The Cubs Already Need to Retool
(Photo: Arturo Pardavila III)
A year ago, the Cubs were baseball’s most dominant team, first putting up 103 regular-season wins and then capping the achievement with their first World Series win in 108 years. (So I was told a few times along the way.) The question wasn’t whether the 2016 Cubs were the best team in baseball — that was obvious — but whether the 2016 Cubs were one of the best baseball teams we’ve ever seen.
No one is going to ask that question of the 2017 Cubs.
This year’s version certainly wasn’t a bad team by any stretch of the imagination. They won 92 games, took the NL Central title again, and were only eliminated in the NLCS when they ran into a 105-win buzzsaw. They were fourth in the majors in runs scored and seventh in runs allowed. The Cubs were clearly one of the best teams in baseball this year.
But compared to what they were a year ago, they looked vulnerable. The offense was still fine, led by a couple of the game’s best hitters, but the supporting cast mostly stagnated or regressed. Dexter Fowler‘s 128 wRC+ and solid defense in center was replaced by Kyle Schwarber’s 102 wRC+ and weak defense in left. Ben Zobrist finally looked old, going from +3.9 WAR to +0.3 WAR. They lost +2.5 WAR from Addison Russell, who was supposed to be breaking out instead. Javier Baez was still the same guy as last year, which is okay but not the superstar for which people have hoped.
And then there was the pitching. Jon Lester failed to crack 190 innings for the first time in a decade while also allowing home runs at a rate unprecedented in his career. Jake Arrieta’s regression continued, as he turned more into a good-stuff-with-bad-command guy rather than the ace he’d been previously. John Lackey was the pitching staff’s version of Ben Zobrist, finally showing his age.
In the bullpen, everyone had flaws. Wade Davis, Carl Edwards Jr., and Pedro Strop were the reliable ones, and they combined for a 12% walk rate, foreshadowing the inability of anyone in Chicago’s bullpen to throw strikes in October. Hector Rondon and Koji Uehara threw strikes but gave up dingers. Mike Montgomery stopped missing bats, and Justin Wilson just fell apart after being acquired to shore up a shaky relief corps.
And the defense didn’t help nearly as much this year. The Cubs were special in 2016 because the club featured not only the best hitters but also the best fielders, too. This year, the defense was merely good. And with fewer batted balls landing in gloves, the pitching staff allowed 130 more runs than the previous season.
Living up to the 2016 standard was always an impossible task, but we were among the many looking at the Cubs as a potential dynasty in the making, and against that kind of expectation, this year’s Cubs team can’t help but feel like a bit of a disappointment. And while they get a clean slate next year and won’t have to deal with any World Series hangover effect, a lot of the things that went wrong for the Cubs in 2017 lead to questions about what is next for the franchise in 2018.
Arrieta, Davis, Lackey, Uehara, and Brian Duensing are all free agents, so the pitching staff is going to experience significant turnover. The position players are more stable, with only Alex Avila and Jon Jay hitting the open market, but that doesn’t mean things on that side are settled. The outfield, in particular, is kind of a mess, with a bunch of flawed candidates offering just enough upside to justify regular playing time, but no one from the group looking like an everyday guy.
If they want to play Ian Happ regularly, does he displace Schwarber or Heyward in a corner (unlikely on both counts) or do they again sacrifice defense and stick him in center? Will they platoon their two lefty-hitting corner outfielders, neither of whom probably provides enough value at this point to justify starting against most left-handed pitchers? Would they be better off with Happ at second base, potentially trading either Baez or Russell for an outfield upgrade?
Or, perhaps more likely, they could trade one of them for another starting pitcher. Right now, the rotation is Lester, Jose Quintana, and Kyle Hendricks, with pitching coach Chris Bosio probably as qualified as anyone else in the organization for the No. 4 spot. The system isn’t brimming with high-level pitching talent to plug the holes in the staff — which is why they traded for Quintana to begin with — and almost all of the team’s once-vaunted farm system is now either in the majors or has been traded for major-league upgrades.
So the team needs at least two starting pitchers, and given how many arms it takes to make it through 162 games these days, probably more like three or four. They’ll have money to spend, but maybe not enough to sign anyone they want: the organization will owe about $125 million to the 13 players either under contract for 2018 or eligible for arbitration and likely to be retained. The Cubs have spent about $170 million the last couple of years, so there’s cash to spend, but when you need two full-time rotation guys, a closer, and a bunch of solid pitching depth, $40-$50 million goes quickly.
There are obviously enough core pieces in place to just make some minor adjustments and still come back as the favorites in the NL Central. If they spread the money around and round out the depth pieces, they’ll likely project as a 90-win team again next year.
Or they could go all out, throwing $30 million per year at Yu Darvish in the hope that Shohei Otani decides to join him, believing there’d be enough pinch-hitting at-bats in the NL for him to hit most every day. Put Darvish and Otani in this rotation, and all of the sudden, the Cubs look like the scariest team in the land once again.
Of course, it’s pretty likely the Cubs wouldn’t be the only team with that plan this winter, and there’s no guarantee they’d get either, much less both. And if they ended up with Darvish but not Otani, they’d be an injury away from long-term disaster, with too much money going to declining (or already declined) players who weren’t capable of supporting the team’s two stars. Betting big on aging free-agent pitchers to fix your organization isn’t generally a great idea, after all.
So the Cubs, who were supposed to be set for the next few years, might already be at a crossroads. At the very least, they’re likely going to be forced to decide whether Baez/Russell is their middle-infield tandem for years to come or whether they need to use one of the two to upgrade elsewhere. And with so many holes to fill on the pitching side of things, the choices the front office makes this winter could have a significant impact on whether the team’s hopes of multiple titles from this core comes to pass or whether 2016 represented the moment at which the organization peaked.
A year ago, it looked like the Cubs could mostly just put things in cruise control and win their division for the next half-decade. A year later, it’s clear the Cubs have some legitimate issues to try and resolve this winter. The front office will be tasked with upgrading an already flawed team while also likely saying goodbye to several of their better performers. Getting back to being a behemoth isn’t going to be easy.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
In 2016, 5 members of the Cubs rotation finished at least 29 starts. There was no way that kind of health luck was going to repeat itself.
Also, the crazy BABIP suppression from last year isn’t a great long-term strategy.
And historically great high LOB%.
A team that was very good at not allowing hits was also very good at not allowing hits when runners were on base…
IIRC, Fangraphs last year had an article that showed they weren’t as correlated as one might expect. Just looking quickly, the ’09 Mariners had .272 BABIP and 73.4% LOB%; which is four points lower than the Cubs last year. The 2015 Cards, who have the highest LOB% over the last few years, had an average .297 BABIP.
The 2016 Cubs (and 2017 Dodgers) ran very low BABIPs and very high LOB%. Hmmmmm…
Given the insane OBP to begin with, the LOB% wasn’t quite as crazy
Cubs weren’t as bad as you think. Had 3 guys make 30 starts for Cubs this year. Then Quintana came over in trade and made 14 2nd half starts(32 overall). Hendricks had 24 starts. But still- relatively speaking, they weren’t as bad as a lot of other teams. Only Pirates, Cards, and Nationals had 3 guys make 30 starts. Conversely you had 4 teams who didn’t have a single guy make 30 starts this year. So while maybe not as insanely as good as last year- it was still above average from a starting pitcher durability standpoint.
I didn’t think they were bad, far from it. They were solid. My point is that the obvious signs of regression were all there, and people ignored them or underestimated them.
In a way it’s more damning. The Cubs in ’17 had 116 starts made by top 4 guys. That was 6th in the NL. Antother 14 made by Quintana after coming over from the Sox. But their FIP was a good 0.55 worse this year. It’s not like for instance it was a situation like the Giants where Madbum only makes 17 starts(but was still good when he started).
Look at the numbers for the top 4…
FIP
Lester 4.10 vs 3.41
Hendricks 3.88 vs 3.20
Arrieta 4.16 vs 3.52
Lackey 5.32 vs 3.81
ERA
Lester 4.33 vs 2.44
Hendricks 3.03 vs 2.15
Arrieta 3.53 vs 3.10
Lackey 4.56 vs 3.35
I think saying it was health luck is really undercutting the pitching situation. they were all significantly worse pitchers this year compared to last year.
I think it has as much to do with the innings they pitched in the last 3 years, as anything.
might. Innings to include playoffs- last 3 years…
Lester 652.1
Arrieta 647.1
Lackey 593.2
Hendricks 559.2
Also this year they played in game 7 of the WS on Nov 2 and then started up on April 2. So only had 150 days of an offseason. Normal team who missed playoffs last year ended on Oct 2 and even if started on April 2 would have had an extra 31 days of offseason. That adds up after a while- remember they had a shorter offseason as well after the ’15 season making the LCS.
I’m pretty sure the Dodgers were one of the four teams who had no one start 30+ games.
And probably the first to have 30+ pitchers start 1 game
Amazingly, this year the Dodgers didn’t have that many DIFFERENT starters, but no SP made more than 27 starts:
Kershaw
Hill
Wood
Maeda
McCarthy
Ryu
Darvish (post-trade)
Brock Stewart (a few spot starts)
Ross Stripling (game 162, if that counts)
Julio Urias (4 starts)
The Dodgers just basically ran that same 6 man rotation out there all season until they got Darvish, by which point McCarthy was on the DL and didn’t return until the last 2 weeks when he was just in the bullpen.
they were. others were Cincy, Colorado, and Phillies.
Looking at the AL- had 2 teams- Boston and KC with 3 30+ starters. Had 5 with no 30+ starters- CWS, Det, Hou(kind of misleading to some degree- as Verlander started 33),Oak, and Sea.
So 3 of 6 teams in MLB that had 3 30+ starters makes playoffs(Cubs/Nats/Bos). And 3/9 teams in MLB that didn’t have a single 30 start pitcher made playoffs(LAD,Col,Hou).
Surprised that the Angels had someone over 30 starts. Sure enough – there was Nolasco with his 33 starts over 181 innings. Next most “reliable” starter … JC Ramirez at 24 starts and 142 IP.
13 different pitchers started for the Angels. The most valuable sat at 1.1 WAR. That comes in at just 0.1 more WAR than Garrett Richards recorded in 28 innings. How this team held on to playoff hopes until the last week of the season is amazing.
And their use of the new 10-day DL rule was masterful, too. Had they been in an actual pennant race, you’d have seen their core starting pitchers more.
