Hairyducked Idiot

The problem is that as a Blackhawks fan, I've noticed over the last five years how many other teams' fans thought they were about to be the next Blackhawks. None of them so far have done it.

Yup. Our 2015 starting rotation right now includes: Jake Arrieta (massive health red flags) Kyle Hendricks (failed to hit 90.0 in his last start) Edwin Jackson Left-handed Edwin Jackson That's it. Teams with good starting pitching depth get sunk by runs of injuries. We're going to have to do an *amazing* job this offseason just to have OK starting pitching depth.

That only works if there were players from the 2011 A's who continued to contribute. The only one I can think of is Coco Crisp, right? And he hit free agency in the interim.

Ehhhhh, if I were as sure of it as you are, then I'd be a bit more excited. If we're going to be awesome in the next couple of years (which is possible), we have to hit on a *lot* of outside pitching, and we're putting that in the hands of the men responsible for the Edwin Jackson signing. I like our chances to be not terrible in 2015, but there's still tons of chances for us to fail to produce extended awesomeness. Converting an awesome pile of prospects into extended success is a lot harder than using extended failure to create an awesome pile of prospects.

OK, that's six guys. In the same time period, Castro, Rizzo, Barney, Samarzdija, Castillo, Lake: 28.9 fWAR *massive* difference :roll: (edit: all we had to do to get to 30.0 was keep DJ LeMahieu to replace Lake on that list)

And prior to that still had less than $3 mil in dead money. Whereas we've had Soriano and Z as dead money in the Theo regime. That can be worked around if we could carry payrolls above $100 mil, but not if we're in the As salary realm. The A's payroll last year, while they were making the playoffs, was $61m. You could add on two Sorianos and it's still less than the Cubs.

I'll cop to thinking Gonzalez had three years of control left instead of four, but Garza was coming off a 4.9 fWAR season. We biffed that badly, and if we had made a good deal then instead of 18 months later, things might look different right now.

The Mets have a top-five farm system and a young team with a positive run differential. If it weren't for the fact they're invested in pitchers whose arms are all going to fall off, they'd be in pretty good shape.

No, silly is forgetting about the existence of Castro and Samardzija. Garza was also a better pitcher. I know Epstein's tried to convince us that "years of control" are more important than quality, but let's not forget about it entirely.

Garza, Castro, Samardzija. All worthless pieces of garbage... No matter how many examples are shown, people will always try to spin some difference. Because they are in denial about how much parity there is in modern MLB and how foolish it is to throw away seasons.

While we used our young MLB pitching to get Ramirez, Edwards, Grimm and Olt. We were shopping Garza the same time they were selling Gio Gonzalez the offseason of 2011-12. The different results are striking.

Both the Indians and Reds under .500 in 2011 and were lower than us on this list: http://www.minorleagueball.com/2012/1/23/2728027/2012-baseball-farm-system-rankings-prospects and have since made the playoffs with a payroll under $100m in their playoff year.

We never gave it a chance to happen, outside of the pre-2013 offseason.

You're right, he's had an excellent 3 year run after missing the playoffs for the 5 previous ones. But circa 2011, they had a bad MLB record and a low-ranked farm system. It should have been impossible for them to make the playoffs by 2013 without massive payrolls.

I'm almost positive he's not the one who says that line, right? Edit: Nope, YT says I'm wrong

I don't caaaaaare if it was voluntary or not. Billy Beane doesn't need $130m payrolls to put together the best team in baseball.

Clear sign of impending callup.

Huh. I really thought I had you ready to flip back, too. You are vastly overstating the degree to which the new CBA changed anything. It was some minor tweaks, and actually saved teams quite a bit of money on the amateur side. Huh? What? Both of these guys arrived after Soto and Wells: http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=4579&position=SS http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=3254&position=P Tyler Colvin's 2010 and 2012 probably qualify, too. Yes, the Cubs were in a bit of a donut hole in the minor leagues. They had just graduated a couple of interesting MLB pieces (Castro, Samardzija) and had a bunch of interesting guys in the low minors (Baez, Alcantara, for example). They had some older MLB pieces as well that still had some useful years left in them, and we had some guys about to graduate that would be useful on the back half of a roster (LeMahieu's having an interesting year, I noticed the other day). In order to bridge the gap from the low minors and the fruits of a hopefully revamped farm system, we were going to have to add MLB talent. Yes, near-ready MiLB players who would be MLB starters was the organization's weak point. But it had other strengths, more than enough to justify not going the Astros' route. The alternative would be to lose for years and years, and right around late 2011 we were all pretty united that this was a terrible idea, and that a guy like Epstein would *never* just give up and focus on building an all-HG lineup four years down the road. It was only after it happened that some decided "well, it was fated to happen all along." A below-average situation has been retconned into total hopelessness.

A very large portion of that MLB payroll decrease has been voluntary. Not a great start, but not the worst ever either. Enough for an allegedly brilliant executive to go to work on, unless he's maybe been harboring fantasies of doing a total rebuild and was more interested in finding a team that would let him do it than objectively looking at the needs of the organization. I wish several of our smartest posters from 2012 would come back to argue with the 2014 versions of themselves. Yes, I know we have more information now, but there's a lot of retconning going on as well.

How many of our current core prospects are in the system due to the major league team sucking? Five? Everyone but Soler and Alcantara

Yes, if we match the greatest run baseball has seen in half a century, then it turns out that these years were probably worth it. That's like saying if Mike Olt hits like Barry Bonds for the next two years, then this three months didn't matter.

It mattered to the seven front offices that got fired in that stretch, I imagine. The seven front offices no one remembers because the team won a bunch of World Series? Those front offices? So let's fire this one and get one step closer to our Brian Cashman?

It mattered to the seven front offices that got fired in that stretch, I imagine.

That's dumb and by extension you're dumb, you dirty apologist. It's uncanny how the assessment of our chances in each year always goes down after the fact, when it makes things look better to retcon those chances. Okay, good talk. The first part was meant jokingly, of course. The second part is dead-on. Every year that's gone by, the state of the Oct. 2011 Cubs gets downgraded retroactively in order to justify what's happened since. Baseball is far too high-variance of a sport to pretend like Epstein couldn't have had the Cubs in position to have a chance by 2013, even if we stipulate 2012 was gone (which we really shouldn't, and weren't at the time). Every year, teams that projected to be in the middle of the pack before the season end up in the playoff hunt. Last year, one such team won the World Series. Epstein failed to give the Cubs that chance (and let's not pretend he didn't try. Edwin Jackson wasn't given $52m to be flipped). He just failed.

1) If it makes you feel better to pretend they didn't take a dive, knock yourself out. 2) I already made the point that you can go ahead and pretend 2012 didn't happen in order to appease the apologists that don't care about winning. And the comparison still doesn't look good. I have way too much respect for Theo Epstein to pretend like by 2013, he couldn't have had the Cubs with a decent chance to be competitive. It's hard to fathom why TT's opinion of him would be so low as to pretend otherwise.