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welcome to the rants live [Applause]
happy wednesday everyone welcome to the rant live with a couple guys from cubs
insider we're here to talk about the chicago cubs not a lot going on but they did
hire an assistant general manager assan bakari and i think i just pronounced his name correctly
which i think is pretty close i think it's yeah [Music] yeah okay i think it's i think that's
well going by the pronunciation guide that they that they put at the it's kind of funny
right because they put out a press release and they put the pronunciation at the very bottom like italicize it
like shouldn't you put it right after his name when you first put it in there like make that which i did when i when i
wrote the piece i like pushed it up to the front because i'm like i i feel like that's fairly important because
uh you know it's not like his name is jed hoyer or carter hawkins that like nobody's
gonna screw up you know what i mean like this is uh you know something i think is is
important but uh yeah either way uh i'm pretty stoked about the higher to be honest and i'm a little bit uh
surprised but yeah they the way they put it in there is essen e-s-s-e-n
yes okay yes i almost got cnn that's right it's you know it's pretty close all things considered uh
historically i'm very bad at uh i was going to say i was i was uh i'm happy that you
i'm proud of you for walking out on that thin ice and uh and for it not cracking and uh sending into uh the the cold
waters beneath on that one for those of the podcasts i am holding my hands above my
head as if i have been victorious in some way shape or form which have clearly not been small you know what you
know what we need to take you need to take pride in those small victories though you know if all we do especially
yeah if all you're waiting for is a walk-off grand slam to celebrate you're going to be waiting a hell of a long time so you know what
singles yeah yeah if you were the braves you'd have a hell of a lot of infield singles they had
like at least three of them last night so so asad bakari what is he's 38 i think
carter hawkins is 37 so uh you know two young fairly progressively minded guys
coming into the gm assistant gm role under jed hoyer um
you know obviously that that feels about as good as as these two hires can feel i think if you're looking at it from the
perspective of hey you want to be more progressive and i think that's where where theo always kind of the side that
theo came out on um what i just don't think he was able to kind of execute in the long term
but what do you think about these two guys and how that kind of translates into
progressively kind of becoming a team that can always be around and uh you know in the play not not not
bad not not as bad as they've just been well ideally um yeah you know i think it's
what's interesting is you know you've you've gotten these guys so hawkins and we we've discussed this
and it's been kind of um ballyhooed is the right way we want to go there but a lot of people have talked
about his um and cleveland organization it would have been the indians when he
was there and now it's the guardians and their ability to develop pitching you know whether that's drafting and
developing or seeking those guys out and kind of building them up from uh maybe having already started a professional
career so you look at the the pitching but before let's backtrack a little bit they made some big differences in terms
of their development infrastructure with justin stone as the director of hitting and then craig breslow as the director of pitching breslow has since been
elevated to assistant gm and vp of pitching well then you go and you bring in carter
hawkins who's your general manager who's got a focus on development specifically pitching then you go get bakari who
again has some experience in baseball ops largely he's a very academic right the guy's got a phd in quantitative
psychology right from the university of illinois yeah it sounds pretty sexy at least but
he's got an academic vent but he's apparently again very progressive uh very statistically minded but then
understand so you think well hey quantitative psychology well gee
what did we hear about hawkins is using available data and figuring out how to break that down
and and digest it and then disseminate that to the players well you know psychology again is how people
think and there's a lot more to it than that but maybe there's a guy who can do that but bakari also developed the
astros proprietary internal pitch grading system so again
you look at everything they've done and they've gone really heavily toward the pitching side
after having built their world series team around hitters right position players
largely and so it's an interesting shift i don't think they've gotten away from the position players but i think what they've seen
pretty clearly is that there's not as long lasting uh a
hit there you know they they did get their quick hit but i think now what they're looking at is developing
not really the way the mets did because the mets have kind of flamed out there's all kinds of fun stuff about them going
on in the news too but i i do like where they're going with this and sort of the trend that this has
taken with some younger guys from different organizations bakari was with the the dodgers before he was with
the astros so now you've got three organizations that are really really renowned for
their ability to develop players in general and pitchers in particular so um
again i like it a lot i like that hoyer is bringing in these outside voices um
and some some guys who are you know clearly familiar with the organization just from
as they all should be when you work in that position you gotta know what other people are doing but i think
it says a lot that you're getting a guy who has been employed
by last year's world series winner and of course the dodgers role is competitive during the time that he was there and then in the last three years
he's been with the astros who are currently in the world series and for him to leave that organization
to come to a cubs organization that is rebuilding uh i don't want to equate that to the john
lester deal and kind of coming over and believe it but i i think you do have to have a belief in an
organization to say like they come off they're coming off the shitty season but gosh i think they really
have something going in and i want to be a part of this moving forward that says a lot to me so uh i have rambled long
enough that's those are my thoughts yeah no i mean i i agree with that it's you know you look at these two guys and
