When trades occur that aren’t quite big enough to merit their own post, we sometimes compile our analysis into a compendium like this, where we touch on a number of transactions at one time. In this dispatch, I’ll cover the Rays’ trades for upper-level depth (pitchers Manuel Rodríguez and Adrian Sampson from the Cubs, and catcher Alex Jackson from the Brewers), as well as the Mariners/Orioles swap of Logan Rinehart and Eduard Bazardo.

The Rays acquired Adrian Sampson, Manuel Rodríguez, and $220,000 of international free agent bonus pool space from the Cubs for minor league pitcher Josh Roberson. Sampson, 31, was originally the Pirates’ 2012 fifth round pick. He made the big leagues with the Mariners in 2016 and then began to hop around the fringes of various rosters, which is part of what led to his 2020 jaunt to the KBO before a return to MLB with the Cubs. He made 19 starts for the Cubbies in 2022 as a long-term injury replacement, but he has missed most of 2023 due to a knee surgery from which he only recently returned. Sampson has been sitting 90-91 mph during each of his last two minor league starts. He does not occupy a 40-man roster spot and should be considered injury replacement depth for the Rays. Read the rest of this entry »

When trades occur that aren’t quite big enough to merit their own post, we sometimes compile our analysis into a compendium like this, where we touch on a number of transactions at one time. In this dispatch, I’ll cover the Reds’ acquisition of Sam Moll from Oakland, the Cubs’ trade for Jose Cuas from Kansas City, and the Diamondbacks’ trade for Jace Peterson, also from Oakland.

While the two teams tilted at Wrigley, the Cubs and Reds added interesting relief options to their managers’ toolkits. The Reds traded hard-throwing prospect Joe Boyle to the A’s for lefty Sam Moll and international pool space, while the Cubs traded outfielder Nelson Velázquez to the Royals for sidearm righty Jose Cuas. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs made it clear that they’re buyers on Monday afternoon, acquiring third baseman Jeimer Candelario from the Nationals for shortstop Kevin Made and pitcher DJ Herz.

What a difference a week makes! After losing the opener of a four-game series to the Cardinals just over a week ago, the Cubs stood at 45–51, and it seemed more likely that they would be sellers than buyers come deadline time. An eight-game winning streak later, off the backs of the hated Cardinals and the moribund White Sox, changed that calculus; even a Sunday loss to break the streak wasn’t enough to banish the idea that the NL Central was there for the taking. After all, four games in the standings isn’t that wide a chasm, and with the fourth-best run differential in the National League, there’s at least one legitimate reason to think the Cubs have deserved better than their .500 record this year. The Pirates have faded, the Cardinals wouldn’t be trading off talent if even they thought they had a miracle in them, and neither of the Reds or Brewers are likely to take big steps forward. Read the rest of this entry »

With the trade deadline just a day away, at last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, making exceptions here and there, but for the designated hitters, I’ve lowered that to zero, both to keep the list length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the second full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, five are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, and 10 are at 1.0 or above. DHs as a group have hit .242/.321/.419 for a 102 wRC+; that last figure is up one point from last year. This year, we’re seeing a greater number teams invest more playing time in a single DH; where last year there were three players who reached the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five, and the same is true at the 400-PA threshold (on pace for nine this year, compared to seven last year) and 300-PA threshold (on pace for 15, compared to 12 last year). That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

The National League Central is the weirdest division in baseball. It’s the only one where the first place team has a negative run differential. It’s also the only one where the second place team has a negative run differential. Indeed, only one team in the division has scored more runs than they’ve allowed, and it’s the third-place Chicago Cubs at 51-51.

With a +55 run differential, the Cubs rank third in the National League, better than teams like the Giants, Diamondbacks, Phillies, and Marlins, and, of course, ahead of the Brewers, Reds, Cardinals, and Pirates. Only three NL clubs have outscored the Cubs, and only six have allowed fewer runs to cross the plate. Only one has done both: the Atlanta Braves. Yet while the Braves have the best World Series odds in baseball, the Cubs’ chances of claiming a title are just a teeny tiny bit worse:

By Pythagenpat and BaseRuns, the Cubs “should” be 57-45. According to the calculation of Pythagorean win-loss record at Baseball Reference, the Cubs “deserve” to be 56-46 this season, five games better than they are right now. That record still wouldn’t be quite enough to put them ahead of the Brewers, but it would bring them within half a game of the division and into first place in the Wild Card standings. Unfortunately for Chicago, Pythagoras doesn’t have much of a say in the postseason race. With a .500 record, the Cubs are four games back of a Wild Card berth, and they’d have to leapfrog at least three teams to get there. Their playoff odds sit at 21.5%, putting them behind the Brewers and Reds in the NL Central, as well as the Phillies, Giants, Marlins, Diamondbacks, and even the Padres in the Wild Card chase. They recently surpassed the Mets, but with the way New York is playing, that isn’t saying much. Read the rest of this entry »

The road has been long for Adbert Alzolay. Signed as an international free agent out of San Felix, Venezuela in 2012, the right-hander worked his way diligently through the Cubs’ minor league system as a starter, making homes everywhere from Eugene, Oregon to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and eventually rising as high as second on the Cubs’ prospect list as a 22-year-old in 2018, Wrigley squarely in sight. Since then, injuries have plagued him: first a lat injury ended his 2018 season that May, then more core complications that delayed the start of his 2019 campaign, and most recently, another lat issue that cost him nearly all of last year, limiting him to only six late-season outings out of the bullpen.

This spring, having played just one full season since his 2019 debut, Alzolay’s health was his “only goal” for 2023. For the first time, he was preparing to work out of the Cubs’ bullpen, an assignment that some former high starting pitching prospects don’t take favorably. But he was firmly on board. “I really wanted to be in the bullpen,” he told reporters. “I feel really comfortable, just bringing the best I have right away.”

