned on a dial back in April while having a conversation with Yan Gomes, and no one ever noticed he had changed the settings. I would not rule out that the ball has been deadened, inadvertently, by something in the chain of custody through which they pass at Wrigley Field. Hitters aren't lifting the ball as often, or hitting it hard as often, as they should be. It's hard to name a way that the humidor-stored baseballs and the surrounding environs could combine to kill the ball's coefficient of restitution, without making it fly less well, but maybe there's something there. One way or another, though, hitters aren't generating good contact in the first place. That was the theme of this year at Wrigley Field--not good contact unrewarded, but surprisingly little good contact, period. Notably, the league is also hitting more ground balls than average at Wrigley this year--that is, the Cubs and their opponents hit more grounders there than when the team is on the road. To be safe, I lopped off all games prior to May 1, and ran the same numbers. I then tried lopping off all games with a game-time temp under 60 degrees. No material changes whatsoever. Regardless of conditions, when at Wrigley, the Cubs and their opponents hit the ball harder (and hit it hard more often), hit it on the ground less (and concentrated more of their in-air contact in the best possible cluster of launch angles), and got much better results at other parks than at Wrigley. This could be a random fluke, resolved by no remedy other than time and the slow erosion of memory. The data say, though, that there's more here than peculiar, persistent, despair-inducing weather patterns. The ball didn't do normal things at Wrigley Field this year. The team and the league should look closely at how to adjust that this winter, if possible. If not, the mystery of the extra ground balls and missing barrels will have to continue next year. View full article

Robles is 6'0" in shoes, though. Just changes the power upside, the ability to shorten the swing, all of it. I think the low-end comp is Victor Reyes or Lewis Brinson, where they'll tantalize but you know they'll never really make it, and the higher-end comp is decidedly not Judge or Judge-like for me; it's Alex Rios.

With injuries mounting at the end of a long season, the Cubs called up one of their top prospects to make his debut Wednesday night. It will be just a cup of coffee, but it's a good chance to discuss what he can do for them in the short and medium term. Image courtesy of © Kyle Ross-Imagn Images None of the traditional tools are in all that much doubt for Kevin Alcántara. He's demonstrated good speed, impressive and improving defense in center field, and a feel to hit that belies his 6-foot-6 frame. His power is still coming together, as is always the case with such long-levered, lanky hitters at his age, but it's already in evidence. For a guy who just turned 22 in July and has that length and gawkiness to manage, Alcántara's top exit velocities--he hit three balls at least 110 miles per hour in his month and a half at Triple-A Iowa--are phenomenal. Right now, however, he swings and misses so much that little else matters. He whiffed on over 30 percent of his swings during his time in Triple A this year, He struck out 43 times in 148 plate appearances there, although he balanced that--just as he has throughout his climb up the minor-league ladder--with a good walk rate and solid power output. He's not yet ready to make contact at a high enough rate for much else to matter in the majors, but he could play a role for the team by the middle of next season, if he can clean that up a bit--and if he can more consistently lift the ball in the process. That's a daunting challenge, in general. Most hitters trade a bit of contact when they try to focus on elevating the ball, because that usually means altering one's swing path to get slightly more uphill. The slight uppercut, which has to be kept distinct from the severe one, is not a flaw, and it can put a player on plane with the ball longer than a flatter swing. However, keeping that uppercut slight can be very difficult, and even when one achieves it, there are some pitches--like flat, riding fastballs at the top of the zone--that a lot of big-league pitchers can throw and that chew through that kind of swing, racking up swinging strikes against it. The good news is that a dramatic swing change isn't required here. Alcántara does have to make some adjustments, but you can see the way he can do it without overhauling everything. At his height and with those aforementioned long levers, it can take a while to learn to work uphill without getting long and loopy in the early phase of the swing. He's clearly focused, so far, on being direct to the ball. The elements of a swing that can lift the ball are there, though. KA Swing.mp4 Alas, another problem at his height is that you can end up hitting the top half of the ball just because your body wants to carry the bat higher than the pitcher is likely to throw it. Alcántara falls victim to this a lot. He doesn't just hit ground balls. He hits an extraordinary number of balls almost straight down, as he did for his first big-league hit Wednesday. KA Hit.mp4 He also grounded out earlier in the game on a ball hit just about straight down. It wasn't a fluke, or a case of nerves. Alcántara has done this throughout his pro career to this point. Because of his speed and the extent to which infielders have to respect his higher-end exit velocities, he will get a fair number of infield hits this way, but that's only a real consolation if you believe he'll hit that kind of ball reasonably rarely. If it's taking up a third of his batted balls, it's a real problem. Well, in Triple-A, it took up a lot more than that. I created a different way to divide up batted balls into buckets earlier this year, splitting them all up into three even launch-angle bins: low, medium, and high. There are some balls coded traditionally as ground balls that go in the medium range. There are some flies that go in the medium range. The idea was to get away from the narrow definition of line drives and capture the fact that higher launch angles engender better results on grounders, so the ones hit at more than 2 degrees get binned with line drives under this system. Here's a graph of Alcántara's rolling five-game Low Hit% for his time in Iowa. He hits the ball down--not even hard, long one-hoppers likely to get through the infield 40 percent of the time, but choppers--on over half his batted balls. As you can see, he made adjustments and had some success lifting the ball late in his I-Cubs run. Still, that has to be his area of greatest developmental focus going into next year: how to simultaneously whiff less and lift more. It's a solvable baseball puzzle, especially for a player with such dazzling tools. If he cracks it, he would become the top prospect in the Cubs system and should replace any of the team's current outfielders. As we watch his first few at-bats in the majors, though, we'll get lots of reminders that it's not going to be as simple as "cracking it". View full article