and you feel pretty good about it like i said i mean two progressive minded guys um
you know the one thing it's like when the cubs made all the trades that they made at the trade deadline it seemed
like they were getting you know kind of i don't want to say over correcting but
are you afraid that perhaps where they where they went and they got all these these high contact guys and now that
kind of that's that's what they've pushed on the offensive side it seems they made those changes it feels like
perhaps they could have been over correcting a little bit from you know kind of these power swing and misguides
to high contact guys with low power and they made these trades i mean it would have to me a perfect world would
have been to have uh that the gm and the assistant gm on board before you went and made the
trades so that they could have weighed in so obviously they came in to you know
the the organization the way that it is with the players that they traded for um and it's not to say that that was any
more or less appealing to them that's that's kind of what i'm getting at is it's like it would have been better to
have these two guys on board before they went and traded all these guys away and and and so it'll be interesting to see
kind of how they go forward in free agency uh to fill the gaps that they may
perceive as being there and obviously there are a lot of a lot of gaps there but if there's one big gap it's the the
power right yeah i mean it looks that way and of course the the whole free agency thing
right i mean rob manfred can be as confident as he wants to be of course he's not gonna say yeah i think we're
gonna have labor strife starting you know i think we're going to be in a work stoppage you know december 2nd and i
know the players union and uh the picture i put out today for the rundown was was uh manfred and tony clark talking
before uh game one last night so it's uh it's kind of funny it is a funny
looking picture actually because it looks like rob's trying to explain something to him um
the last thing you want to just keep his mouth shut publicly anyway literally
but um no i you know there are some concerns although you know i think i think brennan davis is
going to develop some really nice pop and we're seeing nelson velasquez right now uh he tore it up during the regular
season you know despite getting a little bit of a late start he's killing it in the afl right now any look at some of
the other guys they picked up alexander canario bryce ball so they did get some guys that have and
both of those latter two certainly and velasquez has some swing and miss issues uh particularly in two strikes he chases
a lot but uh ball and canario are both both guys who've got plenty of swing and miss in their game uh with some serious
thunder but then you look at like pete girl armstrong is definitely more the contact not not really a power based guy
at all uh nikki two strikes nick madrigal definitely not a uh a power guy at all if nico
horner whether he's a shortstop or plays a bunch of roles they didn't just pick him up but hopefully he's actually healthy enough
to play a more vital role no power big contact so
um it is a little bit interesting i do think they're gonna need to go out there and find some more power uh you know
unless you think patrick wisdom can continue in that regard and then you know there's kind of your balance right
okay here i'll see your patrick wisdom with a ton of swing and miss and i'll raise you and nikki two strikes you know
i'll see your frank schwendell who's got a mix uh you know brennan davis is over here and he's not huge swinging miss but he's
definitely not going to be a high contact guy right i mean he's going to have some uh some strikeouts in his game ian
happ's always going to have the strikeouts in his game so how do you balance that and so i think they did necessarily have to swing a little bit
uh no pun intended to the other side of the spectrum just because of how bad the roster had
gotten how imbalanced it had gotten um but you know you bring up a point
because if you if you move kind of heavily toward one end on that side and you move really heavily toward
pitching on the development side i don't i don't think they're going to neglect the other stuff but you do kind of wonder and that's
where i think hoyer's three to five year window that he keeps stating i think that's where it comes in because
you've got to give this stuff all time to settle um i'm concerned with free agency i
they they desperately need to go out and spend some money but what do they do in that and
is it is it something that they can actually do or are they gonna have to wait till like all this stuff gets settled and hey we're gonna have a two-week spring training and good luck
go sign your players and hopefully you have them ready by opening day uh it could get really weird so i don't
know that could work because that could work in the cubs favor if that actually ended happening right and you know and i was wondering this i was
sitting there thinking like if if the players are legitimately concerned that there could be a work
stoppage like does that motivate some of them to get a deal done
prior to december 1st like would they sit there and think you know what i i don't want to be waiting
especially if i want a really big deal i don't want to wait until what if we're locked out until the start of april i
don't wait till then and then be scrambling and then have to sign some crappy short deal because nobody
knew what the what the ramifications of this all were going to be oh you want to offer me an eight year deal and cubs probably aren't
doing many eight-year deals or any but i don't know it i'm interested in how
that might impact the market if at all and maybe they all say well i don't want to do till we figure out what this
is and if there's going to be a salary floor and a salary cap and all that so
yeah i think what tends to get lost in cba negotiations is and typically i i think this is because the owners kind of
make it this way is that i think the perception from the outside world is that this is about you know
super rich baseball players against super rich owners and at the end of the day the cba negotiations really are more about just
kind of the standard baseball players i mean you don't have that many guys in major league baseball
that are assigned to these huge contracts the majority of the guys that are playing in baseball are assigned to
pretty reasonable deals you know and and so that's tha i think that's important as