That’s not quite right.
Additional teams with 3 or more guys with 30+ GS, beyond the Pirates, Cards, and Nationals:
Royals: Kennedy, Hammel, Vargas
Red Sox: Sale, Pomeranz, Porcello
And the Padres, Yankees, and Indians had 2 guys of 30+ and 1 of 29.
I’m not disputing anything else you said, but I just wanted to note the 2 teams you missed.
I agree with EON. The 2016 pitching staff was just a magical phenomenon where almost every pitcher had a career year. This magic along with Fowler and the good version of Zobrist helped mask the inexperience of all the young hitters. People forget that this is still a rebuilding team and some of the position players like Russell, Baez & Schwarber might bust out. I just think that the 2016 championship was a direct result of an out-of-nowhere magic pitching staff that was SUPPOSED to be the area of weakness. They deserve all the credit for beating that depleted Indians team, but I never thought this would be a future juggernaught based on the fact that some young guys are going to bust and you need to develop at least SOME pitching.
But the Cubs do print money so they can address some of these issues in a way most teams without the financial warbucks would be unable to do. We’ll see.
I’d argue the opposite, Going into 2016, Arrieta was coming off a Cy Young, they signed Lackey and Hendricks was a 5th starter.
2015 was the aberration, that was supposed to be the year for the ‘kids’ to get there feet wet and go through the inevitable growing pains. 2016 was the target for contending.
In 2015-2016 all of Arrieta, Hendricks, Lackey and Lester were top 20 in innings pitched (including post-season), as was Q. Only one team in this years playoffs, had even 2, Sale and Price.
Kershaw and Keuchel are still standing.
Winning is hard!
Theo’s strategy of developing position players and then dealing with the pitching side of things worked great. But this year we saw the risk of not having long term cost controlled pitching.
true, but I’d rather have cost-controlled hitting than pitching. It’s just that the cost-controlled hitting is starting to be not so cost-controlled anymore.
If there was one area that Theo underestimated, it was the market/cost of controlled starters.
Maybe he even is partly responsible for that.developing pitching is risky and hitting prospects are a more stable investment.
But if more do that and buy pitching they outsource pitching development.
That leads to more hitters being offered and more pitchers being demanded so that pitching prizes go up and hitting prices decline.
That might change though because pitching prices continue to rise it can be worthwile to develope pitching again despite the higher attrition because other teams pay you that attrition and the pitching supply will increase and prices fall.
Baseball is hard
It’s especially hard to keep winning when you don’t have high draft picks (that’s how the Cubs got Bryant, Baez, and Schwarber, all top 10 picks; that probably won’t happen again for them in awhile) and/or aren’t in a position to trade short-term assets for future assets (that’s how they got Hendricks and Russell; again, they’re probably not likely to be sellers at the deadline anytime soon). Their core is still really sweet, and mostly cost-controlled, but definitely some fraying at the edges.
I agree with Wu-Bacca, and I’ll add some other names to that list.
Happ and Almora were also top 10 draft picks. Arrieta and Edwards also came over in trades selling short-term assets. Arrieta was a little different profile because he was 27 and already in the majors, but it was still selling a short-term asset and betting on development/upside.
It can be done, though. For example, the last time the Cardinals had a Top 10 pick was in 1998.
Its been forever since the Dodgers had a high pick now; Seager dropped to them at 18, and Bellinger was a 4th round pick. Their best pitching prospect, Walker Buehler, dropped several rounds because his first act as a professional was to get Tommy John.
You don’t have to be in a tank-rebuild situation to still draft great players. You have much easier options there, though, and maybe the Cubs haven’t invested enough in the scouting and player development they’d need to find gems after the easy picks.
The continued stagnation of Baez and Russell suggests that player development might not be an organizational strength.
The Cubs’ drafts have been curious, because they had a pretty amazing run of having five straight top 10 picks who have all turned into at least useful major league players and in some cases much more than that: in order, Baez (last pre-Epstein draft), Almora, Bryant, Schwarber, and Happ. Even picking in the top 10, it’s pretty amazing to hit on all of those picks.
Other than those top 10 picks, though, they’ve gotten very little from the draft. Their international free agent successes have also tended to be highly touted, big money signings.
Eloy Jimenez signed for $2.8 million, and Gleyber Torres signed for $1.7 million.
Its interesing how Arietta is an example of the Cubs using the strategy the Dodgers are using a lot: buying low and turning someone around, but since then the Cubs don’t seem to have engaged in that strategy in a meaningful way, despite how successful it was for them with Jake Arietta.
The Dodgers are doing that more with position players, but you’re starting to see it in their bullpen also (Cingrani). On the SP side they’re using the ‘target good but injury-prone starters and have extras’ strategy that the Cubs could also afford to engage in if they wanted, though there’s an open question of whether there’s enough injury-prone but solid SP out there for 2 teams to do the same thing.
Nothing ruins fun like expectations.
As I wrote here many times last year, the 2016 Cubs simply weren’t that great a team, there was no basis for calling them a future dynasty, so this year shouldn’t have been a surprise. They were a good team, they radically over-performed during the regular season, they had exceptionally good injury luck (including Schwarber being injured almost the whole year and the Indians missing Carrasco and Salazar in the World Series), and they managed to fight and scratch their way to a World Series title–which they 100% deserved because they showed guts and character and did what they had to do when they had to do it–but they weren’t a great team at all. I got thumbs down here for saying this last year and I’ll get thumbs down here for saying this here now, but that doesn’t change the situation.
Hee hee hee. 7 bitter Cubs’ fans already with nothing to say.
Make it six. Why should I be bitter? I’m grateful to Ricketts for buying the team and being one of the best owners in the league.
What casual observers may not understand is that this franchise is built for the long haul. They now have multiple revenue streams, and soon the spending restrictions from the Zell parternship will be lifted. As I understand it, the Cubs will then be able to spend freely without IRS sanctions. If ownership decides they are willing to pay luxury tax penalties, they would have the revenue to sign any free agent they choose to.
Agree 420 man. Not bitter here. And yes, we will compete again next year. And remember, despite his warts, Maddon is still one of the best managers in the game. I truly can’t wait until next year.
To bad the man and his whole family are Trump loving republican mega doners. So boo Cubs till that bunch of trash sells the team, welcome to the curse of the orange idiot lovers, better hope its shorter then the goats!
i count 1 still bitter giants fan who one year later finally feels vindicated due to the cubs being eliminated from the championship series.
No, because the Fangraphs’ crowd finally has no choice but to recognize the truth about the 2016 Cubs. For example, sadtrombone gets thumbs up for mentioning their BABIP luck last year.
Hey, don’t drag me into this mess. Last year the Cubs were awesome. Just because this year’s team isn’t a juggernaut doesn’t mean it is still very good. I don’t think they’re ever going to be able to replicate that crazy BABIP suppression but that’s due to a lot of factors (including but not limited to “luck”). And IMO losing Fowler was a big deal.
Just because a team had something that isn’t sustainable doesn’t mean they weren’t also awesome.
If they were that awesome, they wouldn’t have declined so much so fast. They didn’t lose anyone but Fowler, and they added Quintana.
At Fangraphs, something which isn’t sustainable is normally called ‘luck’, remember?
Skill, luck, and sustainability are obviously related to each other. But it isn’t the only thing. For example, take a look at the variance in team-wide defensive WAR from last year to this year. It’s way, way down. This is because teams are getting radically better at positioning, meaning that great defense no longer provides as much of as an advantage over replacement. A team can have the same defensive value from year to year and still be less valuable in context. There was obviously some luck involved last year but that wasn’t everything.
It wasn ‘t everything, for sure, but it was a huge amount, and without that luck no one would have been talking about them being a great team. You said yourself that it was ‘crazy’, remember?
Wait, is your point that the 2016 Cubs who 103 games were really more like 95 wins good? Because if so, like who cares. At all.
Yep, they underperformed their preseason projection by 4 wins and lost in the NLCS to a team that preseason projections ranked just ahead of them so clearly the team is horrible and anyone that didn’t consider them a fluke champion is an idiot.
Or the defense regressed to the mean, they lost Fowler, counted on too much from Heyward and Schwarber and Zobrist got old.
Russell and Zobrist were projected for a little over 6 wins between them. Last year they produced about 8 wins between them. They produced 2.5.
The Cubs were never the best team in baseball history. They were very good last year. They were very good this year. They will likely be very good next year. Add a couple of relievers get a luck and they’re still at least as likely as anyone else to win a world series next year
I don’t know about that. The Dodgers look pretty fearsome. That’s what’s really depressing.
If the 2016 Cubs are way overrated, then so are the 2017 Dodgers.
2016 Cubs: .255 BABIP, 77.5% LOB%, 105 wRC+
2017 Dodgers: .281 BABIP, 77.8% LOB%, 104 wRC+
And the 2016 Cubs defense was much better than this Dodgers team.
.255 isn’t .281. .281 is normal low. .255 is off the charts.
yeah, they do, and as another Giants fan it sucks. The Cubs got beat by a better team. That doesn’t mean they aren’t built to last; they are. You’re so hung up on “told ya so” you can’t see the forest for the trees. Give it a rest.
Exactly.
I think this is precisely right, agam22. Sure, the Cubs may not be a world-crushing juggernaut, but they’ve got a great young core, a super-shrewd front office, lots of cash, and their 3rd-order wins this year were still 6.5 games better than the Cardinals’ (full disclosure: I’m a Cards fan). The biggest key to winning the postseason is making the postseason, and I don’t think there’s any reason the Cubs won’t do that for years to come.
Everything you said is true, what is also true is that it costs a lot of money to get the 9 or so startable pitchers that the team needs when they currently have 3, and a couple of high leverage relievers with another couple for depth, seeing as how the team no longer has a single top 100 prospect.
So without the assets to go out and trade for what they need without stripping away almost all of the rest of the farm, including all the interesting but lower value names. They have 50mm available to use to get 2-3 relievers, 3 top 6 starters, and as many depth pitchers as they can find. If you give any of the top tier pitchers (including Arrieta) a deal thats 20+mm gone right there. Lester looks like bad money, and none of the current pitchers seems like a true ace, so getting a couple 1-2 pitchers would burn most or all of the payroll space. Future payroll has to budget in all the rising costs of arb players, who have mostly done well at wracking up arb fav stats, and the mostly bad money looking to be left on some of the aging players deals.
