More Off Day Thoughts

In Commentary And Analysis, News And Rumors by Rice Cube115 Comments

This represents the final scheduled off day for the Cubs in the Cactus League until the one right before Opening day, and by this time we’re expecting the starting rotation guys to be able to comfortably go five innings, and hoping that the hitters have better performances for the most part, small sample size be damned. There’s also the World Baseball Classic winding down, with the United States vs Cuba and Japan vs Mexico in the semifinal games before the championship is decided on Tuesday. We did talk a bit about the clock in the previous post and the nice thing was that Sunday’s game (on David Ross’ birthday) was done in a comparatively brisk two hours and 41 minutes, while I doubt any of the remaining WBC games clock in under 3.5 hours, although they have been mostly entertaining when plays were happening. And by all accounts, the WBC has been wildly popular and is likely to persist despite some bad injuries to star players, who themselves are accepting of the risks to play meaningful baseball for their national pride.

With less than two weeks to go until the games start to count, the roster picture is starting to clear up, and while it doesn’t look much different than the last time I thought about it, I think we can do a couple tweaks.

Starting Rotation

I don’t think this will change much up top even if Justin Steele might be a tad behind the others in terms of stretching out, but I also think Hayden Wesneski has done enough to make this decision easy for the Cubs.

  1. Marcus Stroman
  2. Jameson Taillon
  3. Justin Steele
  4. Drew Smyly
  5. Hayden Wesneski

Bullpen

Despite throwing a baseball at someone’s face in the game on Sunday (oops), I think the Cubs will likely have Michael Fulmer close games, at least to start the season. I guess Fulmer also reminded us that injuries can happen in games far more meaningless than a hotly contested WBC match, whether you’re playing or just celebrating (oy). Here are the locks again:

  • Adbert Alzolay
  • Brad Boxberger
  • Michael Fulmer

That leaves five spots, and you’ll note I have fewer locks than last time, because a couple guys have been faltering and certain others I’m just not sure what the Cubs will do with. Given his superb performance in the WBC for Team Mexico and in Cactus League play while he was still in camp, I think we can add another lock (since he’s been squeezed out of the rotation):

  • Javier Assad

And since he’s on the roster already and he’s not doing anything to dissuade us the fans or the team, here’s another lock:

  • Julian Merryweather

There are all the usual suspects to fill out the remaining three spots available in the bullpen per rule, and I think I’ll list them in order of how likely I think they’ll get the spot:

  • Keegan Thompson
  • Michael Rucker
  • Brandon Hughes
  • Rowan Wick
  • Adrian Sampson (mostly because Saturday was the first time he hasn’t completely sucked all spring)
  • Jeremiah Estrada
  • Mark Leiter Jr
  • Anthony Kay

Obviously some of these guys will have to go to Iowa to be taxi squad guys for spot starts and random doubleheaders or whenever an arm hits the injured list, as some of them could be stretched out or just get more regular work.

Position Guys

We got 13 spots here, so let’s do this.

Catchers (2)

  • Yan Gomes
  • Tucker Barnhart

The praise is mostly about their defense and game calling, so that tells you a lot.

Infield

  • 1B – Eric Hosmer (to start the season until he sucks so much they have to just cut bait, I have more thoughts below)
  • 2B – Nico Hoerner
  • SS – Dansby Swanson (the spring strikeouts are kind of displeasing but also it’s spring I guess)
  • 3B – see below

Outfield

  • LF – Ian Happ
  • CF – Cody Bellinger
  • RF – Trey Mancini

The above takes care of eight spots, now we need five for the bench and for matchup purposes.

Bench (includes the 3B roulette)

  • Nick Madrigal – he has played second base in the past, and his noodle arm really made me question whether the third base experiment was wise, but he has been surprisingly competent there so far and it seems the arm will play. He’s also been making good contact even if the luck hasn’t been the best, so it makes sense to give Madrigal a little leash to see if he can stick in the majors.
  • Patrick Wisdom – he is probably the most logical choice to start at third base, and can spell Hosmer at first as part of a platoon or be in the outfield as well. Obviously still strikes out a lot but that power works if he can keep the strikeout rate down.
  • Edwin Rios – since the Cubs seem to always be hunting for those lefty power bats, this makes sense to carry
  • Mike Tauchman – keeping with the lefty bat theme, he plays good outfield defense and can probably be considered expendable for whenever Seiya Suzuki returns, but of course they’d have to open up a spot for him in the first place, which I won’t even try to figure out until another set of cuts is made and we figure out who else sucks more, or maybe they just DFA Sampson again just for the yuks, who knows.
  • Zach McKinstry – again staying with the lefty bat here, he’s pretty versatile on defense though obviously not the same caliber of defender as the starting middle infielders, but those guys have to rest every now and then too.

I just think they probably have guys like Christopher Morel or Nelson Velázquez get regular starts in Iowa because that might do them more good than being benchwarmers, but to paraphrase an idiom, I can’t tell the Cubs what to do, so we will take a wait and see approach. Not that Nelson is making this any easier:

So maybe Nelly makes it after all to shut me right up.

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Comments

  1. Author
    Rice Cube

    As others have noticed, Keegan Thompson’s velocity has trended down and I don’t think he’s thrown more than an inning per appearance this spring, so that’s a bit worrisome.

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  13. Author
    Rice Cube

    The WBC being the event it was suggests that Miami can be a good MLB town if they actually tried

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  14. berselius

    Rice Cube,

    The crowds have been fantastic, at least for the late round games. I do think they should throw Japan a bone and hold a final there every once in a while though.

    One of my coworkers went to some of the AZ games and those were much more of a shitshow, (dying laughing). I don’t think they expected the crowds to be as large as they were and didn’t bring in enough concessions staff.

