Hairyducked Idiot

I keep forgetting that Joe Mather is mostly an outfielder because that makes him so much worse and so nonsensical that a guy like that got an MLB job. My bad. I'm really not inclined to give them a pass on "it was over anyway" call-ups, because they are responsible for it being over at that point.

I'm curious to see your math here. 2012: Valbuena +0.5 Baker -0.2 Cardenas -0.3 DeWitt -0.3 Lalli -0.3 Vitters -1.2 Mather -2.0 2013: Valbuena +0.3 Gonzalez 0.0 Lillibridge -0.6 You could probably quibble over some of these guys being counted as "backup infielders" or whatnot, but the the essential total is about -4 wins against replacement.

The point of complaining how bad the infield bench and the bullpen are isn't to say that Epstein should have spent indiscriminately on those positions. It's to show that this front office has done a poor job in several areas where success doesn't require large monetary investment but rather shrewd judgment. The 2012 and 2013 Cubs didn't need to do nothing but spend money to get better. They needed to spend money and make shrewder decision. So consistently pointing out that spending money alone wouldn't have gotten them to where they need to be is technically true but also a non sequitor. Of course, none of this is relevant if you believe that the state of the team in Oct. 2011 was such that there could be no reasonable expectation of a front office making the right combination of decisions to create a competitive team by 2013 without significantly harming the long-term future of the team. I find that view to be horse manure, personally, and it can only be defended by rather bizarre and byzantine set of self-contradictory assumptions that each take the most front-office-friendly position imaginable. But to each their own.

They would have offset several negative wins worth of production. It's uncanny how everything bad that happens under Epstein's watch is either all part of the plan or too small to deign noticing. I'm not so sure that's not what he would have done with Atlanta. Fortunately for Atlanta fans, their GM went out and got a pair of Uptons instead. I did nothing of the sort. You presented the "inherited immediate lineup or rotation" stat, and I was counting them up. How much credit should Epstein get for Samardzija's success? Well, anyone who claims to know exactly is kidding themselves. But he did have an excellent second half in 2011, and he was promised a shot at starting in 2012 long before Epstein was hired. So the answer is definitely not "all of it" and probably not "the majority of it." I've got them at a combined +0.1, actually, but I've been known to forget how to math. So, roughly a 3-win improvement over what we actually fielded in those positions since last year? Sign me up. It's definitely one of my concerns. But ultimately, this is where we disagree (not to mention 2011 NSBB seems to disagree considerably with 2013 NSBB). The post-2011 Cubs could absolutely have given themselves a reasonable chance at winning a title with a sufficiently skilled and aggressive front office at the helm. At worst, they could have set themselves up to have a real shot in 2013. They chose neither. Is this the part where I list all the talent and we argue over what "bereft" means? See, this is what's so weird to me. When Hendry was around, we constantly said that it doesn't take big signings like that to make a good bullpen. That a savvy front office could build a useful bullpen without those signings. Fine. So where's my useful bullpen, savvy front office? I didn't need Heath Bell for 3/$27 (although that would be preferable to just letting $27 million mysteriously disappear from the baseball budget). I just needed it to not be the worst bullpen in baseball last year.

You are intentionally ignoring the important part. The gripe is doing those things *and not replacing them*. Well, Epstein himself admitted that two of those were mistakes. Meanwhile, our reserve infielders have added up to a net -4.1 bWAR since the beginning of last year. Essentially negating Rizzo or Castro's contributions. That's worth bemoaning.

Marshall, Samardzija, Cashner. Nothing wrong with any of those moves, but once you create the hole there, they need to be replaced with more than just Fujikawa over two years. Yeah, maybe "squandered" is the wrong word for the bullpen. He used those resources to strengthen other parts of the team, but never fixed the hole that left. For the infield depth, when he took over we had LeMahieu, Flaherty, Marwin Gonzalez.

