Matthew Trueblood

For a day on which nothing actually happened, a lot sure did happen on Thursday, eh? Let's clean up a mess. Image courtesy of © Paul Rutherford-Imagn Images On Thursday afternoon, all hell broke loose for a bit on what is left of Cubs Twitter. Most of the good baseball talk these days is happening at Bluesky, but because Jeff Passan hasn't yet defected, those of us who want to instantly catch important news when it breaks are forced to spend some time on Twitter. And if you're one of those people, you surely encountered at least one of several reports that spilled out on Thursday afternoon and evening about a discussion between the Cubs, White Sox, and Mariners, on what would be a three-way trade involving Garrett Crochet coming to the Cubs and Nico Hoerner going to Seattle. Our own Jacob Zanolla was one of the first to report what he was hearing. Others chimed in with similar scraps, and pretty quickly, a speculative deal came into focus for the lovers of tea leaves and intrigue hovering around the hot stove. Because it was out in the social media atmosphere, the rumor took on a tangibility that made it feel very real and urgent for a lot of people. Alas, within a few more hours, there were multiple reports that the "deal" was "dead." Ok, let's unpack all that a little bit. Firstly, let me say: Jacob was not making things up, and I have no particular reason to think anyone else who tweeted seemingly corroborating reports was, either. I can confirm that those talks took place, not merely Thursday or late Wednesday night but in pieces over the last few weeks, and that the three teams were circling toward a potential deal by Thursday afternoon. It would, indeed, have involved Crochet and (most likely) Hoerner, with one headline prospect going from the Cubs to the White Sox, another going from Seattle to Chicago, and a few ancillary pieces changing hands along the way to balance things out. That much is true. If you follow me on Twitter or on Bluesky, you'll note that I neither tweeted nor skeeted on the subject. However, we did do some background work on it in the North Side Baseball Slack channel. For me, the available information did not rise to the level of reportability, but something was close enough that we started getting ducks in a row. Crucially, I think, fans should understand that it's not especially uncommon for a deal like this to get this close. When I say the rumor didn't quite feel reportable, I don't mean that there was any uncertainty about the existence of the discussions. I just didn't have something that met my own standard for newsworthiness, because trade talks get as far as I believe this one to have gotten happen all over the league, every week. Some of them never even escape the biome of the teams involved, but plenty of them do, and at that point, the external holders of the information have to decide what merits public mention. This is not a criticism of Jacob. I want to make that very clear. He and I don't consult on these subjects anyway, and while his contributions are highly valued and welcome, we would not lay claim to a report by Jacob the same way (say) The Athletic would claim and back one by Ken Rosenthal. He is free to speak with his own voice on Twitter and make his own calls about newsworthiness, as long as he's reporting accurate information. I believe he did just fine here. I just want to start by highlighting the fact that this trade was not especially close. The Cubs, alone, have been closer to another notable deal this winter than they were to completing this one. As far as I know, no one ever publicly reported even the possibility of that trade. Some of our perceptions about trade possibility and activity are distorted, if we ever assume we're hearing about everything—or even that there's a reliable difference between what is reported and what isn't, in terms of how real it got before fizzling out. Now, let's talk about how the deal "died," beginning with whether or not it actually did. As the headline probably tells you, that's not how I would characterize the situation, though my quibble is as much with our language for such situations as with the particulars of this one. Once you understand that this trade was never more advanced than a dozen others that will not-quite happen over the next week, you can see part of my nitpick easily enough. Did it really "live," exactly? Or was it just a gleam in someone's eye, noticed from across a room by an unrelated third party? (Let's, er, abort this metaphor right here. But you get my point.) My second issue is the larger one. Is the deal "dead," as some said? I wouldn't put it that way. Obviously, nothing has happened—no players have changed teams in some other fashion, for instance—to preclude the teams resuming talks. When discussions like these collapse, they tend to be hard to pick back up, because someone has shut something down and it might be a (literal) dealbreaker for someone else. But minds can change, and so can circumstances. I regard it as highly unlikely that the semi-reported deal goes on to get done, but it's not fully scuppered. I would say, instead, that it's been thwarted for now, by two separate problems: Getting the Mariners involved was meant to fix a stall reached by the Cubs and White Sox, rooted in the fact that the Cubs were unwilling to give up any combination of two top prospects the White Sox found satisfactory. They had already talked to Seattle about Hoerner, and folded them into the discussion with the idea of sending Hoerner there and having Seattle supply a second piece the White Sox would accept. Two problems sprang up in the attempt to make that work. Firstly, of the three or four names discussed as that second piece, the Sox and Mariners never came to an agreement on one. I won't divulge the names of any of those young players, but I think each side was being reasonable there. Secondly, the Cubs didn't want to send much in other value (either a supplemental, lower-tier prospect to the Sox, or money to the M's, or both) beyond Hoerner and one top prospect to satisfy the other two teams. As we have often discussed here, the Cubs front office does not like paying transaction costs. They would have had to step up in a significant way to bridge the gaps that existed. The Cubs are also distracted, in a way. Yesterday, we discussed how trading for Eli Morgan and signing Matthew Boyd has started to sharpen the positions on Hoyer's winter chess board. In truth, though, he still has multiple potential strategies available, and this move would have committed the Cubs to one path a bit too soon—at least in one reading of the facts. As was also reported Thursday, the team has plenty of irons in lower-tier free-agent fires, and they're juggling discussions about a possible Cody Bellinger trade (though no, it doesn't seem like Bellinger being part of this trade was much of an option; he would land in Seattle only under a totally different set of scenarios) as well as the pursuit of a high-ceiling player like Crochet. The World Chess Championship is happening right now, in Singapore. World Champion Ding Liren and challenger Gukesh Dommeraju have faced off in nine games, so far, of a possible 14, and I've watched a good amount of their match via various streaming platforms. Each has put some creative and dangerous ideas on the board over the last several games, but they've drawn each of the last six. In that entire run of play, there have only been two or three moments when one of them could have taken decisive control and found a win. They've missed them, even then, not because they weren't good enough at chess, but because they had to consider a wealth of options and remain cognizant of the risk of counterplay, all under the tick and tock of a clock. That's a bit like the situation the Cubs are in right now. As frustrating as the last two seasons have been, any baseball fan (and even some chess fans) can see that the Cubs entered this winter in a strong position. Hoyer has to find the move that can be decisive, at some point, or else his team won't get over the hump and back into the postseason next year. The clock is ticking on him, too. Right now, though, he can see multiple paths to victory, and his opponent—the rest of the league, basically—has some turns yet to play. The timing of this deal wasn't right, or at least, it didn't seem so yet to the parties involved. I wouldn't say it's dead, although it can certainly die in the coming days. Juan Soto will soon sign somewhere; that's a big turn for the other pieces on the board. There will be more, too. It's still possible for the board to rearrange itself a few moves down the road in such a way that these three teams face the same options under more conducive circumstances, or that their appetites for risk have risen. In any game of chess or MLB offseason, though, that circling back is unlikely. Thus, the Cubs have to look for other ways to seize the same kind of initiative, be it through direct negotiations with the White Sox on Crochet (giving up that richer prospect package, and hoping to make up the losses via a separate Hoerner trade) or with the Mariners and others on Bellinger (giving them access to more of the free-agent market again). In the meantime, keep taking reports from anyone but Passan with a grain of salt—not because everyone doing the reporting is a huckster (they're not!), but because a high standard for reporting rumors like these might be the only thing keeping any of us sane. If you really want to put yourself in Hoyer's shoes for a while, grab a chess board and a friend, and keep notifications turned on for Passan until he starts skeeting. View full article