The Cubs' chief baseball decision-maker believes his team is creeping steadily toward contention. If only that was how this worked. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer discussed the state of the franchise Monday, and while he fell in line with the tone of urgency and needed improvement set by manager Craig Counsell over the weekend, he framed it more optimistically. “We talk about the gap, I think that we’ve come a long way, and I feel really good about the position we’re in, but there’s still a gap, and that last stretch, that’s what we have to make up," Hoyer told reporters. "We have a lot of room to get to those 90-win teams that we need to have." Hoyer's hurry to highlight the team's closeness to genuine contention is a little bit self-serving, but it's also not unwarranted. After all, the Cubs are going to have a second straight winning season, after two straight lousy ones. Their run differential in each season will end up suggesting they're more like a 90-win team, just underachieving. They have steadily built up their farm system. What Hoyer sees is a team with a lot of pieces in place for the medium term, a lot of young talent rising through the ranks, and a defensible case as a co-favorite in the NL Central going into 2025--even as both he and Counsell acknowledge that the gap between the Cubs and the Brewers is real and persistent. Whether the reality of the situation is more fairly described by the team's run differentials or their records, their fundamentals or their place in the standings, is up for some debate. It's an important question, too, since if you choose to focus on the Cubs' failure to keep up with Milwaukee in either of the last two divisional races and their having missed the postseason both years, you're likely to prescribe an active and fairly bold winter. If, on the other hand, you think this is a team that could as easily have won the division either of the last two years as not, you're likely to agree that the gap is closing and want to keep the train more or less on the tracks. They're kind of boxed into it, but Counsell and Hoyer seem to be walking both sides of that fence. They have to believe, with separate parts of their own brains, that they're already making major progress, but also that they have a long way to go. It's the only way they'll find both the confidence and the urgency to do what needs doing. I want to focus on one element that Hoyer seems to me to be overlooking or underrating, though: time. When Hoyer talks about closing that gap, he's talking about the last four years. He's talking about a series of trades that offloaded veterans en route to free agency and brought in youngsters. He's talking about an upward trajectory in win totals, starting around the middle of 2022 and continuing through the last two full seasons. He's seeing trend arrows pointing upward. The problem with building great baseball teams, though, is that entropy acts on the process. It exerts a huge amount of drag on the process. Hoyer sees himself as building a team that can sustain competitiveness across half a decade or more. He might be right. He's rolling the dice, though, because it might turn out what he's building is going to erode faster than he can rebuild and refuel it. Seiya Suzuki, Ian Happ, and Dansby Swanson are all 30 years old. They're key cogs of this team--arguably, its three best position players, and inarguably its three highest-paid. It's unlikely that any of them will be shipped out this winter, but it's also unlikely that any of them will be as good next year as they were this year, and they weren't good enough this year. Hoyer can, and almost must, go out and usurp that trio by acquiring a position player better than any of them, but if he's thinking in incrementalist, sustainability-focused terms, he's unlikely to do so. He's much more likely to count on a collective improvement from the younger half of his positional corps, in Miguel Amaya, Nico Hoerner, Isaac Paredes, and Pete Crow-Armstrong, plussed up by the imminent arrivals of Kevin Alcantara, Matt Shaw, Owen Caissie, James Triantos, and Moises Ballesteros. Maybe that will play out just as Hoyer expects, but there's risk in the approach. An accelerating decline by one of Swanson, Suzuki, or Happ is well within the realm of possibility. An injury or a failure to sustain linear developmental improvement from any of the younger players could also derail the plan. More importantly, keeping three guys in the lineup--including at shortstop, with Swanson--who are 31 years old means putting a certain cap on your team's defensive excellence. The Cubs need to be an elite defense to have an above-average run-prevention unit, because their pitching isn't likely to be at that level on its own. Jameson Taillon, Shota Imanaga, Javier Assad and Justin Steele gave the team about 620 innings at an aggregate ERA around 3.10. Given the ages and health histories of those four guys, they're not likely to give them that much value next year. They might get considerably more value from Ben Brown, Cade Horton, and Jordan Wicks to balance things out, but then again, they might not. None of those hurlers have proved durable or established an ability to thrive in the big leagues across a full season of work. Already, there's a story making the rounds that the Cubs will spend big on a frontline starting pitcher this winter. That's a good idea, but it will tie up resources. The team has to both score more runs and better prevent them next year, and the age, health, and performance profiles of the roster Hoyer has assembled make it hard to see how they'll do so. His methodical approach has been Hoyer's way of trying to survive the difficulty of getting better by the margin required. He knows attrition and aging will erode this core, which never got quite good enough to do anything satisfying, anyway. Building up the farm system and resisting the temptation to splurge on a superstar are supposed to give the team sufficient reinforcements when that happens, as long as Hoyer can keep finding values he likes on medium-term free-agent deals, like those he's recently handed out to Imanaga, Taillon, and Cody Bellinger. Now that he's locked into another half-decade with Swanson and two more years each with Suzuki, Happ, Bellinger, and Taillon, though, Hoyer has a bit less flexibility than he might have hoped. He's at some risk of having the core erode faster than expected, without getting the boost he hoped for from young talent. The way to make up for that is to find more of those good values he likes than usual this winter, bringing in high-impact free agents both for the pitching staff and for the positional group. The problem with that strategy is that finding those good values is hard. At some point, Hoyer probably needs to break out of that value-focused mode of thought and splurge, after all--be it in the form of money or a trade from his prospect depth, or both. He needs to push in more chips and try harder to win in 2025, not because the team is perfectly positioned to do so or in order to trade the future to make the present better, but because the present isn't going to get good enough to make anyone happy unless he does so, and in that case, the future he envisions might never come. View full article