Theo Epstein talked Cubs a year after his hiring was official.
One year ago, the Cubs had one player who projected as part of the core Epstein and Co. are trying to develop and that was shortstop Starlin Castro. Today, Epstein said there are at least half a dozen in the organization, including pitcher Jeff Samardzija, first baseman Anthony Rizzo, and prospects Javier Baez, Albert Almora and Jorge Soler.
The farm system has certainly improved. It would be nice if some of these guys were in the upper parts of the minor leagues where we can get a better idea, but that's going to take time.
"I also wake up every day and recognize we lost 101 games and understand how painful that was for everybody, including me, and that provides further motivation to get out of this position that we're in," he said. "I think there were a lot of positives. That core, at least in my mind, went from one player to half a dozen, and if we can do that again in 2013, and we look up and we have close to a dozen players in our core, I'll feel great about the overall health of the organization.
"I also want to make the playoffs and I understand that's a big challenge, so I hope we hit on a few guys this winter and get off to a good start and we have one of those unexpected seasons."
It will take an unexpected season to see them contending, but they can get a start on it and it sounds as if they will. This makes me happy. There's no reason to wait until you're a contender to spend money. This team doesn't have to wait to do that so why do it?
"I believe 90 percent of the game revolves around controlling the strike zone when you combine what it means to do so from an offensive standpoint and also from a pitching standpoint," Epstein said. "It's something we weren't really good at. We didn't walk enough, our pitchers walked too many hitters, we didn't manage counts as well as we should've."
It's a big problem for this organization and has been for some time. Hopefully we'll start to see some more patient hitters in the minors over the next few years and obviously a pitcher who throws strikes is obviously nice to have.
The Cubs also extended assistant general manager Randy Bush today. The holdover from the Jim Hendry regime was signed for 3 more years. They also made some other front office changes too.
The Cubs also announced Louie Eljaua has been promoted to special assistant to the general manager and director of international scouting. Paul Weaver, who was the director, will now be an international cross-checker and coordinator for the Pacific Rim. Alex Suarez was promoted to assistant director of player development.
The team also said Mark O'Neal, the Cubs' athletic trainer since 2004, will stay with the organization but in a different role.
The Cubs also hired David Bell to be their 3rd base coach and removed the interim tag from hitting coach Jason Rowson.
Rowson was the Cubs' Minor League hitting coordinator and had taken over the big league team's duties when Rudy Jaramillo was dismissed June 13.
Bell, 40, managed in the Reds' Minor League system the last four seasons, most recently guiding the Triple-A Louisville club in 2012. Prior to Louisville, Bell was the manager for Double-A Carolina from 2009-11. The '09 season was his first as a manager or coach at the professional level after a 12-year Major League career, which ended in 2006.
This feels like a pretty good deal for the Cubs.
Comments
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mb21Quote Reply
If the Dbacks will take Garza and something for Upton, that is fine with me. But why aren’t we talking about trading F7? Because we still have him under fairly affordable salary control? Do we really believe he’s transformed (other than Optimist Club Prez MB)?
And how about the Plouffe rumor? How about trading Travis Wood for Plouffe?
SVBQuote Reply
I have a couple of thoughts here. First, if you accept that any team other than maybe the Yankees needs to have a substantial number of cost-controlled wins, picking up long-term contracts when you’re not contending may not be the best plan. Much has been made about deals like Soriano’s where we expect the first few years to be a bargain and the back end to be a mess. Even if they are not backloaded like Soriano’s deal was, player decline typically leads to a similar effect. So if you sign guys like that before the team is ready to contend, you run a very real risk of being burdened with unproductive payroll once your window opens in exchange for what, not sucking quite as much in the short term?
Second, I think that under the new CBA, we’re going to see shrewd teams who are not contenders lean more and more on the Maholm Gambit — that is, signing mid-level guys to moveable contracts and flipping them for prospects. You’re basically using unwanted room in your budget to speculate on guys who might be worth something in the very near term. It’s really the best replacement for the old Tampa trick of piling up draft picks by letting decent players go to free agency. What that means is that there’s an opportunity cost to signing higher-end free agents to long-term deals when you’re not contending, as you’re not really going to use them to build assets for your team over the long term.
IMO, I think that you look at signing guys who either are very, very good bets to be effective three or four years down the road or guys who you might be able to deal over the next couple of years to continue to build up the system. I suppose that should always be the goal, but bringing in a guy who will be solid for a couple of years and is a likely candidate for a steep decline over the back end of a four- or five-year deal is probably going to be very counterproductive at this point (whereas if you’re contending in the near term, it’s not such a horrible idea).