as we start to go through the cba negotiations is to remember this is the reason that that the baseball side and
tony clark is negotiating it's for these these younger guys it's for these guys who don't have the big deals and that's
why like chris bryant for example great example of a player who
is one of those big contract guys but the things that he does and the decisions that he makes about his contract and how he goes forward with
uh you know his his agenda is very much related to trying to look to the guys at
the back of the line and make sure he's doing right by them and so it's important to keep that in mind as the cba negotiations kind of go
along yeah and i mean it's i think where people you know people get lost in
seeing the extensions by mookie betts and mike trout and the monster deals from bryce
harper and francisco lindor and fernando tatis well that that's all
well and good but the average salary this past season actually fell from 4.1 million to 3.7 million and i know right
like you say that to a lot of and and there will be plenty of just put that on facebook you got plenty of people i could live on 3.7 okay that's not the
point the point is that as baseball continues to sign these multi-billion
dollar rights deals that are heavily predicated on the postseason by the way as we brought up with turner sports with
fox with espn and as the game brings in more revenue it's talking about operating its own
local streaming service and things like that for player salaries to have dropped
by almost 10 percent right i think it's something in the neighborhood of eight percent like for them or not not that far i'm sorry it's
like five percent uh from 4.1 to 3.7 uh so four hundred thousand so yeah i guess it is almost ten cheese i can't
even do math but uh anywhere somewhere around ten percent that's unconscionable from a player
perspective to look at and say you know our salaries drop the the and then and that's the overall right so think about
how many guys it takes if bryce harper's making 30 million dollars a year it takes a whole hell of a lot of
players making a whole lot less to bring the average down to 3.7 and the qualifying offer dropped by 500 000
and that's the average of the top 100 players in the league so you're talking about not only did the top 100 players
overall drop you're talking about having a a larger percentage of the money tied up just
like normal uh wealth is distributed right you're having a smaller smaller number of very very high highly paid
players making up a larger percentage of the pot so then it goes down so again as you said it's about how long does it take to
get free agency the other thing is and here's the big one i think the biggest single sticking point
is owners are going to push for a salary floor which on the surface sounds really
really good except they want to also then institute a salary cat like a hard cap versus what
we have now and it's only they want it at 180 million dollars which is like 30 million 28 million below
what the luxury tax cap was or the the initial level of it so the thought would be that yes these
teams there's more money spread out on the bottom end and teams like the raise and pirates gonna have to spend more
but let's be honest how many more how many teams were below 100 million dollars
and then how many other teams now will drop well below 180
right and live down there oh we can't hit that cap so you're actually decreasing spending overall that's what the owners are trying to do
is artificial and it's not artificial as revenues go up right and and and that's really the key like you said hey the cap
will be 225 million and the floor will be 125. i think
that's one thing but baseball's only sport that doesn't have a hard cap in place right now and they are
really really really opposed to that but the owners are gonna be like but but we put the floor in guys
we have the floor here but uh oh man i don't know dude i listen if tony clark drops the ball again he's
got to go i'm surprised he's lasted this long to be honest with you i think he's he's not he's not directly handling the
negotiations as much i think behind nobody oversees them yeah i mean he did such a bad job that
the last time around me there there were so many issues there you know but i i really think
like to me it's the service time issue which again is it's like complete with the owners that go back i'm like oh it's a 29.5 thing i'm like
one way or the other yeah but if a dude comes up if it's if it's juan soto and he comes up when he's 18 years old
having him under control for 11 years is not better for him that's far worse now you know if you're
wilson contreras and you came up at 24 okay that's pretty good for you because you're talking about you know
five years ish but if you're fernando tatis there is zero motivation then for those teams to
extend these guys as early as they did because now you're not worried about them going to free agency at
25 or 26 years old you can wait till they're 29. so why the hell would i do anything in a
negotiation with you so that thing is to me because now you're looking at will they'll get at least one contract offer when they're
shy of 30. yeah but they're 29. and that might impact the quality of
baseball on the field because what you might see is uh teams bringing on much
more younger players they more propensity to kind of start these younger guys and keep them in the minor
leagues which and that's a whole nother story is is the whole minor league system but they they might feel like hey you
know let's bring young guys let's have as younger team as we possibly can have because the longer they're in the major
leagues if they get that you know the 29 year year old cap
the long the better it is for the team right the more jerseys they sell the more marketable the players become yeah
and it's and here's the thing it's it solves and i'm doing air quotes here for those
of you who are listening it solves the service time issue of holding a guy back yeah air guitar air quotes they were
tight because there's no there's no longer an impetus for them to hold a guy back for
that service time because they've got that more locked in but as you said there that's going to be something that hurts
those guys at the tail end because how many of those because okay well instead of
signing you know rex brothers or you know throw out you know a guy mid to late 30s
reliever instead of bringing that guy up we're going to call up this 18 or 19
year old exactly now we can have him for longer and the thing is then you can you know provided he's
actually good enough right like something if it's a competitive team they're not necessarily going to just pull this guy
