Stratos

He's not that healthy though. Seems like he overachieved last year. But yeah he'd be nice.

If Boras puts himself and his clients into a corner by waiting near the end of the offseason to sign as a deliberate strategy to try to get teams to panic (like many Cubs fans have been doing all offseason) and overpay, then why is this a bad strategy for Jed to do the same? Jed holds the leverage. Cubs have a ton of prospects to deal from in trades, and so Hoyer can simply tell Boras "I don't want your client, he's too expensive so i'm going to pursue trades instead". But for a player/pitcher whose market has dried up he has no other options other than waiting for the trade deadline. I don't believe Jed is going to put himself in a situation where he has to become desperate, and he's not going to panic. Like I've said, the Cubs have options this offseason and can remain flexible. Jed's gone down to the wire many times over the years at the trade deadline and offseason so we have to assume he knows what he's doing.

Who needs a CF or OF?

Cubs came in and signed Swanson for a good value when he didn't have much leverage left after Turner/Bogaerts signed. The Cubs may be trying to do the same here with SP. Snell, Montgomery, Stroman, Imanaga. I'd be fine with any of them. The trade market also exists.

If Breslow found him intriguing enough to sign i'd figure the Cubs did too. The AAV may have been too high above what the Cubs wanted to spend on him. A bunch of quality SP have signed so far this offseason, that should give us a gauge. Pitchers only can get what teams are willing to pay. xFIP makes Giolito look better than he probably is.

Hard to get excited about back-to-back 4.90 seasons and an extreme flyball rate.

I think it would be best for the Cubs if Stroman didn't opt out. I think the Cubs are in a situation that's different than the last couple of offseasons because most of their best prospects are in AAA or AA and pretty close. I think they'll go short-term on as many guys as they can, but that may just not be possible at every position. If the Cubs sign a SP longterm it will be a rotation with only 2 open spots going forward to fit Horton, Wicks, Brown, Assad, Wesneski etc. unless they go with a 6-man rotation. Caissie, PCA, Mervis, Canario, McGeary, Murray, Horton, Wicks, Brown etc are all probably going to be in Iowa to start the year or on the MLB team. Shaw, Alcantara, and Triantos likely start the year in AA, which means they're close too and could get called in up in a pinch like Morel and Hoerner were (though less likely because of the amount of depth at AAA). Honestly it wouldn't shock me if they didn't sign any FA for more than 2 years, unless a great deal falls into their lap that they could flip in future seasons if needed, or keep and flip one of Happ, Suzuki, Taillon etc in the future. I'd be surprised if a significant trade involving prospects doesn't happen before Opening Day, probably for a short-term player/pitcher.

Yeah but you're still losing a prospect. If a player loses value that value is lost and can't be recovered, you can only spend more than you would have to compensate. Ricketts has never really let the FO do that. He's thrown them several extra million when needed in a pinch but not 20-30 million every year.

If the Cubs spent like the Dodgers and could just spend away their bad contracts sure that would be great and would be my preference. But we can't keep comparing ourselves to the Dodgers. They have about 130 mil more in annual revenue. I'm going on the assumption the Cubs have a budget limit every season because that's how Ricketts has always handled the payroll and Jed has to work within that budget, even if I don't like it. Theo wasn't able to just "spend away" Heyward's underperformance. Yes guys get hurt etc and it can't be predicted, and Heyward looked like a smart contract that they still shouldn't have regret signing. But you can minimize the risks, try to choose younger guys over older ones, sign 7 year deals over 10 year deals etc if the choice is there. If you think of the stock market, putting your eggs all in one basket is a lot riskier than diversifying your risk and spreading your money across several good or very good players rather than dropping bombs of money on 1 or 2 stars player through age 40. More risk can mean more reward but it can also blow up in your face and hamper a franchise for years. I don't have an issue of them signing Bellinger or a 30 y/o SP even if they have a couple of meh years near the end. My point before is that they have the flexibility to not pigeon-hole themselves with 1 specific SP or 1 big position guy they like. There have been numerous quality SP's on the market this year with similar value and they can trade for a SP too. e.g. If bidding for Montgomery gets much higher than expected and you can get Bieber cheap then get Bieber, if Montgomery falls in your lap for cheaper than expected and Bieber is expensive then go Montgomery. I think the Braves have a good philosophy. Develop your best players via prospects, extend them or let them walk like Swanson/Freeman if they won't and take the QO or trade them to reload the farm. Supplement the team with trades and smart FA signings. Jed has done the same with Happ, Baez, Bryant etc and it's been working out well so far.

