Hairyducked Idiot

It's bordering on not enough, but it might be defensible. If they do that, they better be right about Arrieta and Hendricks and one of the Doubront/Straily/Wood/Jackson/Wada club. Even if you plan on graduating Baez, Bryant and Soler immediately, you still need one more starting position player (probably outfield), probably two Bonifacio-style reserve infielders, and a backup catcher (or a starter to push Castillo to splitting time)

I'd be fine with Maeda. I don't need a Lester or Scherzer to be happy. I just want to see them make an effort to fill the entire roster with competent players. No "He's probably terrible but might as well take a chance on the upside because who cares" Junior Lake/Mike Olt deals. If they do that and don't have terrible variance or injury luck, I'd expect to be playing meaningful games this time next year.

The Cubs had some pitching too that they could have traded from. Replace Donaldson's fWAR with Valbuena's in 2013 and the A's still win the division.

I thought that's the whole idea of having cheap production in the lineup, so we can spend inefficiently on expensive pitching. I'll believe it when I see it. I'm not saying we're going to get nothing, but we need a lot, and to get a lot you have to pay market rates, and they don't seem to like paying market rates.

It's not faux. I didn't see a lot of this "Oh man, his FIP has always been over 4 before last year!" in the offseason of 2012. It's a total about-face. Which is fine, I don't have a problem with people changing their minds. But to then act like someone who agrees with the consensus at the time is being dumb and crazy? Get out of here with that weak crap.

I'm remembering now why I had Truffle on ignore, and am glad to go back to it. He's so aggressively bad.

I get that you aren't one of our better baseball minds here, and that you make up for it by acting horrified at every single contrary opinion and pretending like it's the dumbest thing you've ever heard. You don't have a lot of clubs in your bag, so it's a shot you have to take pretty much every time. But please, leave these discussions to your betters.

An expected WAR(~5 WAR for Garza, ~3.5 for Gio and Latos), which obviously is heavily influenced by last year.

Let's ask a really smart poster in Jan. 2012 about the relative valuation of Garza at the time. Take it away, TT: Well, yeah. $30 million in surplus value over two years isn't enough to get you multiple blue chip prospects, unless teams get really desperate for starting pitching. They might get that desperate eventually, but at the moment it doesn't seem that way. It's not? Gio Gonzalez just got the proverbial truck of prospects backed up for him to provide what, 40 million in surplus value over 4 years? Mat Latos was largely the same as well, and both of those guys pitch in canyons that might mask their true ability a touch. Both of them were younger and under team control for longer. And also not as productive, that's why we're talking about the surplus value added over the duration of their team control. Man, only *crazy* people think Garza had comparable value to those guys. Or that his being more productive in 2011 was relevant.

Sounds like your definition of player valuation is "whatever I have to make up as I go to absolve the front office of everything, ever." Holy crap is that dumb quote by Daniels, mostly based on how they didn't get to the playoffs, ever causing people to overrate the crap out of the middling return we got for Garza.

I'm fine with believing it will roll over, but that means the "it's not our fault we're bad this year, the owners didn't give us enough money" card is out of play. I'm pretty sure we have enough money from here on out to do anything we feel like. The problem is whether or not they feel like doing enough in any given offseason, given that free agents are still going to be less than ideal value.

Sounds like the front office blew it and missed a sell-high opportunity.

In 2011, one put up a 4.9 fWAR and one put up a 3.3. Bit of a difference there.

Why wouldn't Samardzija count? Or Welington Castillo for that matter?