None of this is to say that I think prospects should not be dealt under the right circumstances, either now or down the line. I’ve always felt like unless you have a guy who is performing very well at AAA or perhaps AA if he’s a “can’t miss” type, the only thing that prospects are really good for is trading for big-league talent. That doesn’t mean that the focus of this organization should not be on bringing in cheap assets to facilitate just that once the core is better positioned to contend, though.
uncle daveQuote Reply
Good stuff. The way he said they’re hoping to “hit on” a couple of free agents this winter makes me think they’re going to go after fliers again, hoping they’ll have bounce back seasons.
Carne HarrisQuote Reply
@ uncle dave:
Dave, I’m not saying the Cubs should go out and spend $300 million. This is a team, however, who can afford to sign a guy (not older than 28 or 30) for several years if they still think he’ll be productive in 2, 3 and 4 years. You don’t want to sign 5 guys who are all declining, but this team can afford to have a declining player, assuming he’s still productive.
The thing about signing free agents is that it makes you that much closer to being a contender. It’s easier to contend if you spend on free agents. There needs to be a balance and I’m very glad the Cubs are trying to create that, but it doesn’t mean they can’t work on improving the big league team through free agency. To be sure, they need to be careful. They would probably be wise to avoid huge contracts, but I might argue that every team should be cautious to give out huge contracts.
If someone could tell me the Cubs are going to be contenders in 3, 4 or 5 years just because they’re trying to build a better farm system I might agree it’s best to wait, but nobody can tell me that. They don’t know. Every team in baseball is trying to build through the farm system. No team in baseball at this point has any advantage over any other team when it comes to developing talent. The Cubs are as likely to hit on a few prospects as the Astros, Royals, Mariners and Tigers are. They’re all trying to build a strong farm system. Some will succeed, some will come close and some will fail. There is no telling which group the Cubs will find themselves in.
Even waiting until you have several top prospects is kind of meaningless. We saw what happened with the Cubs a decade ago. Having a ton of top prospects doesn’t even guarantee you much.
mb21Quote Reply
Most of you guys won’t remember Champ Summers, and I’m assuming that it didn’t get posted in the comment section, but he passed away last week. I remember Champ Summers because I had his baseball cards from both his Cubs time and his Tigers years (also Willie/Guillermo Hernandez) and I thought it was cool that someone’s name was Champ. Summers’ career, which was mostly off the bench, peaked with the Tigers in the late 70s/early 80s when I was really getting into baseball. He was pretty forgettable in the mid-70s for the Cubs.
SVBQuote Reply
@ Carne Harris:
I took it to mean the exact opposite as you. DeJesus did rebound and the Cubs were terrible. They never had a chance to contend because they signed someone like DeJesus and Maholm. I could be wrong, but when Theo says they’re going to sign some guys, hope to get a little lucky and content, to me it means they’re goal is to get to high 70s true talent win team. For that, the Cubs are going to have to pick up several players and we know they are going to spend some money this offseason anyway. I don’t expect Hamilton or anything like that. As I said in a previous thread, I think BJ Upton will be the big free agent signing and for most teams he’s just a player you add to an already good team and put him in the 7th spot in the lineup.
mb21Quote Reply
I think the Cubs ought to spend a lot in short-term FA contracts and use their projected couples years to develop and budget to their advantage. I’d do it like this.
1. Use the Maholm Gambit that Uncle Dave mentioned. If the mid-range FA pans out, trade him for a good prospect. Pay salary as needed to improve the quality of the prospect.
2. Take on bad contracts that aren’t too long. You think Zito is overpaid? Or Travis Hafner? Or Chone Figgins? Fine. Trade him to us with a good AA level prospect(s). We’ll trade you a so-so A level prospect back and pay all salary. If Zito/Hafner/whoever works out, you trade them again mid season as in the Maholm Gambit. Essentially you take the loss on other teams bad contracts on the short term to get them to throw in good prospects for not much in return except for budget flexibility.
There is obviously some care to be taken here. No point getting Ryan Howard as there is no place to play him. But Figgins/Hafner aren’t blocking anyone at UT/3B nor would Zito in the rotation. I wouldn’t want 5 years of Carl Crawford.