He needs to accept the fact that he's old, he sucks now, and he needs to retire. But I like the fact that he seems to love playing baseball.

His 4-seamer was terrible for the Cubs last year, hitters slugged .771 off it. He needs to figure a FB he can use, maybe the sinker or cutter, or get the 4-seamer going better. He cutter sucked too though, the sinker was effective. Small samples though. Weird how pitchers seem to throw sinkers less these days.

Can Manaea throw 94 mph as a starter though? Did he do that last year? Or just in relief? His K rate went up as a reliever. So did his velo I assume. He sucked last year as a SP. 4.82 ERA in 43.2 IP. The Cubs seem to like guys with control and try to improve the stuff in the lab. I think that's why they signed Taillon.

How do you "overcome" an overpriced contract? Please be specific. That money and those wins are gone. It would only happen if the FO has a blank check or can spend silly amounts of money on payroll. I've never argued that you should never sign a player past their prime years, but you should try to avoid it where you can, and try to get more prime years than post-prime years where you can. The Xander Bogaerts contract, for example, is a really bad contract. It's embarrassingly bad. He's going to be a Padre until the year 2033 and very likely sucking wins from the team on a yearly basis for over half the contract. But they went all-in on 2023, that's their choice. They made a huge bet and lost. You can't keep using Lester as an example. He was signed for only 6 years. He had won 2 rings for Theo's Red Sox and performed very well for them in the playoffs and WS. He was arguably good for 4 years and mediocre to bad for about 2, but made up for it with the many very good playoff performances he had for us. He was on Cubs teams that had players with very high surplus value. If he would only sign for 8 years would you have have taken him for 8 years, without the hindsight of knowing what happened in 2016? He would have been an asset for the first half of that deal and cost the team wins over the last 4 years. If the Cubs had a 280m payroll sure, it starts to matter less when you can just throw around money to fix problems. And i've never said they shouldn't sign a high-end FA. They signed Swanson, that's a pretty decent FA contract, even though he's probably going to regress over the latter half of the deal, so yeah you can live with a few years of regression to get a really good player. If he signed for 250 mil would that make you feel better about it because it was "big money"? No, I didn't want them to sign Bogaerts or Turner for what they signed for. I wouldn't have signed Judge, Rodon, DeGrom, or Verlander either. I would love for the Cubs to have the Dodgers payroll. It's projected to be 277m this season by Sportac. If you're spending that much on players and have a very good farm system like the Cubs then I do agree you can sign some of the best players in baseball to deals that probably fade on the back half. The calculation changes if the payroll goes from 230m to 280m. My arguments are based on the assumption the Cubs spend around the CBT line. I've always argued they should spend over the tax line this season. My ideal would be to have a very high payroll and sign Ohtani, Nola or Yamamoto, maybe Bellinger, a good closer etc. So maybe we agree in some ways and don't even know it haha.

It's possible you're right on this specific point, but it can only be confirmed if the Cubs don't spend as much relative to the CBT line as their last run. Otherwise, it just means they're being smart. There's a huge difference between the 2.

The Cubs are a large market team and as long as they spend payroll near or over the CBT like a large market team should they will never "experiment with what it would be like to be a small market team". The Cubs advantage is their larger payroll, so they should use it but typically spend it as efficiently as they can to maximize their wins. Having more payroll shouldn't be an excuse to flush money down the drain. Money = wins. Flushing wins down the toilet is totally illogical (except in exceptional cases, like trading a quality prospect for a 3-month rental at the trade deadline to try to save or leverage a season). The Tigers have been flushing a bunch of wins down the toilet every year the last 7 years because of the Miguel Cabrera contract because they could have spent that money on much better players. Every single front office in the MLB should be doing everything they can to maximize their number of wins per million they spend on payroll. That's literally their job. If the Cubs can do that better than other large market teams they will be at an advantage and win more games than other teams that spend the same in total payroll. I think a lot of fans are impatient and are guided by on emotion over logic. They want star players right now to get a short-term dopamine hit of excitement so their team has the best chance to win next year while not worrying at all about the consequences 5+ years down the line.

