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welcome to the rants live [Applause]
welcome to the rant live everybody it is monday november 15th and we last saw you i think it was thursday so we're uh
we're turning back around quickly because there's so much going on that we felt like we really needed to update the
world on on everything that's going on uh in particular the uh the gm meetings
actually ended with a uh with a thud i suppose nothing nothing
really interesting coming out of the gm meetings at all as usual um some some sound bites i suppose if
that's what you want to call them nothing but no like new sound bites all like old sound boy bites like like jed
talking about the cubs wanting to balance power versus contact and uh and you know uh using the word
nimble a lot yeah yeah like 50 times although you know it's interesting because
and and here's something that we've said you know about jed in the past is that
he he's not everybody always thought like theo fc ever is like oh he's always throwing up these smoke screens like epstein was
pretty transparent right like he was i mean this is the dude who should have said the offense broke somewhere along
the lines right like he would absolutely he wouldn't tell you exactly it's not like oh we are targeting these four
players and this is but he would generally say what he was going to do and and i don't
think i've seen as much with hoyer it feels like he could say something
and i'll see three different people interpret it three different ways
um he said something in there and i can get into it um i'll get into this later as we address
maybe some of the more specific um rumors or hints out there
but uh in a piece that sahadev sharma wrote for the athletic you know he he
clarified her not clarified he classified this quote as saying you know this is an indication that hoyer doesn't
want to do or isn't interested in doing a big contract this winter and i don't draw that same thing from it at all
when i look at it i i see something very different now again hoyer's hedging his bets right
he's he's being he's he's practiced in what he's saying he knows exactly that he's not just saying one thing
uh he's being uh i don't know intentionally vague i guess
would be the way to put it because i think as you said he wants to be nimble they they want to be able to move i
firmly believe right that whatever direction they end up taking
i don't necessarily think i don't think they have and this is not in a in a bad way um
consider like if i go back home i grew up out in the country and there's a ton of country ass roads out there half of
which probably don't even show up on gps but i know my way around the place and i could decide like oh hey yeah i want to
take a right here and i want to check down this way i remember some friends who used to live out this way and then all i got to do is i still hook my way
around it's just a process of if i turn right here i'll i'll have to take a different path than if i were to go left
and i don't think the cubs have have necessarily said no we're not going to go after a big
deal and i don't think they've necessarily said we're going to be super cheap i think they're going to let the market kind of
come to them and i really do believe things could change and turn on a dime should the right
opportunity present itself yeah i mean there's so much that's unpredictable right now but that you
know a balance versus balancing power versus contact thing is something that i keep
i keep coming back to and i just feel like the cubs maybe are over correcting in that arena
area whatever you want to say but it's it's that's my biggest fear is that you know you go through this period of
the last three or four years where the cubs had a lot of power they struck out a ton
um and really their contract contact rate was so poor they've now made all these trades which
would feel like the trades are all kind of leaning towards contact uh you start hearing them talk about
corey seeger which we can get into a little bit later and that's not really a power hitter you
know more of a contact guy contact is great but
like who's gonna be the guy that's hitting the home runs i mean it can't be patrick wisdom right it can't be frank
schwendel or or can it i mean i mean i suppose well but but i guess so
i will look at that and and i suppose we could just jump into it since it's since we're already on there but you know i think the thing with seeger
is that part of it comes there's a couple different things i think at play one is who's your other option right now at
short stops nico horner who's hit three total home runs in uh in parts of three seasons and you
got you know nikki two strikes nick madrigal who's got like two so between the two of them you know that's the
other funny thing is and it's it's not fair and it's not worth spending you know 250 plus million
dollars on a guy just because he's better than nico horner relatively speaking but it's funny because it's
like i don't know man corey seeger's got some some troubling injury history i'm like
yeah okay horner um he doesn't have much power yeah but he's got a lot more and
so when i when i broke it down i didn't actually break it down but i went over to baseball savant and and
they do have an expected home run chart that breaks down like if this player played every game
at x ballpark they have every single ballpark you know how many home runs would he have hit and uh and the cubs were up there
wrigley is like number 10 on the outside of dodger stadium of course i took that out you know assuming he uh won't be
there but it was up there but uh i think cincinnati was like number two or three somewhere you know big up there you know
