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.

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.

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.

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.

3rd in revenue, 7th in payroll, 16th in wins, 1st in our hearts.

Maybe they're trying to tank.

Right but the Cubs underperforming their pythag record was used by someone here as evidence that the team could do better in wins next year. My argument is that they've underperformed their pythag record 2 years in a row in large part because the last 2 seasons the distribution of their run-scoring throughout the year has been quite inefficient since they've scored in big bunches in the summer and followed virtually the exact same pattern 2 years in a row which might not be just bad luck/randomness.

Let's hope it's just randomness and luck. They hit well in April this year.

I don't think the pythagorean wins applies much to the Cubs this year or last year because both years we rightfully underperformed our pythagorean wins because we put up a ton of our total runs and blew out teams over only 1 or 2 months (it was basically just August and some of Sept this year) and much of the rest of the year we didn't have a good offense. This offense seems to have a distribution problem, and if they're only going to show up in the summer this team isn't going anywhere. Last year I thought it was a fluke but the fact that it happened again makes me wonder if a pattern is forming. Who knows. Based on the 2nd half last year I thought the Cubs would have a solid offense this year. It didn't happen. So i'm not going to extrapolate anything about next year based on our 2nd half, other than PCA has hopefully turned a corner with his adjustments and can improve on his first half next season. I thought overall this season we did fairly well on the injury front and I don't expect to do better there next year. We should get more WAR out of 3B, and it'll be pretty hard to be as bad at catcher as well. If we can get just 2.0 WAR out of both 3B and C in 2025 (which would still be below-average at those positions) that's an improvement of almost 5 wins over this year. Improving by 2.0 WAR each at 3B and C plus getting an extra 1.0 WAR out of PCA and replacing Bellinger with Soto (long-shot) would improve us by 8 wins, bringing us to 91 wins if we assume we're a 83-win team. If no Soto then it would be nice to find a few more wins somewhere else. The Hendricks/Smyly/Mancini/Barnhart money comes off the books, that's around 35m i think?

Last year there were 51 qualified players with at least a .800 OPS. OPS in the MLB is down around 20 points. .734 in 2023 vs .712 this year.

Assad is tied for the most starts for a SP on the Cubs, and has a 3.34 ERA. He has a career 3.20 ERA in 289 IP. I wonder how much the Cubs defense especially up the middle has benefited him? Does he induce a lot of double-plays? He has that good sinker. His LOB% has also been consistently high every season, maybe its not a fluke?

Appreciate the thought put into this post. I would project Bellinger for around 3.3 WAR next year if he can stay in RF the whole year, plus he gets some added value tacked on for being able to play 1B well plus the other OF positions as backup, which doesn't show up in his WAR. I'd project Soto for around 6.0 to 6.5 WAR, So Soto adds about 3 wins to this team over Bellinger. He'd be a very nice addition but yeah we need more improvements, we'd still only be about an 86-win team which is still a borderline wildcard team. Catcher, SP, the pen, and ideally another bat upgrade somewhere definitely look like a priority.

The Brewers are 7th in MLB in runs scored, 10th in wRC+, and have the best mbaserunning in the MLB and best defense in the NL. They're 6th in MLB in WAR. Their defense has definitely helped their pitching and team ERA. I'm not sure what you mean by "variance" regarding the Brewers, are you saying they've been lucky?

Most of us naturally think the offense has been the weak link this year, but what if it actually doesn't really matter much which area we improve between pitching vs offense vs defense? At the end of the day we need to improve our run differential and just get better as a team, why does it matter if we score more runs vs giving up fewer runs? This leads of course to the value and efficiency arguments that fans mock about Jed all offseason with his signings. The Cubs had a .512 winning % last year and have a .513% this year. We didn't improve. We replaced Stroman with Imanaga, didn't improve the pen, and brought back the same lineup plus added Busch but Swanson/Nico/Morel regressed offensively. Our position guys have some WAR but we only have 2 players with an OPS over .800, no elite hitter, and 5 guys in the everyday lineup with a season OPS under .700. Both this year and last our offense and bullpen only seem to show up in the summer and then are M.I.A.

Amaya has been having his worst offensive month of the year this Sept. He might do a bit better next year overall but I'm not confident he's magically a fundamentally different hitter now because of 2 hot months and the Cubs would be unwise to go into 2025 on that assumption. Since he only starts half the games as a catcher those 2 hot months equaled only about 100 AB's anyways, a small sample to draw any conclusions. If we look at Amaya's slash lines this year and last year they're almost identical. He typically hit for low AVG in the minors too and given his speed that's just probably never going to change. His walk rate both this year and last year are below league average. His .ISO in the minors were consistently average at best, the only hope being his bat speed is above average per statcast. I think it's most wise to assume that this is who Amaya is unless he puts up an overall season proving otherwise. The icing on the cake is his framing is below average and he's near bottom of the MLB at throwing guys out in a new SB era where the league SB rate has increased by around 60% since the rule changes.

What do you think is more annoying?: bad calls, or having to read fans complaining about every bad call game after game after game followed by the inevitable petition for the automatic strikezone? I have my answer. It's worse than the inevitable complaining any time Sutcliffe is on the air. WE GET IT!!!!!

If the Cubs only had to hop 1 team for the last WC spot then the odds would at least seem more plausible. But counting on both the Mets and Braves going on a skid and the Cubs going on a tear to make up 5 games with 16 games to play is faint odds. FG says about 1% odds of making the playoffs. Braves play the Mets in a week so those games kinda cancel each other out for us. We have an easy schedule coming up, the Mets have a very tough schedule (play Phillies, Nats, Phillies, Braves, Brewers). Braves schedule is sorta in-between.

PCA, what an incredible catch, also considering he was playing in his hometown and had fans all over him trying to grab the ball.

He was pitching at a really fast pace. I think it was probably anxiety, let's hope.

This has been my argument as well. He's essentially the same athlete he was last year per statcast. He's still in his age prime so it makes sense. The EV and max EV is also the same. I think typical results to expect going forward next year should be somewhere between last year and this year. He's still a good ballplayer and there's no reason to be down on him. The contract isn't surplus but it's fine for a FA deal considering he isn't signed into his mid or late 30's. Only thing is it doesn't look like we need a CF anymore and that's where his value is highest, but Seiya isn't a good RF so...

Noticed the Cubs have the 5th best team ERA in the MLB. 13th in xFIP

Put this on a plaque.

I'm glad there's friction. Everyone in the FO should be PO'd at this season. And the fact that guys like Hendricks and Mastrobuoni haven't been released let alone in the starting lineup.

I forgot Nick Madrigal was in this organization.

At least we can hit the Pirates. This team is cooked.