Its not impossible by any means, and fixing most but not all the problems still leaves you with a pretty good team, but not the empire some believed. It also shows what in season block buster deals can do to a teams farm. If the Cubs aren’t careful they will look a lot like the Royals do now in a few years. If the team does sign its stars longterm so they keep the core together, then you have an expensive team with a mediocre farm thats constantly being tapped for value to subsist the ML club, and the cost of building winners in FA is just problematic.
The Cubs are good right now and should be relevant for the next 2-4 years with some maintenance, but MIL is not far behind with a lot of talent still coming, and the Cards are worse then the Cubs currently with a deeper farm. Dominating even there own division, much less baseball as a whole, will require some ninja moves and lucky outcomes.
The Brewers? They were trying to get a good draft slot (aka to lose) and just failed. I don’t they’re in contention in 2018.
I’m triggered. “declined so much so fast.” = making the LCS? Ok, pal
Hmm. So winning 11 fewer games doesn’t seem significant to you?
Nothing compared to the team that won 18 less game from 2012-2013 and 23 less games from 2016-2017.
cheap shot
Winning 11 fewer games than the previous year proves that you weren’t good in the first place:
2001 to 2002 Mariners 118 wins to 93 wins
1998 to 1999 Yankees 114 wins to 98 wins
1954 to 1955 Indians 111 wins to 93 wins
1909 to 1910 Pirates 110 wins to 86 wins
1961 to 1962 Yankees 109 wins to 96 wins
1986 to 1987 Mets 108 wins to 92 wins
Look how many of these so called great teams were total frauds, thanks for opening my eyes johnforthegiants
emotional trauma is a joke to you? that’s fucked up.
The 98 Yankees we basically the greatest team I’ve ever seen and by 99 they were merely very good.
Historically, great teams have A season where it all goes right. But having 20 guys all having peak type seasons is rare.
The cubs still have a team that could easily win any year going forward. This isn’t the NBA where the best team usually wins and having 2 prime age stars means you’ll win 60 games for a decade.
There’s so much variance year to year and pitching is fragile and hard to rely on (looking at you Mets).
Nothing this year changes how great that team last year was.
They need to adjust the roster. Every team needs that every year.
They got back to the NLCS. They won 92 games. Is that your version of decline? How did the Giants do this year?
the Giants fan is pointing at another team for falling so fast……
I would say that is quite the joke.
I am pretty sure if I told almost any fan of any MLB team, and said their team would win 92+ games and make the NLCS/ALCS for 3 years in a row, they would be happy with it. There are no other teams that can make that claim currently, and the LAD, CHC and WAS will be the favorites again next year.
when your anti-cubs bias is so strong that you say shit like “[a 60.7 WAR team] simply weren’t that great a team”
A lot of that was their pitchers’ ‘crazy BABIP suppresion’, as sadtrombone just pointed out. That was my big point last year, and everyone acknowledges it this year even if they don’t like to hear me say it.
You are getting downvoted because your comment is self-congratulatory and doesn’t add to this discussion, not because you are an edgy outside the box voice who says things people don’t want to hear.
Of course I’m being self-congratulatory. I was right and the people downvoting me were wrong, and they don’t want to be reminded that they were wrong. Hee hee hee.
Incidentally, as far as I can tell, the Dodgers this year really ARE a great team. It’s depressing for me and any Giants’ fan, it pains me to admit it, I’ve loathed the Dodgers for more than 50 years, of course I am much much more anti-Dodgers than I am anti-Cubs, but I have to admit that they really do seem to be a great team. My comments about the Cubs have been because they really have been seriously overrated, if I were just motivated by general bias I’d be ragging on the Dodgers, but I’m not.
I don’t think the people downvoting you were downvoting your point as much as you, your tone and your spamming of posts barely related to the Cubs to rant about BABIP. You get downvotes because people think you’re obnoxious. As far as that goes, I don’t think the people downvoting you were wrong at all
Um, BABIP is a really big deal in terms of statistical analysis and understanding. If a lot of Fangraphs’ readers don’t take it seriously, it’s on them.
But just shouting BABIP and regression to the mean into the void isn’t actually statistical analysis
“I don’t think the people downvoting you were downvoting your point as much as you, your tone and your spamming of posts barely related to the Cubs to rant about BABIP. You get downvotes because people think you’re obnoxious. As far as that goes, I don’t think the people downvoting you were wrong at all.”
Amen. The continued presence of obnoxious trolls here is exactly why I didn’t renew my membership here and why I hardly visit here anymore.
FanGraphs, why do you tolerate trolls?
Say what you like about the competition, but that other well-known baseball website would ban this guy for his crap so fast that you’d hear the sonic boom.
Excuse me, I’m leaving and going there now. As happens every time this troll is involved I’m sorry that I wasted valuable time reading useless comments.
You are over 50 years old and you type out, “hee hee hee’? More than once? I figured you were 12 years old when I read your first comment.
No thumbs down from this, one of seven Cubs fans. It takes a lot of luck to win the WS. The Cubs got it. They were a great team for this one year. But always, ALWAYS take the field over any one team. Even one that seemingly is able to suppress BABIB with seemingly great defense. For as much as FG and it’s genius readers speak of SSS, fielding metrics aren’t even close to accurate enough judge a player with a number (WAR). And no matter what the delta or average or mean number is, we/they still don’t know exactly how BABIP suppression works. BTW, just about every pitcher on that staff saw velocity decline this year. Threw a lot of innings last year without regular off-season rest. They’ll never get it back. I’ll get negative hits too. It’s almost childish in some cases. Don’t hit post! DON’T HIT POST! AH, the hell with it!
To be honest my reaction to the Cubs winning the World Series was NOT that they got lucky. Of course they had a huge amount of BABIP luck in the regular season but that wasn’t really a big factor in the postseason. About the most that could be said is that they were lucky that Salazar and Carrasco got injured, but on the other hand the Indians were good enough to get to the World Series without them. It was just a really gutsy postseason run for the Cubs, they made that huge 9th inning comeback against the Giants, they managed to beat the Dodgers although most of their lineup was in a serious slump, and they came back from a 3-1 deficit to the Indians with 2 one-run wins and winning the final two games in Cleveland. Their closer blew 3 saves in the postseason and they still won. They just wouldn’t give up. It wasn’t luck.
So you’ll recognize the Dodgers NLCS slump of 2016 but not the Cubs NLCS/playoff slump of 2017?
Am I misreading your point? Are you claiming that the Cubs or Dodgers had a slump in the 2016 NLCS? If I misinterpreted your point, then I rescind my previous statement.
The idea the Cubs had a playoff slump in the NLCS is absurd; they got shut out by two elite pitchers (Kershaw and Hill, looking their best), then then went back to scoring runs. That’s just baseball.
This year their offense was consistently not good enough in the playoffs, in large part because it wasn’t deep enough at the back end, especially against LHP. And of course then they faced a team that could literally have an all-left handed rotation if they wanted to but did start Yu Darvish once because he’s Yu Darvish.
Let’s see if we can get the down votes to 108.
lol the downvotes here are too funny… everything you’re saying is correct
Only three NLCS appearances in the last three years. What an over-rated team.
As Theo himself has said, all you can do is give yourself as many bites at the apple as possible. Once you get to the playoffs, there is a lot of luck, randomness, and small sample sizes.
I’m very pro-Dexter Fowler, so I’m biased, but I think losing him was a bigger blow to the team than anyone thought at the time. He might not be a “great” offensive player but he is an OBP machine and good baserunner. Having that guy at the top of your lineup is really helpful! The Fowler-Bryant-Rizzo tandem was awesome, and if you believe Kyle Schwarber is his second-half self instead of his first half you’ve got a really great top of the lineup.
Buying top-tier pitching on the free agent market is always risky because the guys on it are about to decline (except for Max Scherzer, apparently). If you want to get top-tier pitching, I don’t think it makes sense to spend a lot of dollars to get Tanaka, Arrieta, and Darvish…who are all pretty risky in their own ways. I’d rather sign a bunch of guys with question marks and upside (like Tillman) and hope some of them come through.
I’d prioritize offense instead. Find another leadoff hitter, get Happ into the lineup regularly, etc. Maybe go all out and see if you can trade some of your young controlled guys (Baez/Happ/Schwarber/Russell) to the Marlins for Yelich and Stanton? They don’t need all four of those guys. I don’t know for sure, but I’m going to guess offense is going to be cheaper than pitching, and more reliable too.
This is all complicated by the fact that they need Jason Heyward to bounce back in order for him to opt-out, though.
I don’t expect the Cubs to trade a young position player. They need and use all of those guys. They’ll add to the pitching staff via free agency.
One unexpected move would be to sign Moustakas and move Bryant full time to the outfield. Then I could see a position player trade.
I don’t know that they need all of Baez, Russell, Happ, and Schwarber. Sure it helps, but Baez and Russell aren’t great offensive players and Happ plays the same position as the other three and Zobrist. They could really use another great offensive player to go with Rizzo and Bryant, and to complement Happ and/or Schwarber. They have adequate but not great offensive production at four spots right now (CF, RF, 2B, SS) and if they could upgrade even one of them it would be really helpful for them.
But I also don’t think they would trade any of them for anything less than a great offensive player or pitcher, and so there might not be a deal anyway. I certainly wouldn’t trade anyone away just because they can.
Agree that Russell and Baez are not great offensive players, but they are great defensive players. This team won in ’16 primarily due to run prevention. In ’17, the offensive production was basically the same, but the run prevention wasn’t. Ergo, they need Russell and Baez. And Almora.
Neither Happ or Schwarber have enough trade value to bring back either a truly great offensive player or a top pitcher. Even putting them in the same package may not bring back the player the Cubs need to improve (whoever that player is).
Having too many quality position players is a problem most teams would like to have.
If they don’t have enough value to bring back guys like Yelich and/or Stanton–even with other prospects thrown in–then sure. I agree. I would definitely ask around though.
I also think it’s risky to attribute everything that happened with the 2016 run defense to any one factor (individual players, positioning, pitching, luck).
I don’t know that Zobrist is a great reason to trade one of the young position players. Some bounce back from this year’s hitting numbers is reasonable, but he’s only signed for two more years and is going to turn 37 in May.
Having great offensive players is one thing. Having balance in your line-up is something else (and I don’t mean LRLR, which is nice too).