up but but you do have that longer time to kind of let them uh
work through things without worrying about starting that clock like all right dude let's yeah let's start it now
because now we're gonna have all of this prime years under there any you know because one way or the
other if he's going to become a free agent at x age period then you want as much time as you
possibly can but but there again how the the players older players veterans
probably aren't going to want that and if i'm a younger dude and i'm saying i plan on being up there but if you're a
high school draftee and you can move up and be there by the time you know most guys aren't debuting at 18 or 19
but even if it's 21 or 22 do you want to be locked in through that whole time
you know six years normally you could at least get the free agency by 28
you know in a lot of those situations uh patrick wisdom would be the uh
another one that would not be in that in that category you know it wouldn't matter and so maybe some of those guys
are like hell yeah man let me be a free agent get me out of this i don't have to go through arbitration you know what i
mean but thank you think about the impact this will have on teams that are very good at developing players younger
players like tampa for example your tampa uh i mean i don't see why they wouldn't
want this because you know they've got they could just you know bring up all the young guys they
want they're very good at drafting and developing guys and and plugging them into the system and having it work at
the major league level and then they'd be able to trade them before they hit their their free agency or the morrowind
and make you know get a ton of picks back although that's where and that's where the salary floor to me that's where the floor is is absolutely
necessary because then you can't just call up a team of guys making the league minimum and
having 10 of those guys on your team because now that's only five million dollars six million dollars that you're spending on you know more than a third
of your roster you've got to go out and pay some players from that point um and so it's that's there but again it's
exactly what we talked about though with the deals that were going back and forth to restart the 2020 season
where the owners would just shuffle numbers around and at the end it was the same thing it's just they're they're moving these numbers and making it look
like it's a different deal when in fact it was the same thing so again it's the same they're they're saying we want a floor
but then they're going to lower the ceiling like no that that doesn't actually help at that point because you're still going to have then the
teams that are at the bottom are going to clear the minimum barely and probably do it with some fun
accounting right and then the teams at the top are going to spend less money
than they would have before because they're they're forced to and so now again you have less overall
spending for a league that has already begun to spend less anyway the the qualifying offer again
that in this of itself going down and the average salary going down because again i want to point that out those are
two separate figures very separate figures but the fact that they both went down
is bad news for the players and that absolutely is something that they're going to want to reverse the trend of uh
especially as those revenues continue to go up and so it'll be interesting man i just i
i don't see the owners budging and i know a lot of people think that the owners don't want to go another season with lost revenues
but as we've said before what happens if there's no season that means you're not paying anyone
so it doesn't cost a whole lot they're losing out on revenues but they're also losing out on all their
expenditures most of them and they're coming off a season where they've just cut costs about as much as they can possibly cut
costs so i mean obviously they hired back uh most of the employees but but we don't know i don't know across the board
you know how how many cuts were made and how much of those cuts actually were you know came back on
the books but i would assume that they're they're you know in terms of their their balance
sheets in as good a position as they could be going into a negotiation where they may
actually end up having a work stoppage let me ask you one question on how jed hoyer will manage this team
you know when theo was in jed's position uh as the president of baseball
operations it was it was his team right i mean uh jed was the general manager
for you know title purposes but it didn't seem like he was really making any decisions it seemed like theo was
making all the decisions obviously jed is going to run things differently he i fee it feels like he
already is but uh how much will this be jed's team versus how much of this will be
carter hawkins and essen bakari's team you know
it's interesting because throughout the epstein
regime right they would talk about how it's a quote unquote and this is jed hoyer's term but
a flat hierarchy where everybody had equal say and and kind of the offices were open and it was all but you always
got the sense that theo was the one pulling the strings at the end of the day right it
felt like and it in in the words afterwards we read between the lines it sort of has seemed like that
like to where you know maybe he was a little too emotionally attached to some of these guys and then it took him leaving and jedhoy are making the tough
decisions and and while you know they did say like a lawyer would get on there and pound the table for some guys
here and there and whatever and then that would come through i i do kind of wonder how much of it was
truly a delegation and how much of it was theo
wanting to kind of have whether it was final sign off or having a little more control of things uh you know i might be a little bit
black and white on that and i know there's some gray area in there but this really does feel like and i guess the
other thing is too that was also theo and jed and macleod and a bunch of guys that they had
brought over from um from quote unquote other organizations those guys were all together at boston right they were all
part of that red sox thing so it you sort of felt like it was the old boys club and there's a bunch of guys who
sort of thought and felt the same way and and kind of knew one another really closely whereas
now i think this is the entire reason hoyer is bringing in guys who have made their names for themselves with or other
