Hairyducked Idiot

The "This Time We Will Catch Houston" Edition. AKA the "Pay for the reconstruction as fast as possible" edition. Jackson, Castillo and Valbuena are declared the starters for 2013. Valbuena gets maybe $1.5 in arbitration (estimating high to be on the safe side). That solidifies the starting position players before you enter the offseason. *Maybe* you dump Soriano and use the salary relief to pick up a cheap veteran replacement. Trade Vitters for a similar-quality live arm you can get in a prospect-for-prospect deal. Soriano/Jackson/DeJesus Valbuena/Castro/Barney/Rizzo Castillo Bench: Sappelt/Reed-Johnson-style vet ($1 million) Cardenas/Mather-style-minimum-guy Recker or Clevenger (sometimes a five-man bench, sometimes six with the now-traditional waiver-wire shuffle going on all season). Garza and Samardzija combine for $20 million in arbitration deals. Okay, on to the pitching: Non-tender Stewart and Volstad. Find a guy who will take a 1/$10 deal that you can Maholm this trade deadline (McCarthy? Villanueva? Heck, can we try to see if Dempster wants to do it all again? You could probably get Liriano really cheap, and FIP seems to sort of like him). Leave the bullpen alone and assume you can fill it out with young guys and waiver-wire pickups. Total MLB payroll (including Soler and Concepcion's MLB contracts): ~$75 million. It's hard to get a real read on the Cubs' books, but that should leave like $60-80 million in excess baseball operations budget to go toward the renovations. That's half of what the Cubs were hoping to have to contribute, and about a quarter of the total cost.

Up to 125 PAs. The BB rate is stubbornly staying up at 15.2%, so that's really encouraging. There doesn't appear to have been any loss of BB-ability when going from AAA to the majors like I thought there would be. The K-rate is still right around where it stabilized, currently 42.4%. Short of a major adjustment that's about a year overdue at this point, I don't see that changing. Regression to the mean hit the high-variance peripherals pretty hard and they are now right about where they should be: 14.3% XBH/BIP is right about normal for somewhat fast line-drive hitter. 20.0% HR/FB ratio is still a smidge high, imo, but close to what we can expect from him (career MiLB of 18.3% according to MLC). .286 BABIP is a smidge low, balancing out the HR/FB variance. The result is a 170/296/358 slash line for a .654 OPS. I think you might be able to justify giving him a reserve OF spot next season based on those numbers. So long as he can BB enough to keep his OBP at .300, you could do worse in the Reed Johnson role, and he's young enough to keep around on the slim prayer that he learns how to hit.

Vindication for Dusty Baker.

He's due up fifth. Perfect for some walk-off heroics.

Rizzogasm

Meant to post that in today's (Friday's) game thread.

Yeah, there's obviously not a player on that list that isn't worth sacrificing a second-round pick for. Worst comes to worst, you trade them in 2014 and get a way better prospect than your 2nd-round pick probably turned out to be. It's not as simple as that though. Pretty close to everyone on that list will require a 4-5 year commitment. So the question becomes who off THAT list do you want for that length of time? Like I said, I understand Upton, but not anyone else. Well, that's a different discussion. Personally, I think those guys are a much better asset for the Cubs than another year of payroll flexibility, but ymmv. That's a lot different than saying we should avoid them because we'd have to give up a second-round draft pick.

Yay Castro. 100 losses doesn't seem likely at this point. Welcome back, K-Jax. Nice to see you haven't lost a step.

Yeah, there's obviously not a player on that list that isn't worth sacrificing a second-round pick for. Worst comes to worst, you trade them in 2014 and get a way better prospect than your 2nd-round pick probably turned out to be.

Which is precisely my point. After the first round, the draft is just about loading up on a bunch of long-shots. You get 19 lottery tickets in rounds 2-20. Losing your second-round pick just means you only get 18 lottery tickets. I'm not saying a 2nd-rounder is no better than a 20th rounder, but he's a lot closer to a 5th-rounder than he is a first-rounder. I really don't care about losing a second-round pick because even though that sounds really high, and in a league like the NFL it's really important, in MLB that's just the first of many poo-flingings.

I think you don't have to look at the exact draft spot to be realistic about the value of the prospect you are going to get there. There are two phases of the MLB draft: the first round, and then a gigantic craps shoot of lottery tickets. 2nd-round picks fall into the latter category. I'm not particularly worried about losing out on one. The possible trade value of a mediocre MLB player we sign >>>> the value of a 2nd-round draft pick. From your list, I'd have no problem sacrificing a 2nd-round pick for any of the 3b and most of the pitchers. Haven't really looked at the outfielders too closely. Now, granted, the Cubs aren't exactly a model franchise for drafting and development, but the Cubs haven't had a 2nd-round pick produce more than 0.5 bWAR since Maddux in 1984.

