Hairyducked Idiot

Especially if they deal him in a tumultuous MI sandwich with Baez. Still think they could get a seriously good return for something like that. Then who the heck would be Russell's DP partner?

Holy crap when did Soler get to negative fWAR.

Herrera is better at baseball right now than Olt, Villanueva or Baez.

Really really want the Pirates to slip and make this a two-spot race.

Kyle violated the sanctity of DMs and blew it up And waged a war on Theo to deflect my guilt.

And I bet Kyle wears his tighty whities inside out to save money at the laundromat. Laudromat? I ain't taking the time and expense to put nine separate quarters on strings.

is that like the improvement we were going to get from Soler, Castro, Rizzo, Baez and Alcantara this year?

It was the detractors who brought it up this time.

We were talking about this in another thread the other day: I think that there's more evidence that we're a souped-up version of the Brewers (stocking up for years for a golden generation and riding it to a few years in the sun) than we are becoming the Cardinals. If you want to be the Cardinals, you have to hit on your small-time IFA investments, your non-top-10-overall picks, your prospects that you didn't trade premium MLB talent to get. Have we really been doing that? I don't see it. The Cardinals already have 6.2 bWAR from their 2012 draft class and ours is looking awfully iffy.

This is reasonable/fair. I think fans are ready to credit Theo for this team because they believe the plan he has been executing is starting to produce results. It's hard not to speculate that things are on the upswing and the team is destined for repeated playoff appearances. Obviously how the future plays out answers the question. Out of curiosity, rather than just say "let's see what the results are to judge Theo," how many playoff appearances do you expect for the Cubs from 2016-2020? I know you could say, I'm not going to guess at numbers, but based on what you'e seen and your overall impression what is your answer? To answer your question, I think 3 out of 5 is a good over/under. I think the upswing thing is the appeal of narrative. We love to explain our sports teams in terms of stories, and the "We were bad, then we were patient, then we got better, then we got great" is an easy story to understand. Getting better, or more importantly getting great, for 2016 and 2017 looks pretty tough to me. Not impossible. It's pretty easy to see how it could happen. All you need is a couple of breakout offensive seasons from our ubertalents and the top half of the pitching staff to stay healthy. But I think the downside is real too: On offense, the only guy who is young enough to make me really sure he'll be noticeably better in 2016 is Russell. The rest are in that iffy range of just barely pre-prime where the median of the curve is not much improvement left at all. For the pitching, I think the question is just how often are you going to get 150+ healthy, productive innings from your top 4? It's not something that's going to happen every year. And we're going to need it to, because there is just stone cold nothing coming up the pipe. The first wave of pitching prospects was supposed to be ready by now, and it's looking like a pretty substantial bust. In the meantime, the Cubs have been one of the most overachieving teams in the league by Pythagorean Wins, and there's two *really* good teams in the division that have pretty good cases to still be pretty good next year. The narrative says the Cubs are betting on the future in 2016. We've seen what betting on the future looks like this year: it's a messy, unpredictable affair. Sometimes it shows up as Kris Bryant playing at a 5-fWAR pace, and sometimes it's thinking you've got the middle infield settled with double redundancy only to have three of your four highly talented young guys become sub-replacement simultaneously.

That's how you know he's getting lucky.

Richard now has better peripherals than Haren.

That was a great example of umpires' "don't end the PA" bias. If there were less than 2 strikes, he's not calling that a ball.

That was a great example of umpires' "don't end the PA" bias. If there were less than 2 strikes, he's not calling that a ball.

yes

Kyle mid-life-spiral, teenage CT and jorts-wearing Derwood walk into a bar. Who gets wedgied first?

My argument is that Theo Epstein's results with the Cubs have not been sufficient to warrant praise of any kind. What imaginary alternative GMs would have done only comes up when those who disagree with me bring them up. They think nobody else could have done better, I think they could have. We are on equal ground in that regard.

"What actually happened" is not a direction you want to go when defending Epstein's Cubs tenure. Stick with the vague, unprovable future.

It's not all of central Illinois. The game is on WCIX here in Springfield area.

Theo Epstein's job is not to be better than me. It's his job to be better than the other 29 team runners. We have a series of contests every year where they compete at a game of base to see how he is doing.

Point for the two-strike slap hitting.

https://twitter.com/CubsUmp/status/627905669602123776/photo/1

He stole it from me. I've been pushing that one for years.

If we do make it this year, that helps a lot. My stance in all of this is "actual results matter, enough that he needs to produce some before being put on some pedestal of unquestionableness."