organizations who have other kinds of thoughts so that he can say hey give me give me some feedback let me
know what you're thinking how is this all working out and then i do think he's going to delegate a little bit more authority
down the way because hoyer's expertise is not in player development right it's not in the
technology side necessarily it's baseball ops and it's so i think i think he will
be the one you know negotiating contracts and working out some of those deals and whatever but i do think that there's gonna be
more of a of a truly progressive feel because
did you get the feeling that after like when they first blew into town epstein and hoyer and boy this
could be different they're going to upgrade new technology and better scouting and not this old school stuff
but you still got the sense that even after that all got improved after those first couple years that then it still
stagnated and there were no new voices there weren't really any changes and they kind of rested on their laurels i
don't know if you got that same sense i i'm sort of feeling that now and i think that's this is a move to prevent that
from happening again yeah i think retrospectively speaking you can definitely see that happening so
hopefully hopefully i i guess we'll find out in the off season right i mean we know what the trend has been the last three or four
years just in terms of the inactivity of the cubs in the off season so you know i mean if that
same thing kind of happens and they bring on just kind of like no name free agents and you know there's there's
really nothing that makes you say this is any different of course it's a completely different team too right i mean
you know the last three or four years all the cubs you felt like the cubs needed was you know three or four pieces
maybe to get them to the world series and that was the one thing that they just didn't ever do and so you know it's
like one of those obvious things too where you're sitting there and you're like oh my god why don't they just do what it's obvious
that they need to do they never did it never worked out and so so now you're in this situation where
they really need to improve vastly and it's hard to expect it to look any
different but in the same sense it kind of has to look different right they've got different people at the helm so
we'll we'll see if this is if that was really something that like an edict of
ownership and well whether that edict will continue or whether
there really is going to be a change in how they bring on guys and who they bring on in the off season so
a lot of variables yeah yeah it's going to be uh i think we're going to see some differences again whether and and how
quickly we see that uh this first off season is is definitely going to be
uh i think up for grabs you know and we may not find it right depending on what happens again with the cba
it could be a while before we really see anything in terms of what these guys are trying to build at all like even an
inkling of it so uh you know i'm really really hopeful that uh that that they do get this figured out and that you know
maybe both sides will bend a little bit and on on some of the things that they're looking for but um
i'm i'm not i'm not real i'm still not real hopeful on the cba front just because of the
things that are that are in there that at least we know of what ownership wants that to me
seems like a non-starter uh but if that stuff gets worked out in enough time for us to see it
i think we'll learn a little bit from these free agent signings because i i don't think they're just gonna go out and do
one and two year deals i do think they are going to look for a couple guys who can bridge the gap into that next competitive window and maybe even
fairly deep into it um it'll just be a matter of again whether the whether the money is actually there
to do that to the extent that we hope it will be yeah and as you mentioned um
who is it uh mcleod jason mcleod has moved on uh from the organization no
real surprise they're actually kind of a relief i guess but it's kind of like you know i
i always had really high hopes for jason mccloud and and and maybe i expected more from him than
i should have but he was like you mentioned he was one of the the three guys
i just struggled to look at and try to figure out what is jason mcleod's legacy with the chicago cubs
i mean i think i think the troublesome part is it
looking back on it it feels like maybe he was put in a role for which he was not best suited um
just like i mentioned jed hoyer's expertise is not really in player development so let's say those roles had
been reversed and that mcleod was the gm and jed hoyer
was putting was the vp of of development and whatever would we be seeing the exact same thing
play out but just with different names right would would mcleod now be the president of baseball operations and
making these moves and hoyer would be on his way out of the organization and i kind of feel like that's sort of the deal because you know and we saw like
mcleod oversaw some of those changes and and the farm development that saw the cubs go to the
number one farm system in baseball and and develop a lot of these great players however a lot of us
because of the the drafts that took place those players moved up really quickly and they had a bunch of top-line guys uh it became evident i think one of the
areas the pitching the lack of pitching development is probably going to be his his public
legacy um and uh i do want to address the uh the
the question about shiraz raymond here in a little bit too because there was uh that kind of cuts both ways um
but the the thing with mcleod then is that you know at cubs confess like publicly
admitting that they were not as aggressive as they should have been with pitching development that they that they had to
make some philosophical changes and i'm like it's good that you're acknowledging that
but literally everybody else has been saying this for two or three years like it's already been obvious
how were you not being more aggressive why were you being so passive with this development in the first place
and i think that part was difficult in that i think he's a good motivator and
manager of people and can serve well in a gm or president role honestly when he can delegate that
down i i do think that he personally was a little too conservative in the way he
went about the role that he had and he just wasn't a good fit for it so um it's gonna be a muddied legacy honestly i
mean i don't think it's and i don't think it's his fault i think he was put in a position for which he was maybe not best suited and uh and the results are