Promoted to is to emphasize the point that if Castillo is the catcher after two offseasons, it's because Epstein chose him to be (and not saying that's a bad choice), not because he inherited him from Hendry and had little choice but to make him the starting catcher. Whether or not it lends credence to the idea that the roster he was handed sucks, I find that irrelevant at this point. We're past asking "Why did Epstein turn over 2/3rds of the roster" and to the point where we should be asking "Why hasn't he done a better job with that 2/3rds of the roster?" If your answer is "Because committing resources to trying to make it better wouldn't support his long-term plan to build the team for sustained success," well, I disagree, but at least you are framing the question correctly. Epstein has done a masterful job of giving the press piles and piles of quotes that say absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. No matter what he does in any given offseason, you can go back and find quotes from him saying he would do something along those lines. That's great. Meanwhile, we're 66-114 with his teams. Give him credit for any individual move you want, but the sum total isn't good enough. Soto, Castro, Barney, Samardzija. That's four right there. We also had a decent amount of homegrown bullpen and infield depth, both of which Epstein squandered. It's not a coincidence that those are now two of the weakest parts of the team.

Well, technically, Epstein could have non-tendered Garza, right? If we're counting those players, throw in Castro, Samardzija and Barney. Those seven in aggregate are worth what they are getting paid, I'd imagine. It's one thing to argue that we're bad because Epstein has decided it's worth it to be bad for some long-term plan. But we're far past the point where we can say that we're bad because the front office didn't inherit enough from Hendry. They've had two offseasons now to build a team that they wanted, and they've done so.

By my count, 19 of the 25 men on the current active roster were either acquired or promoted to the roster by the Epstein/Hoyer regime. It's time they start getting the credit for what's happening.

I always have nagging concerns, but I'm going to give it another year or two before I start to worry too much. It is frustrating that he's essentially the same player he was when he entered the league, but he's young enough that I'm not giving up on the breakout just yet.

So Jackson is 1st in FIP, 3rd in xFIP and 5th in ERA. He's definitely either been the best, the worst, or something else.

I'm really, really curious to see if there's any pressure on his job by the end of the year. My guess is no, but who knows?

Wow. It hurts to see a right-hander make Rizzo look that bad.

Burgos' scouting report and even his peripherals in the minors screams "Casey Coleman" at me. No excuse not to hit this guy.

After today's game, Rick Porcello has 3 HRs, 3 Ks and 3 BBs in 13 IP, for a 2.08/9 ratio in all of them.

We have a shocking amount of Brewers fan fiction, actually. Including some illustrated Braun/Fielder yaoi. Was just able to catch up on the highlights from last night's game, and Borbon's early slide was the most Cubs debut I've seen in a long time. Things have devolved to the point where we are actually reenacting scenes from Major League.

I think even that might be reading too much into it, and that's not even a particularly ambitious reading. Maybe they are thinking that they might want to trade both Soriano and DeJesus while bringing up Sweeney but not Jackson, and that Borbon represents an opportunity on that front who might not be there in June or July when this all goes down. But it seems to me to be just as likely more of the random waiver-wire poo-at-wall flinging that could see Borbon waived again in a couple of days.

He's 27. Projection is over. He's a 5th outfielder who is somewhere between replacement and a little above, with some generic, basic CF skills. He doesn't make any sense on this roster, but he was free and gave the Cubs a hilarious moment yesterday.

So it seems the point of this was to try to sneak Borbon through waivers to be able to outright him to AAA when Stewart gets activated, and we'll carry six outfielders for a couple days until that happens. I still really don't see any value in that, but I guess the Cubs do.

That sure seems pointless. If there is one thing this team does not need in the slightest, it's left-handed outfielders. DeJesus and Schierholtz both need RH platoon caddies and have them. Ryan Sweeney is a (imo) slight better version of Borbon at Iowa. And presumably Brett Jackson will get some MLB time by the end of the year. I'm having trouble imagining anything that would be more redundant in this organization than a mediocre backup left-handed outfielder.

