Stratos

He's the best defensive SS in the game. He's whiffed on a few balls hit right at him he should have caught. They have 6 weeks plus Jan/Feb offseason (where he says he doesn't touch a grounder) to shake the rust off and prepare for the season. We're paying him a gazillion billion dollars. Once it's Opening Day its go-time. If a guy makes a bad play he should have made that cost us a game yeah it's fine to criticize him. Hitting well isn't a license to whiff on balls.

Can you pitch?

Sure but if you acquire the best talent the probability of having good results goes up. A week worth of games is much more random than a month or a year. Blowing a lead doesn't mean anything but blowing 8-0 is pretty bad and there's more than randomness going on there. 4 different arms couldn't lock it down and Assad was left in too long for an early April game, I assume because the pen has some issues. Now we're back to relying on 3 supposedly effective late-inning guys because Merryweather is out: Leiter, Neris, Alzolay. Same thing as last summer, same thing that wore down those our only reliable 3 arms and led 2 of them to incur injuries and made us miss the playoffs. And 1 of them is already injured this season. This is a joke. We didn't do jack s**t for the pen in the offseason besides replacing Fulmer with Neris and Boxberger with Almonte. We literally went with the exact same gameplan. I also want to know what's going on with Swanson? Is he not in season form yet? We already know he doesn't a groundball over the winter.

Yeah they did and we missed the playoffs by 1 game. The pen was also a mess in Sept. I'm tired of the pen being in disarray. Yes reliever results have some randomness, but having a pen filled with mostly random dudes off the scrap heap is going to lead to more randomness because we have no idea who will have a good or bad year if few guys are inherently, clearly good pitchers. Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman weren't randomly good, they were money every year. Cuas, Almonte, Leiter, and Merryweather are just random dudes. They all have the potential to be good, Smyly and Palencia aren't exactly guys you can count on. Neris' velo was down 1.5 mph last year so we got him on a sort-of discount. even though he's been only a bit above average most of his career. Cubs continue to just roll the dice in the pen and let the chips fall because that's how the they see bullpens: random. I get the thinking but i'm pretty tired of it, but not much we can do I guess given cheap man Ricketts, and the upper minors doesn't have much in terms of dominant reliever prospects. I don't expect blowing 8-run leads to be normal, but the entire pen has looked shaky so far and the whole thing is held together with tape like last year. You want to waste the first month or 2 figuring out which random dudes are going to be effective and you'll blow your playoff chances just like last year too. Go get some f***king arms instead of this Almonte/Cuas dice-rolling nonsense.

Brown will need to pitch a complete game under 100 pitches or Cubs need to score 15. Let's do it.

Besides the pen blowing up, Dansby needs to catch that liner hit at him by Machado. The exit velocity was 96 mph I believe, not crazy. And Tauchman needs to stop that ball rolling past him in the gap. Suzuki missed one like that the other day. I'll never understand how outfielders can watch balls roll past them to the fence when any infielder even a 1B could easily at least knock it down with a slide. They just need to slide.

I wanted another quality pen arm with Neris. We know there's always injuries, like Hughes/Boxberger etc early last year. Almonte is more of an average middle reliever. He may turn out decent with his slider if they can get his FB effective, but we'll see. Leiter and Neris can be dominant, with Merryweather. Alzolay is tough when he's on. Losing Merryweather is tough. Hopefully this is just a terrible game and a fluke, but you can't lose that lead and have 9 unanswered runs.

Over 100 pitches on your 2nd start of the year is a bit much.

Not so fast. Same pen as last year 😥

Before the season I was worried about injuries specifically from Steele, Leiter, Merryweather, and Alzolay this season due to their overuse last season. Didn't think Steele's injury had anything to do with overuse, but with Merryweather also on the shelf and all these other injuries around the league i'm wondering if it may be related. We saw Hendricks and Stroman have injury issues the year after being pitched a lot in 2021 after the COVID-shortened 2020 year. If the league wants to keep the pitch clock I think they need to be reasonable and also make some adjustments so players can get used to it. E.g. Add another roster slot to the 26-man just for a pitcher, and add 2-3 seconds to the clock, at least until the established pitchers get used to it for a couple of seasons and can build their arm up a bit. The Cubs would be very wise to play it conservative until more data comes out and watch the pitch counts and reliever usage on guys in April/May and maybe even all year. With reduced recovery time between pitches maybe they should take about 10 pitches off the total pitch count of a SP that they'd normally allow.

double-post

delete

Cubs been wearing out SP, this is good. Also makes the pen a bit thinner for rest of the series.

Cooper will start vs LHP it looks like. Unless Madrigal is playing 3B I guess. Not too many PA's for Cooper right now I guess, but a good guy to have in case of injury somewhere.

So it's the opposite of living in Chicago: you go north in the summer instead of south for the winter. That's neat.

You're a hero for making major life decisions based around baseball. ST in AZ is another bonus. You could moved to Myrtle Beach haha. The Carolinas sound nice, never been though. Been to Tennessee, it was beautiful. Not into the desert vibe, though not a fan of the humidity in the south/Florida either haha.

Tommy John LOL

We'll have to see how we hit (and pitch...and field) on the road.

So we went from a .500 team to the 4th best team in the MLB because of 6 games, 3 against the Rockies at home? That seems odd. They still have our playoff odds at 51% haha.

Almonte has a filthy slider. I'm happy Imanaga has kept the ball in the park so far and the FB at the top of the zone seems to play at least in this early going. If he can catch Freeman and Ohtani whiffing on it then that's a great sign so far, though they're both LHB. Humid day in Chicago is different than dry AZ air. Add Horton to the rotation next year hopefully, and that's Steele/Imanaga/Horton plus Taillon/Wicks/Brown/Assad to play with as 4/5, with 2 of them potentially in the pen. Little might even have closer stuff if he can figure out the control. The position side already looks pretty solid before adding Caissie, PCA, Shaw, etc., and the depth is very good everywhere. But let's not get ahead of ourselves LOL.

Cubs offense looking like they're picking up where they were in Aug, which is awesome given it's early April and the weather sucks. This is a fun team to watch, especially with the upgrades. Belli still looks legit too. Almost every position guy on this team seems like a gamer who do the little things. Hopefully we have a fun year of baseball again.

Nice thing is that if Imanaga is effective over the next 2 seasons and the Cubs exercise their options on Imanaga he can't opt-out.

He's got 2 options so maybe.

PSD did 1 thread per series, less work, worked well. Just a suggestion.

Analysis: he can't catch or throw. Conclusion: he sucks.