what they are but i mean he still spent 10 years with the organization and is probably going to get a nice deal somewhere else
maybe the mets who knows the job that no one wants
so we'll see we'll see yeah you mentioned cubs convention just quickly is there any word on cum's
convention no i think they're going to try to just soft pedal that thing as much as they can and
there's no way they're going to do it i mean there's no reason not to do it as far as i'm concerned i mean as long as
everyone well if they're masked if you show if you show vax proof and all that although
you know here we are in you know almost november and there's been zero word on it i i don't think because here's the
other thing though let's think about this what kind of a season did the cubs have do you think the ricketts are going to want to run cubs convention after the
season they just had trading all those guys i think it's much much easier for them on all fronts to be like ah blah blah
blah pandemic uh you know chicago's they're already they're hosting events that uh you know
at the united center indoors now with a lot more people uh i i think there's no way they do it because they
do not want to put up with all of the because they know the feedback's gonna be bad and you know
there's issues with marquis like they're just gonna get booed incessantly even by the the pollyannas who normally
show up so i yeah i think we we wait on on that until next year they'll do some virtual stuff that
people can't boo them actively at they can just keep everybody muted um yeah
but but i do want to there was a there's a question on here and part of the reason i want to bring this up is interesting because
uh we actually broke the news on cubs insider of of uh shiraz raymond leaving
the cubs and going to the rangers um of course he's i don't remember has he now left the rangers i can't remember he i
saw that he did yeah yeah that's right they parted ways so um but at the time
so someone had reached out to me uh anonymously we'll say right um because i'd written
some things and and talked him up pretty well you know being one of the smartest guys in the room whatever um and this
person was like yeah you know hey i'm sorry i didn't i didn't share this or cite you because you know realistically
there's there's some stuff there like dude made some really poor decisions internally and
it wasn't so much that i mean it was that he wanted out because i mean he can say after the fact like i didn't have a
voice and then part of that's because like yeah because when he talked you you some stuff up
and so i think there was a he was gonna be on his way out and it sounds as though perhaps that maybe was a bit of
and i wrote about this i think when i think i did mention that in a blurb that he's out with the rangers or whatever
um so i you know and i think that's there's two sides to every story right and somebody might say well i wasn't
part of the inner circle i didn't get my voice heard as much and i think there was probably a reason for that we'll say
that there were some and and again that gets into uh player evaluation right he was
heavily involved in that and and so um when you look at some of the player
evals and some of the pickups the cubs made and other things maybe they didn't um
yeah you can kind of see where that went so i think there's a fairly good reason why he's maybe not with either his past
two employers so let me put this to you so you know
at the trade deadline when the cubs were done making all their trades i remember what was that a friday was it friday the
13th i think no it wasn't the 13th it was like the 30th or whatever 31st 30th
but it was a friday and i was in chicago and uh it was insane and uh
after everything was done and all the dust had settled and we looked at kind of who had gone where you know you had
kimbrell you had a lot of players go into contenders kimbrough going to the white sox javi going to the mets brian
going to the giants rizza going to the yankees marinette going to the padres
and jock peterson going to the braves and jock was the first trade that was made but at the time you never would have
guessed that it would have been jack peterson who who would be the one who was having
postseason success and had had been part of leading his team
to the world series and that none of those other guys were in the world series how surprised are you that that
it's played out that way i'm really surprised i was gonna maybe we'll address there's a comment in
in our live comments about jed fancing himself a pitching coach which i i think can't be further from the truth
um i don't i don't know where that uh comes from so it's a bit so there's occupying because i was looking at that trying to
wrap my head around it while you were asking me the question but no um and i i wrote that about peterson
yesterday because he wrote a piece in the players tribune and it's wild to think about not not
only because it's jack peterson who was by and large pretty disappointing uh for the cubs outside of like he you know boy
he looked like he was gonna be a stud for them and he was he was hitting all kinds of home runs you know he's like came out tore it up at spring training
remember killed it in spring trip we had like nine home runs or something like that yeah and then just one hit and then he kind of caught a great personality
but what is wild is that at the time of the trade did you read my piece and look at my
tweets about this do you have all this stuff i was asking okay i'm aware of the situation
but it is for those who are out there if you didn't already see like the when the cubs made that trade and it was during the the all-star break they
were 45 and 46 they were two games under they were in third place in their division and they were tied with the
cardinals at the time right the reds were ahead of them the braves were 44 and 45 in third place
in their division and four games out the cubs were eight games out of first
but so were the cardinals right the cardinals were four games back of second place
the cardinals picked some guys up go on a run made the wild card the braves picked
some guys up after they lost ronald lacuna junior by the way their best player picked some guys up and now they're in
the world series and up one no yeah well they're they're winning so far
in the world series and then as i said in this piece i'm not indicating that like well the
cubs could have got some guys and done the same thing but because the the braves do have better pitching
as uh and they're younger they didn't have as many guys who are going to term out at the end of the year so yeah