Part of the value of the contract to which the Cubs agreed earlier this week lies in the clarity it provides them—the options it forecloses. Some observers don't seem to have noticed. Image courtesy of © Ken Blaze-Imagn Images There are a variety of valid analyses of the Cubs' agreement to sign Matthew Boyd to a two-year deal at the beginning of this week. Some fans appreciate the mixture of depth and upside he adds to the team's starting rotation, but others balk at the lack of star power and at a price tag that tends to suggest a lack of huge moves trailing in this one's wake. Both are reasonable positions. However, there's also a thread of conversation going around the internet that is not reasonable, and which we need to thwart. No matter what you might hear, or from whom, the Cubs are not going to deploy Boyd as a reliever—at least not unless or until he suffers some significant injury that alters his arc from here. Boyd has evolved nicely over his long career, from a lefty very much vulnerable to right-handed batters into a much more platoon-neutral one. He allowed just a .641 OPS to righties in 2024, easily the best of his career in seasons featuring any meaningful number of batters faced. He's developed his changeup into a weapon against those batters, and throws it more than he used to. Meanwhile, he's brought along his sinker, which works nicely out of his low slot as a weapon against lefties and allows him to be less reliant on his sweeping slider than he was earlier in his career. In short, while he might not be available every fifth day the way an ideal starting pitcher would be, it's his well-rounded skill set and ability to thrive as a starter that made him attractive to the team. He's started 168 of the 182 games in which he's appeared in his MLB career, and he's only become more viable as a starter in the last few years. You can also consider the terms of the deal and see the situation plainly: The Cubs didn't pony up $14.5 million per year to a player they envision as a reliever, given that even if he did slide into that role, Boyd's upside would be something less than that of a relief ace. While many Cubs fans (rightfully) hope and expect that the team will still try to add to the top of the rotation depth chart this winter, and while many of them (less rightfully) might prefer Javier Assad, Ben Brown, or Jordan Wicks as starters, the fact that this deal happened at all sends a clear message: the Cubs don't agree. Boyd got this deal because the Cubs (and at least one or two other teams in the market) view him as a starter, and a strong one. If he can harass lefties with his slider, sinker, and four-seamer and make the changeup work off his four-seamer consistently against righties, Boyd is simply a different pitcher than his somewhat ugly career stat line implies—and the team is betting big on that being the state of things. Part of the value of this move was that it headed off some other possibilities. Fans won't view it that way, and are certainly not obligated to do so, but that's a real consideration. For the third year in a row, Jed Hoyer and company entered this offseason with a huge spectrum of possible paths to building a better roster. Sometimes, all those possibilities pile up on one another and become an obstacle to decisive action, rather than facilitating it. Early moves (like the team's trade for Eli Morgan and the Boyd signing) sometimes help as much by partially checking off an item on a list as by actually solving a roster problem. There is still plenty left for the Cubs to do this winter. Signing Boyd narrowed the number of options available, but that should make it easier for the team to choose their next moves. To see that value clearly, though, you have to embrace the inevitability of Boyd being part of the team's starting rotation. It's not a fluid situation. He's locked in, just as Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, and Jameson Taillon are. View full article

It's a small thing, but it's important: the Cubs still have control of their center fielder for up to six more seasons. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images Somewhat infamously, in 2015, the Cubs waited until the day they could delay Kris Bryant's free agency by a year before they called him up. It wasn't even close to being the first case of such blatant service-time manipulation. It wasn't against the rules. It was, however, a little icky. Since Bryant went on to win the Rookie of the Year Award that season, under new rules added to the collective bargaining agreement three years ago, he would now be given a full season of service time, anyway. At the time, though, Bryant was left without a recourse, other than the grievance he and Scott Boras filed—and, predictably, years later, officially lost. It doesn't seem as though the team did that with Pete Crow-Armstrong. They did wait until almost the middle of September 2023 to call him up for the first time, but that appears to have been about bringing him along at the appropriate pace and about the competitive circumstances they faced in the moment. Besides, at that moment, it was hard to guess whether he'd be positioned to start the following season with the Cubs. If he did, though, he would certainly get over a year of service time in 2024. He didn't. After the Cubs re-signed Cody Bellinger in February, Crow-Armstrong began the season with Triple-A Iowa. He got the call when Bellinger was hurt colliding with the wall in April, but didn't play very well, and was sent back down three weeks later when the team got healthy again. More injuries made way for him again by mid-June, but Crow-Armstrong ended this season with 170 total days of MLB service time, counting 2023 and 2024. A full season of service time is 172 days. In other words, though he's only two years from reaching salary arbitration, Crow-Armstrong is still six years from free agency, just as if he were called up for the first time this April. It's a big deal for the Cubs, because that extra year of team control increases his trade value, their leverage in potential extension negotiations—and, if he pans out the way they hope he started to in the second half of 2024, one extra season of his services if no extension comes to fruition. Crow-Armstrong will turn 23 next March. The season in which these two days of service make a crucial difference, 2030, will be his age-28 campaign. There's every chance that that's still part of his peak; he's likely to remain an elite defensive center fielder at least through that campaign. Crow-Armstrong is penciled in as the team's starting center fielder for 2025, and he's a key X-factor in any projection of their success next year. His plate discipline is far, far behind his tools. It's still far from assured that he'll blossom into the star the team hopes he can be, but we've seen some glimpses of his upside. That the Cubs have (theoretical) control of his services for 2030 is welcome news, though Crow-Armstrong has every right to feel slightly put out about it. View full article