milwaukee so if you look at his what i'm saying is his power would play up uh
being at wrigley field and in the nl central versus and interestingly enough as a
left-handed batter uh coors field was the one at which he would have the least
number of homers uh as far as expected holders of any ballpark in in the uh
in the majors and sandy but san diego was up there toward the top which is kind of
weird because you normally uh you know the narrative on those two is opposite but uh
i guess where i'm going with that is though so he's a better shortstop and a much better hitter than horner
he's still a contact bat i think the power will play up and you're talking about a guy who's probably you know
healthy for a full season probably translates to 20 25 to 30 home run power ish you know maybe a spike here or there
eventually you figure he's probably gonna have to move off a short that's what all the experts kind of feels you know bigger guy and as he fills out
maybe he moves over to third however uh for a team like the cubs that has a
ton of young shortstops or at least a few who are coming up and you know who are anticipated to be very
very good potentially elite level defensive players maybe with really good hit tools
well then yeah you can move them over to third and now you've got this guy coming up so you're not necessarily blocking anyone i think
things set up for him pretty well and i and i do think an
opportunity again should that present itself now a lot of people are still skeptical about
whether the cubs would actually be in on him so that's something we can kind of address too if we want to well yeah i mean and the rumor is that
he's looking for a really long-term contract right so he's 27 years old
and you know and jed has also commented on kind of the risks associated with a
long-term contract which is i think the piece that you were kind of talking about that you had written uh about where he
had commented about that and it was kind of like you couldn't really tell was he saying that that was something that they
didn't want to do or was he setting you up so that you were prepared for when they did do it
yeah i mean i i think so i wanna i think i had this in here somewhere
so i i feel like so the comment from him in here so he said as you layer on gears
obviously you're laying layering on a lot of risk to any transaction by definition projecting a player's
performance gets harder and harder as you get away from their last year in their last couple of years anytime you do that you're introducing risk
listen i've been a part of long deals that worked out exceptionally well and i've been a part of long deals that
didn't and here here's the this part the last sentence and this is what i think is really key
you just accept that going into them by definition you're introducing more risk
into the transaction when you layer on years and that last part to me you know it he
sounded like he was tempering things but that last part to me does not end like that to me that's the
opposite of saying we're not going to do these big deals to me it's just simply laying out like yeah
if you do these you're accepting going into them that there is a lot of risk to it and that
i i just feel like that's just a statement of fact more than anything else and the idea is less that
they don't want to do a big deal but more that if they do one they're trying to find the player out
there who who most mitigates that risk and fits with what they have and and to me
there's any number of different risks but but seeger does seem like a really good fit because he's he is as you
mentioned the contact he's got probably the best hit tool maybe of anybody on the market definitely of the short stops
that are out there uh much better strikeout rate swinging strike rate than the cubs in general
have had over the last several years and like i said i think the power plays up and they have so here's where i go back to
the risk as i mentioned with him moving off short there's a lot of risk for another team that's saying we're gonna pay a ton of money for a premium
defensive position uh but we're afraid this guy's gonna have to move off well the cubs don't really have that fear because
ostensibly they would be able to replace him within two to three years at shortstop if he did have to move or you take one
of those guys and you have them play at second base or you haven't played it through i mean they they have more flexibility there i think than
than a typical team would that that needs to compete right now and that might be hurting you know three years later if he does have
to move well and the sentiment is that uh you know the the owners i don't know if you
want to say the owners the league whatever is i think trying to make players
that are free agents now kind of feel like hey maybe you should sign before the cba expires because if
you don't sign before the cba expires it's gonna be just this crazy you know
one month two week three week period who knows where a free agency where
you're gonna lose a ton of value or potentially lose a ton of value or not start the season with a team
um if you don't sign and in a situation like that if corey seeger's thinking you know hey maybe i'm better off i have had
an injury history and maybe it's kind of getting in his head a little bit uh maybe he does sign here soon i don't
know what what do you think the chances are that we see either corey seeger or someone uh another big free agent
sign before december 1st i i mean i think it's fairly i will be just so eduardo rodriguez just signed