Not at all. I'm simply looking at the same information as you in a different way. Payroll does not guarantee success. The correlation is there, but it is not overwhelming. MLB has provided a variety of protections in its CBA, most importantly the six years to free agency, that make developing talent more important than spending money. But if you feel that you haven't developed enough talent, you don't have to choose to pack up and go home. Spending money can be a bridge to the time in the future when you have developed more talent. Yes, the Angels only won 89 games last year and missed the playoffs. The Tigers won 88 and squeaked in. And it was an unusually good year for a couple of really low payroll teams. And even in that unusual year, I think there's a pretty obvious place to draw the line on that graph and which side of that line I want to be on: http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/493/payrollwins3.png I want to be on the side where 6/9 teams on above .500, not the one where with 9/21. (and I'm fairly certain this is using USA Today payroll, which is the one that had the Cubs at like $75 million last year or whatever because it didn't count traded players where we were picking up the tab). But money still helps you get better players, and better players still help you win. We have a very recent history that shows us that you can get a couple of playoff appearances out of a spending spree being added on to a bad team. I'll grant I post so many places that I don't always keep track of who I've argued what with, but can't believe you've never seen me do an alternative offseason, or seen me post the reasons I don't like doing them. There's a bunch of small variables that you have to set arbitrarily, and they can get you to pretty much anywhere you want to go. And all that will happen is the next person will say "nuh-uh" to half the variables and claim it all invalid. Darvish would have fit this team's needs so hard it's not funny. Letting Ramirez go was clearly a mistake if all we were going to replace him with was Ian Stewart. Passing on Fielder seems prescient once we later traded for Rizzo, but I wouldn't have minded one bit having Fielder and tarding Cashner for something else or using him out of the pen. What if he's part of a Headley trade, for example? Any number of cheap or expensive relief pitchers to replace Marshall and Samardzija were clearly needed. I wasn't a big Cespedes fan at the time, but clearly he would have fit nicely in our outfield. As awful as the 2011 Cubs were, it's amazing how fast they get better if you add a league-average bullpen, a 3b, an OF and some smart roster decisions on the bench. And then you don't have to employ whatever guys off the street were pitching for us down the stretch.

And then when we let it drop, we won 61. Developing cheap talent is more important, but not spending what you can is fighting with one hand behind your back.

The Cubs are buying the city more than $5 million worth of stuff.

It's always worth rehashing. It's not an either/or. Would an extra couple of million in the draft budget at the expense of an Aaron Miles been a bad thing? No. But even with what they spent, they should have done better in the post-Prior drafts. Scouting skill, development skill and luck seem to have been marginalized when discussing organizational drafting and development in favor of an obsession with overslotting and total draft budget. Signing bonuses are only a small part of the picture. Post-Prior, the Cubs were absolutely horrible at drafting for a long time. The MLB spending didn't cause the problems, but it did save us from a decade of losing. When the farm system isn't producing and you stop spending, you get the 61-101 Cubs of last year. Expensive free agents weren't the water sinking the boat, it was the pump keeping the boat afloat. I have trouble calling it idiocy when the city is getting so much out of the deal for essentially nothing. Ricketts came to them asking for $300m and they talked him down to him buying a bunch of stuff for them. They took him to the cleaners. Who is the idiot in that scenario? It's kind of a monkey's paw situation. When I wished for those things, I didn't think to specify that I didn't want it to come with lowered payroll, lowered attendance and lowered winning percentage every single year. And honestly, I could do without a bit of the amateur spending. I'm still trying to find a reading of Armando Rivero's scouting report that justifies $3.1 million. After Gerardo Concepcion, they kind of lost the benefit of the "maybe their scouts see something different" with me, and it's starting to feel like amateur spending just for the sake of it rather than with an eye toward ROI.

I like the idea of 95th percentile projection or something replacing the idea of "ceiling." I hate ceiling. It's so meaningless. If Sammy Sosa could hit 66 home runs, then basically everybody's ceiling is everything.