The speedy, smooth-fielding Korean infielder must sign with an MLB team by Jan. 3, 2025. The Cubs should at least give him a call. Image courtesy of © Mandi Wright-Imagn Images Three weeks ago, I wrote about why Hyeseong Kim could be a great fit for the Cubs this winter. Now, the second baseman has been officially posted by the Kiwoom Heroes, for whom he's played the last six seasons in the Korean Baseball Organization. He will have 30 days to sign with an MLB team, with the team who acquires him paying a posting fee to Kiwoom in the process. With a few moves already under the front office's belt in the time since the article linked above came out, let's revisit the argument for signing Kim and determine the extent to which he remains a good option. In short, both Nico Hoerner and Isaac Paredes are right-handed batters, and Paredes, in particular, has always sported significant platoon splits. Kim, who will turn 26 next month, is a left-handed hitter who's most likely to profile as a second baseman in the big leagues, but he should be capable of sliding over to third at least occasionally. Alternatively, the team could ask Hoerner to pick up some reps at third. In either case, the idea would be to reduce the playing time of both Paredes and Hoerner by about 30 percent, with all of that time coming out of their at-bats against right-handed pitchers. Kim would balance the lineup with what seems to be a high-end contact-and-plate discipline profile from the left side, boosted by good speed. He's light on power and would be a bottom-third hitter in a good lineup, but that's fine. Given the value he would provide with his glove and legs, he'd only need to show solid OBP skills against righties to be an especially useful player in the Cubs' circumstance. With Mike Tauchman out the door via non-tender, the lane for adding a medium-cost left-handed batter who heavily favors OBP over slugging in terms of value has only grown wider. Now that we know with some certainty that the team intends to spend slightly less than they did last year, the modestness of Kim's price tag should carry some extra appeal. Signing him could still be part of a complex of moves that involves sending out Hoerner (in addition to the more likely trade of Cody Bellinger), to save some money and ensure financial flexibility, but it would work just fine to bring Kim aboard merely as the 10th regular on the roster, akin to the role Tauchman ended up playing in the injury-riddled early stages of 2024 for the team—only he should be even more valuable than Tauchman, overall. It will be interesting to see where the bidding goes on Kim. Even by the lower standards of KBO, his batted-ball data didn't blow people away, so much of his value in MLB figures to hinge on sustaining great strikeout and walk rates. No one think he's a viable shortstop in the majors; he'll have his market constricted by the widespread belief that he's a second baseman. On the other hand, he had a power surge his last two years in the KBO, splitting plenty of gaps. He's younger than most free agents teams get a chance to sign. He could end up signing a deal as long as five years, but with an annual average value well under $10 million. If that be the case, despite their usual aversion to long-term commitments, the Cubs should at least stay involved. View full article

Reported;y, the Cubs are a "viable" destination for one of the sport's best starting pitchers. But he wouldn't come cheap. Image courtesy of © Paul Rutherford-Imagn Images All offseason, close observers have been keenly aware that Garrett Crochet is going to be traded this winter. The chances that he remains in the White Sox organization come Opening Day are somewhere south of 10 percent. Most Cubs fans have also been vaguely aware of the fact that the North Side is a plausible landing spot for the current pride of the South Side club, since the Ricketts family seems disinclined to spend big money to catch up to the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets, and Phillies in terms of spending like legitimate big-market powerhouses. Now, however, the Winter Meetings are a mere few days away, and the trade market is beginning to percolate in earnest. Wednesday morning, albeit in vague and very on-brand form, Jon Morosi of MLB Network and FOX Sports brought that background notion rushing into the foreground. By no accident, this is a tweet short on specifics. Morosi, one of the most well-liked people in baseball media, is nonetheless something shy of a true news-breaking titan. He's prone to tweets like these, which include no new reportage (notice that he doesn't indicate having been told this by any particular source or having new information, per see) and trade on the automatic credence lent to everything he says by virtue of his role with two of the major news and coverage outlets attached to the league. This tweet shouldn't make you materially more confident or expectant of the Cubs being involved in Crochet trade negotiations, and while it tacitly invites you to imagine a bidding war between the Cubs and a divisional rival for the services of an elite White Sox southpaw (something we have seen before, after all!), I would advise against indulging that imagination, too. In this case, though, the seemingly unprompted update is still helpful in a small way: it makes more salient a consideration that probably already belonged near the front of our consciousness. The Cubs are definitely interested in Crochet—enamored of him, even, according to two sources in other front offices—and they have the MLB-ready, high-upside young position players the White Sox want in a trade. With Matthew Boyd providing expensive but potentially strong depth at the back end of the rotation, the Cubs are now poised to add an elite starter at the other end of it—but need to do so on a cost-effective basis. Crochet checks the boxes. What stands out most with Crochet is that, while he had a very fastball-forward approach last year, he has a deep arsenal that allows him to dominate hitters regardless of handedness or skill set. He didn't lean on one out pitch to rack up strikeouts in 2024; he has four pitches that all miss bats at a rate well above average. Crochet's fastball shape isn't that distinctly cut-ride option the Cubs prefer, but he more than makes up for it. His four-seamer sits 97 and touches 100, even as a starter, and his cutter and sweeper work off it gorgeously. His changeup plays off the heat and the cutter nicely, too. He even has a sinker he threw enough to force hitters to think about it last year. Pitch Type High% InZone% Miss% Vel HorzBrk IndVertBrk Fastball (4S) 49.0% 59.4% 31.4% 97.2 -7.9 15.2 Cutter 22.5% 53.2% 33.2% 91.6 3.7 5.7 Sweeper 17.1% 44.0% 42.7% 84.2 14.2 -0.5 Change 11.3% 25.4% 33.9% 91.0 -15.5 8.8 Fastball (2S) / Sinker 40.0% 44.0% 32.1% 97.9 -15.2 7.8 The wildest reality with Crochet is that he might yet have another level to reach. His ability to throw strikes with the cutter and even the sweeper could allow him to rely less on his fastball, and that pitch itself could be better-located, just by reorienting his approach to be more focused on attacking the top of the zone. Throwing fewer heaters, in particular, could resolve the slight home-run problem Crochet had against righties last year. Crochet does have a bit of a dead zone fastball, so his success with it depends on command and that overpowering velocity. The Cubs could have him lean more into the cutter and away from the four-seamer as a result, though he still needs the high, hard one to set up the rest of his arsenal. Either way, even though he might be squared up more than an average pitcher, it seems certain that Crochet would benefit from the superior Cubs defense, after he was often let down by the fielders behind him on the South Side in 2024. Crochet is an ace, without question, and his only question mark—whether he can be a durable starter across a full-season workload, including pitching into October—would be a less daunting one for the Cubs than for many teams, especially now that Boyd is on board to lend extra depth. The only real reason not to pounce on a Crochet trade is that it would cost the team a ton of young talent. With two years of team control remaining, Crochet would cost the team two of their top tier of highly-regarded position players already at Triple A, headlined by Matt Shaw, Moises Ballesteros, and Owen Caissie. If they only gave up one of those, it would only be because they threw in Cade Horton, Ben Brown or Brandon Birdsell instead—and even then, they'd also give up a significant third piece in the process. You can map the cost for Crochet pretty neatly onto the one the Cubs paid for José Quintana in 2017. Quintana pitched better than is generally remembered while with the Cubs, and to the extent he fell short of expectations, it was because the organization failed in their support of his ongoing development and good health, not because they were wrong to make that move. That deal doesn't deserve the malign with which it's remembered, but this one would be a much clearer win. Crochet's ability to lead a rotation deep into the postseason is bounded only by his health, not by his stuff or skills. There will always be such questions around great pitchers who become available. While it would sting for prospect lovers, this is the kind of trade the Cubs must make this winter: consolidating assets by dealing multiple young players with exciting but uncertain futures for a player with the demonstrated ability to dominate in the majors. Crochet is, arguably, the clearest opportunity to make such a move, and maybe the time for pulling the trigger is drawing near. View full article

Definitely intriguing in that role. I want to see the league as a whole, and the Counsell-led Cubs specifically, develop that role more. I do wonder if the future of it is as a second rotation, where you might have three two-inning guys (on the Cubs, it'd probably be Wesneski, Brown, Merryweather, as currently constructed? But you could find three on almost any team) who work on three-game (often four-day) rotations. You could get these guys to like 100 innings apiece that way, without the unpredictability and impediments to routine that are such underrated sources of the performance volatility and injury risk that come with most modern relief work.