The reason the Cubs signed Heyward, Fowler and Zobrist was to bring that balance; to provide that contact.
Zobrist, hopefully that wrist was a thing and he bounces back next year. But that was always going to be a contract more about the beginning over the end of it.
Fowler, was a placeholder, I mean we lucked into him in 2016. Theo may have underestimated how hard it is to find a true lead-off man.
I think AA will be more then fine in CF and adds that contact.
Heyward is going to be a black-hole for years to come. And dictate some painful moves.
Schwarber for Danny Salazar.
WHO SAYS NO?!
(Other than the Indians, who would probably say no)
Why? They’ll have 1B open. Schwarber will be a cheap middle of the order bat for several years. Tribe are deep enough in pitching with their top 3 all under control for several years.
One problem is that players who are all offensive value and no defensive value, like Schwarber, don’t tend to stay that cheap in arbitration. Arbitrators generally give a lot of weight to “baseball card stats” without nearly as much deduction as WAR for the positional adjustment of playing 1B or DH.
Schwarber for Betances + a 40-grade prospect?
The Cubs were always going to miss Fowler’s 2016 performance even if they signed him.
I mean, I expected his defensive numbers to regress but DRS -18 is quite ugly.
Cubs’ offense was good this year and are not expected to get any worse since most of their hitters are young and/or had a down year.
Besides, Hewyward bouncing back to the point where he wants to opt-out would imply that the Cubs do not want him to do so.
Three points:
1) For whatever reason, Fowler was okay (and only okay) defensively with the Cubs. He has played in some pretty difficult outfields, but I think the real difference was positioning. I would be interested to hear whether the Cards positioned him in a different, more normal spot than they did with the Cubs (who I think had him very deep most of the time).
2) I think DRS has a habit of producing some really crazy defensive numbers…it’s very aggressive at assigning defensive value. This is because across the whole system, DRS uses smaller sample sizes to compute everything (1 year of baseline data instead of 3, smaller zones to measure whether someone got there, etc). All this is to say, when DRS and UZR agree in direction but disagree in severity (like this year, when DRS thinks he was awful and UZR just thinks he was very bad) I tend to wonder whether DRS is more aggressive than it needs to be.
3) You can never have enough offense. Scoring runs never goes out of style.
As a long-time Cubs fan, my hope for 2018 mostly rests on improved performance from the core. Russell and Schwarber need to live up to their previous prospect status. Almora needs to be the regular center-fielder. A return to form by Zobrist (hampered much of the year by a wrist injury Dave did not mention) will help as well. Contreras solidified his status as one of the better catchers in the NL. Lester, Hendricks, Quintana is a good (not great) top 3. It seems the Cubs could add 50 million in payroll; that should be enough to bring back Wade Davis and sign a pitcher such as Alex Cobb or Lance Lynn, and maybe even add another arm in the bullpen (Addison Reed?).
Oh yeah, that Bryzzo fellow isn’t too bad either.
The Cubs should be prohibitive NL Central favorites again next season.
It remains the best time ever to be a Cubs fan.
the big question for me is the pitching. I don’t think it’s a cinch that Wade Davis will be back. And that would obviously leave a gaping hole there.
One thing also- the money is going to start to get more and more prohibative. Bryant, Hendricks, and Russell all enter their 1st year of arbitration. Maybe ok for 2018, but as we go on, their numbers are going to take huge jumps(this year they made a combined 2.45 million). Baez and Schwarber 1st year for arbitration is 2019. So that’s going to impact the payroll as we go along quite considerably.
Just looking at things- the 2017 payroll according to br was 173 million. With arbitration guys- they are at 131 million for ’18. So the number there keeping same payroll would be around 42 million for next year. BUT- in 2019 with the projected arbitration guys- they are already at 144 million. So I don’t know how much they can do long term deals for free agents unless they’re willing to dramatically increase their payroll long term.
Agree about Davis. Disagree about payroll. They are willing to go right up to the luxury tax. After the Zell partnership thing is over (I think after 2019), Tom can start spending his own money if he chooses to. They have Bryant for four more years – that’s the window. I think they’ll spend whatever it takes to get another trophy.
right, but these next 2 years are crucial in building the dynasty.
And I would also suggest that some of the BR arbitration numbers they have would be pessimistic- and the actual numbers will be higher than shown.
especially since future arb is based on future performance. I mean its basically baked in that if you win, then your players will cost more. If Baez and Shwarber have a big year in 2018 then the 2019 number goes up. It also isn’t about having the money to spend, since the CBA has made it worse to go over the luxury tax threshold. 2020 is the first year some of the bad money starts to go away, and by that season they will be closing in on losing most of the core, so beyond that point you either need the payroll to keep them, or a replacement for Bryant, Rizzo, Russel, and Hendricks along with others by 2022. Only the Dodgers seem willing to go more then a little over the LT and even they are trying to get down towards it if they can.
Its a good core, but the costs of pitching has gone up considerably especially for relievers since Epstien undertook this path, and now he’s caught between a pitching needy organization and a hard cap on spending.
I agree on all of those points, and it looks like the Dodgers have a path to get under the luxury tax by 2019, or at least get payroll much closer to it.
This year’s Dodgers’ payroll had almost $60 million total to Crawford (not on the team), Ethier (only 38 PA’s), and Gonzalez (negative WAR). Crawford and Ethier are gone after this year, and Gonzalez is gone after next year. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GLH-k0DkKqYXvwVMoYzwxCB9S3JhqkAEfc9MLMHKHAc/edit#gid=242513397
The Heyward thing (whatever you want to call it) is going to be a huge decision for the Cubs. Last season was probably rock bottom for him and he had a better year but he’s certainly not a guy that needs to be penciled into the lineup without question in 2018 and beyond. Do the Cubs continue (based off the money/contract) to give him starter playing time or do they look to move him into more of a bench/utility role? It’s also interesting too because his defense is solid enough to justify him from that standpoint but if Russell, Baez, Schwarber and a few others aren’t going to hold their weight offensively, a glaring hole like Heyward becomes even brighter.
I don’t know, the 1880’s were a pretty good time to be a Cubs fan too.
If the Cubs’ success is your only barometer of quality of life, then I would agree with this.
I may have suffered an horrific death from diphtheria, but boy were those Cap Anson Cubs fun to watch!
Ironically, Chicago was one of the cities ahead of the curve in public health. But between overall rates of infant mortality, disease, labor unrest (Haymarket Massacre!)…yeah, I’m happy I was born almost 100 years later.
the 2017 cubs were a lot like the 2015 cubs…could be this is more “who they are” than who they were in 2016?
winning the central gets them into the dance, where they’ve struggled each year to survive the Division series and they’re 5-10 in the LCS
the cubs have gone from also-ran to competitive, and you’re right, that’s fun
I agree with quite a few of your points, but I think that return to form by Zobrist is highly optimistic, even considering the wrist injury. He turns 37 in May, and players of that age don’t tend to return to form. They’re rather older and diminished versions of who they used to be.
Depth Charts projects him for a 102 wRC+, which is an improvement on this year, but I’d be surprised if Zobrist is ever again as productive as 2015-16.
You’re asking for a lot of bouncebacks and improvements all at the same time (Russell, Schwarber, Zobrist, Almora) without any decrease from the rest of the guys. That’s a recipe for disaster.
Let’s face it: the Heyward contract has, in retrospect, turned out to be a huge mistake and it’s going to hamper this team for years going forward.
Generally, I agree with your point.
But looking at the Cubs’ position players’ performance this year, I would take over on most of them.
Rizzo wrc+133 WAR 4.0 definitely over
Bryant wrc+146 WAR 6.7 stay
Baez wrc+98 WAR 2.2 slightly over
Zobrist wrc+72 WAR 0.3 slightly over
Schwarber wrc+102 WAR 1.5 slightly over
Heyward wrc+88 WAR 0.9 stay mostly because he might not see as many PAs.
Jay wrc+101 WAR 1.6 stay
Contreras wrc+121 WAR 3.2 slightly under
Happ wrc+113 WAR 1.8 slightly under
Russell wrc+84 WAR 1.4 definitely over
Almora wrc+103 WAR 1.2 slightly over because he probably will see more PAs.
You could quibble a little bit on individual players, but overall, the big picture is that this group is extremely likely to improve next year barring serious injury to Brizzo.
I think you overestimate how hard it is to get over 4.0 war as a first baseman. Rizzo is older than the rest of the team; hes not likely to get dramatically better. He had the same value this year as Cody Bellinger at first base; its really good. He’s not Joey Votto or Paul Goldschmidt. Anthony Rizzo is an all-star quality 1B, but not a perennial MVP candidate.
Jon Jay is a free agent.
So many young Cubs have platoon problems that need to be figured out to determine if they’re regulars or not.
I fully understand the difficulty of getting over 4.0 war as a first baseman, it is simply that you massively underestimate Rizzo’s past performance.
His past four seasons since his break out has been
wrc+ 155 WAR 5.7
wrc+ 145 WAR 5.4
wrc+ 144 WAR 5.1
wrc+ 133 WAR 4.0
If you are willing to take under on his wrc+ 133 WAR 4.0 next year, I’d be more than happy to take the bet.
Fun fact: Before 2017 season began,
Rizzo had the highest WAR projection among first basemen according to both ZiPS and steamer.
And yes, that includes Votto and Goldschmidt.
I would suspect that after this season that will not be true in 2018.
You don’t just get to handwave off the performance as if it didn’t happen for future projection. Anthony Rizzo’s performance this year was basically the same as it was in 2014 and 2015, which was a slight drop in SLG from 2016 with identical OBP.
However, his defensive value dropped from last year back to career levels, his baserunning value dropped further, and the run environment improved so that his performance is relatively less valuable.
2015 Anthony Rizzo: 701 PA, .278/.387/.512, 5.4 war
2017 Anthony Rizzo: 691 PA, .272/.392/.507, 4.0 war
Anthony Rizzo didn’t change; baseball changed. The single largest difference is from +2 BsR to -4.2 BsR, and the rest is the difference in the league offensive level.
His 2015 performance was 45% better than league average. This year’s basically identical performance was only 33% better than league average, because the league average has changed.
He’s now 28. Next year is more likely to be a decline from established levels than an improvement, and his established levels aren’t as valuable as they used to be.
I am not saying Rizzo would go back to his 2014 numbers.
I know his 2017 was not great, but just good.