Even if they signed Bellinger to a longterm deal but without a NTC it could work. Even with a NTC he can still be traded, like Darvish was. Happ or Seiya can be traded down the line also. I think the plan all along may have been to sign Yu Darvish on a good value deal and then flip him after he has a really good season. I think the same could possibly be said for Taillon (though not a "really good season", but they probably thought they can extract better performance out of him with the pitch lab magic etc)

The Cubs should be spending as much on total payroll as possible, so if they don't at least spend up near to the CBT line I totally agree. Total spending is different than how they spend, however.

My point was just that Jed has a lot of options so he has the luxury of being flexible. I don't agree with the "go get your guy even if overpaying". At the end of the day, every player has a n inherent value determined by the Cubs, and they need to numerically quantify it and put a price on that value. Everyone is worth something, everyone can be underpaid or overpaid. I don't see the reason for them to pigeonhole themselves You're right, lower revenue teams do use this sort of Moneyball approach. What if a team with a much larger payroll used the same approach? What if the Rays had the Cubs payroll? I think it's worth the experiment.

Exactly my point. I do complaint about the Mancini contract, but looking at the options last year it was very thin. I believe only about 7 of the top 9 or so 1B on the FA market last year had a good season worth anywhere near their contract. Belt and Drury. We can count Bellinger too I guess, some credit to Jed there too I guess. As far as Barnhart, the options weren't great last offseason also, I guess they went with defense-first at cheap cost and focused their money on other priorities. A lot of players from last offseason's FA pool had disappointing years.

I believe the Cubs organization is at a point where the FO can afford to be even more patient than normal, largely due to the strong farm system. This allows him more options and flexibility than usual in FA. Jed doesn't NEED to sign a FA CF like Bellinger. He has Tauchman, Canario, and PCA if needed. He can also acquire a stopgap in a small trade if needed, or sign a guy like Bader until PCA is ready. Jed doesn't NEED to sign a FA SP like Imanaga or Montgomery, in the short-term he can also trade prospects for a SP with 1 or 2 years of control left until Horton, Wicks, and Brown may all be ready to join Steele, Taillon, Assad, and Wesneski as rotation options. He doesn't NEED to sign a FA 1B or DH. He also has Mervis, Morel, Canario, and Wisdom as options there, and can also make a trade for one. Similar with Chapman. We have Morel + Madrigal + Wisdom, then Murray + Slaughter in AAA, plus Shaw in AA who might even be ready by the end of 2024 or next season. Plus trade options on the table too. If all those guys get the flu they have Triantos, Mastrobuoni, Strumpf, and Bote in the upper minors or on the bench as well as backups. We have a lots of depth this year as most positions. I think Jed will use this flexibility to wait out the market and pluck the best value deals that present themselves when comparing all the options in FA and in the trade market. We can be sure he has done all his prep work with teams and agents and is simply waiting until the market presents the opportunity to pounce. If a FO's job during the offseason is primarily to maximize the amount of talent and potential number of wins the team is likely to achieve given the payroll budget they're provided by ownership, in both the short and longterm, then this is a logical approach. Jed's been working in the high levels of MLB front offices for 20 years for big market teams who have won a few World Series rings, so this isn't his first rodeo, so for now I trust he knows what he's doing.

del

Should have signed Abreu, Josh Bell, or Rizzo last year instead of Mancini and Hosmer. I mean c'mon Jed! Navarez or Zunino > Barnhart. LET'S GOOOOOOO!!

I tried my best to figure out the teams needing an 1B, or could really use an upgrade based on the 1B's they had last year. I have no idea about whether any of these teams have an 1B prospect they're planning to play next year. The most obvious team that's a potential contender that's needing an 1B is the Brewers. Most of the others that could really use an 1B are just bad teams: MIL, WAS, KCR, COL, DET, CHW, LAA, MIN (maybe?), SDP (maybe?) This doesn't include teams that may look for a DH, but if I were Hoskins and healthy I'd want to play 1B to prove i'm healthy and boost my value for next FA period.

I guess when there's no news you just have to make up your own trades to fill air time lol

I think the whole idea of needing a "core" is overblown.