The strategy is to gamble on FAs and bad contracts. The price of getting out from under a bad contract is giving up good prospects. But for some teams, that might be worth $10million, plus the ability to reuse the money for what you want. Sometimes the bad contract may not be so bad, like Soriano this year.
Probably there is something huge I’m missing in this strategy, like some clause in the CBA that screws up my strategy, but the Cubs have resources, and probably 2 years to stare at their navels, and overslotting draft picks or splurging on the international market are off the table.
SVBQuote Reply
8==D~
dylanjQuote Reply
If the Tigers win, everyone will praise the GM for spending a metric fuckton of cash on Prince Fielder.
joshQuote Reply
@ dylanj:
Back from the dead?
joshQuote Reply
mb21 wrote:
Well, yes, and that gets to my comment about the relative utility of prospects. When I referenced guys who are “can’t miss” I was talking about guys who are in the top 25 of all of baseball. There’s still substantial risk there, but it’s pretty low in the grand scheme of things.
I wouldn’t suggest simply waiting on the farm to produce a championship core. You rightly point out the folly there. But you still have to be mindful of how you use the resources at your disposal to build a club/system, which are:
1. Payroll
2. Playing time
3. Draft picks
The use of #3 on that list has been pretty severely curtailed by the new CBA, but you can still make an argument that there’s significant value to landing in the top five or so spots (which kind of ties into the concept of “can’t miss” guys noted above, as has been mentioned extensively in the various studies of draft pick value that are out there). Playing time is valuable only to the extent that you can use it to either win games or build value of your assets on the ML roster, but if you’re looking to cash in on mid-level players you need to have them in the lineup and producing. Likewise, if you’ve tied up payroll on a player who is a known contributor, you can’t use it on someone else.
The whole goal of this exercise is to collect as much major league talent as possible, and while there are cases where players picked up off of the dead pile or through the middle to lower tier of free agents have significant value (Ryan Dempster being the best example I can think of), you’re right to note that probably the easiest and most dependable way to buy talent is through free agency. I’d just warn that the availability of players through free agency who can contribute at the right level and price point — especially at three or more years out from signing — is very limited, and that it’s worth building the opportunity costs outlined above into the calculation when thinking about how to value these guys. And once a player gets fully into the decline phase, it becomes that much easier to grab someone else who can provide similar production at an equal or lesser price.
Finally, what often gets lost in conversations about the value of free agents the the variability of a value of a win. You can calculate an average price per win and hold any potential deal up against it, but that’s only part of the story. For a team that’s not contending, the value of each marginal win is significantly less than a team that’s a legit playoff contender. Not only does that tweak the relative value of a free agent in the near term for the Cubs, but it also presents an opportunity to exploit a team that needs the talent to get over the hump and get greater value. Yes, you can theoretically trade any free agent, but some are more valuable than others, and that really has to be a significant part of the calculus when choosing who to sign.
In fairness, I suppose an argument against using this approach is that you never know what will be available to sign later on. You might need a third baseman (’cause, hey, the Cubs always seem to) and one simply might not be there. I’d still operate with severe caution given the current state of the team, though.
uncle daveQuote Reply
@ josh:
Showing his excitement over my FA strategy, of course.
BVSQuote Reply
@ josh:
Probably will even if they don’t. It was a great move to add on to a team that was already a contender. I’m in the camp that believes superstar talent owns the postseason, and the Tigers have that and then some.
uncle daveQuote Reply
@ dylanj:
So you’re saying you just had dinner?
BerseliusQuote Reply
@ mb21:
Be curious to see which route they go. I can see pluses for both. Go the flier route we can hopefully boost our farm system even more at the trade deadline. But since free agents have been part of the plan all along, you know they have some targeted and we can’t expect them all to hit the market the year we’re *supposed* to compete.
Carne HarrisQuote Reply
Let’s say the Cubs are a true 68 win team right now. The Cubs do nothing and they’re a 68 win team. Matt Garza is a free agent after next year and Soriano the year after. It’s unlikely the Cubs will have any major impact from the minor leagues before that time. They lose 4+ wins, perhaps gain a couple in players getting better (Castro, Rizzo), lose a bit in Barney. DeJesus is gone. Without having to go through the entire team, the Cubs are basically a 65 to 68 win team two years from now. Then they start having some prospects who are getting close or even starting to get to the big league level. Now the Cubs have to hope that these guys are either superstars or they go out and spend big bucks in order to contend.