I'd be wary of selling low, too, but keep in mind: none of the other 29 teams are run by basics. Haha. They aren't seeing the aesthetics; they're seeing that fastball that has remained string-straight through three iterations of his mound position and arm angle. I would guess his trade value will be basically the same a year from now, because I don't think he's got that fastball adjustment in him. I don't like to live by pitch modeling numbers, but he has a 51 Stuff+ on the four-seamer, and ugly numbers via both StuffPro and PitchPro, too. I wouldn't say his stuff is better than Miller's (although the sweeper CAN be) unless he and the Cubs can find a way to get him operating the four-seamer and the sweeper out of the lower arm slot he abandoned a year ago. He's a puzzle. It sure is tough to let go of the upside that comes with hitting 97 and having a plus breaking ball, though.

There are plenty of players below the young righty on the team's 40-man roster, who can be cut to make room for their newest starting pitcher. Still, the arrival nudges them closer to the horns of a dilemma that has been lurking for a while. Though it was only Monday morning that Cubs fans woke up to concrete news about changes to the team's 2025 starting rotation, there was never much question that such a change was coming. Matthew Boyd slots neatly into (for now) the fourth spot in the team's projected starting staff, pushing everyone but Shota Imanaga, Justin Steele, and Jameson Taillon down a rung in the hierarchy. Someone was bound to be brought in to effect that shift, but now it's really happening. For Hayden Wesneski, that pulls the eventual resolution of many questions about the future a notch closer. It's been a tantalizing but difficult two and a half years in the Cubs organization for Wesneski, whom the team received in a trade for righty reliever Scott Effross at the 2022 trade deadline. He was initially viewed as a starting pitching prospect, but the auditions he got for that job (most notably in the first six weeks of 2023) didn't go well. He still might have upside as a big-league starter, but increasingly, it feels likely that one of these two outcomes will prevail: Wesneski makes a full-time, permanent move to short relief for the Cubs, where his stuff might play up and allow him to blossom into a dominant arm. Wesneski does figure it out as a starter... but it happens elsewhere. The Cubs trade him to a team in need of help in the rotation and with a bit more time to bring along a hurler still feeling for the command and polish required to succeed in long outings and face opposing lineups two or three times. Earlier this offseason, the team acquired right-handed reliever Eli Morgan from Cleveland, adding him to a mix that already included Porter Hodge, Tyson Miller, Nate Pearson, and other relievers with impressive but inconsistent track records. On the other hand, they non-tendered Adbert Alzolay, and have released hurlers Trey Wingenter and Yency Almonte. There's room for the good version of Wesneski in their projected bullpen, particularly because he can still be optioned to the minor leagues for one more season. Because his four-seam fastball is too straight and is constantly at risk of getting hit hard, he's struggled to both miss bats and limit power when forced to work through opposing lineups more than once. In relief, however, he can lean much harder on his plus sweeper. He has far better career chase, whiff, ground-ball, and strikeout rates in relief, and in 2024, he seemed to figure out the best way forward for himself in that role; he just wasn't actually called upon in it very often. Specifically, late in the campaign, Wesneski appeared to be getting behind his fastball better, leading to better carry, more velocity, and the ability to miss bats with it. He fanned nine of the 20 batters he faced in the big leagues in September, using mostly the recalibrated heat and that devastating sweeper. Wesneski Heat.mp4 While he does still fit into the team's plans if permanently shifted away from starting, Wesneski might serve them best as a trade piece. There are teams who might see him as a diamond in the rough, figuring they can fix his persistent release-point issues and help him find a fastball that isn't as easy for opponents to square up. Either way, the additions of Morgan and Boyd have forced the team closer to making a decision about Wesneski. If he's going to stay in the organization, he needs to come to spring training ready work in short bursts and avail himself of the 1-2 extra miles per hour he's generally found on his heater there. Otherwise, they should be shopping him, treating him as a valuable but secondary piece in a number of possible trade permutations to get their hands on much-needed upgrades for the lineup or at the higher echelons of their pitching hierarchies. View full article

Very MUCH non-Soto!

