Hairyducked Idiot

6 Ks in his last 30 PAs

My ideal at this point is to keep all three of Bonifacio, Valbuena, Murphy, and then only carry four outfielders.

So assuming Fujikawa to the DL, we need to cut six more pitchers. Wada, McDonald, Rusin feel like gimme cuts.

I'm really impressed that they'd send down Parker. I don't have a strong opinion on him either way, but I love seeing that 46 innings don't guarantee a guy a job if they don't think he's one of the best 25.

Fujikawa. I wouldn't expect him to be in the picture for at least a couple months, unless I missed something. It's yet to be decided, but he was already throwing from a mound early in ST. That gives at least a chance of pitching in May.

My preference would be to carry all three (plus Bonifacio) and only carry four outfielders.

I'm not sure why, I'm guessing health, but the Cubs have been sneaking up the Fangraphs projected standings. We're up to 75-87

I only played the first year of real pitching little league, and I was the kid who would stand in the back of the batter's box and bail out on wild pitches away.

I was starting to feel good about Mike Olt, so I needed to find old threads to feed the doom boner.

LOL, looking back at the "2013" thread from late 2012. Who was this visionary who nailed exactly what we were facing back in Aug. 2012:

When Olt actually has success, I'll follow you. Right now he has a decent spring training. I want so badly to believe in this front office. I miss the feeling we got in the days after he was hired, and maybe even right up through the Wood trade. But if I'm going to believe that all this The Cubs Way: When It Happens, three-hour-conversation-on-which-foot-to-hit-the-bag-with, super-computer-buying, hire-100-new-guys-for-baseball-ops stuff is actually going to mean anything in the long run, I need to see it on the field. Teams that smart, that good, shouldn't be losing 197 games over two years regardless of the payroll. Almost all of their "success" in the last two years has been dumping assets to get prospects, basically emulating the Golden Generation strategy that small markets have been using for as long as I can remember. Trying to time a window of success around the graduation of a core of key stars. The Brewers did it. The Pirates might be doing it right now. The difference between that brief window and true sustained success won't come from dumping at the deadline or tanking for top-5 picks, it will be when they consistently develop players and make personnel decisions better than other teams. And they haven't done that yet. There have been some successes (our draft picks have almost always gained status as they played, we've been good at finding cheap, short-term SPs, the Wood trade) and just as many failures (lol we broke Castro, our IFAs have been a mixed bag at best, we busted an entire offseason hoping for Tanaka only to get outbid by $40m). I'm not seeing much evidence that they can actually out-maneuver and out-develop teams in the long run to keep any success past the golden-generation window. But it wouldn't take *that* much to make me see it. Imagine a 2014 in which Mike Olt becomes a useful 2-3 win starting 3b, Javier Baez comes up midseason and does Javier Baez-type things, the bullpen becomes a team strength and we have a surprising 79-win season. I'd be all over Theo's nuts at that point. That's not even that much. But if Olt sucks, Baez comes up in September and K's 35% of the time, the bullpen is blech and we lose 95+ games again, then I'm again asking myself why should I believe any of this hard work they talk about is really going to pay off?

The fact that he missed that much development time is exactly why I worry.

Yes and no. If you want elite talent, your odds of getting it in the first few picks are quite a bit higher than getting it anywhere else. But with a great organization like the Cardinals, you can get a pretty steady stream of note-quite-elite but really useful talent.

I'd be pretty freaking excited about Kyle Hendricks if I knew his fastball would average 91.9 mph next year.

The early 2000s say hello. I never approached those days with the kind of confidence I have now. And I'm as jaded as they come. Then you weren't paying close enough attention.

Fun with arbitrary endpoints: 5 Ks for Olt in his last 19 PAs.

That's like the fifth time this spring I've looked at a highlight and briefly wondered why they were at Wrigley.

I was gonna post a joke about being sensitive to Canadians for whom "Gretzky traded to L.A." is still a sore subject, but that's gonna seem lame after this.

OK. They chose to lose in 2012 because they were trying to get a handle on what was happening. They gave it a shot in 2013 with what money they had, but it fell apart in a lack of pitching depth and some bad luck. They seem to have given up completely for 2014, content to lose and leave millions in payroll unspent.

Didn't he grow up in LA? Might be a favor kind of deal.

What in the actual hell?

If our SP pitching is our biggest problem, then either Travis Wood and Edwin Jackson got in a car crash together or our OF is overachieving significantly.

I'm ahead of the curve.

At this time of the year, my projected win totals always seem to be higher than most others'. I'm a reckless optimist.

Guys, we can't try to win now, because if we fail it could set us back and we'd have multiple years of losing cleaning up the mess. Safer to just lose for multiple years now and not take the risk of having to lose multiple years.