The problem with this is that most players who reach the big leagues aren’t going to be big producers right away. If you spend gobs of money at once it tends to put you in a situation in which you have very little payroll flexibility for several years.
This is a simplification of course, but to me, waiting until you have the talent in the minor leagues to contend is more than likely going to result in failure. It’s just going to be too hard to contend at that point. Castro will be making a lot of money by then, Rizzo will be arbitration eligible, F7 if he ends up being as good as he showed he can be this year will either make a lot of money or be a free agent.
Unless you get luckier than shit like the Rays did, this type of approach really isn’t going to work. The Rays got a ton of production all at once from prospects who made little money. We probably won’t see that happen to another team.
What if you instead add 6 or 8 wins this offseason in a few players (no ridiculous contracts that way). You add a few more next offseason and even with future free agents, increased salary to young players on the roster now, the Cubs are in a better position to actually do something if their prospects end up being able to produce at the big league level. You’re able to do this without spending tons of money at once. You have money coming off the books each year because you’ve spaced the signings out. It gives you flexibility each and every year and makes it a hell of a lot easier to contend becuase you then need 3 or 4 prospects or young players acquired through trade somehow and you’re contending.
mb21Quote Reply
@ Carne Harris:
Not to mention that it’s quite likely fewer and fewer top free agents will even be reaching the market (young players like Castro get signed long-term frequently these days).
mb21Quote Reply
Sam Fuld —> Super 2 (dying laughing) (dying laughing) (dying laughing)
BerseliusQuote Reply
Can’t remember if this was posted here earlier but
Mark Grace ————-> possible felon
http://www.suntimes.com/sports/15225262-573/ex-cub-mark-grace-could-face-aggravated-dui-charge.html
BerseliusQuote Reply
@ Berselius:
Think of all the trouble he could have avoided had he just called a taxi…
Rice CubeQuote Reply
Except, you know, the 4 pitchers that won a Cy Young and never pitched in the WS. Because forever is longer than a decade, you see.
Mercurial OutfielderQuote Reply
@ mb21:
Sure, if you spend responsibly there’s no reason not to do so. My point was more that I hope the team is considering the true sum of costs of adding free agents, including opportunity costs in both the short and long term, before doing so.
Also, there’s a difference between trading for prospects and trading for guys who aren’t established but are a good bet to contribute in the short term. Trading Cashner for Rizzo theoretically weakened the team in the short term and carried some risk for the Cubs (by trading a guy who had performed reasonably well at the ML level for one who hadn’t) but that’s markedly different than trading for a guy who you’re going to send to Daytona and hope he comes out the other side in three years or so. IMO, to the greatest extent possible, the near-ready guys are who you want to focus on right now if you’re the Cubs (even if you aren’t going to be able to engineer a straight-up heist like they did with Rizzo), and also IMO, the easiest way to pick them up is to grab very movable guys with ML-level value to contending teams. That doesn’t preclude spending money this offseason (and, really, requires it), but it’s also not likely that you’ll be happy with the guys they do lock up.
Depending on how much overall talent/money you need to give up to do so, the Uptons look to be pretty good candidates to help fill those roles for the Cubs at the moment. They have plenty of prime left, could probably benefit from a change of scenery (in BJ’s case, at least), and if you want to prep for a worst-case scenario you can probably arrange either to come on board on a relatively short-term deal, three or four years. My fear in Justin’s case is that the Young/Bell deal signals a commitment to him by the D’bags, though.
By the way, I really like the Young pickup for the A’s. Might be more than you want to pay for him salary-wise, but he’s got the potential to put up some decent numbers while letting you field a sick trio of Crisp, Young, and Reddick left to right. I’d move the fences back 15 feet and let those guys dominate the outfield if I were the A’s. And the Cubs might do well to take a look at Jonny Gomes as a short-term solution in right field now that he looks to be let go by Oakland. Might have an inflated price coming off of a career year, but I feel like he’ll have value at the deadline by dint of mashing lefties and being a great clubhouse guy. (If I were the A’s, I’d consider keeping Gomes around to platoon with Crisp and soak up some ABs at DH, tho.)
Last thought: how the fuck do you get from “Melvin Emanuel Upton” to “B.J. Upton,” anyway?
uncle daveQuote Reply
uncle dave wrote:
better not to ask.
GWQuote Reply
Rice CubeQuote Reply
new shit:
http://obstructedview.net/commentary-and-analysis/in-andro-veritas.html
GWQuote Reply
Rice CubeQuote Reply