it's a difference here although freddie freeman still doesn't have an extension and said that's a pretty big deal for them but it's it's interesting to see
how you can make a few tweaks get on a bit of a run that's what the cardinals did right they won like 55 games in a
row uh you know then i don't think they lost in the second half that's obviously not true but but they did have a
tremendous winning streak in there um and so you you can make it just funny to see that that's really
the start of well the eu darvish trade was the start of the cubs waving the white flag but during the season
that was a huge change and so and i mean the the braves were behind interestingly enough the mets who were
in first place most of the season right and then the phillies uh neither of whom went on to do anything there uh and so
to see how that worked out with the braves and the run that they
were able to go on and with peterson being a large part of that just
not only with this bat right he's hitting any hitting home runs with anthony rizzo's bat of all people right
he's got the pearl necklace and the blonde haired he's all fired up and and it's jocktober again
and we saw that with him with the dodgers like where he would just show out you know a huge home run in the world
series last year and the fake asterisk world series uh that the dodgers won
but there is something to be said for creating that vibe and that's what the piece that he wrote about was and
just kind of bringing that together and how those guys in atlanta all sort of meshed really really well and i think
that's something that we saw for a minute with the cubs but really when you start looking at it and we started
breaking it down after that may that they had um man things just before a little bit
before that and certainly after that it just they felt like they were a bunch of individuals rather than a team and
you started to see that and that's what happens when guys don't know where the hell they're going to end up and they do all end up on different teams because
peterson thought he was going to get traded again like he thought he might get flipped by the break
you know how bad would that was just a rumor that was kind of out there i don't know there was no but they said that to
him they were like hey dude don't get comfortable like he was somebody told him that when he got to atlanta like don't get comfortable he might get moved
again um but but that was more because they were again they were in the same position the cubs were if the braves lose 11 games
from the time he gets traded there he's gone again they're done you know what i mean they were both they
would have they would have dropped out of it but they didn't um and it's funny what happens when you start stringing together wins
and then you know speaking of going back to and when i'm thinking about the cubs and kind of how they got into this
situation in the first place it's just like if there's one thing that we all should have learned it's that you know
where the cubs had this young team that won the the world series you know kind of ahead of their when when they ex were
expected to arrive i think the expectation wasn't 2016. i think it was more of 17 and 18 with the
guys and kind of where they were in their contracts and their development and everything so it came early and when you when you do that and you
have young players but they're it wasn't a secret that these guys
contracts were going to end at the same time and that's what i just can never get past but hopefully judd has learned is
that even though you have a tremendous amount of success with a team it doesn't
mean you want to continue going down that path and and going all in year after year after year until you get to
the point where you have to make a decision on you know seven of the guys all at the same time
you have to they should have traded one or two of the guys somewhere along the way and while that doesn't you know
make for for good press if you're the cubs because people you know get attached to players and whatnot it's a heck of a lot
better than than timing out and having to do what they just did that's that's to me that's the most ridiculous part of
what they did is they could have traded schwarber right after the 2016 uh season
it wouldn't have been a popular move but it would have saved them a lot of heartache right now if they would have
done that for him and maybe one or two other players well yeah i mean what if they make a different decision on him
versus solaire right they traded solaire for wade davis um you know and and
that kind of ended of course you know now you've got schwarber and we i think i remember last week when we see you
know like how far up your ass was your head collectively
that schwarber had to go someplace else and sometimes it takes that right it takes a different perspective but you know to get him down in that
squatted stance again and look at the season he was having with washington you know and now that it is kind of
funny that like both jorge solaire and kyle schwarber have been batting lead off for their respective teams
you know like definitely not prototypical lead off uh hitters but well in a position that comes and
struggled with for years after dexter fowler left and one of them was kyle schwarber they tried to make that work
and it just didn't and there was other weird stuff there but i yeah again
they hung onto them hung on to them and and at a certain point and i would say that they did once they
figured out they couldn't extend them but they never really had meaningful extent like
the tough part for me to wrap my head around is not that they didn't trade them and not that they didn't extend them
uh when when they could have early on but that they i really think and somebody had a an article out there
about it and it was really it was mostly about chris bryant in particular but you kind of got the feeling that the
plan the whole time was to let it happen the way it did was to let these guys play everything out
and try to squeeze as much juice out of those oranges as what they could
and then and it's it's like a um the the microcosm of that would be what they did
with the oldest chapman when they picked him up they're like we're gonna throw this dude every day and when we get to the playoffs he's going to pitch in
every game multiple innings if he has to we really don't care if his arm falls off because we are not going to resign
him and he'll just be gone after the season now they did end up trading these guys all at the end but i mean if you look at it like they
