MLB: ***Official 2021 Chicago Cubs Season Thread***
- Thread starter Cyched
- Start date
This is about where I am at with this team lately. There is no light at the end of the tunnel with this current group and it's going to be painfully obvious that they need to sell off and get what they can this summer to start the rebuild.
Also in regards to Javy scroll down the page a bit and look at the pitch location for one of his at bats. He swung at pitch #4 that was no where close to a strike. I honestly don't know why any pitcher just doesn't thow a bunch of junk pitches outside the zone to Javy right now and make him take a walk because seems like there isn't a pitch he won't swing at lately. He has just 129 walks in 2583 career AB. As a pitcher I'd take those odds with the way he has swung the bat since last season. Even if he does take a walk chances are the guy behind him is going to get out anyways.
Enhanced Box Score: Brewers 7, Cubs 0 - April 14, 2021 (bleachernation.com)
Also in regards to Javy scroll down the page a bit and look at the pitch location for one of his at bats. He swung at pitch #4 that was no where close to a strike. I honestly don't know why any pitcher just doesn't thow a bunch of junk pitches outside the zone to Javy right now and make him take a walk because seems like there isn't a pitch he won't swing at lately. He has just 129 walks in 2583 career AB. As a pitcher I'd take those odds with the way he has swung the bat since last season. Even if he does take a walk chances are the guy behind him is going to get out anyways.
Enhanced Box Score: Brewers 7, Cubs 0 - April 14, 2021 (bleachernation.com)
Padres absolutely fleeced the Cubs in the Darvish trade. Davies is garbage and we didn't even get good prospects.
On the surface it was a salary dump for sure. Davies is only costing them about $8.4 mil this year year then he is a free agent while Darvish is 34 and still has 3 years and $59 mil on his deal and was going to be a waste with this current roster. They did get back some very young position prospects but it may be 3 or 4 years down the road to know if any of them turn out to be any good. Let's not forget that Kyle Hendricks was part of the Dempster trade to Texas and was 22 at the time which most of the guys the Cubs got in the Darvish deal are under 20. Never know with these deals what diamond in the rough you may get. I wasn't expecting much from Davies as he was just a throw in to fill a spot in the rotation and to offset some salary.
The pitching staff as a whole has actually overachieved expectations a bit so far which is scary to think what the scores may look like when they come back down to earth a bit. As a staff they are 9th in MLB in OBA at .225 and 7th in strike outs. ERA in the middle of the pack at 17th at 4.37.
Really worries me about what they can get in trades if some of these guys don't start to heat up before July. I can live with the losing as I expected this to be a transition year but the offense so far is way beyond what anyone imagined they would be. For all the guys playing in contract years you would have expected some to be more focused at the plate and get off to hot starts. Not only are they making it tough for the Cubs to get anything in return but they are going to have a hard time finding lucrative multi-year deals elsewhere if they don't turn it around quick. I'm still irked the Cubs did not trade Schwarber after his best season in 2019 where he hit 38 HR 92 RBI and batted a career high .250. He's a poor man's Adam Dunn and surely some AL team would have given a decent prospect. Instead they let him flop in 2020 and walk for nothing. Heck his name came up in 2016 in the Chapman trade talks and it's hard to tell if the Cubs would have won the WS without him but it sure would have been fun to see what Gleyber Torres would have done at 2B as a Cub as he's looked really good in Yankee pinstripes so far. Trading for Quintana was a bad move too in hindsight as Eloy Jimenez is going to be a stud for the White Sox. It's ironic that the Theo/Hoyer front office traded away probably 2 of the best prospects they had for a rental closer and a guy that was nothing more than an inconsistent back end of the rotation starter. I know this was a Hendry trade but DJ LeMahieu as part of the Ian Stewart trade is another one that haunts the club still. Yankees resigned him for $15 mil a year for next 6 years, he is 32 now but he sure fits what the Cubs are lacking which is a guy that hits for contact and high OBP at the top of the lineup. Had their chance to sign him after 2018 too when the Yanks gave him a 2 year $24 mil deal too.
Prospects were rated lower because they are pretty young/raw. They have huge upside. Judging the trade 3 weeks into the season seems a bit premature.
I know I should hate them but they are a really fun team and I find myself rooting for them a bit. I'm a little bit of a bandwagon Padres fan this year but mostly just because I bet on their win total over and I absolutely HATE the Dodgers.
Like I said in my post, I think it may be 3-4 years till they really know what they got back in that trade and you have to hope they did their due diligence with their scouting to think they maybe snagged a diamond in the rough or 2 from a pretty good farm system. If they all never make it to the big leagues then it was a bad trade but in the short term they saved on payroll and can hopefully turn that savings into an impactful signing or trade in the near future.
None of the four were even in their Top 10 prospect lists. Padres had 4 players in the Top 100 and brilliant Cubs management couldn't even get 1 of them for thr Cy-Young runner up next year.
Don't forget they alos traded Caritini who is probably the best hitting backup catcher in baseball.
The World Series in 2016 was nice but this front office has been a dumpster fire for the last 3 or 4 years.
Need to save some of these homers for the rest of the week.
Just shows how flawed this offense is. When they are hitting the ball out of the park it is fun thing to see but this offense is not dynamic enough to manufacture runs when they aren't hitting homers. They also did this against a guy with just 7 career MLB starts in 3 seasons and some backend bullpen arms they threw out there to finish out a game they were not going to win once they blew it open in the 5th.
Again, these prospects are projected to be big league ready 2024 at earliest, hence their lower rating. We aren’t going to be able to fully grade this trade for many years. The cubs system is in desperate need of more talent and got an influx.
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
The rankings are based of future potential, not what level or how good they are at 18. If they base it off your method some 28 year old for the Iowa Cubs would be the best prospect every year.
I stand by my statement, couldn't even get 1 of their top 10 prospects for the Cy Young runner up.
Epstein and Hoyer did a phenomenal rebuild but the last 2 or 3 years have been a disaster.
I get what you're saying, but it isn't quite accurate. Jasson Dominguez has the highest ceiling of any prospects in probably the last 20 years, if not longer, and the highest he's ranked on any respectable ranking service is 28 because he has 0 professional baseball experience. The 27 guys ahead of him are expected to be up by 2022.
There are 5 guys with an ETA of 2024 (which is what all our guys are considered) in the Top 100. All of them except Dominguez are a year older than all our prospects.
Additionally, remember the Padres had 5 guys in the top 50 in all of MLB last year. Their 6th was their first round pick of 2020, who was considered the best high school player.
While I think we could have and should have received more in this trade, if prospect ratings are of any importance to you, my guess is that within the next 2 years, the Cubs will have one of the best farm systems and Preciado/Caissie will be near the top of it.
Or we could realize that it's still incredibly early into this season and jumping off the bridge in mid-April is foolish. I just continue to find it humorous that when the Cubs are doing bad in a game we have two pages worth of posts, but after yesterday there's only a half a dozen posts.
I hate the Ricketts as much as the next guy but let's remember the Wrigley renovation and Marquee Network are both somewhat new. While they've made bank throughout the whole process, their pockets are really going to start filling up now that they don't have any more major projects they're funding. They won't be selling the team for a long while.
