Author: Rice Cube

Tom Ricketts Talks Shop

Looks like Tom Ricketts has seen fit to talk to the media today. My vantage point is that the Cubs have drawn their line in the sand, and Scott Boras has drawn his, now they just have to compromise because Ricketts won’t undermine Jed Hoyer by directly negotiating with Boras. It also does sound like he would very much prefer Cody Bellinger return to the club.

Here’s some snippets from Meghan:

There might be more as she tacks on but you can click through if you wish.

Just a quick add-on re: intelligent spending:

New Cubs Slogan

The hashtag might need either a reworking or a reformatting because yikes, but this isn’t absolutely terrible IMO.

UPDATE: (dying laughing) they changed the hashtag (dying laughing)

Just in case they nuke the original, behold:

Cubs 2024 Promos!

The Cubs just released their promotional items for this season:

There are some pretty fun player bobbleheads, including one of Ryne Sandberg’s statue, plus Clark the Cub plushies for the kids. There’s also this incredible Pat Hughes sweater shirt. Guess I’ll be planning a trip if I can.

The Price is Right?

We are in like month three of the great Jed Hoyer game of chicken with regard to the big name free agents, though I am still quite confident that this isn’t *it* for the Cubs, they’re just waiting out Scott Boras and other assorted agents in bidding for the remaining free agents, if they’re even interested. Chances are they’re for sure interested in Cody Bellinger and may even be the high bidder, even if Boras won’t be able to set a record with this contract. Unfortunately the Cubs are so ironclad with their security that it seems like the agents can’t even make up a rumor, but since they won’t fix that in time for this offseason, we will just have to wait for the Passan bomb when it drops.

The Cubs have at least signed one of the better free agents on the list in Shota Imanaga, with one of the more fun flowchart-style contracts I’ve seen in ever. Of that top ten, we still have Bellinger, Blake Snell, Jordan Montgomery, and Matt Chapman still searching for their next contract. I still think, like most of the so-called “experts” out there, that Bellinger will eventually reunite with the Cubs, and my guess is that they avoid the other guys attached to the qualifying offer, which leaves Montgomery as a viable option to bolster the rotation. Of course, the Cubs are now about $30MM under the first luxury tax threshold per Cots, so they might not want to spend too much more, unless they are at the point where they don’t care whether they cross that threshold or not. Then again, even if they did pass that threshold, the Cubs can rapidly get under again due to the way their current deals are structured. Regardless, there are plenty of ways to work up the roster through trade and free agency, even outside that top 50.

Per the MLBTR free agent list, I’m going to suggest that the Cubs will not sign another catcher as they seem content with Yan Gomes and Miguel Amaya plus whichever random catchers they can pass through waivers and outright to Iowa. Since they also just traded for Michael Busch and he needs a position, plus the fact that it’s a spot that Bellinger can play assuming he comes back, probably not going to dive into the first base pool either, barring a spring invite for Joey Votto. I’m going to say that there’s enough depth to cover second base and shortstop, but third base is a bit more of a mystery since we aren’t sure how well Busch, Patrick Wisdom, or Christopher Morel can handle it in-house, or if the Cubs are willing to cough up the draft pick for a short-term type deal for Matt Chapman, like they did when they signed John Lackey.

I think at this time I’m just kind of rationalizing how “fine” the Cubs are currently without even diving into the free agent pool for position players beyond Bellinger and maybe Matt Chapman. The more important investment should likely be in the pitching staff, where the Cubs could drop some coin on Montgomery. I did read that Hyun-Jin Ryu is working out in Korea, and Brandon Woodruff is still out there, which work as stop gaps with some pedigree for this year (Ryu) and next (Woodruff) should they accept a Cubs invite.

As for relievers, it’s interesting to note that both of the Cubs’ oft-injured bullpen guys of interest, Codi Heuer and Brandon Hughes, are listed as free agents, but those are likely the non-roster invitee type signings if any and not the Hector Neris deal (agreed upon but not official yet). The Cubs do have plenty of good right-handed pitchers but may want to throw some dollars at guys like Brad Hand or Amir Garrett.

What this says to me is that, even two weeks before pitchers and catchers report, there are still plenty of avenues for the Cubs to take if they choose to. As always, we are forced to take the wait-and-see approach because nobody is saying anything. But it’s nice to know options are there!

The 2024 Hall of Fame Class

Perhaps it is coincidental that the National Baseball Hall of Fame would announce its inductees in the same week as we got the Oscar and Razzie nominations (I have opinions on those too), but the time has come to welcome more icons into the shrine of humans who were very good at this baseball thing. We know from earlier that former manager Jim Leyland was voted in by the Veterans Committee (specifically, the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee for candidates who did their thing from 1980 on), and poor Lou Piniella just missed getting in.