It's only capped at 70 wins if our front office wants it to be. I don't think it's that simple. Do you advocate giving away our 2nd round pick for any of the guys I mentioned that may get the qualifier put on them? I don't, because none are true difference makers, other than Greinke and Hamilton, who obviously are too risky for Theo to use his first big step here on. I can't think of too many MLB players I wouldn't give up a 2nd round pick for. Second-round picks suck. Our 2nd round pick should be right around 40th overall, right? There have been 47 40th overall picks in the history of the draft. 4 of them have a career bWAR of greater than 1.

It's only capped at 70 wins if our front office wants it to be.

****abunchadustybaker

Anyway, to me, the bullpen is going to be the bellweather this offseason. It needs to be better, and it can be better with minimal investment. I have no doubt that they'll find a collection of arms to file behind Samardzija and Garza in the rotation. I'll even live with it, albeit while complaining loudly, if they decide they really like Valbuena or Vitters to try at 3b. But there's really no reason to just completely ignore/dismantle the bullpen yet again.

That's a Truth Hangover.

I posted these numbers in the game day thread, but they belong here. I'm continuing to argue that the "go cheap in the first round and save money for later overslots" approach is a really, really bad way to draft. The analogy I use is the NFL draft. People think baseball talent is distributed that way: First-round picks are awesome, but there's a slow and steady dropoff as you go down through the rounds, and mid-round picks are still quite the important value. In baseball, the drop is much steeper in the first part of the first round, and then you enter a very large pool of undifferentiated mediocrity. I'm not at all convinced that the "first-round talents" you can get overslotting in the second round are really all that much more better than the ordinary second-round talents, and so forth. Anyway: I posted this over in the gameday thread, but it really goes here in case people want to 1975 to 2000 Overall pick, percentage who posted at least 10 bWAR in MLB, average bWAR per pick. 1, 72%, 31.4 2, 44%, 12.0 3, 36%, 10.2 4, 28%, 9.9 5, 20%, 6.3 27-30, 12%, 3.1 47-50, 10%, 4.7 The dropoff in expected value in the early picks is significant. Even dropping from the 2nd-best player to the 5th-best player cuts your odds of getting an established major-leaguer in half and costs you 6 WAR in expected value. Meanwhile, the mid-second round picks were outperforming the late first-rounders. Obviously, this information could change with time, and it takes awhile to see because of the nature of the draft, but I don't think the talent distribution has changed much.

I just realized my chart might not have been clear. The average wins was per *pick* not per player that made it. So if you have a 40% chance of making it and a 4 win difference per pick for one slot over another, then the players who did make it were on average worth 10 more career wins at the higher spot.

:yahoo: 40/80 will continue to break causality and there's not a thing any of us can do about it.

He clearly belongs in the rotation, and he's clearly not as good as I thought going into the season. I wouldn't mind seeing him dealt to a team with a better ballpark fit. Wrigley with the wind blowing out is worse than kryptonite for him. A team like the Padres or Mariners would probably get a lot more value out of him than we will.

I can't believe those idiots gifted him a rotation spot and kept Travis Wood in Iowa. Idiots. That argument wasn't actually being made, was it? I know people were debating which two, to keep up between the4 of Volstad/Maholm/Wells/Wood but I don't remember anyone of those guys should get a spot over Samardzija I wanted Wood over just about everyone. It wasn't going to come down to Wood or Samardzija, but if it did, I wanted Wood. Not the least of which because moving Samardzija to the rotation put a huge hole in our bullpen. What Epstein said about the draft is true for all baseball analysis: Everyone is wrong a lot. You just try to be a little less wrong.

I can't believe those idiots gifted him a rotation spot and kept Travis Wood in Iowa. Idiots.

I'm waiting until the end of the season to do the "I was right about.../I was wrong about..." thread. Samardzija definitely goes into the "was wrong about."

It isn't. It's a rhetorical fallacy, but not a semantic one. But arguing about whether it is or not is a semantic argument.

I could be wrong and am certainly too lazy to look back over the three pages it would take to confirm, but I think CubinNY was advancing the "no margin for error because of his straight fastball" theory, and I was simply skeptical about his stamina as a starter.