Hairyducked Idiot

I don't, seeing as how we've seen them do it several times now. Volstad and Lillibridge off the top of my head.

If that does happen, it happened after *two* championships. I'm not exactly going to cry myself to sleep.

No clue on the PP, but we lost some key PKers over the offseason. It'll get better as the season moves along.

Some random Cubs musings I'm *still* not sure we end up with a regular 3b out of the organization. Prediction: Baez stays in the middle IF, Bryant to the OF, Christian Villanueva doesn't hit enough to start in the majors, Candelario doesn't stick at 3b and Mike Olt's concussion/eye problems never go away. Lake is our starting LFer, Arrieta is in the rotation and Donnie Murphy is our first infielder off the bench. This sort of "winning job for next year with statistically shaky but superficially strong in a small sample size" stuff got Hendry all kinds of well-deserved crap. There's got to be a trade coming to deal with all this relief pitching. It's just wasteful at his point, unless the front office just has no faith in guys like Rusin, Rosscup, Grimm, Ramirez, Cabrera, etc. If some of those guys just rot in AAA this year, it makes their acquisitions and emergence last year a bit less impressive. I like Travis Wood in the middle of the rotation, but right now we have exactly one pitcher above A+ with a reasonable projection to be in the top of a competitive rotation, and that one's future in the organization is very much in doubt. Tanaka or not makes such a huge difference in our projection for 2014-2016. Not that we actually seem intent on using it, but the financial flexibility in 2015-16 is just ungodly, especially when you consider how many pre-arb players we should have in the lineup by then. You could put together a whole MLB roster in 2015 for like $50m.

First birthday hat trick in Blackhawks history and first in NHL since 2002, according to Twitter.

Yep.

So at this point, the outfield is made up more or less entirely of fourth and fifth outfielders, the infield has absolutely no quality depth, the rotation is weak at the back-end, but we've got nearly triple redundancy in the bullpen. Weird.

Not as good. Similar but with less velocity, as I understand it.

I wouldn't mind letting Arrieta and Hendricks battle it out. Hendricks seems to be locked in to starting at AAA, and I don't think that's unreasonable. I would be pretty ecstatic though if we managed to bump Arrieta out of the rotation. He's not the worst fifth starter we've ever trotted out there, but he's pretty bad and I think he has a much better shot to be useful out of the pen.

If they wind up with the 12th pick they should trade down. They need as many picks as possible to fill all the holes on D. Forget that. D is irrelevant in the modern NFL. Draft more offense and score on every possession.

I'm not crazy in love with it, but it would be an above-average pitching staff and would probably make the first half of the season watchable.

It sucks that we're in position where this one player makes the difference between a productive and non-productive offseason, but he would make that difference if we could sell him on Chicago and come up with the money.

That's more or less true, but it's not like that money was being diverted to the major league product very often. The Cubs underinvested in all aspects of the organization, top and bottom, for most of the 20th century. Then in the 21st they've kind of bounced back and forth between a few different plans. There was barely any time at all where the reason scouting/development was underdeveloped was the MLB product hogging resources.

It is literally amazing to me that this complete and and total horsepoop has become accepted fact for so much of the fanbase. PR firms exist, and make lots of money, for a reason. And it's amazing to me that you think a team that was saddled with so many bad contracts, had two losing seasons prior to Theo taking over and little to no young, controllable, impact talent should be able to magically conjure a winning team immediately upon signing a new GM while at the same time building a healthy franchise where there hadn't been one in 60 years. It's also amazing to me that you could also be blind to all of the progress that has been made in building a healthy franchise able to produce teams that will consistently be in the playoffs. They're not there yet, but the progress is measurable whether you want to see it or not. We didn't say any of those things. You actually did say the thing you said. Which was really, really wrong. There was like *one* time in all of Cubs history that they simultaneously spent money to get the best possible players in the majors and sort-of shortchanged the rest of the franchise (although not as much as some want to believe), and it was a blip. Barely even a year or two.

It is literally amazing to me that this complete and and total horsepoop has become accepted fact for so much of the fanbase.

A bunch of articles on Twitter saying that 7/$130 in Texas is like 7/$155 in New York because of Taxes.

You misspelled "delightful and witty." Easy mistake to make.

And we did, in fact, have a pretty decent rotation despite all that happening. For having to deal with a Garza injury and trade and a Baker injury, it ended up being with spitting distance of average. The bigger problem was that our lack of pitching depth forced us to sign swingmen to do double-duty and try to patch the rotation and pen at the same time, and when those guys got pressed into service in the rotation, the pen fell apart. From Gregg's first save to the day of the Garza trade, the team was 39-40. 5-13 before Gregg, 22-43 after Garza. This post has me irrationally optimistic about how decent the team could be if Rizzo's results improve and Castro bounces back to at least 2010-12 form...a little Baez call up magic could make things interesting. That is, of course, assuming the rotation isn't a dumpster fire, which it very well could be depending on what happens with Samardzija and Tanaka. I agree that there's enough there to hope on, but the problem is that while we should get some improvements from Castro and whatever, that's probably balanced out by not having a bunch of random replacement-level infielders go out of their minds like Ransom and Murphy did. And I'm not ready to count on 3-4 wins from Welington Castillo every year just yet. And thanks to North, I now know that Junior Lake is awful despite what we got from him last year. It feels like we're almost Hendrying in that we're addressing precisely what went wrong with the previous season and letting new problems emerge (but I guess you can't fix everything with our current budget restraints). It's hard to see the bullpen not being at least adequate this year if not better, but the rotation looks iffy and the offense looks pretty putrid to me.

Call me when we actually have a healthy franchise top to bottom.

I think the "relievers are inconsistent" thing is overblown a bit. If you look at peripherals and not just ERA, they aren't *that* inconsistent. Feels like the sabersavvy fans' bias against them came out of the era when ERA+ was the best tool we had for pitchers.

But they'll get another year of Tanaka It's sometimes hard for Cubs fans to remember that other baseball teams perversely want to have good baseball players on their roster and win lots of baseball games.

As long as the Bears still win this game, then the controversy can be kept to a dull roar. If they lose, all bets are off.

Season over.

Honestly? I'd rather just keep Barney. There's got to be a limit to how many of these AAA fringey pitchers we can make adequate use of. Given the choice, Ramirez seems like he has a bit more upside.

$80-$100m doesn't sound like enough, honestly, though I could be wrong.