Hairyducked Idiot
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Everything posted by Hairyducked Idiot
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I really don't want this place to be yet another place overrun with prospect/rebuilding obsession. The good news is the team might be good soon, and history suggests that most people who get that way forget about it pretty quickly once the team gets good and then a few years later a new generation of fans thinks that it's all some big, grand new plan that's never been tried before.
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The idea that you have to wait until your team is amazing to make a big move is wrong. The maximum point of leverage on additions is when your team is in a close playoff race.
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Frequently. But there never seems to be any correlation between how aghast people are about the opinions and whether I'm wrong or not. I really didn't want Mike Piazza if it meant we had to include a top prospect like Pat Cline.
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This is the first stupid opinion I've seen in this thread
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So Spencer Strider has been an excellent major league pitcher the last two seasons. He was in the minors in 2021. 32 pitchers appeared on baseball-america's top 100 list in 2021. He was not among them. 35 pitchers appeared on the 2022 list. He was not amongst them. Strider has put up 8.2 fWAR in the majors in that time. The exstence of Spencer Strider does not bolster the case that someone like Horton can't be traded for Bednar.. It proves that someone like Horton is overvalued, because you never really know where the top young pitchers will come from.
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Am I wrong or was Spencer Strider relatively absent on top-100 lists in the minors?
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Cool. He's not elite relative to them, unless your definition of elite is really loose.
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Specifically for pitchers. The exact opposite for hitters.
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The point was never "lol Cubs pitchers are always bad." The point was TINSTAAPP. And Arrietaing. You shouldn't overvalue highly-rated pitching prospects because the nature of pitching is so volatile that it's more important to have a lot of depth and an organization that is good at developing pitching than it is to have specfic highly-rated guys.
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I didn't say top-5 pitching prospect. I said no-doubt top-5 prospect. Meaning top-5 in all the lists, not just in his best showings. Show me a prospect ranking that has Horton in the top 5 prospects in baseball, and I'll call him elite. I wouldn't call Kyle Harrison elite either. In prospect terms, "elite" should be reserved for the 70 FV guys. If you can find guys putting Horton in that tier, go nuts. We need a word that separates the Prior/Strasburg tier of prospects from the "this guy is probably one of the top-10 pitchers in the minors right now" tier, and "elite" used to serve that purpose before people started trying to expand it. They're in the process of ruining "generational" the same way.
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WEll if anyone is offering a pretty good major leaguer with 3.5 years of control left at a different position, then I'm probably interested in that too.
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Successful MLB relievers are less volatile than minor league starting pitchers.
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If PCA were a more volatile prospect, if Candelario were still in the first half of his pre-FA years of control (with the age to match), and Candelario was a better player than he is, then yes.
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No. But that's closer to the truth than getting hysterical over the idea of trading a 25-50 prospect for a successful major league pitcher with 3.5 years of control left.
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Yes. I am saying he is not elite. Sports has a massive problem with word creep. Once a word starts getting used, it gets spread to more and more players because fans can't stand the thought of their guy not getting it, and then the word becomes meaningless. If you're not a no-doubt top-5 prospect in all of baseball as a pitcher, you aren't an elite pitching prospect. You're a very good one. I didn't ignore any of that. I explained to you why all those things you said actually support my position, not yours.
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The Price/Strasburg/Prior tier.
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The most likely scenario for Brown and Wicks is that they are never a consistent part of a MLB rotation. Maybe Wesneski too, but if someone wanted to say that they had him at better than 50/50 to stay in the back of someone's rotation, I wouldn't disagree too hard.
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I'm also high on PCA, give or take. He more or less checks all the boxes; Not a pitcher, highly thought of by scouts, producing well while being young for the level, has a non-volatile skill set.
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It's not about the Cubs being good or bad at developing pitching. The late 90s/early 2000s cubs, which make up a chunk of that list, were pretty good at developing pitching. It's about the inherent volatile nature of prospects, and especially pitching prospects.
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You're *so* close to understanding why you shouldn't overvalue very good but non-elite pitching prospects. Prospect development (especially pitchers) not being linear and what we hope is a nascent Cubs ability to draw value out of unexpected prospects is *exactly* why we don't need to overvalue a guy like Horton.
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Do I hate them or do you wildly overvalue prospects and I keep calling you out on it?
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I'm not, like, demanding they move him for Bednar. But I won't be mad if they do. Is he a top-50 prospect as a starting pitcher? Sure, give or take. Here's a list of every Cubs pitcher who appeared on Baseball America's list between 15 and 60 in the last 25 years: Juan Cruz, Ben Christiansen, Angel Guzman, Felix Cisco, Justin Jones, Trey McNutt, Carl Edwards, Brailyn Marquez, If you're not willing to give up an average guy from that tier for 3.5 years of control of a guy you *know* can pitch in the big leagues, then you're just plain valuing prospects wrong.
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Yes, I have been keeping up. You don't get to change the definition of prospect. Guys are eligible for lists until they lose their rookie eligibility. Let's just be easy and use the MLB Pipeline list. There's more than five pitchers in front of him.
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I didn't say absurd. I said it was aggressive. There's dozens and dozens of prospect lists out there, so you can always cherrypick the one or two that have a guy the highest. And when your rating of a guy is higher than even the highest of all those? THen it's ... aggressive.
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What percentage of lists would you say have 4 or fewer pitchers in front of him?