Which, by the way, is precisely why I expect better performance from him next year.
Besides, cherrypicking raw stats from 2015 to compare to 2017 number is really disingenuous.
2015 Rizzo: 701 PA, .278/.387/.512, wrc+ 145 5.4 war
2016 Rizzo: 676 PA, .292/.385/.544, wrc+ 144 5.1 war
2017 Rizzo: 691 PA, .272/.392/.507, wrc+ 133 4.0 war
Baseball changed from 2015 to 2016 too.
Rizzo’s stats changed too. His wrc+ did not.
Tell me again how Rizzo did not change.
Bottom line: I would put more weight in a three year sample of performance than a single season’s even though it was the most recent one and so should you.
Right, but look at the very numbers you posted. 2015 and 2017 are identical! the wRC+ is different because the offensive environment around him changed. His performance in those two seasons is identical. Its just less valuable now than it was in 2015.
25-27 are by far the most common ages where players have their peak season. Rizzo’s age 26 season was 2016. 2017 is right in line with what he did prior to that (and honestly barely different from 2016; the difference is an extra 6-8 doubles). There isn’t any concrete reason to expect Anthony Rizzo to improve over his established level, which has fundamentally been the same. The league has just changed around him.
First basemen over 4.5 war universally cracked both .550 slug and .400 OBP. Anthony Rizzo has never done either of those things in his life, much less both. That isn’t to say that its impossible, but it is isn’t particularly likely, either.
I like Rizzo, but you’re being a little too optimistic. Projections this year weighted in the odds that his 2016 was the start of an upward improvement trend. With a downward-facing but mostly stable trendline, I’d expect the various projection systems to project him 3.5-4 war depending on how they project his playing time and whether they expect further declines in his baserunning.
https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2017-trade-value-1-to-10/
In July 2017, Rizzo’s projection for 2018 was 5.7 WAR
and he was expected to produce 5+ WAR for another three years after that.
Let’s compare that to say, Goldschmidt’s projection for 2018 which was 4.8 WAR.
Important caveat: Rizzo was on pace for 4.6 WAR at that point but underachieved to 4.0 WAR.
So let’s generously dock 0.6 war from the projection and we still get 5.1 WAR.
Admittedly, that value is higher than I expected, but there you go.
I’m sorry but you don’t understand how projections work.
By the way, Rizzo had a better 2nd half than Goldschmidt.
A team with the resources the Cubs have has the ability to carry one contract like Heyward with no ill-effect. I mean, the Dodgers carry like 4 of them. If the Heyward deal is the Carl Crawford deal for the Cubs, its no excuse for them to not contend.
the only difference is that the Dodgers were usually able to use taking on some of those crappy deals to get some value elsewhere, whereas the Cubs offered that deal of their own accord. Maybe a better similarity is the last 2 years of Andre Ethier’s contract, where despite his 2 playoff homers he has only had 54 ABs over the last two seasons but made over $35M for it, due to injury.
The Heyward contract is bad, but it shouldn’t strangle the Chicago Cubs any more than it would the Dodgers or the Yankees.
Mr. Cameron is spot-on, as always, in his analysis of the ways the Cubs need to improve and of the challenges ahead, but the header should have been “The Cubs Already Need to Retool A Lot Earlier Than We Thought They Would”. The issue to me isn’t: Do the Cubs need to make some changes? Of course they do, and the aging and free agency of guys like Lester, Lackey and Arrieta were known last year, too. But rather what Dave is pointing out, maybe unintentionally, is that we should’t get too carried away with WAR projections five-years out (as the FG article he linked to did which called the Cubs a dynasty in the making). I’m all for doing the WAR projections and it’s the best tool we have, and it certainly provides useful information, but perhaps it was getting a little carried away last year to say the Cubs were the “team to beat” for the next half decade?
As a Cubs fan, however much I wanted to put up a “I Want to Believe” poster with the FG article about the Cubs dynasty, I read that to truly mean that the Cubs have achieved what Theo and Jed set out to do: build a team that’s going to be a contender for as many years as possible. Three LCS? Three 90+ seasons? A World Series? Likely to be in the running next year? Check, check, check and check. But to think that we can know two or three years out which team is going to be winning in the upper 90s to 100+ and be a “dynasty” is the real thing that needs retooling.
Cubs are 5-10 in the LCS and 4-3 in the WS with an extra inning win over the last three seasons
Results suggest they’re a competitive regular season team and need to get better in a number of areas
They’re 10-4 in other playoff games. Good talk.
They must be terrible, then. I think we’d all prefer to be rooting for a team like the Padres (chosen for example purposes only) and their superior 0-0 postseason record the last three seasons.
“if we just ignore [most of] their wins, they’re terrible!”
you have been found GUILTY… of pointing to an extremely small sample (against superior opponents)
I think that was clear pretty much from the beginning when epstein went all in on hitting. almost all of their better prospects were hitters and even the better pitching prospects were mostly relief prospects.
but Theo hit the Jackpot with arrieta and Hendricks and paid up for lester so it worked and they had a Monster Team from 15-17 (minus the bad first half of 2017).
however now arrieta is a FA (and getting older anyway so the decision is tough) and lester might start his Age related decline. Hendricks is still very good and Young but realistically he is more of a good number 3 (say mid to high 3s ERA) rather than a TOR. Theo is not stupid and knew that would happen, he knew at some Point he would Need to sell some of his hitting depth.
objectively he overpaid for chapman (Surplus value) but he knew that despite the window seeming to be too open that the best Chance to win even might be 16/17 and in the end it all paid off. that doesn’t mean the window is closed now and in fact the Young hitters might even get better but the juggernaut Phase where they have great pitching and hitting might be over now. window of opportunity has to be considered in trades, not just pure Surplus value.
basically Theo Needs 2 SP for next year. a new 4 to replace lackey and the toughest is a replacement for arrieta (maybe arrieta himself?) that is not an easy Task.
a 4 is not that hard to find but another star is tough to find.
Right now the Rotation is probably
1. lester
2. Quintana
3. Hendricks
4. montgomery?
lester isn’t really a 1 anymore and probably more a high 3s ERA pitcher going Forward. Q is Young and good, he should be a good 2 as he was for the sox. Hendricks is good too but ideally the cubs get a 1 to compete with scherzer, kershaw, sale…
then the 4 guy is not that hard to find but it hopefully is a better Option than anderson and the other cheap guys they tried.
cubs are still in a good Position but with arb kicking in on the hitters that won’t be easy to pay for.
Odorizzi is thought to be very available. He has 3 years of arbitration left. Davis is a FA, and Colome with his 3 years of arbitration would make that pen look a lot better. With the emergence of Happ, Schwarber is looking pretty expendable. Would a Odirizzi and Colome for Schwarber team work for both sides? Cubs get better, Rays get cheaper.
Odirizzi is team control for 2 years and Colome is team control for 3 years. Definitely would get a whole lot more than just Schwarber.
Yes but if the cubs add two nice prospects it could make the deal interesting. Question is if cubs have prospects the rays want.
Say schwarber, Albertos and zagunis plus a ticket for odrizzi and colome.
Hendricks is the type of player that does not get a lot of love around here due to his FIP beating ways, but seriously?
A good number 3? You have got to be kidding me.
His fip based war for the past two years is #19 right below Stroman and two spots ahead of Cueto.
His RA9-WAR? #6 between Verlander and Strasburg.
He outperforms Quintana, Verlander, Bumgarner, etc. in ERA-, FIP-, xFIP-.
There is a reason he started the Cubs’ NLDS game 1.
Good number 3. What a joke.
I think all the trades are going to come back to bite Epstein sooner than later. No one will regret it because it got them that championship, but we’re talking a team that went from a top five to a bottom five farm in a matter of a few years.
They are going to have to be big free agent spenders to make up for the fact that they don’t have any top end pitching in the pipeline or top end players with which they can acquire said pitching. I guess you almost have to trade Schwarber, but I think everyone outside of Cubs fandom is wise to his real value at this point.
If they want to keep this going they’re going to have to be big players in the free agent market, but even there we’re entering a few years where the market is going to be hyper competitive because most of the big market teams are in a contention window all at once. There are simply more buyers these next couple offseasons than in the past few.
Think they’re a good team for 2018 but by 2020 they will be the second best team in their own city.
They do have some nice pitchers in minors; who knows how they’ll develop. De La Cruz, Alzolay and Albertos look the best of the bunch.
I think team will eventually regret the Quintana trade.
I’m not so sure this argument holds a ton of water. One of the biggest reasons that they have dropped in prospect rankings is that many of their better prospects are now on the big league team.
I still really like the Quintana trade. He has 3 more years of team control, he’s dependable, and he’s only 28. Who knows if Eloy & Cease ever pan out? Torres will likely be a star, but I’m not sure they’ll miss guys like Candelario and Vogelbach.
We all love prospects, but that’s all they are until they’re proven big league players. The young core is pretty solid until 2020/2021 and I feel pretty good about the Cubs contending during those years.
And I’m not sure there isn’t a team out there that doesn’t need a retool every couple of years. There are no dynasties in baseball anymore.
I like the Quintana trade as well, but the Cubs paid a hell of a price for it, and why? Because they have no top end starting pitching coming up through the minors, Arrieta is leaving (and will be expensive and probably very overpaid if he’s retained), Lester’s best days are behind him, and given the teams involved in the 2017 & 2018 markets they can’t just assume they can get front end pitching from free agency.
I think that trade was an acknowledgement that the team’s pitching staff was poorly constructed to contend even as soon as next year. I also don’t think they have the pieces to reasonably make another trade like it.
I’m not bashing the Cubs here out of any resentment against them, I just think that their inability to cultivate top end pitching has put them in a bad spot as far as sustained success compared to, for example, the Astros or Indians.
Really? What are you smoking and where can I get some? What they gave up to acquire Chapman, Davis, Quintana, Avila/Wilson, Warren. I mean what they traded away in those deals turns any bottom 5 farm into a top 5 on the spot if they somehow added all that. Eloy, Candelario, Cease, Starlin Castro(who outproduced Russel this year), Soler, Torres, Mckinny, and those are just the headliners. Since the end of 16 they have graduated 2 of the top 10, still have 4 of the bottom 5, and traded 4 of the top 6. AA and Happ are the graduates.
