Hairyducked Idiot

It was self-masturbatory claptrap about how kids these days (especially a certain very dark Hispanic kid on the North Side right now) aren't as virtuous as he was. I thought it was classless to clearly throw a current star under the bus just to make himself look better by comparison.

I'm exaggerating a bit, but I never particularly liked him once I was old enough not to just love him for being a Cub. He was like Ryan Theriot in how he thought way too much of himself, especially on defense because of his overrated fielding percentage. His HOF speech really rubbed me the wrong way.

Self-righteous whining about kids these days from the guy who refused to get his uniform dirty because it might risk his fielding percentage? That's not a point in Sandberg's favor.

It's okay to quit on your team as long as you do it quietly. (also it helps if you are white)

Both.

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We're talking about upgrades/downgrades vs. the 2011 Cubs, though. While I'm not in love with Marlon Byrd as my every day RFer, the Cubs got a .252/321/390 line out of the position last year.

Only above-average defender? Darwin Barney is going to throw a ball at your head. And he'll probably hit it, because he's a good defender. Jackson to CF, Byrd to RF and anyone to 3b should all be significant improvements over last year. Plus I'm projecting some improvement from Castro`.

Ooh, that's a new tactic. We can add "general accusations of ignorance" to the playbook. Anything to avoid having to back up your own assertions. WAR is nothing more than a currency to describe value in this discussion. You could use runs or outs or dollars or whatever, but wins is a logical one.

Let's say the team is not competitive for 2012 or 2013, so you decide not to waste the huge salary for those two years. What's the opportunity cost? What are you going to spend that money on instead that helps the team?

Presuming the removal of bad luck is not the same as hoping for luck. You've got a nice racket going. You get to make vague statements of doom and dodge any attempt to be pinned down to specifics. Then when someone disagrees, you either nitpick the specifics or accuse them of not providing any. Okay, this time with specifics for you to pick at: The Cubs got 0.8 WAR out of 72 starts (roughly two rotation spots) from the parade of awful replacement pitchers last year and the injured Randy Wells. They got 0.3 WAR out of RF. Matt Garza gave up 0.8 WAR worth of runs more than his FIP would predict. Ryan Dempster gave up 2.0 WAR more. (Obviously, defense was a part of that, but this is where we'll include the assumption that the Cubs have a better defense in 2012, which I think is reasonable). If the Cubs spend $30 million on pitching to fill those two rotation spots at the prevailing price of about $4 million per WAR, they get an upgrade of 6.7 WAR. If Matt Garza and Ryan Dempster get back to their predictive FIP rather than their descriptive ERA, then you get another 2.8 WAR back. That's 9.5 wins of upgrade without touching 1b.

The Cubs last year got replacement-level production out of RF, No. 4 starter and No. 5 starter. They also had several other starting pitchers exhibit quite a bit of poor luck. There's 8-12 wins to be had fairly easily by fixing each of those things. After that, it gets a bit harder to upgrade without signing a major upgrade, but there's still a lot of fairly easy wins to be cherrypicked.

If you are very lucky, you call it 1998.

And that's where we disagree. This team is a lot closer to average than it is a complete mess, presuming we clean up the back of the rotation and get a small upgrade in the outfield by replacing Tyler Colvin's playing time with Brett Jackson.

That was in Ramirez's best season in the last three, by far. A reasonable projection has him dropping a bit. So for Ramirez, we're looking at a projection of 2.5 WAR to 3.5 WAR, depending how optimistically you want to project him. (I'm not saying he couldn't have a better season than that, or a worse season, I'm just saying that projecting for 2012, that's pretty much the range you have to come in at). Alternative cheap solutions project from a pessimistic 0 WAR (that's pretty much what replacement level means) to the optimistic 1.5 WAR (if the platoon works reasonably well or you get a good vet). That's pretty much the range we're arguing about here. I see it closer to 1-2 wins (I'm pretty bearish on Ramirez and bullish on internal options), but I could see the argument that it is closer to 3 wins if you were bullish on Ramirez and bearish on the replacements. I don't see how a 3-win downgrade would mean that we are so doomed that we have to put away any thoughts of competing if we whiffed on the elite 1bmen.

