Matthew Trueblood

The Cubs and Nico Hoerner agreed on a contract extension on Monday night. This isn’t a megadeal or a risky, long-term commitment, but that’s ok. It’s a small thing, but from small things, momma, big things one day come. Nico Hoerner was already under the Cubs’ control through 2025, and he and the team agreed to a contract for just over $2.5 million for 2023 back in January. This new deal, worth $35 million over three years, extends that team control by one season, and that makes it pretty unusual. Let’s talk about what differentiates it from most extensions signed at similar career stages recently, and what that can tell us about the Cubs’ direction and the implications of the pact. By the time a player reaches three years of service time and becomes eligible for arbitration, most of the team’s leverage over them has dissipated. As such, the most common types of extensions signed in this window are those that fall on either end of the extension spectrum. Some guys sign seven- or eight-year deals worth nine figures, as Kyle Seager and Freddie Freeman each did last decade. Others sign deals that only cover their arbitration-eligible seasons, or even just two of the three. Shohei Ohtani did that with the Angels a couple of years ago. Deals that fall between those extremes are rare, though, and even when they happen, they usually have something this deal notably lacks: a club option for the second year of would-be free agency. Two years ago, the Royals signed former first-round pick Hunter Dozier to an extension that cheaply bought out one year of free agency, but it also gave the team an option on the following season. The Reds signed Tucker Barnhart to a similar deal in September 2017, and the Red Sox did one with Christian Vázquez the following March. The last truly relevant comparator for this deal that I can find, though–the most recent one that bought out exactly one year of free agency, without an option attached–came back in January 2015, when the Reds committed to catcher Devin Mesoraco. Unlike most of the other guys who sign at this stage (guys like Max Muncy, who did a deal with the Dodgers that gave them an option on his first would-be free-agent season), but much like Hoerner, Mesoraco played a premium position and was in line to reach free agency at a relatively young age. Also like Hoerner, Mesoraco was a former first-round pick. That many of the guys we’re talking about here were catchers underscores why Hoerner was at all interested in this deal, which delays free agency for him (even if it does compensate him pretty fairly for that season, as we’ll discuss more in a bit). For a guy with numerous and visible strengths and youth on his side, Hoerner faces a lot of uncertainty. He’s sliding to a less valuable and much less valued defensive position this year. Injuries have stunted and slowed his emergence. It makes sense for him to seize upon a significant, guaranteed payday. It just wouldn’t have made much sense for him to give away any more team control than that, unless the Cubs were willing to go into the same range Freeman reached years ago with the Braves (eight years and $135 million). Obviously, that kind of deal wasn’t forthcoming. When the Cubs publicly trumpet Hoerner and proclaim him a building block for their future, they’re not faking it, but nor is Jed Hoyer given to irrational commitment. Since the megadeal was off the table, it was going to be this kind of half-measure or nothing this spring. In similar situations, most teams and players simply agree to drop it and check back in after the season. That’s why this kind of deal rarely materializes. Therein lies the excitement and encouragement of this deal. It’s not just about locking up Hoerner for 2026, or gaining cost certainty for 2024 and 2025. It’s really about laying a foundation of commitment. It’s a down payment that doesn’t demand an overcommitment from either side, but that signifies some investment from each party. Right after the deal happened, you could find some people on Cubs Twitter talking about it as a bit of a PR move. I don’t think that’s wrong, exactly, but it’s deeply incomplete. That wasn’t a primary or even secondary motivation here. The secondary motivation was locking up one more year of Hoerner’s services. The primary one was showing Hoerner (and other players to whom the front office might talk, either now or in the future) that they’re willing to try something creative, to bridge some gaps, and to pony up for great people and players. On Hoerner’s side, it’s an acknowledgment of that gesture, and an intimation that he trusts them. Because it pushes free agency one year further away, and because it holds down his earning potential for the next two seasons pretty efficiently, the very structure of the deal encourages both sides to re-engage and do a longer deal if things look good after this season, or after 2024. That’s by design. In that way, even though this move changes little for the 2023 Cubs and makes a small immediate difference in their long-term plans, it’s a major development. In the long run, its impact will be greater than it seems if viewed through the narrow lens of the contract terms. View full article