On the ballot itself, for me it hasn’t changed since the last time, and I feel like a lot of the public ballots have generally agreed with my not-so-brilliant choices:

  • Bobby Abreu
  • Carlos Beltrán
  • Adrian Beltré
  • Todd Helton
  • Andruw Jones
  • Joe Mauer
  • Manny Ramírez
  • Álex Rodríguez
  • Gary Sheffield
  • Billy Wagner

Some of these guys have some give left, and the showing from publicly revealed ballots has been very kind to Joe Mauer on his first go-around, but Gary Sheffield’s time on the writers ballot is done. There will also be a cull of the guys at the bottom of the ballot, who despite getting a handful of token votes will not go forward in the process. The always valuable public tracker by Ryan Thibodaux and friends suggested before the announcement that Adrían Beltré should sail in despite a handful of idiots not voting for him, while Joe Mauer and Todd Helton had a bit of a buffer above the 75% cutoff, and Billy Wagner will likely need another year to earn induction. This is probably a good time to share this masterpiece from Randall from some time ago:

https://twitter.com/RandallJSanders/status/1064956433358307328

Appropriately, Beltré was the first announced:

Next up was Mauer, with the stick:

The last inductee of this cycle was Todd Helton, who in the final voting actually got more support than Mauer:

Billy Wagner missed by a handful of votes in his penultimate year of eligibility but should be able to surge to induction in his final year. First-timer David Wright got just enough votes to stay on the ballot, but a few guys, including fun players José Bautista and Bartolo Colon, are done, as is Sheffield (pending any Veterans Committees). The BBWAA has the vote totals and now we turn our attention to the 2025 class, which obviously will be without the new inductees but will have Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia joining the names as guys who are most likely to get a plethora of votes.

New Year Boredom

So here we are, the first post on this here website in the year of our lord 2024. As has been indicated by many media outlets and online personalities, the Cubs have still not made a major league transaction, whether trade or signing, and we are probably a week or so away from torches and pitchforks at the Cubs Convention. Not that this matters to Jed Hoyer and friends, because they’ll take their time and you’ll like it, dammit.

I was chatting along on the Discord whilst I was supposed to do actual work (nobody is productive this time of year so I don’t feel so bad) and I got some ideas to try to amuse myself. After all, baseball is an entertainment product, and while we understand it is run like a business to make the rich white men who own the teams even more money, they can’t make money without a base level of entertainment. And right now, I am highly bored by the lack of activity (possibly due to owners being cheap, possibly due to the TV carrier bankruptcy stuff, and possibly because teams are either hugging their prospects or just not desiring the thin crop of free agents this winter). Part of the fun of the offseason (used to be, anyway) is the moves we see throughout the winter to give us hope for the coming season, whichever squadron is being rooted for. I’ll ramble on for a couple ideas…

An Offseason Trade Deadline

The rostering deadlines are after the World Series, and there are a few other milestones we can look at as well. In chronological order, we have something like:

  • The free agency opening date – usually five days after the conclusion of the World Series. We won’t pick this date because teams still need to know who will become available due to various mechanisms including the declining of the qualifying offer.
  • The rostering deadline – usually the week or so before Thanksgiving. At this point we know who will be free agents, and if you’re protecting guys from the Rule 5 Draft anyway, you already know who you want to keep for sure and who is relatively expendable, so this might be the earliest we set the deadline.
  • The Rule 5 Draft – usually in the middle of the first full week of December. This is a month after the World Series and seems like plenty of time for MLB’s now-engorged front offices to figure out some trades, especially since they just literally had the Winter Meetings.
  • The arbitration figure exchange date – usually in the second week of January. This is a month before spring training so by now if you haven’t figured out a fair deal you might as well trade the guy and make it some other team’s problem? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want to think about trades and stuff on the eve of spring training either.

I feel like an offseason trade deadline will drive some level of urgency, give us a period of fun news, and get teams set up early enough that they can now focus on free agency if they haven’t done that already because apparently multitasking can’t be a thing anymore.

Free Agency eBay

Someone in the chat suggested that there isn’t like a “Buy Now” button for free agents, but I did wonder…why not? I think we discussed in one of the Dreamcasts that we don’t necessarily want a hard deadline for free agency because I’m reasonably sure that would skew the leverage to ownership, wherein MLB can weather a year of no availability for a specific player more so than that player can just not work for a year. But with the goofiness that happened with media leaks during the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes and the common refrain that the agents and teams are using media leaks as leverage plays anyway, maybe we can kill two birds with one stone with an eBay-like system.