His enthusiasm for the role has shown. In 34 relief outings, Alzolay has posted a 2.63 ERA, 2.66 FIP, and 3.17 xFIP with 10.10 K/9 and 1.54 BB/9, racking up 1.0 WAR in just 41.0 innings. His Savant percentile rankings have surged in the bullpen; from 2021 to 2023, he’s gone from the 56th percentile to the 91st in HardHit%, 36th to 88th in xBA, 23rd to 95th in xSLG, 32nd to 98th in xERA, and 15th to 93rd in barrel percentage. His .270 wOBA against is 54th among 370 pitchers qualifying for Statcast’s leaderboards, but that seems to be underselling him; his .245 xwOBA against is ninth. Read the rest of this entry »

I experience baseball in many different forms. Writing is obviously one of them. Watching (both in person and on television) is another. Playing doesn’t happen as much as I’d like to, but it’s still one of them. The last one, which has become the most accessible to me, is through data: performance, expected stats, projections, etc. Data serves as a conversation starter or a thought provoker for me, and I rely on it heavily in my writing to tell the story of a player’s triumphs or struggles, especially Statcast data.

When working with Statcast information, it’s important to understand the inputs that create the data points. For example, I know that xwOBA is formulated using a combination of exit velocity and launch angle (and sometimes sprint speed). Perhaps it would be helpful if there were more inputs such as batted ball spin or spray angle, or perhaps it would complicate things. But what is important is that I know those are not included in the formulation — knowledge that I can use when assessing players for whom those inputs could be statistically important. I’m specifically thinking of the profiles of Isaac Paredes and Cody Bellinger.

Neither Paredes nor Bellinger have big power in terms of raw exit velocity, and neither is a batting average king (although Bellinger is over .300 at this moment in time). Instead, they rely on consistent contact to the pull side in the air to make up for their lack of raw power. I have an idea in my head of what a good hitter is. One of my most general criteria is the ability to hit the ball consistently hard, but it’s important to leave wiggle room there so you don’t exclude the edge cases, like Bellinger and Paredes. Both are below the 20th percentile in terms of average exit velocity and below the 10th percentile in HardHit%, but both have ISOs over .200 with double-digit home runs and doubles. That’s unusual, but it brings me back to stressing the importance of spray angle for a certain group of hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Before this season, Nick Madrigal had spent just one inning at third base. It was in a showcase game; he was a high schooler. Madrigal played a fair bit of shortstop at Oregon State, but he has always primarily been a second baseman. Then in December, the Cubs signed Dansby Swanson, bumping Nico Hoerner over to second and Madrigal into a utility role.

Madrigal took the change in stride. He started a long toss regimen to improve his arm strength, and said all the right things to the press:

Bench coach Andy Green even flew out to Arizona to spend a week helping him get up to speed at the hot corner. All of that work seems to have paid off. So far this season, Madrigal has spent 53 innings at second and 303.2 at third. As a third baseman, DRS and OAA both have him at +4, DRP has him at +1.1, and UZR has him at -0.1. Again, that’s after exactly playing exactly one inning at the position when he was a teenager.

It looks like Madrigal’s regular playing time at third is coming to an end, though. Patrick Wisdom is returning from the IL, and Madrigal just started his own IL stint due to a right hamstring strain. It’s a disheartening development for many reasons: Because he needed season-ending surgery on that same hamstring in 2021; because it makes his spot on the Cubs’ roster even more precarious; because he was on pace to have the most productive season of his young career; and because he does something really fun when he plays third base. I’ve been struggling with how to put it into words, so before I make my attempt, let’s see if you can spot it for yourself.

I don’t have a good sense of whether or not you’ll notice what I want you to notice. Maybe you saw it right away. Maybe you’re a Cubs fan and you already noticed it earlier this year. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing that you don’t notice until someone points it out, and then you can never not notice it. To make it a little easier, I combined two frames from that clip: I took the moment when Madrigal fielded the ball, then I added the moment when he threw it over to first.

Those two Nick Madrigals are in very, very different places. The first one is fielding the ball in a normal position roughly 15 feet behind the bag. Somehow the second one is way over on the right, about to make his throw with a foot on the infield grass. That’s a whole lot of infield to traverse right in the middle of a routine groundout. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago Cubs. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Between Cody Bellinger’s perplexing season, Dansby Swanson’s continued excellence, and Christopher Morel’s power surge, there are a lot of fascinating things happening with the Cubs. But I want to focus on their cleanup hitter and right fielder, Seiya Suzuki. In his introduction to the majors, he posted a 116 wRC+ in 446 plate appearances, but various hand, ankle, and finger injuries throughout the year kept him from getting in a prolonged rhythm; a 158 wRC+ in the first month and a 139 wRC+ in the final month sandwiched a 98 wRC+ from May through August. We got a few glimpses of what peak Suzuki could look like; health was the key to that becoming a consistent display.

Unfortunately for him, he suffered an oblique injury during spring training that forced him to withdraw from the World Baseball Classic and slowed down the start of his season. Early-season oblique injuries are incredibly frustrating; as you’re ramping up activities, the last thing you want is to hurt a part of your body that compromises your rotational power. He returned to action on April 14, but he wasn’t the best version of himself. His groundball rate that month was 49.1%, most likely due to an overly flat swing path. His 30-degree Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) — the angle of the barrel at impact — was flatter than any of his best months in 2022 by at least a full degree without a corresponding increase in pitch height, making it very tough for somebody of his size and mechanics to cover breaking balls and offspeed pitches consistently without significant body angle adjustments to compensate for his high hands preset and flat path. The blueprint for success from the previous season didn’t look like this. Read the rest of this entry »