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Stratos

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Everything posted by Stratos

  1. Stratos
    He looked nasty in Spring Training. Too bad he got hurt. He had bite on the curve then if I remember.
  2. Stratos
    Maybe Isaac is a little banged up, or Craig is playing matchups. Maybe they want to see if Wizzy can do better with more regular playing time? Hard to come in and hit when you're only playing once a week.
  3. Stratos
    Maybe Craig can bring in the entire Brewers organization.
  4. Stratos
    The Cubs sound guy started playing the track "Sweet Emotions" by Aerosmith over the speakers when Kyle came off the mound for the last time and gave the teammates hugs in the dugout and gave the curtain call. C'mon sound guy, just let the moment breathe and play out.
  5. Stratos
    Alcantara so far has shown 91st percentile sprint speed. Holy jeez.
  6. Stratos
    Clark the mascot doesn't matter to me. The flashing LED lights are a bit tacky for a 100+ year old ballpark. I don't mind Ricketts making lots of money, the Cubs are a business and not a charity. But there's also a way to do and a way not. There's just something so cold, calculated, corporate, uncaring and impersonal about everything now. That's not what attracted me to the Cubs in the first place. Just seems like every decision is made with the intent of sucking as much money out of my pocket as possible and its hard to root for that as a fan. If you want brand loyalty then put the customer #1 or at least somewhere near it. I feel the business side of the Cubs is tone-deaf and don't use the history of the ballpark and franchise enough for their business advantage. If you want more night games I get that. If you want to put up a giant scoreboard to show more advertisement then ok i get it, but don't turn Wrigley into an amusement park. Flashing LED stadium lights don't bring in revenue and aren't why fans come to Wrigley.
  7. Stratos
    The Ricketts have turned the Cubs into just another cold corporate product. Complete with flashing LED stadium lights after a win and Clark the Cub for your kids private box suite birthday parties. It makes me sad.
  8. Stratos
    The pre-pitch hitch in PCAs batting stance is back and has been for at least a week. Not as bad as pre-ASB but it's there
  9. Stratos
    It's really not possible to "prove" why Alzolay got injured or Leiter sucked in Sept. I think there's a decent chance that if they had another reliable arm or 2 they may have been able to avoid the injuries and/or some Sept fade (even though the pen did ok in Sept besides those 2 guys).
  10. Stratos
    I looked at Baseball Savant. Alcantara has already showed elite bat speed. Based on the very small sample (5 competitive swings) he'd rank 13th in MLB between Juan Soto and Vlad Jr in bat speed among qualified hitters. He's above De La Cruz, Alonso, Soler, Tatis Jr, Witt Jr. Has the same bat speed as Mike Trout. Not sure if his numbers may drop with more swings, this stat measures avg bat speed on competitive swings, not max bat speed. On the Cubs he ranks above Wisdom and below Morel and Canario (who has insane bat speed). He has the longest swing on the Cubs per Savant which isn't surprising. Gotta think the HR power will come for him, and given the bat speed and swing length he may whiff a lot. PCA to compare shows well below-average bat speed and avg to below-average max exit velo.
  11. Stratos
    Ok i guess i'm wrong on the ranking. Changes nothing about my point though
  12. Stratos
    Then who is 2nd, 3rd, and 4th? I've never seen anything ranked this way in my life.
  13. Stratos
    Was Alcantara already on the 40-man before he was called up? Hope so.
  14. Stratos
    I said they were TIED for 1st, 2nd etc. Read my last post to rcal. The 3 of them were used a lot those 2 months. How is that not clear and obvious?
  15. Stratos
    From July 1 to Sept 2 there were 3 guys tied with Leiter for 1st, 6 tied with Alzolay for 2nd, and 12 tied for 4th with Merryweather. Of the guys tied with Alzolay he threw more IP than all of them. Of the 12 tied with Merryweather he threw more IP than all but one. For the guys tied for 1st with Leiter, one guy threw more IP and the other threw as many as Leiter. We can slice it another way. There were 174 qualified relievers over that period, not 183 like I said. My bad. Of those 174, those 3 Cubs relievers each appeared in more games than 145 of them. There were a bunch of guys who threw more relief IP than those 3 Cubs relievers in that period but almost half of those were clearly longmen given the number of games they appeared in (e.g. 11 games vs Alzolay's 27). We can split hairs any way we want but they were on the mound a lot that summer.