Theres no way all the players they dealt since 2015 didnt tank the farm systems future value, and you cant go pull a 2015 Intl signing period like they did to get Eloy+ anymore. So yeah they dont have much in the minors, wont be drafting high, and will keep needing to mortgage the farm to supplement a contender.
For baseball teams prospects are either coming in, or going out, and theres no real middle.
Although the LAA manage to somehow deplete the minors constantly without producing a contender, despite having the best player on the planet, so I guess if your the Cubs you want to do the opposite of that!
Yeah but teams that have great player development keep graduating great players AND restocking the farm at the same time.
The Cubs built a great farm system when they had a bunch of really high draft picks; they haven’t shown they can go out and find or make or develop quality MLB players outside the top half of the first round.
You have to do that to build a sustainably good farm system.
Sure, you could use logic and reason to describe the Cubs current position and why they failed in the 2017 NLCS.
But I knew this was going to happen in April. The first game I saw this year was against the Dodgers, the Cubs won that day. Addison Russell hit a beautiful home run down the left field line and Almora made 2 great plays to rob Cory Seager of extra bases.
But when I ordered a beer the guy says to me “That’ll be $9.75”
This is when I knew they were doomed to fail. Beer prices rose from $7.75 to $9.75 within their 3 year post season run.
If the Cubs wish to win a World Series again, they must appease the Beer Gods, for the Beer Gods are friends with the BABIP Gods, and the BABIP Gods are cruel.
9.75 is just fucking outageous. Outrageous!!
This explains a lot. I wasn’t aware that the aforementioned Gods were pals. My Angels, and their 16-dollar tall boy of Corona, are doomed to embarrassing contracts for life!
houston is gonna face the same problem after next season, and they’re already at/near their payroll ceiling. the lesson: stop crowning dynasties so early. baseball moves way too unpredictably, and a sustained run of what the rangers or cardinals have done recently is impressively rare.
The Rangers are quite the odd choice for sustained success…
yeah but then go look at their seasons. in a 7 year period from 2010 to 2016 they make the playoffs 5 times, and 1 of the 2 years they missed, they won 91 games, and lost in a 1 game playoff. In baseball today- that’s sustained success.
He’s not wrong!
Pretty much as good as sustained success is going to get is consistently winning 90+ games and sometimes being a flawed team in the playoffs. That’s certainly what the Dodgers have done for some time now. It’s not really clear that you can be better than the Dodgers or Rangers have been over a 5+ year span of time consistently; if everything clicks your team will snap to 100+ wins or go on a playoff tear to the world series, but at that point its about being fortunate enough to play well in the playoffs.
you could do a lot worse than montgomery as your #5. I think it’s silly to say the Cubs need 3 or 4 starters when you already have Lester, Hendricks, Q, and Monty. If they were to sign one of the top guys and then take a flier on one other guy, they’d be in pretty good shape.
The issue is that a team realistically needs to plan on using more than 5 starters in a season due to the rate of pitcher injuries. The recent history is that even playoff teams on average need something like 25-40 starts from pitchers not in the planned 5-man rotation, depending on if one goes by the planned rotation as of Opening Day or at the start of spring training. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/163495284/mlb-teams-need-starting-pitching-depth/ . And that’s for playoff teams, a group with selection bias toward relatively good health and performance from planned starters, because those teams won enough games to make the playoffs.
I agree that it’s not necessarily problematic to go into a season with someone like Montgomery as a planned #5 starter. What most contending teams want to have, however, is depth from another 2-3 pitchers outside the 5-man starting rotation who look like they could be at least 1-2 WAR starting pitchers (on a rate basis for full season production). For some teams, those players are prospects in the upper minors, and ideally at least some of them have upside beyond being 1-2 WAR starting pitchers. Or maybe some of that depth is a swingman in the bullpen, like Montgomery, or maybe it’s having more than 5 starters and using the 10-day DL creatively, like the Dodgers did this year.
The key point, though, is that a team that only has 5 starters in its plans for the year is short of starting pitching.
Call me crazy, but if they’re willing to move Russell or Baez for pitching, I’d think that giving TLS a chance to lead off and play 2B would offer a lot of what they lost from Fowler. He only has 109 career PAs against LHP, but those SSS results are promising. Play Happ in CF/RF based on an Almora/Heyward platoon. Build a lineup like:
LaStella
Bryant
Rizzo
Contreras
Schwarber (w/ a Zobrist platoon if he bounces back against LHP)
Happ
Russell or Baez, whoever they keep
Heyward RF/Almora CF platoon
SP
The only position they don’t have an internal replacement for on the roster is backup SS, but a utility IF like Pennington would be a cheap enough acquisition such that they could allocate all the post-arbitration payroll to the pitching staff. They’d lose a lot of defense going from Baez to TLS, but it might be worth it to have someone who sees a ton of pitches and doesn’t strike out.
Crazy like a fox, maybe. I also have said many x’s, that TLS would start on a lot more teams then you would think. In the juiced up, TTO, defensive shifting environment baseball is in, 3AM would provide passable defense, provide the contact this team sorely needs and put up close to 20 HR’s.
I don’t think the Cubs should over think this too much. Trade Schwarber to the AL for either/both starting and relief help and move Happ to left. Schwarber’s flaws are obvious and his value has decreased this year, he still holds a good amount of surplus value. I think a few AL teams would welcome the potential of his bat to their lineup, especially if they can spot in him left or first along with at DH. The Yankees make sense depending on what they do this winter.
The Cubs also have the payroll flexibility to go out and sign Darvish, but I think someone like Alex Cobb makes more sense if they still think Lester is an ace/near ace. Lester, Hendricks, Quintana, Cobb is solid 1-4. That frees up money to go get another bat for the outfield.
I don’t think the have the prospects and players to trade for Yelich, but I could see them signing Cain, but I don’t think Cain will age well, and so keeping the contract short would be the key. I have my doubts. You could also talk me into McCutchen ending up at Wrigley and ending up in a super platoon with Almora and Hayward shifting between center and right depending on who is pitching.
Depending on the Schwarber return, they’re either a starter or a few bullpen arms short. Those can be addressed cheaply in free agency, and then if need be, at the trade deadline.
problem with this is Schwarber right now you would be selling at a pretty low point. Also, power bats as we saw this year didn’t fetch a whole lot of return value. So all in all, not a great combo. I don’t see Schwarber getting the Cubs back in return what you think they would get.
I am by no means a Schwarber fan, but he has four years of control and is a non-super 2, so we’ll say at $30m. He should out perform that even if he’s just a two win player each of those seasons. He’s not going to return a stud; but he could return a fairly paid bullpen arm (continuing with the Yankees, Robertson and young arms as an example).
For an AL team he’s aDH. Teams are rightly skeptical of 25 year old DHs as it denotes a lack of athleticism and young guys with old player skills don’t age well.
For the next 3 year’s I think he has more value to the cubs than he’d return. At least until his salary gets higher.
Baez could definitely return songething. I’m sure there are several teams that can talkthemselves into the idea that Baez is one small adjustment from hitting his ceiling and being a 6 WAR middle infielder.
I agree that Baez has value, but I’m not sure how many (if any) teams would talk themselves into big upside for him at the plate. He has a career 29.3% K rate and 5.1% BB rate across nearly 1,300 PA’s, and this season wasn’t much better. That profile seems like it is more than one small adjustment from being a really good hitter.
Cobb is seemingly perpetually on the FO’s radar…..
Schwarber for Colome and Odirizzi. Who says no?
Rays cackle as soon as they hang up the phone. Shwarber alone isn’t getting you either of those guys let alone both.
With regard to the Cubs loss, I never knew there were so many ways to measure an asskicking.
I wonder if Theo will take the LA approach and just sign every halfway decent starting pitcher with injury concerns. Go into the year with 10 viable SPs and plan on rotating them through the 10-day DL, and use the rest to supplement the bullpen roles.
They don’t have the top end of LA (nobody does), but hard to see this not being the model going forward for any big-market club.
It’s an interesting thought, but those guys don’t tend to be all that cheap if they have legit upside along with question marks (health or otherwise). Kazmir signed two years ago for 3 years / $48 million, and McCarthy signed at the same time for 4 years / $48 million.
I’ll take having 10 legit options as some exaggeration, but the cost of signing even 3 or 4 pitchers with that profile adds up fast. You can try to go after guys who are one or two tiers down and therefore cheaper with only 1-year pillow contracts. Most of those guys, however, prefer a situation where they’re more or less guaranteed a back of the rotation spot that allows them to rebuild value if they’re healthy and effective. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the Dodgers have followed this strategy with a combination of multi-year free agents and early in career players under team control.
It highlights one of the secondary problems with the lack of a minor league pitching pipeline: legit AAA pitching prospects are also the depth for nearly inevitable injuries to the major league rotation.
10 really wasn’t that much of an exaggeration, tbh. Dodgers went into the 2017 season with the following pitchers competing for a starting job:
Kershaw
Hill
Wood
Urias
Maeda
McCarthy
Kazmir
Stewart
Ryu
Ok, so it was 9. But next year, they’ll have this same list while perhaps retaining Darvish and/or adding Walker Buehler. 10 legitimate SP possibilities really isn’t an exaggeration after all.
Fair point that ten wasn’t really an exaggeration, so I stand corrected.
I’ll stand by the point, though, that even with their payroll the Dodgers still are getting there by having two minimum salary prospects (Urias and Stewart) and one acquired arbitration player (Wood) included in that group. It’s also helpful for planning that all three of those players have options and can also be sent to the minors without veteran’s consent, if that’s what overall rotation health and performance dictate.
You can definitely cross Urias off that list for 2018. Kazmir seems like a long shot, and Brock Stewart’s very fringey as well.
The Dodgers also didn’t go out and put together that list in one year. Hill signed in 2017, Maeda and Kazmir in 2016, Wood and McCarthy were acquired in 2015. They’ve continued to add people as uncertainty as long as there’s been uncertainty in the rotation, but I think it’s fair to say that having such a large stable was more something they were ok with than a deliberate strategy.
I think the strategy was deliberate but there’s not enough guys of this profile each offseason, and you dont want them all to expire at once anyway.
Rich Hill isn’t really in the conversation: hes expected to be a playoff piece. the rest aren’t.
Its very similar to how you project payroll and staffing at a business. If you have 150 employees, you expect in any given week you will not have a few of them due to vacations, sick time and other family emergencies, so you actually carry more people than you strictly need so that if you need 150 people to get through the day, you actually have those people (so maybe you have a staff of 160 or something total).