In a deal reported deep in the night, the Cubs have set a high floor for the back end of their rotation, with a pitcher who provides depth and gives them many more options for their next moves. Image courtesy of © Scott Galvin-Imagn Images The Chicago Cubs agreed to a two-year deal with veteran left-handed starting pitcher Matthew Boyd, Jon Heyman reported early Monday night. The oft-injured southpaw will earn $29 million over two seasons, and the deal appears to be neither front- nor backloaded. All offseason, I have said the team needed to add two starting pitchers: one at the front end of their rotation, and one at the back. This is the latter type of move, but a very strong version thereof. Boyd, who will turn 34 on Groundhog Day, made only eight regular-season starts in 2024, and has not pitched even 100 innings in any season since 2019—although that year, he threw a whopping 185, in his second straight campaign as a high-volume starter with the Tigers. Durability is not Boyd's strong suit, but that might just be a good thing. He was available at this price precisely because he can't be counted upon for a whole lot of work, but when he's on the mound, lately, he tends to be quite good. He carried a 2.72 ERA and struck out 27.7% of opposing hitters for Cleveland during the regular season in 2024, and carried that brilliance right into October. He's a move more in keeping with the strategies we see embraced by the teams we all ask the Cubs to more closely mimic: the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets, and Padres, who compile depth in an acknowledgment of the risk of injury but don't simply pay for reliable innings at a low level of quality. They'd rather have a good pitcher than a merely average one, even if it means paying a premium for a player who might spend a good chunk of the season on the injured list. To those who don't follow the American League closely, Boyd probably isn't much of a recognizable name, but he's had a long and occasionally very promising career. The last few years have been painfully injury-disrupted. He missed most of the second half of 2021 with arm discomfort the Tigers couldn't help him diagnose or resolve, at a time when that organization did virtually nothing right. Finally, in September, he was diagnosed with a torn flexor tendon, and underwent surgery to repair it. He wouldn't pitch again until the final month of 2022, after signing with the Mariners over his injury-shadowed winter. Then, in June 2023, he tore his UCL, requiring Tommy John surgery and shelving him until the second half of 2024. Thereafter, though, he reminded everyone of the two reasons why he's consistently been in demand all these years: He can really pitch, as a lefty with a funky slot and a good arsenal—which got markedly better in 2024; and He's one of the game's good guys, beloved in every clubhouse to which he has ever belonged. Boyd was an integral part of the Guardians rotation down the stretch, and then allowed just one run in 11 2/3 innings of work over three appearances in the postseason. Let's get into the nitty-gritty here, because it's pretty interesting stuff. Boyd, a Washington native who has long been a disciple of Driveline, is not a hard thrower, but he is a bat-misser, when he's right. He has a five-pitch mix: four-seamer, two-seamer, changeup, slider, curveball. The curve is sparingly used, and fairly new, but helpful. The four-seamer, slider, and change anchor the repertoire, and can mix in nasty ways. As you'd expect, against lefty batters, Boyd is slider-heavy and prefers to pair it with the sinker—though, in a wrinkle we know the Cubs like, he uses that sinker more like a true two-seamer, with more arm-side run than heavy action, often attacking the upper half of the zone with it to jam a lefty or set up another offering. Against righties, he's primarily a four-seamer and changeup guy, and the curveball comes into play more. For all our talk to date about how the Cubs like cut-ride fastballs, Boyd's is a pitch without a lot of vertical ride and with arm-side action, even from the four-seamer. It's probably best to think of him as a poor man's Sean Manaea for this offseason. Whereas Manaea would have cost the Cubs draft picks and is likely to get a three- or four-year deal worth more than $20 million per year, Boyd offers a much less durable (but similarly high-upside) low-slot, multi-pitch, veteran profile from the left side. TDZvdmJfV0ZRVkV3dEdEUT09X0FRY0VYRlVBVlZRQVd3UUZVUUFBVUFVRUFGaFJBRkFBQlFZQ0J3UUVVRkpSQmxaUg==.mp4 For what it's worth, too, getting such a lefty might have been high on the team's priority list, if they believe at all in the strange phenomenon of Wrigley Field playing very lefty pitcher-friendly of late. I broke down the data on that earlier this offseason, and it's worth considering when evaluating the addition of Boyd, as opposed to (say) Frankie Montas, who signed a similar but larger deal with the Mets earlier Sunday night. Boyd will not sate the appetites of virtually any Cubs fan right away, but he's a solid addition. He's a clearly better pitcher than Jordan Wicks, and gives the team a better matrix of possible outcomes if Ben Brown, Hayden Wesneski, Cade Horton, or Brandon Birdsell are unable either to stay healthy enough to have an impact or to succeed as starters. He also makes it more feasible to trade from the team's upper-level pitching depth, should they end up in a negotiation wherein their young offensive prospects aren't quite getting the deal done in the right way. If this is the only major addition the Cubs make to their pitching staff this winter, it's insufficient. That feels unlikely, though. They paid a small early-winter, buy-now premium to land a player who can replace the gravitas of Kyle Hendricks and Patrick Wisdom, brightening the clubhouse a bit; has proved the ability to get out even very good hitters, very recently; and might have been undervalued by the market because of the way his injuries have prevented him from stringing together successful outings over the last four seasons. It reads as a move designed to give them upside even while adding to the back end of the rotation. They still have ways to further strengthen the team by adding to the front end, or by turning their attention to building an elite bullpen. 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Deep into the holiday weekend, now, you should be sick to death of football. Watch an old baseball game with us. Image courtesy of YouTube Today, at long last, I want to talk about Mike Harkey. In the first two installments of this semi-unintentional trilogy, I focused on the quirks and quiddities of the Cubs' broadcasts back in the heyday of Harry Caray and Steve Stone, assisted by Arne Harris; and then on the Dodgers' nifty, doomed, fascinating little technological measure, captured in the game. Today, let's stick to ball, and specifically, mostly, to Mike Harkey. If you don't remember Harkey, you're forgiven. He only pitched 656 innings in the big leagues, scattered across nine seasons. About 420 of those were for the Cubs. He was quite good in 1990 (more on that shortly), quite bad in 1993, and quite injured between around around those years. The game I tuned in and watched, and am exhorting you to watch with me in remote, time-shiifted fashion, is this one, from May 23, 1990. Harkey, then 23, entered this game (he hoped) on the upswing. He'd been blasted over the first six starts he made that year, with a 6.23 ERA and .842 opponent OPS. Yet, he retained a rotation spot for the defending division champions, and not without reason. He had a big build and a lively arm, and when he was right, you could see how he might dominate even a good lineup. His previous time out, in Houston against the Astros, he had fired eight scoreless innings, scattering just 10 baserunners and bringing that ERA all the way down to 4.93. Even in that outing, he'd only struck out four, while facing a whopping 33 Houston batters and throwing 130 pitches. (Yes, 130. It really was 1990, you see, and even a 23-year-old was expected to pitch until the hitters started to tell the manager he was done.) (Gee, one wonders if that kind of thing is why Harkey was hurt so often.) For the season, the best of his career, Harkey would only end up striking out 12.9% of opposing hitters. Strikeouts were less common then, of course, but not so much less common that this was typical. The league fanned at a 15.1% clip in 1990. Harkey was a big, fairly hard-throwing pitch-to-contact guy, which is part of