did get down the road a little bit with javi on some talks and that was the only one that like publicly both sides sort of acknowledged
with rizzo it was acknowledged the whole time like they never really made an offer that they thought would be
amenable to him they knew that they never really engaged with chris bryant in a meaningful way they haven't really
gotten down the road with wilson contreras so none of this stuff really happened the only guy that they extended from a position player perspective was
david bode who approached them about it which is still looking kind of interesting uh on their end but
they're looking smart on his end yeah no um he's like god i'm not that good i better cycle quickly but you kind
of feel like this is what they wanted to where they could they could put out enough of an effort that they could say
publicly that hey we tried you know these guys just didn't want to be here which is
um and and you know then they could kind of get away with doing this and then not that they really wanted to reset but i
think it was kind of like hey we're cool with it if these dudes want to resign at a really low level and some of that might have been that they simply didn't
have the budget to do it that they knew at a certain point they're like well we're not gonna have the money over here in the next three
years to do this so it's a mix of things i don't want to say it's as black and white as like they drafted them called them up and we're like we're never
actually going to extend these guys we're all gonna we're gonna have to end up trading them um but yeah i don't i don't think they ever
wanted i think when they called them all up they knew damn well did they said this we knew we weren't gonna extend all
of them but like to not extend any of them is that's a little bit egregious i think
you know you don't keep anybody come on man look at the look at the giants
like everybody on their team is 37 years old they've all played with the dodgers for last 20 years
you know like you can still be okay with a bunch of older players just got to be balanced so
whatever man it's uh it's just kind of weird i've got some thoughts on there i guess but uh
we'll see i just i don't think any of it's black and white at all but i also don't think that they really
ever had a strong intention of signing any of those guys to anything
other than a very club friendly extension which anthony rizzo already did several years ago so he was like yeah
what are you guys i'm not doing another one of those like which one and if that's your approach then then why don't you take the smart
move and just be like all right hey we're going to need to trade some of these guys along the way and so that's the thing that just never happened it's
like why wait to the very last minute some approach it appears that they're going to be taking with wilson contreras
and it's just like come on yeah you wait till the value is all the way gone like oh hey wilson's
gonna turn 30 in may as a catcher who we've overused already well sure
that's the best time to get value out of a catcher he's got four months left on his contract he's 30 plus years old and
he's been catching way too much it's they could have they could have restocked their entire system
by trading kyle schwarber after 2016. i mean the return that they would okay it was
they could have gotten andrew miller for trading him when he when he had a torn acl of course then that might have hurt him in the world series right
that was a different deal at the time he was able to come back and do that it was like all right man his value is never
going to get any higher and and they just they you know uh and that's but that's again the issue is
you run the risk you either trade them when their value is really high and all of a sudden that guy's going to get even that much better or you wait and you
hold on and you wait till the value's so low that you can't get anything for them and they sure as hell love holding onto
guys till their value was all but gone and then like get a couple prospects for you cool
oh well yeah hindsight's always 20 20 you know i mean it's a it's easier to talk about these things now that we can
kind of look back and you you you're further and further away from it so it becomes a little easier to to
define i think and it becomes a little bit more black and white instead of gray but uh but still
things could have been different but instead here we are facing uh having to watch two cubs former cups
players hit home runs in the world series and uh facing an inevitable
lockout or strike or something with this cba how does that work does it it doesn't become a lockout like right
away right does it it does the season have to kind of do they have to wait for like pictures and catchers i mean i think they can do it
whenever they want i guess although i you know they wouldn't be motivated to do it
right away right because like they they only they want to lock them out so not to pay them you know this is like
we you know no you don't get to use the facilities like we're not paying you a damn thing and then you know is it a strike right away i think it's just
everything kind of gets suspended it's technically a work stoppage because there's no contract under which they're
actually operating uh as far as anything new going on so i think you know any new business is
suspended and then it would be at whatever point the league year is supposed to start i
think that's when the lockout technically begins because it's at that point that players would normally although i mean i guess
they would they could lock them out and say well you you know we're not even going to give you you know at will access to team
facilities and that sort of thing like no you're on your own and so i think in that regard um i
suppose i don't really know what the rules are around that but those guys aren't getting paid you know like none of them are getting paid during that
time anyway so i think it's really the important part is once the league year is set to start and those guys are going to start getting paid that's what really
matters but they'll lock them out of spring training uh do all that stuff so
well it should be fun so we'll we'll probably have some things to talk about and then really rant absolutely yay
so it should be lots of fun but uh all right well it's been a good show i'd say it's probably time for us to go
and do uh do other things with our day besides talk about the cubs and stress out about them but
i know unfortunately but yeah we love you all all you viewers and
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so [Applause]
you