In this case, we would get the leaks still, but the leverage would be contained within the eBay-like system, where the agents and players set their reserve (the minimum they will sign for). Just like on eBay, if the reserve is not met after a certain bidding period, the auction would end with no winner and the player would go back on the market. The agents and players could also set the “Buy Now” price, which I presume would be their ideal contract, and a team can just agree to that price right away and that particular auction would be over. If you set the auction time to a single week, I imagine that would drive some urgency as serious teams will have to place their bids, keep outbidding the other teams, and all parties (minus the media) would be able to see this real time. Once the auction is over, whether a team wins because they outbid the competition and exceeded the reserve or the player has to go back to auction, the media would get an automatically generated press release and we can move on.

It still kind of sucks to talk about players as commodities here but I hope you know what I mean. The teams are bidding for the services and performance of a professional player and it would be nice if they gave us some entertainment in the meantime. I was thinking that this should be sort of a blind bid in some way, where you don’t know which team has the high bid but you can see what the bid is, similar to some features that eBay allowed back when I actually used it a lot, and as I thought about it, I changed my mind about whether the public and the media should see this because I think this would be the most fun and least speculative and subject to fake news, as it were.

I would like the Cubs to sign some players who are good, and given how stupid this offseason has been, anything that can drive action is good by me. Of course, I realize that there is strategy involved on the part of the agents and the Cubs brain trust, and keeping deadlines out of it at least keeps some leverage for the players, as I’m guessing that an eBay-like system might decrease some of their leverage, but I’m honestly not sure.

Anyway, if you want to have some actual fun while the Cubs and the rest of MLB’s front offices get their heads out of their asses, this was a pretty fun listen from the Cespedes Family BBQ guys as they interviewed a guy who had never seen a baseball game before.

Happy New Year, Sign Votto For the Hell of It

As 2023 winds to a close since the Cubs aren’t gonna do much in the way of transactions anyway, it’s a good time to share this masterpiece from Joey Votto and suggest that they just invite him to spring training for the yuks.

Merry Christmas

This is usually around the time I’d make some kind of parody of a classic Christmas poem or that Mariah Carey song, but the Dodgers have sucked all the fun out of this offseason and stalled everything so there isn’t much non-Dodgers/non-Juan Soto news to report, especially not from the Cubs, who barely did some random minor league signings (which are still important, but honestly just not very fun). Since there’s nothing to report, and I’m not that motivated right now, I guess we will defer it to next year since apparently that’s something MLB allows us to do.

In its stead, I’ll just say I appreciate you all letting me hang out here at this place I found many years ago when I was wondering why the hell Ryan Theriot would be worth that much in arbitration. It was a simpler time before we worried about things like worker’s rights and the like (not that we shouldn’t care, mind you), and I didn’t quite know why I thought he was nuts for wanting the $3 million or whatever it was, but I’m glad someone was able to break down the numbers and value calculations for me. Ever since we shuttered our own site at world series dreaming dot com due to our shifting priorities, I wasn’t able to blog until you all let me in, so thanks, and sorry.

Also much appreciation to those of you who hang out with me on the podcast, which maybe five people listen to regularly but it’s more of a fun hobby than anything, a chance to talk amongst fellow fans about the stupidity that is Major League Baseball. At this age, and given how hard it is to make an actual living out of blogging, I’m just happy to have fun.

So yeah, thanks, Merry Christmas, and a happy new year. May Jed find some couch cushion money and sign Cody Bellinger already.

Delayed Gratification, Or Why Haven’t the Cubs Spent Money Yet?

There are a million things we can probably rehash about the whole thing where Shohei Ohtani basically wasted everyone’s time, but aside from acknowledging that the most consequential free agent in MLB history was the rate-limiting reagent for the offseason reaction here, let’s not do that rehash and instead figure out what the Cubs are doing (or not doing). Of course, we have to also say that we can’t tell the Cubs what to do (as the front office led by Jed Hoyer has implied many times before). And finally, we also must note that it would be somewhat disingenuous and foolhardy to just assume Craig Counsell can squeeze a few extra wins out of this club that might be without Cody Bellinger (if he doesn’t re-sign with the Cubs, as is rumored to be his preference).

Why So Slow?

This isn’t just the Cubs, by the way…it’s a lot of MLB that hasn’t really done much, and there are a lot of names still on the board to welcome to the North Side (or elsewhere, because not everyone will or should be signed by the Cubs). Here’s a fun Passan tweet:

If you click through, you’ll see the Cubs have spent $0 in MLB free agency (the minor league deals don’t count even if they might turn out to be impactful), and given that they had a huge deal on the table that they probably just abandoned because they knew Ohtani wouldn’t seriously consider, they theoretically have a lot of money. They could push to next year, but that again would be dumb particularly if you don’t trust PCA to hit right away and there are multiple positions that need to be upgraded. Me being the eternal optimist, there is most likely a plan in the works, they just haven’t fully executed it yet.