Michael Fulmer didn’t want to let go of a dream. The Cubs didn’t want to pay top dollar for a new closer. The two found their way to one another as their options dwindled, but the fit might turn out to be fate. Once an All-Star starting pitcher for the Detroit Tigers and a much-rumored Cubs trade target, Michael Fulmer had a hard fall from those heights beginning in 2018. He had never missed bats like a true ace, and that season, the league found a way to exploit that fact more consistently than they had in his first two campaigns. His ERA got bloated, and then he got hurt, and his career as a starter ended with a thud. Since 2021, Fulmer has been a fairly successful one-inning reliever, tapping into more swing-and-miss and limiting hard contact as he was unable to in his doomed efforts to return from Tommy John surgery as a starter. He accomplished the metamorphosis that has made many pitchers rich, even when they seemed to be on the verge of falling out of the majors altogether. As it turns out, though, that was always a begrudging transformation. The man who briefly dominated the American League with what radio commentator Jim Price lovingly called a “swingback fastball,” faced with the reality that he could no longer stick as a starting pitcher, went to the bullpen and went right on plotting his return to that very role. This winter, as a free agent, Fulmer initially told interested teams he wanted to start again. That stalled out most conversations, and kept him on the market until the middle of February. If you incorporate that information into your evaluation of Fulmer’s last two seasons, they make more sense. Despite mid-90s fastball velocity, he didn’t discover a new gear or start striking batters out at a 30-percent clip when he made the conversion to relief. In fact, since the start of 2021, his strikeout rate is 23.4 percent. That’s barely average for all pitchers, let alone for a high-leverage reliever. Why didn’t he find more whiffs next to the sunflower seeds in the bullpen? Much of the answer is that he kept pitching like a starter. He threw four pitches to lefties throughout the last two seasons: his slider, his four-seamer, his sinker, and his changeup. He even sprinkled in the odd curveball. Against righties, he was more slider-heavy, and he gradually shelved the changeup. He stuck with the cutter-shaped slider he had always used, though. He could throw that bullet-spin slider at over 90 miles per hour. It had a sharp veer, a slower but no less aesthetically pleasing mirror image of that “swingback” sinker. He felt confident about throwing it for strikes, or at least about being near the zone with it. Unfortunately, the results showed that hitters had a similar comfort with it. They never crushed it, but they swung at it at an exactly average rate, and they whiffed considerably less often than at an average slider. No more. Now, Fulmer is a closer. If he couldn’t start, he at least wanted that opportunity, and that was the role the Cubs gave him a chance to earn. He came into camp even before his deal was official, and under the stewardship of the Cubs’ evolving pitching instruction infrastructure, he’s turned that cutterish slider into a whippy, sweeping thing that has a much better chance to miss bats. The horizontal movement is just one aspect of the difference. Fulmer’s new slider spins about 150 revolutions per minute faster than the old version did. It also has slightly more vertical depth, and it’s about four miles per hour slower. That combination is the recipe for many more whiffs. Fulmer hasn’t abandoned the hard, short slider. He still has it as a supplementary option, and can go there if he needs a strike but doesn’t want to pour in a fastball. For the first time, though, he’s learning to really pitch like a reliever. He doesn’t have to leave everything he learned in his years as a starter at the bullpen door. He can still use his four-seamer or sink the ball a bit, as situations, matchups, and his comfort warrant. He can still use the odd changeup to keep lefties off-balance. He can still use either variant of the slider. He just needed to embrace the fact that he’s not the player he once dreamed of being, and now that he has, he can find the true upside of his best weapons, old and (especially) new. This is part of what the Cubs have done well recently when it comes to the bullpen. Most of their high-profile, successful reclamation projects haven’t faced the same dilemma Fulmer is just now resolving, but they’ve done that specific thing, too. In general, in addition to getting better at pitch design and analytics-informed training, Chicago is good at getting mental and emotional blockages out of the way for relievers at a tricky career stage. If they’ve unlocked Fulmer’s potential by communicating well and being patient with a proud hurler, they could realize as much profit on this move as on any reliever deal in recent memory. View full article

I think he still counts as ultimately uninteresting, but I have one Jorge Soler anecdote to share. I was in the Cubs' clubhouse for two days in June 2015, working on a feature for Baseball Prospectus. I must've spent three hours in the clubhouse and the dugout. I never saw Jorge Soler's left hand. The man walked around, everywhere, for a long time on two consecutive days, with one hand down his pants.

