Matthew Trueblood

Very well-put. Yeah. I think that’s what they tried to do by signing Swanson and Taillon this winter. The problem is that there weren’t a couple more such guys already on the roster, either via more aggressiveness in previous winters or via better scouting and development recently.

When Marcus Stroman takes the field and picks up the ball to throw the first pitch of the 2023 season for the Chicago Cubs, he’ll be the perfect standard bearer for them. Stroman is an amalgam of so many tweaks and tinkers, so many tricks and tenacities, that he is at once endlessly analyzable and utterly unsolvable. His team is much the same way. One of the game’s smartest and most ardent craftsmen, Marcus Stroman has engineered every pitch in his arsenal through careful calibration. He guards his secrets, but you can see the way he’s worked to refine certain pitches, reshape others, and execute everything more consistently. He is, inarguably, in the business of constant, continuous pitch design. What sets him apart from many of his fellows, though, is that Stroman does most of it the old-fashioned way. There are analytics-guided, objectivist, quantitative ways to do all of the popular things of modern pitching. Because we are a society (and because baseball, especially, is an industry) very comfortable with both using and being governed by numbers, those quantitative approaches have quickly become the dominant ones. However, there are also intuitive, subjective, qualitative ways to do most of the same things. Right now, the industry privileges the former over the latter. Increasingly, teams are uneasy with the idea of letting pitching instructors and coaches (let alone individual pitchers) steer things like pitch design and pitching strategy based on anything other than data, because the data is there, and we have a bias in favor of objectivism. Stroman, though, seems to be a holdout–a subjectivist in the old mold. I don’t mean to imply, by any means, that Stroman isn’t using data to inform his training or his tinkering. He’s clearly making some use of numbers. Whereas many pitchers and teams react with fear or resistance when something they try clashes with the numbers, though, Stroman almost seems to enjoy it. More and more, pitchers strive to have clear distinctions between their pitches. One pitch might play off another by starting in the same visual tunnel, or by mirroring its partner’s spin, but the goal is for each pitch to do something markedly different than the others in the repertoire. To that thesis, Stroman is the antithesis. Take a look at his pitch movement by pitch type in 2022: I often say that pitching is not really one thing, but two distinct ones: pitching to righties, and pitching to lefties. If you break it down that way, Stroman does have fractionally more differentiation between his offerings. Righties rarely see his cutter, so he's playing his slider off the sinker and four-seamer fairly often. Even so, he does occasionally use the cutter, and he slightly changes the shape of his pitches from one to the next, rather than try to execute the same version of each pitch each time he throws it. For the first time, last year, Stroman had two different sliders. Righties got one with more tilt and lateral movement; lefties got a more vertical version of it. He also tended to let his sinker run to his arm side more against lefties. That's strange! Normally, a pitcher tries to tamp down the run on a sinker against opposite-hnded batters, to get them to see it more like a four-seamer, which has smaller platoon splits. Stroman doesn't care, though. He's using the sinker to set up his cutter, and vice-versa, so he wants lefties to be fooled by each. He's not chasing strikeouts with those offerings, but looking to induce weak contact. He's hard on the pitch-classification systems, but he's also hard on us, because we've learned to use averages to talk and to learn about pitchers' stuff, and Stroman is not a set of averages. He makes every individual data point important. Look at his distribution of pitch velocities from last year: This chart doesn't even break out his four-seamer from his sinker, but you can see how much overlap exists between the cutter and those pitches; between his slider and changeup; between the changeup and cutter; and even between the cutter and slider. As any good pitching coach told their pupils to do until about a decade ago, Stroman adds and subtracts velocity on each offering, based on the situation and his read of his oppoonent's swing path and timing. His distribution of spin direction is even more wild. Sometimes, what the algorithm is calling his cutter (because it's hard and tight) is probably really his slider. It's impossible to tell for sure, though, because he really does spin his cutter unusually inconsistently in the first place. On top of that kind of quirk, everything Stroman throws--every single offering, to a greater extent than almost any other pitcher in baseball--moves in a way considerably different than its spin direction would imply. (Spin direction is captured in the lefthand image, above. Actual, observed movement is on the right.) He's using finger pressure and seam-shifted wake to change things up so much that hitters rarely have any cue about what's coming. As hard as he is on pitch classifiers and on fans who want to break down his stuff, he's merely trying to be hard on hitters, and it's working. When you add Stroman's athleticism, his attitude, and his toughness to the equation, you get a pitcher who succeeds far beyond the merits of his raw stuff. That's why he does what he does. The 2023 Cubs can only compete for the playoffs if they're Stroman in macrocosm. They need to be unpredictable and aggressive, They need to make opponents, and maybe even fans, a bit uncomfortable. They need to outstrip their talent by having good chemistry and paying attention to detail, and by doing things a little bit differently from one moment to the next, always learning from the previous plays, always sensitive to the situation. Projection systems don't project that kind of thing, because the things that create that kind of magic don't generally show up in the database those systems use. The Cubs, like Stroman, will just have to beat the odds. View full article