with the tigers today five years 77 million another three million dollars in um impossible incentives and he's a guy
with a qualifying offer right but the tigers to me uh you know if wade miley signaled that
the cubs might be looking to spend some money this is a signal they think that the tigers are looking to go big i could
honestly see them being in uh significantly on seeger
correa maybe trevor story like i think they're targeting and we'll probably go after but of course they they made the
first move to go and trade for tucker barnhart so we're talking about guys the the rats were the reds were jettisoning
um the rets but um yeah i i think that
and again that's a sign right that's the first big contract we've seen andrew haney you know what eight and a half
million something like that eight million uh that's not that big a deal but this you know hey long-term deal for
a qualifying offer guy no less right that that is significant and i think that maybe uh you know opens the
gate a little bit but jeff passan mentioned specifically that uh seeger and simeon might be
among that group and those are both boris clients scott boris so that's a little bit interesting
um but if i if i may kind of steer this into the
conspiratorial realm and i wrote about this please do yeah thursday or friday so i'm
so what you know you you i know you follow the nfl and i don't know how much you're
into the nba but those free agency periods are those long drawn out free agency periods or
are they just an absolute frenzy in which breaking news is coming out every five
minutes like for a period of 24 to 48 hours or something like that no i they're fun but
but but listen baseball tries as hard as they can to be the anti-fun
we are long we are drawn out we like to take our time
but and then it's fun it's there's fun mixed in but right but we've heard we've heard rob manfred tempered kind of
say that he likes they the baseball has wanted because what they want is a spotlight but here's
when i when you start piecing things together so it's interesting to me and again this is just me connecting dots
and and you know again maybe i put a little tinfoil on here and we'll go with that but everybody like it it's not just one
person there seems to be this consensus that mid february is the time that it'll
get figured out right now part of that is because both sides will realize hey spring training's supposed to be
starting we need to get this wrapped up but what if you start looking at this you
start drawing this out and you start seeing
oh that's an interesting comment there um no but you start looking at it and you think um
let's see the nfl really gets hot and heavy
in december right you get the playoffs coming december january you've got the the end
of the season now 17 weeks and the and the poster you've got uh college football right the bowl games take place
heavily in december start of january the super bowl takes place on february 13th
so football is going to dominate the news cycle
if you have a sluggish free agency period anyway right in the last several years there have been you know the e-rod
signing is a big deal but generally the big contracts don't get figured out till later anyway
it's slow it's sluggish there's never a constant news stream and if there is
it's going to be taken over by the nfl anyway so what if
they don't come to an agreement on december 1st the owners lock them out they say well we're not going to have much news anyway
we can use this moratorium for two and a half months to leak our own information out there
to keep ourselves in the front of the site you know every once in a while we'll drop a new thing
about this uh this uh proposal that we've got and people pick it up and run with it and we we do a better job of of
publicity than the players do and then we'll just wait out the news
on college football on the nfl when they would be dominating us anyway and then damn it right when the nfl is done
that season is over we can try to get this figured out we already knew what we wanted to do we lift the
lockout free agency is this tremendous free-for-all baseball is in the news
bang bang bang all these guys playing straight into spring training boom hype machine now we've got an nba slash nfl
style of free agency heading right into a new season and now we've got this great you know the owners oh my goodness
look they delivered us oh they kept us from a work stoppage i i'm not saying that's like that they've
got because you run into a lot of serious danger if you're trying to push that thing up just like you know playing
chicken or driving your car with the you know the gas gauge on zero to see how far you can actually go beyond zero
but i'm just saying things line up and when people are already saying we think it'll stretch to mid-february i
don't know man the timing is such that i yeah while they well they might not be like this is what we are trying to do
i certainly believe the league at least thinks it would be very
beneficial to have that kind of free agency period because everybody
gets i mean the nba free agency opens up and the moment it strikes when the when
the you know the moratorium ends you've just got deals flying like crazy and it
is just huge for the news cycle so i i think there's something
there from the owner's side that they while they might not be actively trying to do it they are absolutely not trying
to prevent such a thing i'll say that it's an interesting thought because as you mentioned there are multiple people
saying that they believe this is going to stretch into mid-february which would make it you know kind of a little
suspicious that that's what the people who are saying they think it's gonna last longer than just a few weeks or
