Hairyducked Idiot

Vitters' BABIP down to .143. Dude could really use some luck.

Sorry, but I'm not buying the whole "If we added X, Y and Z, we'd still only have 75 wins." We don't know that. There are too many things that go into a major-league season to think you can just swap a few WARs in and out and confidently say where we'd have ended up. There are several teams fighting for playoff spots right now that were supposed to be 75-win teams. The 2011 Cardinals looked like a 75-win team at times last year. The whole "either we have a juggernaut team or every win is wasted" idea is silly. You might as well say "if we don't win the World Series, we might as well have been last for draft position." Every season is a chance to win, every chance to win is sacred. We took a dump all over this sacred chance to win for vague, uncertain returns.

They've got four players in their lineup right now with a better OPS than .750. There's a very decent chance the 2013 Cubs don't match that if they don't make a significant effort to acquire immediate impact players.

I'm still wondering where all the money went this year. The 2011 Cubs spent around $160 million between the big leagues, the draft and IFAs. Add up this year's payroll, draft, IFA, organizational changes and infrastructure, and I'm still coming up way short of $160 million. Depends on how you spread out the money. The Cubs committed around 40 million in IFA money this year. How much is being put on this year's budget versus other years is completely unknown. How much of the 8 million investment in the Dominican Academy is on this year's budget is unknown. They've fired quite a few people and expanded the front office at the same time. That's going to cost a little extra. They've made quite a few technology improvements throughout the system, which is going to add some initial cost. Basically the only two things we know for sure are payroll+draft. Those two are somewhere in the 118-120 million range combined. Do the others add up to 40 million extra? Probably not, but there's enough there that it easily could depending on the accounting of it. It would be very, very unusual for a business to count against the budget money that they aren't actually spending this year, such as IFA contracts. Soler didn't get a $30 million bonus. He got a long-term, escalating deal. The hiring/firing of minor personnel and technology improvements are a drop in the bucket. Those are several orders of magnitude short of being more than a blip in this discussion.

I'm still wondering where all the money went this year. The 2011 Cubs spent around $160 million between the big leagues, the draft and IFAs. Add up this year's payroll, draft, IFA, organizational changes and infrastructure, and I'm still coming up way short of $160 million. I haven't done the math, but did you figure in our official payroll number or what we're actually paying guys? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Before the trade deadline, we were at almost exactly $110 million in actual commitments, including what we are paying for Zambrano. It's actually less than that because of Wood's retirement and some deadline deals, Add in the draft, IFAs and the new front office personnel, and there's still about $30 million missing.

I'm still wondering where all the money went this year. The 2011 Cubs spent around $160 million between the big leagues, the draft and IFAs. Add up this year's payroll, draft, IFA, organizational changes and infrastructure, and I'm still coming up way short of $160 million.

I'm not pretty sure about that.

If we take the same approach as last year, this team is Astros-level bad in 2013.

Yes. We traded something valuable for three somethings valuable.

Oh, win? Just win games? Why don’t I strap on my win helmet, and squeeze into a win cannon and fire off into win land, where wins grow on winnies! It's sad how thin the margin is on this being your least coherent point in this discussion.

didn't Casey Kotchman have a 2.8 fWAR last year? fwiw, Kurt Suzuki and James Loney had 2.3 fWAR seasons too last year Dempster and Marshall were good enough players, but their contract statuses sucked most of the value out of them as assets Until Theo rode in on his magic unicorn and convinced teams to pay significant value for these previously worthless pieces. Gotcha.

The vision includes sucking for a few years on purpose. It's not a great vision.

Marshall. Barney. Dempster. Cashner. Samardzija. And can you disagree with our FO's decisions on a single one of them? Loaded question. I disagree with the direction the front office chose. Once that direction was chosen, their decisions with each of them have made perfect sense. But regardless, those were assets in place.

As opposed to what? Simply bad? We'll never know. As opposed to less awful than it is, most likely.

yes, that's basically what i'm saying by this same absurd twisted logic, we know Larry Andersen was simply oozing with trade value when the Red Sox dealt him Yeah. You are being silly and I think/hope that you know it. That list included players coming off of 2.8, 2.2 and 2.8 fWAR major league seasons. To call them "penny stocks" just because you found a tortured phrase that could theoretically apply to them and sound bad does not diminish their actual value, which was significant. The organization has significantly more player assets than the three players you named, and it also had significant financial assets at its disposal. This team is awful right now because Epstein chose for it to be awful. No more, no less.

(when i said he left them nothing, i assumed it was easily understood that meant nothing of value...he obviously left him some players with which to actually physically field a team, and not that he made off with all his players like some dastardly bandit) So what you are saying is that Cashner and Marshall had no value whatsoever, but Epstein used his magic Jedi mind tricks to turn them into valuable assets?

Marshall. Barney. Dempster. Cashner. Samardzija. hindsight BS a FA-to-be middle reliever a guy with a career 79 OPS+ a 35yo FA-to-be coming off a 4.80 ERA season a pitcher coming off a shoulder injury who'd still never topped 100 IP a wild reliever who'd never even produced a 4.25 xFIP none of these were assets with significant value at the beginning of the year So if we assume that none of the players we had under Hendry could ever improve from the worst possible way you could spin them, even the young ones, then I guess it's fair to say that Epstein was left with nothing.

Marshall. Barney. Dempster. Cashner. Samardzija.

Well, yes. That's what Theo Epstein built his name doing: Drafting better, later. If he can't do that, why did you hire Theo Epstein?

A combination of A and C, maybe a tiny bit of D.

1) He's not breaking any rules 2) Use the ignore function if needed. Seriously. I do have him ignored. Here's what happens: Ignored post I don't see. Reply telling him he's an idiot. Reply telling him he's an idiot. Reply telling him he's an idiot. Reply telling him he's an idiot. Another post I've ignored. Reply telling him he's an idiot. Reply telling him he's an idiot. Reply telling him he's an idiot. Reply telling him he's an idiot. Then the next topic has the same thing. I realize being a moron is not against the rules. It brings down the site. Yes I'm still reading the site because there are people making comments that I value. Then there's this that comes with it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't care for it. I find it very intriguing that you find the person making the post you've ignored to be the problem in that scenario.

At 30%? I absolutely think he can be a starter. But I don't think he can maintain 30%. Or 35%.

Well, Travis Wood does suck after all :( Where are all the pitchers going to come from?

Do I understand correctly that you're saying we're not yet at the point where he's had enough PAs to draw any conclusions, in fact we're only about half way there, but you're drawing conclusions? Just trying to wrap my head around that one. It's not binary. 59 PAs isn't meaningless and 60 PAs suddenly changes everything. 51.4% in 35 PAs is enough to strongly suggest that he has a terminal (to his career) contact problem. The chance that it's variance and the true underlying K-rate is something acceptable like 30% is pretty low.

Dead on. I looooooove Crane Kenny. I write Mrs. Kyle Kenney in my notebooks.