David Ross showed his hand in spring training. Whenever possible, it looks like he’s going to have the same three hitters atop his lineup throughout 2023. Hear me out: Do those guys have just a whiff of the top of the 1984 Cubs order to them? With so many moving parts and matchup guys populating the rest of the roster, the Cubs won’t use the same lineup from the cleanup spot downward very often in 2023. The same isn’t true at the top, though. If Nico Hoerner is healthy, David Ross wants him in the leadoff spot. If Dansby Swanson is healthy, he’s Ross’s second hitter. If Ian Happ is healthy, Ross likes to slot him in third, behind Swanson. Those three are expected to be the heart of this team this season: their top performers, and their leaders. It’s fitting that they’ll be the three guys sure to bat in the first inning whenever Ross can pencil them into the order. I was trying to remember the last time the top of a Cubs lineup had quite that feel to it. These guys certainly aren’t as good as, for instance, Dexter Fowler, Kris Bryant, and Anthony Rizzo, who batted 1-2-3 a good number of times for the Cubs in 2015 and 2016, but Rizzo and Bryant frequently flipped between the second and third spots, and many other players (Jorge Soler, Ben Zobrist, etc.) spent meaningful time in the second slot. Nor did those guys run as much or as well as Hoerner, Swanson, and Happ should run under the new rules of 2023. The 2008 triad of Alfonso Soriano, Ryan Theriot (remember his one great year?) and Derrek Lee feels a little more comparable. Those guys batted in that sequence 74 times that year, and they blended speed, batting average, tough at-bats, and lethal power–although sometimes in a confusing, inefficient sequence. If things go well for this year’s Cubs, though, they’re going to run this trio out atop the order quite a bit more than 74 times. Sunday was the anniversary of one of the great trades in Cubs history, amid a year of great Cubs trades. On March 26, 1984, the Cubs dealt Bill Campbell and Mike Diaz to the Phillies, and received in return Gary Matthews, Bob Dernier, and Porfi Altamirano. A week later, that team opened a season in which they weren’t expected to be serious contenders, only to stun everyone by streaking to the NL East title. For that team, Dernier, Ryne Sandberg, and Matthews batted 1-2-3 121 times. They were instant offense. The two veterans facilitated and maximized the explosive breakout of the young Sandberg, and all three garnered MVP votes by season’s end. I’m not saying that Hoerner, Swanson, and Happ will replicate the transformative impact of Dernier, Sandberg, and Matthews. That would be nuts. It’s not a rational or serious expectation. I’m merely saying that, if we want to tell ourselves a story in which the 2023 Cubs surprise people and seize the NL Central from the heavily favored Cardinals and Brewers, that story could be best and most pleasingly told by starting with Hoerner, Swanson, and Happ reprising the roles of Dernier, Sandberg, and Matthews. Baseball Prospectus publishes its PECOTA projections, not only with 50th-percentile numbers, but with the option to view other percentiles, too. In other words, one can check a player’s 90th-percentile projections to see what it would look like if they had a year in the top decile of possibilities, based on the simulations and spectrums of outcomes the system spits out. Let’s indulge for a moment. Here are Hoerner, Swanson, and Happ, with their 90th-percentile projections for 2023. The 1984 Cubs Redux Player AVG OBP SLG HR SB Hoerner .281 .342 .406 10 20 Swanson .256 .323 .443 24 20 Happ .254 .342 .463 25 8 In one way, that serves as a note of caution. None of those lines amounts to the catalytic excellence that was Sandberg’s 1984. If these are 90th-percentile outcomes, we’re reminded that a real recapturing of that summer’s magic is something closer to a one-in-a-million shot than to, say, one in one hundred. In another, more salient way, though: don’t those lines look pretty? The Cubs got a .307 on-base percentage from the leadoff spot in 2022. If Hoerner could restore some competence and intensity to that slot and set the table for a pair of solid sluggers who can also put pressure on the defense in other ways, it starts to feel possible that the team could score enough to support their excellent defense and their improved pitching staff. It’s a fantasy, but Opening Day is just two days away. You can afford a bit of irrational exuberance. You might even need it. View full article

Tim, buddy: I wasn't guessing. With 3-4 years of service time, this type of deal is quite rare. You can check my work on the MLBTR Extension Tracker, which is here: https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/extensiontracker

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