Stratos

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.

I wouldn't do the 3rd one.

How do you know this? How do you know that Ricketts doesn't set a max payroll and largely leaves it up to Jed to figure out how to maximize the wins with that money? That's also exactly what they've said is how it happens. I think if there's going to be major spending on a player Jed and the FO go over it with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it's the best move for them, and then take all that data/evidence and show it to Tom to get his final ok on spending that money. I think he generally trusts Jed to do his job. Tom's not a baseball guy, WTF does he know about winning ballgames? IMO it's all data-driven. They've worked out the math and in their analysis they conclude that these huge 300/12 type deals don't produce as many wins for the team as e.g. 2 separate 150/6 deals. We don't really know what that math is, but I think they probably have a good argument. I wouldn't call these mega-contracts, but just as an example if the Cubs could have cut bait on Heyward and Lester halfway through their contracts we would have been much better off. The likelihood that a player on a mega-contract outperforms that contract is close to zero. The best they can do is live up to it, and that doesn't happen often.

I don't know the exact solution but the disparity between payroll between the richest and small market teams seems to be increasing and it isn't good for competitiveness and the sport in general. They need to do something next CBA. Total spending isn't the issue, it's the distribution.

And the 50 million signing bonus. Cost the Dodgers 35.5 AAV equivalent.

Maybe they should figure out how to make the playoffs less random. I say a 7 game divisional series is the bare minimum they could try.

On the plus side, if I become a Dodger fan for the next few years life is suddenly super amaziing! We just got Ohtani and Yamamoto baby!!

Fair enough. My assumption is Yamamoto will be about as good as Steele, but hard to say.

Yes, the only way anyone wins the WS now is by luck. The Dodgers won 100 games this season and just added Ohtani, Yamamoto, and Glasnow. Urias was worth 1 WAR last season, but if they let him walk they still added about 15 wins. Lucky for us Ohtani can't pitch yet.

The Dodgers now have 4 players who are better than anyone on the Cubs. Any time Glasnow is healthy you can count 5. Maybe the Dodgers sign Soto and Sasaki next year, that would be fun.