The Dodgers approach their pitching believing that most to all pitchers are going to miss some time each year, so they have to build it with enough depth to still have 5 reasonable options. Some of those guys will end up never being useful (Kazmir), some of them will be intermittant (McCarthy), some of them will be mostly fine in a given year (Maeda), but you dont actually know which is which when the season starts.
But there’s not enough of those guys available for everyone to do it that way. They’re cheaper than market rate because of the injury risk scaring off other teams, but its not like there’s 15 pitchers of Brandon McCarthy’s ability and injury history sitting around waiting for a phonecall.
The bigger problem is that it isn’t clear there are enough of those guys for more than 1 team to engage in this strategy. Just having 7 of them and it doesn’t work out so well for the Dodgers this year; they used basically all that depth to do what they did.
He kinda has, to lesser extent.
Butler, Mills, Anderson….
I suspect we’re going to see MLB crack down on abuse of the 10 day DL. Especially with the 4 extra days off that we’re going to have starting next season.
I see a lot of comments about this but very little official, and it doesn’t seem that realistic to me because the 10 day DL was created expecting it would be used more and guys with injuries too insignificant to get DL’d in the 15 day era would now get DL’d.
I don’t think a single one of the pitchers the Dodgers DL’d this year had a phantom injury or complaint. They all did have some sore something or other. Several were DL’d after being hit with line drive comebackers; others were DL’d for career recurring issues; Brandon McCarthy effectively got DL’d with the yips. Those complaints are almost exactly the profile of what was expected to get people onto the 10 day DL: minor issues that guys would otherwise play through (often to their own long-term detriment) that instead they can rest for because they miss less time.
I don’t know anyone who didn’t think pitchers would be a majority of this. Now what ended up being the case is that the Dodgers were the only team with enough depth to do this in this way, whereas other teams still made people play through these minor complaints because they had no good options to replace them.
And yes, I’m aware of a random comment from Ross Stripling in 2016 where he suggested he was mostly being DL’d due to an innings limit.
If there’s a problem with the 10 day DL as it is its that it’s much more useful to the Dodgers than others because they actually have the depth to use it.
You saw some teams with poor depth selections not even using the 10day as intended for their position players (the Mets in particular had this issue, see Cespedes). Its not a surprise that the team that specifically built their roster around redundant depth would be best positioned to capitalize on the DL changes with both pitchers and position players.
The only thing that really got covered is the starting pitchers, but the Dodgers did this all year with position players and relievers as well, and it wasn’t notable because other teams also had the depth to do that with those groups of players, and they did.
Only the Dodgers had so many viable SP that they could also allow the SP to take advantage of the shorter DL time to minor injuries before they turn into nagging or more serious injuries.
Echoing Mike’s good points, I think this use of the 10-day DL would probably only turn into a controversy and crackdown if a player got upset and filed a grievance over it. I guess the logic would be that a player in his final year before free agency might feel like a bunch of trips to the DL depresses his value, but then again that perspective from other teams is presumably minimized if there’s a sense that a team is using the 10-day DL somewhat aggressively.
To Mike’s point about pitchers, I do think that most pitchers for most of the season have some sort of ailment that could in theory justify skipping a start or two to recuperate. I remember reading a few years ago, for example, that Adam Wainwright said after a season that he’d pitched through soreness that was so bad in between starts that he couldn’t open a soda can with his right hand. That’s on the extreme side, but I’m sure that pitchers routinely pitch through lesser aches and ailments.
Can we please discuss Almora as an everyday player? He had an avg of .271 against RHP this year in 180+AB. That is not a number that needs to be platooned. Given his quality defense, this guy should be an every day OF. Heyward may be making $30M/yr but at this point I see him as a late innings defensive replacement. Zobrist is a switch hitting Tommy LaStella / bench bat at this point in his career.
If you want to go with Offense, then put Schwarber in LF (with Almora and Happ in the other two positions). If you want defense, go with Heyward in RF and trade Schwarber for a starting pitcher.
What was his OBP against RHP?
.291. I can’t split the 2017 season, so I can only offer what my eye’s saw. Almora will be fine. And he has the one thing this team needs, contact to balance the line-up.
Yep, .291 OBP vs. RH pitching in 2017 and .300 over his two years in the majors (which admittedly is only 272 PA’s vs. RH pitchers). 81 wRC+ vs. RH pitchers in 2017, and 84 wRC+ for career.
It’s not a big sample, so maybe he’ll improve on those numbers, but his current production needs to improve to feel good about him being an everyday player against RH pitching.
I’m just here to read all the Cub fans’ comments defending the team!
Bring David Ross out of retirement!
🙂
I think another reason that we saw a bit of a drop off is team health. Other than Schwarber, the 2016 team had one of those crazy years where everyone stayed healthy most of the year. 2017 saw Russel, Contreras, Arrieta, Heyward, & Zobrist all miss time this year.
The Cubs were and are a great team, but it does take some serious luck to win a championship. And that goes for ANY team.
The Cubs success over the past three years has increased revenue astronomically, so they will not hesitate to spend $190 million in 2018 if necessary. And they do not need to sign two full time starters. The Cubs 2017 Minor League Pitcher of the Year, Jen-Ho Tseng, will be competing with Mike Montgomery for fifth spot in the rotation. They will spend in free agency to add high leverage relievers and a solid starter, such as Alex Cobb. As far as position players go, the 2017 Cubs are the only team in MLB history to have five players under 25 each hit more than 20 home runs. The future is still very bright for the Cubs, with more World Series Championships to come.
You forgot to add “because I said so”
You’re welcome.
Think the Cubs are pretty high on Alzolay but he’s a mid-season call-up at the earliest next year.
One thing that you forgot too is that Contreras, Arrieta, Lester, Hendricks and Russell all missed WEEKS at a time due to injury. Bryant played a few months with a busted thumb. That’s a ton of core players that had to deal with pretty significant injuries.
There’s something to this point, but injuries are a normal part of the game. In a lot of ways, that just highlights that the Cubs’ 2016 season was unusually injury-free (other than Schwarber, who almost certainly wasn’t that much of performance hit once his full expected value including defense is taken into account).
That’s particularly the case with four of the names who you mention, because catchers and starting pitchers missing time with injuries has some year-to-year variance but is just sort of par for the course in baseball. Any argument of “assume basically everyone on the team stays healthy” is proposing a very fortunate season that rarely happens.
Dodgers lost Andrew Toles for the season during April, Julio Urias for the season in May, Franklin Gutierrez for the season in May, Yimi Garcia for the season in March, and Andre Ethier didn’t join the club until September. They also lost Logan Forsythe for a few weeks, Adrian Gonzalez for 95% of the season, Kershaw for several weeks, Justin Turner for a few weeks, and Corey Seager for the entire NLCS… injuries happen. That’s why depth matters.
Heh… (puts hand on chin) Please tell me more about how the Cubs aren’t going to be able to keep the same 8 position players, 5 SP’s and bullpen guys every year!
Hendricks and Quintana signed through 2020
Bryant, Rizzo, Russell, Schwarber, Lester and Baez go through 2021
Contreras through 2022
Of course, there will be some additions and subtractions but they’re still set-up as good as anyone and the right guys steering the ship. Might even add Bryce on one of those 3 year opt-out deals after 2018.
Good post, but I feel like quite a few of these points were known after last season and in fact made on this site, by writers and/or commenters.
It was known that Arrieta and Lackey were FA’s after this year, with little if anything in the way of near-term pitching help in the minors. The Quintana trade subsequently helped to address the rotation, but it was predictable that such a trade would carry a high price in prospects. That was one reason that writers here questioned the Chapman deal at the time: those trade chips instead could have been used in a deal for controllable starting pitching.
It was known that the Cubs starting pitchers’ collective good health during 2016 was unusual and highly unlikely to recur.
Jon Lester was turning 33 this year, and his performance was likely to decline at some point over the next couple seasons.
Dave Cameron had been notably negative on Schwarber relative to the hype around him, albeit still expecting him to hit better than he did this year.
Zobrist was turning 36 this season, so some fall-off was likely this year and in subsequent seasons.
The team defense in 2016 was so far out on the right hand size of the distribution compared to baseball history, not just 2016, that it was likely to regress back to being good but not historically great.
Baez is a good player, but his K% vs. BB% made it tough to forecast any jump in hitting performance (and his wRC+ actually improved a bit in 2017 vs. 2016).
It seems to me that the biggest negatives this year were Russell’s production declining at the plate and Heyward giving us less reason to think that he’s ever going to get his hitting production back to near pre-2016 Heyward.
Add it all up, and a few more of those things broke toward the negative side than we might have expected. OTOH, though, some possible negatives didn’t happen: no key pitchers needed TJ, neither Bryant nor Rizzo missed a bunch of time with an injury, and Contreras kept hitting well while taking over as starting catcher.
The way things are developing for the Cubs probably hasn’t quite hit the realistic median forecast after last season, but it doesn’t seem like these developments are over at the left hand of the distribution either.
You can’t really find much to complain about when a teams last 5 first 1st round picks are all contributing on a WS caliber team. Add in Russell and Contreras, who have a low floor and plenty of upside.
Zach Godley would look nice in a Cubs uniform, oh wait, what?
As good as the FO has been at trading for cost-controlled starting pitching (Arrieta, Hendricks, and now Q), they have also traded their fare share of pitchers now contributing at the MLB level.
The FO attacking pitching with #’s, also calls in to question the ability to develop said pitching. But regardless, it was still was expected to take longer to come to fruition.
Tseng has now been the Cubs MiLB pitcher of the year 2x. He’ll get a shot.
As my momma used to say, ‘keep stuffing the tube and something will come out…’
De La Cruz, Alzolay, Albertos, Little, Lange, Mills and Hatch to start with. Late 2018 is realistic for one or two in some role. But 2019 is more realistic.
On the reliever side, Dillon Maples’s stuff is nasty. Good Edwards Jr. is un-hittable. And they have some other great arms in the pipeline and all of the above who could contribute in 2018.
The FO will attack pitching the same as they always have, sign one big FA and closer and fill in the rest.
I would also never rule out This FO’s ability to give a pitch; And land Ohtani.
On the offensive side, having great offensive players is one thing. Having balance in your line-up is something else (and I don’t mean LRLR, which is nice too).