why he never did ascend beyond the heights he reached in that first full season in the majors. Nonetheless, Harkey looked good on this day. Steve Stone noted that he had demonstrated the ability to throw both his changeup and his curveball (from a low-three-quarters slot and with good velocity on it, I would say what he then dubbed a curve would go by the name of sweeper, now) for strikes against the Astros. He was doing the same thing early against the Dodgers, and when the Cubs gave him a thin lead (thanks to Dave Clark, who really could hit a righty, baby) in the third, he seized upon it. No Dodgers batter reached base in the third, fourth, or fifth innings. In the top of the sixth, there was some danger. Harkey got the leadoff man, opposing pitcher Tim Belcher (batting for himself in a 1-0 game in the sixth inning! It was not at all noteworthy then, but would be unthinkable by the final few years of DH-less baseball, 30 years later), but then gave up a double and a walk to the top two hitters in the lineup. This was his third time through, already. In some modern games, it would have been time to turn to the bullpen. Back then, though, no one even got warm. Harkey recovered gorgeously, including delivering a couple of nasty changeups to fan Kal Daniels and get out of the inning. It was the second time Harkey's change had retired Daniels on a whiff, and he'd grounded out to Mark Grace in between. Harkey seemed to have the Dodgers slugger in the rocking chair. The Cubs nearly blew it open in the sixth, with two runs generated partially by sloppy Dodgers defense. Harkey mowed down the Dodgers in the seventh and got the leadoff man again in the eighth, cruising, up 3-0. But up 3-0 with one out in the eighth never seems to be that kind to the Cubs, does it? A clean single by pinch-hitter Mickey Hatcher started the trouble. Then, Lenny Harris hit a dribbler down the third-base line. Luis Salazar overran it, going into foul territory, and he failed to even consider that as he reached back for the ball, he was reaching into fair territory again. He was, though, and while he might have had a play on Harris if he'd been in better position or been more aware of the call, he had none by the time all was said and done. Next, a slicing line drive fell just shy of a sliding Doug Dascenzo, putting the Dodgers on the board. It was a well-struck ball, as Hatcher's had been. In all likelihood, this was the hitters telling Don Zimmer they were catching up to Harkey. Still, it could have been caught, if Dascenzo were slightly better-positioned or a hair faster off the block. Harris's and Stan Javier's singles felt unfair, given the great day Harkey was having. He'd earned better. He recovered to get pinch-hitter Eddie Murray to tap back to the mound, though, and although the tying run was now in scoring position, the Cubs were also just one out from escaping the jam. Zimmer had, in my opinion, a difficult dilemma on his hands. He'd allowed Harkey to face Murray, even as Stone remarked on TV that it was time to go to warming southpaw Paul Assenmacher. Murray was a better left-handed hitter than a right-handed one, at that stage of his career, and Assenmacher would have a better chance of getting a double play from him. Harkey had won that battle, though. Should Zimmer let him try to win the war and get Daniels out a fourth time? He went to Assenmacher, and any modern manager would do the same. On regular rest, after throwing 130 pitches in Houston, Harkey was at 101. Daniels, though not much remembered now, was a formidable lefty slugger at the time. Gaining the platoon advantage and going to a fresh arm was a no-brainer. I can't shake the feeling, though, that Harkey had Daniels's number. He overwhelmed him through three at-bats. He just needed one more good changeup to get through the eighth. Surely, though, that's hindsight talking. Assenmacher gave up an opposite-field, three-run homer, to ruin the day. That's baseball, sometimes. Harkey had pitched brilliantly, but it was no easy call to leave him in even to face Murray. There was every risk that Daniels would have done the same thing to him, had Zimmer left him in. The game was defined by some sloppiness, between the Cubs' sixth-inning rally and the Dodgers' to come back. It ended that way, too. A walk and a single to lead off the bottom of the ninth gave the Cubs lots of hope. Those came against Dodgers pitcher—I swear, this is true—Mike Hartley, who gave way to (best we can do on a match) Don Aase, but Aase for Hartley worked out better, sadly, than had Assenmacher for Harkey. Joe Girardi botched a sacrifice bunt, allowing the Dodgers to get the lead runner, so instead of having the tying run a sac fly away and the winning run on second, the runners were still at first and second. A pinch-hitter named Curt Wilkerson struck out, and leadoff man Marvell Wynne recorded the final out. Ryne Sandberg stood in the on-deck circle. Alas. Despite the mistakes by each team, this was a fun game to watch. Despite Sandberg not having a big impact (he went 1-for-4 with an unimportant double), it was nice to be reminded of an unintentional competitive advantage the Cubs claimed back then, too. Sandberg batted second most days, which is (we now know) where a team's best hitter should go in the lineup. At the time, it was vanishingly rare for a player as good as he was to actually bat in that position. From 1984-90, the 1984 and 1990 Cubs were the fourth- and fifth-best teams in terms of OPS from the second spot in the order. The only clubs who beat them were two Red Sox iterations for whom Wade Boggs took that duty, and the 1985 Mariners, thanks to the one All-Star season of left fielder Phil Bradley. This concludes our three-part tour of one random game on YouTube. More such games will be recapped and rehashed later this winter, so don't feel too put-out about this one being a loss. If nothing else, we hope you had fun remembering some guys—and some broadcasters' habits, and some forerunners to modern controversies about the use of technology in baseball, too. Happy Thanksgiving. View full article

Yesterday, we began a festival feast of old baseball by talking about the unique aspects (good and bad) of a 1990 Cubs broadcast. Today, let's tackle the game that was played that day, itself. Image courtesy of YouTube The funny thing about baseball is that every time a team tries something novel and interesting, they are lampooned for their ridiculousness, or else they instigate moral panic. Yet, everywhere you turn throughout the (more than) 150-year history of the game, there have been teams innovating, trying new things both legal and otherwise to gain small advantages within games or across seasons. This has become a more divisive and uncomfortable subject since the Astros were found to have cheated through the use of technology-assisted sign stealing, of course, but again, the Astros were just one in an unending line of teams both before and after them who were shopping for edges in ways they thought of as more creative than truly nefarious. Less well-remembered, but about equally recent, is a controversy between the Mets and Dodgers in 2016. Los Angeles asked permission to paint markers in the Citi Field outfield prior to a game that spring, but after it was determined that they were using electronic positioning devices—laser-based range finders, basically—to pinpoint the marks they wanted to put down for their outfielders, the league forbade them from doing it. What's notable, though, isn't that the measure was barred, but that it was something the Dodgers wanted to try at all. Teams are so precise and so focused on defensive positioning that they wanted to deploy high-tech means of ensuring they got it right, even though there are myriad ways—certain visual cues, the positioning cards all outfielders now seem to carry, coaches shouting and waving their arms—to do it without that rigamarole. They trust the technology, and they want to use it to increase the precision of their work. That's not anywhere close to new. What does it have to do with the game played on May 23, 1990, between the Cubs and Dodgers, though? I'm glad you (well, I, but kind of you) asked. In 1990, the league restricted the number of coaches teams could have in uniform and in the dugout during games. This was in response to a rising tide of teams employing more coaches than ever (hey, we've come full-circle, there). Back then, it was less because teams wanted to have three hitting coaches to implement highly individualized and