Hairyducked Idiot

A few pundits have brought it up, and for some reason he keeps coming up very high in preseason betting odds to win it.

I saw Trubisky lead an offense to 30 ppg for a month and a half stretch once, too. Fields' five-game run a) came when they switched up the offense, so defenses didn't have film on it right away. b) was something they were reluctant to do earlier in the season because it can lead to QBs getting hurt and it did lead to him getting hurt and c) was bookended by equally long stretches of bad offense on both sides. I find it very easy to envision a version of fields that isn't a startable NFL QB. It's the version we've seen most of his career to date.

I have never been less sure of what to expect from a Bears season. There's almost no outcome that would shock me. My natural tendency to doom boner says that snap processing is the most important skill a QB can have and it's not something that can be fixed if Fields' brain doesn't have it, and that last preseason film breakdown sure looked familiar. The offensive line is looking shaky and is still too enamored with run-blocking. We have no idea if Poles' approach to building a defense works, and who cares if it does because it's defense and doesn't matter. I could easily envision a collapse on par with last season. But Fields is also insanely talented and hard-working and has some legit weapons surrounding him. I genuinely would not be shocked if all the preseason MVP hype came true and he led the team to 12+ wins. I really, really want to see how this plays out. The only thing I don't want to see is a tepid result where Fields doesn't play bad enough to lose the job but not nearly good enough to feel secure in him.

I agree but I also think that applies to to this season too. People act like you can predict NFL win totals with way too much precision. A lot of NFL games end up being coin flips that can turn on a single play, and 17 games is not a large sample. Bad teams can and do win 10+ games due to luck (hi 2022 Minnesota vikings) and good teams can have seasons derailed with injury runs

I don't have a strong opinion on keeping Hendricks either way. But if we don't, it's not because we have five starters already.

It's pitching. If you aren't running 8 deep in the rotation heading into spring, you don't have enough.

I liked what I saw from Young in the pre-season. Lots of decisive, quick-hit reads. Very, very good at moving around in the pocket. Accuracy wasn't amazing.

have they changed the rules in the last few years or are these still revocable waivers? Anaheim can let a claim through, negotiate a trade or pull them back still?

Bears have picked up a DB, a DE and a kick returnor off waivers.

1 would be better as a sports fan. 2 would be more fun as a doom boner.

I am so ready for this season and an end to the BS once and for all. I think Fields is legitimately capable of living up to the MVP hype and also capable of flaming out completely. I just want it settled one way or the other.

Must-win?

I mean, not really, no

He's the least objectionable of our near-ready starting pitching.

The most recent actual park factor for Iowa that I can find was published in 2022 by baseball america and had Iowa at 111 for generic run production and 119 for home runs. So if anything, I'm being generous by merely calling it 6%. It's hard to be more right than I am on this one. At the end of the day, all you have is generic sputtering fake outrage and no facts.

Well some of them play good defense, that could help their case.

It's 100% correct. .800 league OPS, 6% park inflation means you need an .848 OPS just to be league average. .900 would be barely above average. I'm just not even close to incorrect on this one.

Iowa Cubs have an .868 team OPS at home vs ,821 on the road. I don't see OPS against in any easy to find site, but the Iowa Cubs pitching staff has an ERA of 5.51 at home and 5.20 on the road. Both numbers indicate home park inflating offense by about 6%. The IL average OPS is .801. The MLB average OPS this season is .731. So league average is ~9.5% higher in this league vs. the majors. So even if the international League were *exactly* the same difficulty as the major leagues, an Iowa Cub would need to be putting up an .848 OPS to demonstrate that they would be a league average hitter in the majors. But of course, MLB is quite a bit harder than the majors, as Matt Mervis found out. Here's a list of every player who has had at least 50 PAs for both the Iowa Cubs and Chicago Cubs in 2023, what they OPS'd in Iowa and what they OPS'd in MLB Miguel Amaya .929 to .771 (-17%) Nick Madrigal 1.192 to .710 (-40%) Mike Tauchman .870 to .775 (-11%) Christopher Morel 1.156 to .808 (-30%) Miles Mastrobuoni .921 to ,565 (-38%) Matt Mervis .958 to .531 (-45%) If someone wants to take the time to weight that by PAs be my guest, but in the raw that's an average decline of 30%. So even if he *were* OPSing .900 (which again, he isn't, that's an arbitrary endpoint), that would make him project to about a .630 OPS in the majors. I'm sure it's fun to think the Cubs are just *so* good as an orgainzation that they have literally a dozen guys in Iowa who could hit in the majors right now but we don't have room for, the reality is it's just a park/league combination giving everyone superficial slash lines. Of course, the flip side of this is that I've probably been too hard on pitchers like Wicks.

Good enough for what? Good enough to continue his employment? Good enough for his parents to be proud of him? Absolutely. But if that's your standard for good enough for a major-league roster spot, we're gonna need to expand to 50 teams to fit all the newly qualified major leaguers. Especially since we're not even talking about what he's *actually* hitting, we're talking about what he's hitting in a sample specifically selected ad hoc because it puts him in the best light.

OK then this game will probably count on his stats. If he hadn't, it might not have.

What does being a finished product have to do with it? We're talking about calling him up for a roster spot right now, not his prospect status. All the games count. The games before the last 21 were also official minor league baseball games that count on his record. There's no reason to pick out his last 21 games other than to make him look better, it's motivated reasoning. What more do I want him to do? Not be 7th on his AAA team in OPS (min. 100 PAs).

Nope, still right. Crushing is relative to league and park. In a league where everyone is OPSing .800, in a hitters park, a .900 OPS isn't "crushing."

I'm very disappointed that plug-in MLE calculators are no longer a thing on the internet, apparently.

The IL has a collective OPS of .801 and Iowa has a historical park factor of about 110. Iowa Cubs hitters are collectively OPSing .845 and their pitchers have a team ERA of 5.37. The best team OPS the Colorado Rockies ever put up in Coors Fields' launchiest days was a .837. Just looking at raw OPS is going to massively overrate hitters playing at Iowa, especally when you aren't even looking at raw OPS but selecting an arbitrary endpoint to maximize the OPS you're looking at. If you really squint and fudge, it's almost always within reason to argue that anyone employed to play professional baseball at the AAA level could probably do a credible job filling the last roster spot on an MLB team for a month. But that's what we're doing here. We're squinting and fudging to make a case for a guy because pixels gotta be spilled and because it's fun to make cases for guys. He's not better than Matt Mervis, or Jared Young, or Yonathan Perlaza, or Mastrobuoni, or PCA. He's indistinguishable from Bote or Slaughter or Vasquez.