Chicago Cubs baseball is… well, pretty much where it’s always been. But now, we’re here, too! Welcome to a new era for a long-running, passionate online Cubs community, North Side Baseball. I’m Matt Trueblood. For those who don’t know me, I’ve spent years in the loose and ever-shifting sphere of digital Cubdom. I was one of the original crew at Baseball Prospectus Wrigleyville, and I’ve been hip-deep (or, if we’re honest, sometimes in well over my head) on Cubs Twitter for a decade or so. I’ll be leading the charge here as we get going, writing often about all things Cubs and working with a small but growing staff of fellow thinkers, writers, bloggers, and talkers to deliver daily content and start some high-quality baseball conversations. My hope is that this will be a welcoming and thoughtful place for all baseball fans, but especially for Cubs fans. We will endeavor to bring you analysis, commentary, and perspectives that you can’t find in a dozen other places online, despite the wide selection of very good Cubs content available. We’ll dig into subjects in depth, but we also want to respect your time, so most of our pieces will be fairly short. I solemnly swear not to try to cram everything I know about a topic into one post about it, so that we all have room to kick around related ideas in the comments, and so that the conversation can be picked up wherever we leave off, on some other day. Although they’re no favorites to win anything this year, the 2023 Cubs figure to be a compelling and watchable bunch. Whereas the last two seasons have been marked by much waiting and seeing and not much doing or serious evaluating, this year provides a chance to grade the team based on whether they take concrete steps toward being a consistent contender and a championship-caliber franchise again. I’m excited to be starting our journey at such a pivotal juncture of the team’s, and it should make for lots of fun viewing, reading, and discussion in the months ahead. Please stop by often, and add your voice to the conversation, be it by commenting on stories you find here, setting up your own blog in our forums, or contacting us to find out more about writing for the front page. At its best, Cubs fandom is a network not unlike the neighborhood in which Wrigley Field is situated: a bit crowded and populated with some more corporate faces than in the past, but fundamentally, still something organic and wholesome and real. I will never forget my first taste of Wrigley. I was eight years old, and my dad drove us down from Appleton, Wis. to see Ryne Sandberg’s last home game. Though we didn’t know it at the time, that would also be the last time Harry Caray sang from the WGN booth at the seventh-inning stretch. It was the end of a long and dreary season, but the Cubs won in a romp, and after the game, at that long-since-razed chain-link fence beside the long-since-buried player parking lot, I got Sammy Sosa’s autograph–thanks to being perched atop my dad’s shoulders, lurching and pleading desperately. My dad was a Ryno diehard. He had wanted me to go that hard for his autograph instead. Twenty-five years later, I’m not sure which of us was right, but the fact that he supported me in my choice and that my fandom took its own distinct shape (even as it grew in the shade and under the influence of his) is a wonderful reminder of what a big and inviting tent the Cubs can offer us. I’m thrilled to have this chance to stand beneath that tent with all of you. View full article

After signing a seven-year deal worth $177 million, Dansby Swanson probably wanted to put up better numbers in the Cactus League. By now, we all know better than to obsess over spring training stats, but it’s worth discussing: Should fans be worried about the shortstop’s struggles? In one sense, the answer is easy: no. Don’t ever put too much stock in outcomes in Arizona (or in Florida, for that matter), and always remember that the fundamental reasons for which the Cubs wanted Swanson and paid him so handsomely remain valid. That Swanson didn’t hit for average or even generate power this spring shouldn’t concern anyone overmuch. Several years ago, a study by analyst Dan Rosenheck found that a player’s spring stats do matter to some extent, and especially that their strikeout and walk rates can lend us some insight. After all, those are the numbers that tend to stabilize most quickly during regular-season play. That might prompt one to fret over Swanson’s 14 strikeouts in 46 spring plate appearances. It needn’t, though, because Swanson’s good offensive performance over the last three years of his Atlanta tenure came despite a 26-percent strikeout rate. In such a small sample, a bump from there to 30 percent is not statistically meaningful. Just as importantly, Swanson has drawn nine walks against those 14 strikeouts. That implies that he’s taken an especially patient approach at the plate this spring, focusing on good swing decisions, which is also what Swanson himself has articulated recently. Being more patient than usual, whether as a strategy or just in the name of seeing a few more pitches and training one’s eyes before the stakes are dramatically raised, can easily lead to more strikeouts, because it tends to mean deeper counts and more two-strike situations. That kind of thing can be modulated and ameliorated fairly easily. That’s two reasons not to sweat Swanson’s strikeout-swamped spring. We should take a moment, though, to admit that there remain some bad vibes about it, and to grasp why. There have been repeated allusions, since the Cubs and Swanson agreed to a deal in January, to the team’s belief that there is another offensive level Swanson can reach with just a few tweaks. That makes me nervous. For one thing, it’s an uneasy echo of what the team said when they signed Jason Heyward prior to the 2016 season. Heyward had had an excellent career to that point, but there were some well-documented shortcomings in his game at the plate, and the Cubs set about trying to fix them all, to turn him from a mere All-Star into a Hall of Famer. Instead, they helped create a major problem, because the adjustments didn’t work, and Heyward went backward. Whenever a team acquires a talented player with a strong track record, it’s a risk to try to change what they did to achieve that level of success. The Cubs’ hitting development infrastructure wasn’t up to the challenge of doing that with Heyward seven years ago. Are they better now by a wide enough margin to ensure that the same thing won’t happen? Secondly, though, and more broadly, it’s a mistake to envision the glorious upside of every big-league free agent a team acquires–especially ones who sign for big money. That’s an indication that they’ve already had considerable success, and it might not be the case that that success was merely a preview of greater things to come. Instead, it might well be that their success has been the result of maximizing their talent through hard, smart work. If an executive or an organization gets in the habit of seeing significant upside in high-profile free agents, they’re probably succumbing to overexuberance, and the likelihood of costly failure is substantial. On balance, I expect great things from Swanson this year, and throughout his contract. I don’t view the poor spring numbers as a red flag. I just think it’s important to notice and name the danger in wanting a $177-million investment to return the same production as a $300-million one. If the Cubs wanted Trea Turner, Xander Bogaerts, or Carlos Correa, they needed to sign them. As long as they’re ok with what Dansby Swanson actually does well, though, everything should be fine, Cactus League batting average be damned. View full article