The reason the Cubs signed Heyward, Fowler and Zobrist was to bring that balance; to provide that contact.
Zobrist, hopefully that wrist was a thing and he bounces back next year. But that was always going to be a contract more about the beginning over the end of it.
Fowler, Theo may have underestimated how hard it is to find a true lead-off man.
But, I think AA will be more then fine in CF and adds that contact.
Heyward is going to be a black-hole for years to come. And dictate some painful moves. First casualty being Schwarber.
As it stands:
A team could do a lot worse then an outfield of Bryant (led 3rd basemen in errors), AA and Heyward.
First to third with Rizzo, TLS (the contact sorely needed), Russell and Baez.
And the flexibility of Happ (contact issues) and Zobrist off the ‘bench’.
This seems like an overreaction to me. This season was a regression down to what the Cubs probably are, but I would assume they regressed a little under true talent levels. The Cubs are probably good for about the 94-97 win range next year depending on any additions or trades.
I do think there are 3 things the Cubs need to make every effort to accomplish this offseason.
1. Find a way to get anyone to take Heyward’s contract. Swap him for another bad contract in a change of scenery deal. Swap him for some pine tar. Almost anything. I don’t think there was a single at bat this year that anyone rooting for the Cubs was just hoping he would just strike out instead of hitting a weak ground ball back to second base. While his defense has value, it isn’t nearly worth the black hole in the line up that he is. I personally would prefer someone who is average in both aspects than what Heyward has been the last 2 years. I was on team Heyward can find a way to improve until about August. Chicago is just the wrong place for him, I hope he breaks out elsewhere as I like him.
2. Sign 3 starting pitchers after letting Arietta walk. Arietta has lost his control, and isn’t going to be worth the money that is going to throw at him. Better to sign 3 of the mid level guys and figure out how to use Hendricks, Lester, Quintana, and those three as a 6 man rotation with the 10 day DL. Use Montgomery for the 7th and you are set.
3. Sign every single bullpen arm that will say yes to coming to Chicago. Every Single One. Edwards and Strop are the only two guys in the current pen that are worth anything, but both have a tendency to completely forget where the strike zone is. When they actually are throwing in the general strike zone area, they are great, not so much when they are not within 2 feet of it. Montgomery would be used as the swing man for both long relief and spot starts. But every other bullpen arm needs to go. Maddon trusts none of them, and quite frankly, he shouldn’t. This is the Cubs true weakness, and it is almost a joke.
The story of the Cubs postseason this year is their bats went cold (which bats can tend to do against good pitching) and their bullpen couldn’t hold the good work the starters put in. Through my eyes, the team appeared demoralized by this fact, and then I don’t think they ever recovered from the Turner walk off, despite winning game 4
On point 1, I think that you’re underestimating just how negative Heyward’s contract is now. He’s got 6 years and $127.5 million left on it, with the player opt-outs not relevant unless he dramatically recovers at the plate.
He’s totaled about 2.5 WAR over the past two seasons, with his defense providing basically all of that value. Dave Cameron has pointed out before that teams seem not to pay up for defense quite as much as WAR would indicate, so his market value might be a bit depressed even relative to that WAR total. Heyward’s career path has been extremely odd due to his collapse as a hitter, but he’s 28 so aging curves would dictate that you expect further decline in coming years. It’s easy to look at his contract and see north of $50 million of expected negative value. You mention the Cubs taking on someone else’s bad contract, but there aren’t that many contracts that are that bad. The Cubs would more likely end up having to send along money to eat a lot of Heyward’s contract.
In a vacuum, some team would take a flier on a 1-year pillow contract for him and hope that he gets closer to pre-2016 Heyward, but I don’t think that you’d find many if any teams wanting to commit long-term money to him. I also don’t think you’d find many if any teams planning to contend wanting to bring him in and count on him to start. We’ve seen a fair number of bat-first corner OF’s floating around over the past year without as much demand as you might expect based on WAR. That’s not Heyward’s profile, but it does indicate that teams have something of a glut of options for corner OF.
Heyward also has a full no-trade clause through 2018. He could agree to a trade, but it’s another complication.
The Cubs should be like at worst the 4th richest club in MLB. If the Heyward contract is that bad, they can afford to literally pay him not to play. The Dodgers paid over $50 million this year to guys who made no significant impact on the roster or weren’t on it whatsoever. The Cubs can afford one of those guys. If Heyward’s not worth his roster spot, cut his ass and move on with life. They’re not the Royals where this is a crippling problem.
It sucks that Heyward hasn’t worked out, but at some point continuing to get bad production from him is sunk cost fallacy in action.
I agree with Mike’s overall point about the sunk cost fallacy, and even “bad Heyward” has produced enough to be a perfectly fine bench outfielder. His situation isn’t like Pablo Sandoval, where the player was taking up a spot while producing below replacement level. Heyward has a bad contract for the team unless he rebounds significantly, but he’s not a completely useless player by any means.
That said, though, the Cubs also have some other contracts for aging players (Zobrist, and Lester to a lesser degree) that may or may not end up looking great over the next 2-3 years. The Cubs appear to need to pay free agent prices to acquire a fair amount of starting pitching and late inning relievers, and those deals can go wrong in a hurry if bad luck strikes.
I agree that a single contract like Heyward doesn’t overly hinder the Cubs, but it does reduce their additional margin for error. The Dodgers and Yankees have so far been the only teams showing a willingness to pay substantial amounts of luxury tax ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_luxury_tax#2002.E2.80.93Present ), so it’s functioned as something of a soft cap that other teams won’t consistently exceed by a large amount.
Teams can easily survive bad contracts. Barry Zito comes to mind immediately.
Really, who last year didn’t think the Cubs were going to have starting pitching holes after this season? Even if they hadn’t regressed, Arietta and Lackey were still going to be free agents with nothing on the farm to replace them, while Montgomery was never any more than a #5 starter at best. Their lack of pitching depth is really something the Cubs should’ve seen coming.
A few points from some someone who actually watched every inning of every Cubs game since 2014…
Russell and Baez make the best middle infield defense in baseball. No reason to break that up.
Tommy LaStella is out of options I think, so I imagine he’ll be moved. Really a shame. I’d love to see how much damage he could do given 500 PAs a season.
If Jason Heyward learns how to correctly hold and swing a baseball bat, it’s a sad possibility that by mid season,2018, Schwarber Happ or Almora get moved. Depth really helped the Cubs this year, but if there’s true value to be had, I think Theo will get it.
If Heyward doesn’t improve offensively, I suspect by midseason he’ll be a defensive replacement and the volleyball rotation will continue.
No mention of Almonte?
Cubs and Rays swap looks sensible. Arms for infielders.
I don’t think the 2016 Cubs were overly “lucky.” They won 103 games, but their Pythag was 107. Over the last 3 years they’ve won more games than any team in MLB, by a decent margin …and 3 years is not a small sample size. Over past 3 years:
Cubs 292 wins, 97.3 avg. (Pythag:290)
Dodgers 287, 95.7 avg.
Tribe 277, 92.3 avg.
Nats 275, 91.7 avg.
Astros 271, 90.3 avg.
Cards 269, 89.7 avg.
Red Sox 264, 88 avg.
The Dodgers are the only other team even in the same solar system over the past 3 years. I think you’d have to say the Cubs have a good baseline.
There are as many ways to shape this narrative as there are axes to grind, including mine. But the number of things that went RIGHT for the 2017 Cubs clearly shows how premature the dynasty predictions were.
Start with excellent overall health:
— The 4 returning SP regulars shed just 5% of their prior starts (116 vs. 122), with no drop by the over-30 trio. Montgomery, Butler and later Quintana filled out the rotation quite capably.
— Nine Cubs had 400+ PAs (2nd in MLB), and 11 played at least 108 games (1st in MLB).
— Russell missed 6 weeks, but the team went 24-17 (better than their season rate) and increased their lead.
— Contreras spent a month on the DL, but the team went 18-11 (with an .832 OPS by the just-acquired Avila), and he still ranked 5th in WAR at the position while logging a typical starting catcher’s workload.
— None of these guys missed even 4 straight games: Bryant, Rizzo, Baez, Jay, Almora, or Happ (post-callup). Schwarber never missed 3 straight except during his demotion, nor Heyward except during 2 short DL stints.
The preseason trade for Davis worked perfectly: He pitched more than the year before and blew just one save, while Soler played his way back to the minors.
The deadline deals for Quintana and Avila worked very well: Quintana pitched as expected and they went 10-4 in his starts. Avila matched his career WAR rate and they went 16-9 in his starts, plus the timing was lucky with Contreras hitting the DL 10 days later.
And the performance of young guys and role players wasn’t all negative. Contreras, Almora and Jay combined for +2.5 fWAR over Depth Chart projections, in roughly the projected PAs. Happ had a good debut year (1.8 WAR in 413 PAs), and LaStella was an excellent bench player.
Meanwhile, the main shortfalls could hardly be called surprising:
— Decline by 3 SPs who averaged 34 years old this year;
— Sharp decline by the 36-year-old Zobrist;
— Schwarber failing to maximize the one thing he’d ever done well (hitting RHPs); and
— Heyward basically repeating his disappointing 2016.
If that’s all it takes to make a great team into merely a good one, then it was never the makings of a dynasty.
Just out of curiosity … If the 2017 Cubs were “one of the best teams in baseball,” how many teams are in that group?
Yes, they were 7th in both W% and run differential (NL 4th in both). But they fattened up on a very weak schedule — bottom-5 by B-R’s SOS.
They ranked 9th of 10 playoff teams both against other playoff teams (9-16, going 0-5-1 in those season series) and against teams that finished .500 or better (35-35). Only the Twins were worse in those measures.
They won their LDS by the skin of their teeth and lots of luck in the finale, helped by a team that’s never won a series; they were outscored 21-17, batting .180 with 2 HRs. Then they were squashed in the LCS, tying the worst average margin of any LCS or WS that went at least 5 games.
I’ll grant they were better than Minnesota, and maybe the Rockies (though they lost that series 2-5). I can’t see them higher than 8th overall. I’m not saying that’s *not* “one of the best teams,” just wondering what that phrase really means.
Correction: The Cubs were 11-21 vs. other playoff teams in the regular season. B-R searches are giving faulty results with a “Made playoffs” criterion. I’m not going to manually check the rest of the playoff teams, but I’ll guess my “9th of 10” ranking still stands.