  16. Stratos
    Leiter and the Cubs are pretty lucky he only wore down and didn't get hurt. I guess Ross thought he did what he had to do which is why I blame Hoyer more. Riding a guy hard and risking his career or future earnings via injury so you don't have to give a prospect for a solid relief arm is unethical IMO.
  17. Stratos
    In 2023 between July 1 and Sept 2nd there were 183 qualfied relievers in the MLB. Leiter tied for 1st in appearances (28), Alzolay tied for 2nd (27), and Merryweather tied for 4th (25). From the ASB to Sept 2 Leiter led everyone. They were used a lot. Alzolay especially given the history of arm injuries. They played a ton of close games during those months and those 3 guys seemed to be in virtually all of them. That's mainly on Jed, he didn't get Ross a proven dependable arm at the deadline. He said at the time the cost for relievers at the deadline was too high. Alzolay went down with injury in Sept last year, was bad to start this year and blew 5 saves and now his arm is in a sling. I'd like to ask Jed what the cost of that has been. It might have cost us the playoffs last year given Alzolay was hurt in Sept and Leiter had a 8.59 ERA in Sept and was probably gassed.
  18. Stratos
    Merryweather was largely a starter in the minors. Cubs played 27 games in Aug 2023 and Alzolay and Leiter threw in over half those games, which is especially a lot for a guy like Alzolay with a history of arm injuries. Merryweather threw 14 IP in 27 games that Aug. 14 IP x 6 months = 84 IP pace.
  19. Stratos
    Nobody but Jed liked that Neris signing, i'll never understand it. Maybe the stats he looked at didn't show 25 balks per year.
  20. Stratos
    Rossy also pitched the crap out of Alzolay/Merryweather/Leiter during last year's summer because we lacked pen depth and relied and a bunch of JAGs, Merryweather himself being one. We won't know for sure, but i wasn't surprised when they got hurt. 2 of them also got hurt around last Sept. At the 2023 deadline we acquired another JAG to replace the other JAGs. Seems like they're doing a lot of signing interesting JAGs and betting on their coaching and development to make some tweaks to get something out of them. Its not surprising it can take 2-3 months to figure out who doesn't suck, and by then we've had several blown leads/saves. But alas, there's also randomness. Given the Fulmer and Neris signings me thinks Jed doesn't pay much mind to xFIP.
  21. Stratos
    Last offseason I made a similar argument about our pythag record where hopefully this year the distribution would play out differently. Including if we had a better bullpen that didn't blow all those saves in the first half we could get closer to our pythag record as well. Our pen was built the same way and the same thing happened it. Our offense was almost the same group of guys and the same thing happened. I'm saying now that maybe it isn't luck, maybe it's a pattern. Who knows. I'm not going to speculate on the cause of what happened. Maybe they like hitting in warmer weather? I have no idea. Maybe they will break the pattern and overachieve their pythag record next year, but i'm just saying i'm not counting on it either. I'm assuming this is who they are if they had the exact same winning % 2 years in a row.
  22. Stratos
    Yup. It's big now for teams to buy up everything around the stadium because that doesn't get calculated into revenue sharing. Lots of money to be made there. And we can see now that Theo left in whole or in large part because he wanted a piece of the ownership of a team and he couldn't get it from Ricketts, that's where the real money is. Theo is now part owner of the Red Sox, That's his childhood team so i'm happy for him, Baseball is a business and not a charity, I don't have any issue with owners like Ricketts making lots of money. But at least get close to ranking in payroll what the team ranks in revenue. If you don't that's just disrespecting your customers.
  23. Stratos
    They're gonna have some 40-man squeeze again this offseason I assume so I get it, not worth it for only a few games. Nice to give Kilian a look I guess. Too bad he got wrecked again.
  24. Stratos
    3rd in revenue, 7th in payroll, 16th in wins, 1st in our hearts.
  25. Stratos
    Maybe they're trying to tank.
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