Go back to read the 2011 archives. All the people here, now proclaiming that they had zero chance whatsoever not to suck, had some pretty good plans. Despite the painting of this is a monolithic plan they've had since the beginning, the Cubs have gone through several different plans under this regime. In 2011-12 offseason, they seemed to be pretty content with tanking. They could have gotten much better results with some simple tweaks (replacing what they took out of the bullpen when they removed Marshall and Samardzija, picking anyone besides for the love of god Ian Stewart for 3b) and not making some very bizarre roster decisions early in the year (Volstad over Wood, Clevenger over Castillo). They should have taken the season seriously. But if they weren't going to, then they needed to trade Garza that offseason. He was coming off a career year in which he relied heavily on breaking balls, and that's never a good long-term bet. Compare that with the A's selling Gio Gonzalez (who was under more control but an inferior pitcher) that offseason and setting themselves up for their turnaround. In the 2012-13 offseason, they absolutely did try to win, and failed. They gave out a lot of free agent contracts, and other than the bizarre decision to let Sveum give a job to his good friend Lillibridge, they seemed to mostly be trying to fill out the roster credibly with an eye toward giving themselves a chance that year and setting a foundation for 2014. Unfortunately, they got some bad luck and it turned out several of their multi-year bets went wrong. Which is on them. Edwin Jackson being the biggest, of course. So in the 2013-14 offseason, they changed plans yet again, and that was when there started being rumors and published reports that they'd pushed their plans back and started re-targetting for 2016. They then decided they had so little regard for the upcoming season that they didn't care if waiting for an admitted long-shot in Tanaka meant probably blowing off the entire offseason and the 2014 season with it. And that's exactly what happened. So in summary, a better plan would have been to try every year instead of just one of the three, and even the year they had the right plan, their execution was subpar. Better decisions needed to be made. But trying to paint this losing as something they've been planning all along and something they had no choice but to do is wrong on both accounts.

except you're completely ignoring the composition of the major league clubs (both teams were packed with young pitching and the pirates with young hitting) and the composition of the minor league systems (players in the high minors versus low minors). i think/hope you're just doing this troll or get attention as per usual, because the alternative is that you're an abject moron. Go sit your [expletive] on a scorpion. The Cubs had some nice young pitchers and hitters too, you know. Or I assume you know. Maybe the retcon to apologize has gone so far that you've actually forgotten?

If there had been an organization that was an exact clone except their shortstop was named Starlin Castri, you guys would be claiming that was the critical difference and really poor Epstein with his o-ending shortstop was doomed and had no choice but to rebuild.

I specified "before or after 2011." I'm including the Jan. 2011 rankings, when the A's were 27th and the Pirates were 19th, which should have meant both teams had no choice but to tank for three years until they fixed that because they were dooooomed anyway.

I got what you were saying. I'm simply saying it's a meaningless distinction and one that glosses over some of the Cubs' strengths at the time. If only we'd had a 27-year-old Mark Reynolds or a 28-year-old Ronny Cedeno, *then* Theo could have had a chance. Alas...

Did they have good players? Maybe we should have looked into acquiring some if that helps you win.

Oh crap, I missed Pittsburgh. That makes four.

which teams were those? i'm looking forward to hearing this, because it will probably be extremely easy to punch holes in this argument. I'm sure you'll find it extremely easy to find meaningless distinctions that justify your ridiculous belief that the Cubs have been justified in losing terribly for three years running.

A's, Indians, Reds So did the Cubs. Castro, Garza, Samardzija, Castillo. The Cubs didn't really have all that many in bad contracts. Most of them were expiring when Epstein came on board, or maybe had one year left. 3.) They had more success from guys that came up from the minors. In most cases, it was never that high to begin with. Well, as long as the future is bright, who cares, I guess...

It was pretty bad -- most had them 20-22 if I recall, and I know BA was higher, but they still had them as middling. Our top guys (outside of an 18-year-old, just drafted Baez, who surely wasn't going to make a difference in the majors for awhile) were Jackson, Szczur, McNutt, Lake, and Vitters. And they all turned out to suck, so good luck turning a bad team around quickly with prospects who end up being terrible at baseball, when you are also being sapped of cash flow to build the major league roster through free agency. It's not just that the farm system was bad; it's that the farm system gave us nothing once they did come up. If some of those guys had contributed, then maybe Theo sees the urgency in adding parts around them. Part of the reason the farm system didn't have that much about to graduate is because there was a decent chunk of young talent already on the team, like Castro and Samardzija. I'll point out again that three teams were lower than us in the farm system rankings at either the beginning or end of 2011, were below .500 in 2011, and have since made the playoffs with a payroll of less than $100m. It isn't some magically hard thing to do.

The farm system wasn't terrible. We have tons of examples of teams fixing their farm systems without needing to lose a bunch. We have plenty of examples of teams without a lot of MLB talent or a great farm system or a lot of money turning it around in less than three years. So there's no reason they couldn't have made a real effort at doing both. None at all.