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  16. Author
    Rice Cube

    Yay…one more week to get ready for the rules tweaks along with the other stuff re: the rules they’ve been trying to adjust to already

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  20. berselius

    This has been a reminder of how little I follow the league. I can’t decide if the fact that I have no idea who is the starting US pitcher is for the wbc final is more of an indictment on me or the WBC (dying laughing).

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  23. andcounting

    berselius,

    This WBC is like some kind of fairy tale. Yu Darvish throwing Kyle Schwarber like six different pitches and he fouls them off until he can mash a splitter. Unbelievable.

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  24. andcounting

    And it’s going to be Ohtani vs. Trout (batting 3rd in the 9th) with the game on the line. Holy shit, these guys are sticking to the script.

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  27. berselius

    I missed who said it earlier, but at least one of these guys will get to win a title in his career (dying laughing)

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  37. berselius

    Rice Cube,

    I was wishy-washy on the calls from some folks out there to do this every two years instead of four…the last two rounds certainly changed my mind (dying laughing).

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  38. Author
    Rice Cube

    Passan with the report on the rules tweaks, the timing will remain but there will be some leniency on when the clock will actually start up again, which seems reasonable to me since everyone was mostly getting used to the timing of the pitch clock rules anyway. There’s a snippet in there to talk about the shift stuff too on replay challenges, which I guess would only matter if a middle infielder was cheating when he fielded the ball, and not allow a challenge on a ball that was fielded by SS on his side of the field if the 2B was still cheating, for example.

    https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/35916318/mlb-making-small-changes-pitch-clock-rules-memo-says

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  40. Author
    Rice Cube

    Rice Cube,

    Hehe, the part about the bat boys and bat girls is interesting, they’re gonna do sprints and then we might occasionally get the game delay because one of them pulled a quad or something

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  43. Author
    Rice Cube

    Injury/recovery notes:

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  47. Author
    Rice Cube

    Opening Day starter confirmed

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  48. Author
    Rice Cube

    Cubs win in 2:32, guess they’re fine with the pitch clock stuff, I’d like to see more runs scored in a variety of ways, but runs are runs and that’s fine

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  50. BVS

    I think Leiter is a lock for the pen. Probably takes Thompson’s spot. Thompson to minors for a few weeks to work out velocity. Maybe Hendricks to 60 day IL do Leiter has a roster spot.

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  53. Author
    Rice Cube

    Hmmm, guess Bote isn’t making the club and neither is Velázquez

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  58. Author
    Rice Cube

    Today’s MLBTR chat is with recent retiree Ryan Lavarnway, this was funny

    https://live.jotcast.com/chat/live-chat-with-former-mlb-catcher-ryan-lavarnway-15374.html

    Dotel/jackson
    10:48 Did you have any conversation with Octavio Dotel or Edwin Jackson as you continued to add franchises to the back of the baseball card?
    Ryan Lavarnway
    10:49 Hahaha, no. But I played with Edwin on 2 or maybe even 3 different teams and he is an awesome guy

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  62. Author
    Rice Cube

    Rice Cube:
    Cubs win in 2:32, guess they’re fine with the pitch clock stuff, I’d like to see more runs scored in a variety of ways, but runs are runs and that’s fine

    The Cubs apparently read the comments and have not yet hit a home run en route to scoring these 8 runs so far

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  64. Author
    Rice Cube

    Today I learned you could pre-buy a funeral, guess you gotta do what you gotta do to make money sometimes

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  76. BVS

    Rice Cube:
    Regulars at home, randos go on the road tonight

    Wisdom wants to know what he needs to do to get some respect around here, especially because he tried to ask himself without registering an account, but the recaptcha wouldn’t load up and recognize his humanity. (That’s really an exceptional level of disrespect.)

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  77. BVS

    I’m working on my laptop in my recliner. To do that, I have eyeglasses with a prescription optimized for arm’s length-ish. So the game on the TV across the room is blurry. Texas and the Cubs wearing the same color combination is not helping.

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  86. Author
    Rice Cube

    Five days to opening day, after today there’s one more match up against the Royals then a couple exhibitions against the White Sox before the travel day, we probably know the roster sometime Monday or Tuesday

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  91. andcounting

    Rice Cube,

    I take nothing for granted. There’s always the possibility of some kind of contract/eligibility shenanigans or overthinking about stretching him out, conditioning or whatever. But man does the rotation look pretty decent.

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  95. BVS

    Only thing this game told me was Mastrobuoni should get the Util IF role and not McKinstrey.

    But then, I’ve never understood the McKinstrey camp. He doesn’t hit, at all.

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  99. Author
    Rice Cube

    It seems rosters aren’t due until the morning of Opening Day so that might put our planned pod to obsolescence if the Cubs don’t pretty much finalize everything by Wednesday 😬

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  100. andcounting

    BVS:
    Only thing this game told me was Mastrobuoni should get the Titanic deck chair role and not McKinstrey.

    But then, I’ve never understood the McKinstrey camp. He doesn’t hit, at all.

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  102. Author
    Rice Cube

    Broadcast missed the first pitch but Dansby did the olé bullshit and got a sweet out, looks like Nico finally got to play, Steele giving up hard contact but I’ll assume the whole “getting work in” thing for now

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  103. Author
    Rice Cube

    My stream appears to be at least two pitches behind GameDay which is usually a pitch behind live so things probably happened while I clicked in, nice defense by everyone to keep it scoreless for now

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  109. Author
    Rice Cube

    Steele so efficient against the Royals prospects that they let him go into the 6th and he just finished the frame with a little help from that defense

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  110. Author
    Rice Cube

    If he can play that kind of defense and hit at least league average I’m probably cool with Dansby even if they paid him too much (dying laughing)

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