evolving plans for each player than because they thought themselves engaged in a tense game of chess every day, against the opposing team and its manager. The coaches who clustered in the dugouts tended to be advisors on strategy and deliverers of signs, rather than instructors and biomechanists, but anyway, they were growing in number, and the league decided it was getting out of hand. Previously, six coaches had been explicitly allowed, and teams were often able to fudge it and get a seventh involved. The NL forced them to come back down to five for 1990. The Dodgers begrudgingly removed ex-catcher Joe Ferguson from their dugout staff. But the Dodgers didn't want to lose the value they were getting from having an extra set of eyes, so they (and a couple of other teams) simply pivoted to radio. Ferguson took up residence in the press box each day, and would radio down instructions on (among other things, probably) positioning defenders to Bill Russell, manager Tommy Lasorda's right-hand man. On May 23, 1990, it looked like this. Plainly, this is not a clandestine operation. You've gotta love the 1990 vibes of that headset. The league was aware of the process and allowed teams to use it—until barely a year later, when "reports of abuses" of the system were lodged by various opponents and the league banned radio communication in the dugout. The Dodgers were mad. "Football teams do it, why can't baseball teams do it?" Lasorda asked, rhetorically. He had a fair point—but maybe the motive for that protest was really that the team was finding too many edges, after all. It's funny how it's always the Dodgers, isn't it? Throughout baseball history, while the Dodgers might not originate a given innovation, they tend to be the ones most eager to adopt and expand it. They were, of course, the first organization to break the color line, which is sold to us in textbooks as a moral choice but which history suggests was much more about gaining a leg up. They were among the first teams to create a full-fledged farm system, an innovation Branch Rickey brought with him after creating the modern farm while working for the Cardinals. It was while in the employ of the Dodgers that Tommy John underwent and recovered from the surgery that now bears his name. Rickey made famous the Dodger Way, including little things like "coconut snatching"—a ham-fisted metaphor for finding opportunities to move players to new positions, especially sliding them up what we would later come to understand as the defensive spectrum—and physical training tools like string-frame strike zones and stride-correcting bands. I often lament that the Cubs have not taken a turn as the powerhouse of the National League for a decade—or even been consistent enough to post seven winning records in a stretch of 10 full seasons—since the 1930s. It's not a coincidence, unfortunately. There have been times when their ownership should have spent much more on the team, and opportunities were missed. More often, though, the Cubs got beat—they keep getting beat, even—because the Cardinals and Dodgers were better and earlier than them, at things like building a farm, integrating the roster, codifying player development, and seeking tools to stay ahead of the competition. That doofy-looking headset on Bill Russell is an imperfect metaphor for the problem, but it's one symbol of it, nonetheless. Here endeth Part 2 of our discussion of this one random game from nearly a quarter-century ago. Tune in tomorrow, when I actually talk about the players who played in this game (and how it went) for the first and only time! View full article

It's a holiday weekend. With the long desert of the offseason still stretched out before us, allow yourself an oasis and flip on a game from May 1990. The internet is, in some ways, a marvelous and joyous thing. Image courtesy of YouTube I refuse to be starved for baseball. It's healthy, sometimes, to deny oneself constant indulgence in vices, but I find my addictive love of the game too strong to stay away from it for long, now that the world wide web has made it possible to luxuriate in games anywhere from 10 to 45 years old almost on demand. When winter hits, we're not commanded to hibernate and make do only with the baseball we soaked up all summer. We have the option to treat summer as eternal and spin our way back in time, to some game we've never seen before, or had long forgotten. We can find all kinds of old baseball that is, nonetheless, new to us, and experience it the same way we might have if we were years older or hadn't had school that day. For this privilege, we have to thank (profusely) the myriad amateur archivists who post games by the dozens on YouTube. It's a treasure trove, and while a few accounts have been taken down over the years due to apparent copyright infringement, the league seems to have adopted a stance of benign neglect toward them lately. So, for instance, you can search for games from any team and any year, and you've got a fair shot of finding at least one full game they played that year. Today, let's enjoy what happens if you search "1990 Cubs". The game we'll review together is from May 23, 1990. Linked here is the detailed box score from that day on Baseball Reference. (Spoiler alert, obviously.) And here's the video itself: For nostalgic types, this is the superior form of the upload, because it includes (many of) the commercials. If you miss not only baseball (the game you got to watch just a few weeks or months ago) but the world of the 20th century, watching these games can really make you feel immersed in it—and the videos that keep the commercials from the original broadcast maximize that feeling of time travel. Not all of that is good, of course. Did you miss hearing Thom Brennaman call games? Probably not, but he takes the middle three innings of this one, alongside Steve Stone. Then again, if you're young enough not to remember (or perhaps even have heard of) the arrangement, this might give you a fun frisson of discovery: As late as the mid-1990s, Harry Caray would swap into the Cubs radio booth to do play-by-play for innings 4-6 each day. Stone would then broadcast with (most often) Brennaman, Josh Lewin, or Wayne Larrivee, until Caray returned for the final three frames. It wasn't a common setup even then, but it was certainly not unique, either. Nowadays, it would be a downright thorny legal issue. Anyway, Brennaman is here. So are some of the things we did well to leave in the century to which they belonged, like a midgame sequence in which Arne Harris lingers long on a shot of an attractive woman in the stands. Unlike so many similar shots over the years, this one doesn't involve an especially revealing or suggestive outfit. Yet, after Stone finishes a salient point about Mike Scioscia's evolving approach at the plate, Caray says, "Sorry, Steve, I didn't hear anything you said," followed by an unsavory chortle. "With me, Harry, it's baseball, baseball, baseball," Steve replies, but it doesn't quite save this moment from cringe territory. Harris, the famous producer of Cubs games on TV for so much of the formative period of the modern team, was infamous for these shots, but in this case, he also chose to work in artistic juxtaposition. After a brief cut back to game action, he delivered a shot of an adorable baby or toddler, as if to shame Caray for his ribaldry. Not only didn't it work, but Harry kept shooting: "Is that yours, Steve?" he teased, and Steve was forced to disclaim his paternity of a random child on national TV. It's undeniably funny, and a big part of why the Cubs' popularity soared during the superstation years. It's also a little unsettling, through modern eyes. Let's take a moment to celebrate Harris, though, for the much less objectionable innovation that made him and his broadcasts famous. Do you remember watching Cubs games prior to about 20 years ago and thinking every play—even relatively routine ones—was a little more exciting than in other places? Do you ever think that players used to run harder through the bag on ground balls than they do now? As ludicrous as those subjective impressions sound (and are, objectively speaking), they weren't totally in your head. They were created for you, by Harris. As nicely detailed by Zach Buchanan in this 2021 piece at The Athletic, TV producers of baseball games can make two different sets of choices when a ground ball is hit during a game. As a default setup, they pretty much all start with the center field camera, then flip to the view from high and