It is also noteworthy that among the teams that haven’t spent, a few of them include the Blue Jays, Mariners, and Yankees, two of which are rumored to be in on big free agents, and the other is a Jerry DiPoto trade blitz away from being interesting. The Cubs have been linked either by concrete reports or by quantum string theory to said big free agents, including Japanese star Yoshinobu Yamamoto and their own (hopefully non-departed) Cody Bellinger. The issue is probably just agent maneuvering and haggling with front offices to maximize their client pay, which they absolutely should do, even if we’re bored as hell.

The Timing

As of this writing, we are at December 17, a week from Christmas, even though Jed Hoyer isn’t Christian so he probably wouldn’t care, but many free agents are so maybe they try to get something done. However, pitchers and catchers don’t need to officially report to Spring Training until around Valentine’s Day, and players a few days after, so there is time to get stuff done.

I went back and looked at some big signings I can recall and when in the offseason it happened. Keep in mind that as analytical front offices have become more prevalent, there may be a bit of schmollusion going on, but at some point a team knows they want a guy and they need to pay up, so perhaps it isn’t as big of a deal as I joke about.

  • Alfonso Soriano – I thought he was a perfectly fine player, warts and all, he just kind of aged poorly and couldn’t lay off those frisbee sliders. Anyway, he signed on 11/20/2006 before the Cubs won back-to-back NL Central titles, which was earlier than I thought but maybe they just wanted to get it over with before Thanksgiving.
  • Milton Bradley – ironically one of the reasons I found this here website, the much-maligned mercurial outfielder signed on 1/9/2009 so at least one major signing so far has taken until the new year before being finalized.
  • Edwin Jackson – I’m sure many are still annoyed with this particular signing, EJax signed on 1/2/2013 and hey, he did his best and he’s an Immaculate Grid Hall of Famer. By the way, Kyuji Fujikawa (remember him?) signed a month before on 12/7/2012.
  • Jon Lester – this is the first evidence of the Cubs hype video working to snag a marquee free agent, as Jon signed on 12/15/2014. Objectively, this is the best Cubs free agent contract of all time.
  • Jason Heyward – the Cubs paid handsomely for the most impactful speech in postseason history as Heyward signed one year after Lester did on 12/15/2015. John Lackey signed a week before Heyward did, by the way, as did Ben Zobrist (after the Cubs cleared some money or something with the Starlin Castro trade).
  • Yu Darvish – Berselius’ favorite pitcher was signed after I guess his market cratered a bit and he needed to be somewhere before spring training, on 2/13/2018.
  • Craig Kimbrel – To skirt the QO, the Cubs waited until after the Draft and signed Kimbrel on 6/7/2019, as an example of a deal that could happen in-season if, say, Matt Chapman somehow found himself unemployed by Draft time, which would be more difficult now that the Draft happens during All-Star weekend.
  • Seiya Suzuki – I don’t know if he posted late or something, or maybe it was because of the lockout, but Seiya signed officially on 3/18/2022. The other Japanese stars coming over don’t have that long as they are already posted and they only have the 45 days, so expect guys like Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga, etc. to be signed by early to mid-January.
  • Dansby Swanson – our most recent big fish signed on 12/21/2022. Just for fun, I looked it up and Trea Turner signed on 12/8, Xander Bogaerts signed on 12/9, and Carlos Correa finally signed the following January because of the ankle time bomb thing. For those wondering why I forgot, Cody Bellinger officially signed the week before on 12/14.

Because MLB has no deadline (and really, they shouldn’t, because we don’t want to remove leverage from the players side), the next big signing could happen anywhere between now and Spring Training, so we don’t have much of a choice but to take a wait-and-see approach.

Whither Plan?

In our experience, the Cubs tend to keep things close to the chest and once details leak, the transaction is completed almost immediately afterwards. This was true when Theo Epstein was in charge, and appears to also be true under Jed Hoyer. The agents have to leak things to reporters to try to generate momentum for their clients, but Hoyer and friends are disciplined (probably to a fault, but maybe it serves them well) and basically seem like they just don’t care what Scott Boras or whoever is saying that might eventually be misquoted by a Bob Nightengale.

If you asked me to make a prediction (I kinda hate doing this because I’m risk-averse and I don’t really gamble), I’d say the player preference was to know where they stand before Christmas so we might see something happen before next weekend. Trades are also possible so there could be news on that front to augment this lineup, making it possible that the Cubs actually spend no free agent money but still improve the team substantially. You also never know if the Cubs already Zoomed with Yamamoto and invited him to the Winter Wonderland in a Santa costume. We don’t have any choice but to wait and it’ll happen. Or it won’t, it could go either way.