I know that "embarrassingly bad" isn't strictly quantifiable, but I think that's overstating how bad the Cubs' offense would be. We scored 654 runs last season, the average National League offense scored 669. Presuming we at least bring back Carlos Pena or his equivalent at 1b, the rest of the offense would be more or less the same. Yeah, you can get a bounceback year from Soto or improvement from Castro or Darwin Barney could fall apart or Byrd could get old, but projecting an average of the same thing is pretty reasonable. In order to drop into the bottom quartile, we'd have had to have scored 614 runs of fewer. Using B-Ref's Batting Runs Above Average, Ramirez was a +28 runs with the bat. So in the nightmare scenario where we don't make a single upgrade to the offense in the entire offseason, we'd still have to be 13 runs below average offensively at 3b in order to drop down to 12th in offense in a 16-team league. It wouldn't be a good offense, or even an average one, but it's not quite as bad as some would have you believe.

Take the platoon idea out of it. What's your projected 2012 WAR as a full-time starting 3b from: Aramis Ramirez Jeff Baker The best veteran stopgap $2 million can buy.

Exactly. Of course there's a dropoff from Ramirez to the Baker Brigade. But there's an opportunity cost to everything. Re-signing Ramirez at the price he'll likely command probably means taking a hit in the rotation or 1b. It's pretty hard to make a case (and I notice no one's tried to make it, other than just vague statements about how hard it is to replace Ramirez) that the hit from Ramirez to internal options is bigger than the hit from a good FA pitcher to Casey Coleman.

What's with Chicago media lately and burying the lede? http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/ct-spt-1102-cubs-jed-hoyer--chicago--20111102,0,2949935.story Toward the end of parsing all the generic quotes from Hoyer's press conference, we get this: Buehrle to the Cubs makes a lot of sense, for the reasons listed here: http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2011/11/cubs-nationals-may-have-interest-in-buehrle.html He's said he wants to try the NL, he would't mind staying close to home, and the Cardinals rotation is pretty full. He'd fit nicely into the short-term veteran FA mold we are looking at.

On Epstein compensation: Says MacPhail is the only real precedent, so it shouldn't be that hard to figure out.

That's actually the argument against re-signing Ramirez. He's not at the far end of the spectrum (on either end). He's on the good side of the middle, and I'd we can replace him with players on the worse side of the middle. But there are players at the far positive end of the spectrum available at 1b, and there are players at the far negative end of the spectrum that need to be replaced in the rotation.

That sounds like a flaw with WAR No, it just comes back to some people overrating Ramirez. 2009-2011 fWAR: 2.2, 0.4, 3.6 bWAR: 1.4, -1.0, 3.6 bpWAR: 2.3, 0.4, 2.4 He's a nice offensive player, but he gives some of that value back in every way imaginable: terrible baserunner, terrible defender (at this point in his career, in his prime he was able to hold his own), prone to nagging injuries.

http://www.suntimes.com/sports/baseball/cubs/8553492-573/cubs-more-interestedin-arms-than-sluggers.html Stupid tea-leaf reading at the top of this article, but lots of good stuff at the bottom, including:

I type gud late at night. Yes, overstating. If a guy is above the league average in OPS, then the weighting difference on OBP isn't going to take him that much further below average. Yes, he might technically be below the exact average, but unless you never want to call a player average (only above and below), then he's close enough. I didn't say we were getting an elite pitching staff. I said that I was disagreeing with someone who said that the offense was that bad. This is getting pointlessly bogged down by nitpicks and semantics. Here are the two points I am making: 1) In an imaginary world where the Cubs re-sign Pena, put Jackson in CF, and do not make any other upgrades via FA or trade, the 2012 offense should still project to about 30 runs below league average. That's 2011 Atlanta: not good, but not something that goes down in the annals of awful. 2) There are other routes to improve the 2012 roster besides Prince-bert. The Cubs got 2.6 fWAR from Pena last season and he'd likely be available again at about the same price. They got 72 starts from No. 4 or worse pitchers last year totalling 0.8 fWAR. Spending the team's remaining $40 million on two starting pitchers to replace most of those 72 starts likely gives an immediate improvement in the same ballpark as signing one of the elite first basemen and one pitcher.

If I'd been using previous levels of ability, the gap would have been a lot higher. Are you saying that you don't think Hoystein can find a 3-WAR starting pitcher (which is what I was projecting for Oswalt) with whatever is left over of $40 million after signing Wilson?