behind home plate—a proxy for the vantage point of the broadcaster calling the play—when the ball is hit. The industry standard, going all the way back to the 1960s under NBC Sports producer Harry Coyle, was to stick to that second shot and follow the play to its conclusion, unless it were a ball in the gap or something, necessitating cuts to runners in various positions. On a grounder to second base, the camera follows the ball to the fielder, then patiently tracks along with the throw, over to first base. Harris didn't do things that way. He was famous for the 4-2-3 cut (named for the standard numbers assigned to the various camera positions involved), which starts the same way the Coyle version does. Once a player like Ryne Sandberg or Shawon Dunston collected a bouncer, though, Harris would cut to the camera positioned high alongside first base. The resulting shot would have the fielder throwing the ball downscreen, and right around the time it got to the glove of (in this case) Mark Grace, a runner would zip by in a blur. This style creates, perhaps, some artificial suspense, and those of us who watched hundreds of games produced by Harris learned to intuit based on the runner, the pace of the ball, and the cleanness of the play by the infielder whether they would be safe or out. For casual and new fans, though, and perhaps especially for kids, it was easy to mistake the extra cut and the more visible speed of the runner—they're streaking straight across your screen, in the Harris formula, instead of running deeper into the picture and off toward a corner as they do when viewed from high behind home—for extra action and more drama. It worked on plenty of double play tries, too, transforming even the out on the lead runner into a tense, visually captivating thing. The shots now often seen in slow motion on replays used to be how Harris would frame the play in real time. I began life as a baseball fan in 1997, so I only watched five seasons of Cubs baseball before Harris died at the end of the 2001 season. The broadcasts still tended to use his device until several years later, but now, they match the industry standard and stick to 4-2 on such plays. To some extent, Harris was also problem-solving, because in that much lower-definition era and without motion smoothing options like we have today, the extra cut kept him from having to show the throw across the diamond more or less as a confused blur, as some broadcasts did. These days, no one has to work around that hurdle, so the 4-2 makes the most sense. I still love the 4-2-3, though, even though I'm now aware of it and much less taken in by its attempt to create drama. I suspect the effective deployment of this subtly different capture of a play is part of why so many fans fell in love with a version of the game that was not actually materially more interesting or varied than the one played now—whatever old heads might tell you. For today, we end this here. This is part one, and it didn't even talk about the game itself! But when watching these old games, the game itself is just part of the fun anyway. Tomorrow, we will tackle the action of the contest. Come back and check it out. View full article

We know the Cubs will try to add proven, high-quality pitchers this winter, even if it be at a high price. That does not need to come at the expense of adding interesting arms on minor-league deals, though, and one journeyman should garner special attention from them. Image courtesy of © David Frerker-Imagn Images By all rights, Emmanuel Ramírez should be out of professional baseball. The game has told him he's not good enough—and even that it was functionally done with him—more times than most players can bear. Signed out of his native Dominican Republic back in 2012, Ramírez was released by the Padres at the end of the 2020 season. He then spent single seasons in the Atlanta and Yankees systems, cut loose again at the end of each. He became a minor-league free agent three times, and the third time, he ended up spending a year (2023) in the Mexican League. The Marlins liked what they saw there (and in last winter's Dominican Winter League) enough to bring him back into affiliated ball, and he finally made it to the big leagues for the first time, at age 29. After 15 ugly appearances with an ERA near 7.00, though, Miami waived him. The Blue Jays claimed him, but never brought him to the big leagues, and then they released him earlier this month. In nearly 900 professional innings, Ramírez has only gotten one taste of the majors, and the cup of coffee was a bitter one. His ERA isn't even good in the 101 innings he's pitched in parts of four seasons in Triple A. Quite simply, he's on the fringes of the MLB apparatus, over 30 years old and seemingly hanging on desperately to his last shot. He's back down in the Dominican, pitching winter ball again. That's not the résumé of a highly appealing free-agent target, but that's just what Ramírez ought to be, on a minor-league deal this winter. The gawky right-hander bears a passing resemblance to Carlos Marmol, but that's not why Marmol's former team should want him. He has redeveloped himself as a pitcher, and his stuff and his funky delivery are perfect fits for the Cubs. The mix is very simple, two pitches with a vague tertiary option. Ramírez throws a fastball that sits 94, with good cut-ride action. As I hope you've gleaned from me by now, the Cubs adore that fastball shape. It's what Porter Hodge, Justin Steele, and top prospects Cade Horton and Brandon Birdsell (among others) do, and the team targets it wherever they can find it. They also love a good splitter, and Ramírez has just that, too. It's almost the only pitch he throws as a complement to the heater. That splitter has variable movement, but the velocity gap it achieves from his fastball—10 miles per hour, on average—makes it a potential bat-misser even when it doesn't fall off the table as steeply as one might like. Most of the time, there's plenty of movement differential between the two pitches, too. For that reason, hitters whiffed on over 47% of their swings against the splitter last year, between Triple A and the majors. Ramírez's breaking ball is coded as a slider but really acts more like a curveball. It's not a very good pitch, and isn't of great use to him. Maybe the Cubs could help him firm it up into a truer slider, or a Death Ball-style curve, but the thrust of Ramírez's arsenal is the rising heater and the diving splitter. When it's right, it's plenty. E Ram Splitty.mp4 As you can see, Ramírez's splitter works just fine even against righties, thanks to an extreme overhand slot. That delivery is also where the backspin on his fastball comes from. He struck out 32.1% of the right-handed batters he saw last year; he can dominate them even at the highest levels of the game. The splitter pulls a string on them; his fastball is almost untouchable at the top of the zone. E Ram Heat.mp4 You've already seen his stats, though, and I'm telling you he'll be available on a minor-league deal. Why? Because lefties tend to bash his head in, especially by taking advantage of mistakes on his fastball. The slot Ramírez employs begets misses along a vertical line, rather than a horizontal one. He doesn't miss in when he's aiming away; he misses down when he's aiming up. That's always trouble. E Ram Dong.mp4 The difference in results against a pitcher's four-seam fastball based on vertical location tends to be fairly stark. For Ramírez, it's downright extreme. He just can't work effectively at the bottom edge of the zone with that pitch, so every miss has a chance of becoming very costly. Why should the Cube still be interested? Beyond the nice fit of the traits they seek (that fastball shape, for one) and the things they coach well (a sharper breaking ball from just this kind of pitch mix, for better results and platoon matchup insulation), there's one more thing: the Cubs don't have anyone else who throws like Ramírez. A great bullpen gives opposing teams an endlessly changing set of varied looks. The Cubs lean heavily toward lower arm slots; Ramírez would bring their only true overhand arm to the mix. By no means should Ramírez prevent the Cubs from landing anyone else this winter. He doesn't even need to take up a spot on their 40-man roster, initially. He has impressive enough stuff and is a good enough fit for the organization, though, to make him worthy of a close look as the team collects insurance policies to help make it through the long season ahead. View full article