whatever you know all are landing in the same time period it's true um
yeah i mean i think it'd be interesting to see obviously it's only a one-year deal so it's not like this would you know happen next year in the year after
and the year after whatever but uh um [Music] interesting thought i suppose um and i
hope we don't find out but it's just like when you start talking and hearing about what's going on with the cba right
now it's you're not really hearing all that much i mean we've heard the the the notion that the owners have proposed
apparently free agency beginning at 29 and a half arab salaries tied to fan graphs war
which i think is the dumbest proposal i've ever seen and it's kind of like
have you noticed that when when these cba negotiations come up it feels like what you hear first
and most prevalently are the owner proposals and they're these outlandish proposals and it's like
they're good at doing this they always do this they always get these things out there and people start talking about
them as if they're reality they may not even be reality but people are talking about them why don't the players do that
same thing why don't they make these crazy asks and get it out in the news and make it
sound like it's super reasonable and and all this stuff it's just they're always on the defense it seems yeah and i don't
know if that's if they just have bad pr you know bad
the people driving the pr just don't make any sense or if they just know i think part of it is
the mentality of the like the people who are going to be swayed you know by the owner's side of
things let's say typically don't have a great deal of understanding about
exactly what's going on with this because the owners do a very good job of presenting their stuff in a way you
know they'll say well hey let's eliminate arbitration let's just look at it on value then you know you
don't have to get your feelings hurt by this we'll just have a set schedule but it's like at the same time
you know so then people look at that i guess from the outside they'll be like oh well that's very fair oh and look
580 000 times whatever you know in this calculation well yeah that's awesome of course i
would love i would play baseball for half you know what i mean and so the fans are so easily swayed by that
when they don't look at the idea that yes but that takes all control away from the players right the players
have no bargaining power at that point just here but outside of the
of what the proposals actually are it's just the owners control the dialogue yeah yeah the players here
the content is they're always in control of the dialogue and they do this every
single time it's just like why can't the players union get out in front of this why can't they try to control the
dialogue i assume that so much of it right because where does this information come you would think that agents
would be pushing that stuff a little bit more but i mean when you get someone like like again you know
look at the narrative that comes from guys like buster only and john heyman and some of these others
will it's because they've got so many league sources right so the league sources are much more well connected because at
the end of the day you know it's not those individual players that you need the the information from it's the the agents but
then it's the team owners the executives people like that and i think that's that latter group is
that's who these these national pundits are a little bit more beholden to in many cases
and so i think that's where their loyalty lies and so it's much easier for the owners and the thing is the owners
are united right we could say the union is but realistically the owners in the league
have a more of a vested interest among one another than maybe the players do because the the players are so
individually motivated understandably so right because they at the end of the day they've got to look out for number one a
little bit more and i think there's i think it's easier for the league and the owners to put up a
more unified front and to easily leak that information out to those national people who then put that out
and put it into the public and just get it out there they can disseminate that information so much faster i think it's part of it but they're just more
practiced with it too like they're usually they are they're all they're all these billionaire
businessmen for one you know from one walk of life or another um or not really walk of life they're all silver spoon
people but they're they are more practiced in terms of the deception and the gamesmanship that
goes into this stuff whereas you know i think the union is just not i don't think they see as much value in it which
is silly because they should because like public opinion weighs pretty heavily on this stuff and they need to
be smarter with it i think well and you mentioned the agents i think that's where the real shortfall comes in here
is these agents have got to get together and they've got to be more coordinated they've got to be more organized on how
they handle these types of situations like the cba negotiation it's just like
it seems like it's every man for themselves and the players have a very short-term view
and the owners have this long-term view and that's why the owners win the negotiations all the time
because their horse wants to help anybody else who's not scott boris or who's not yeah who does not employ scott
boris hell no he doesn't give a about those other people like and other players yeah so he's gonna say what is
in the best interest of himself and those who he represents and i get it but that's the thing is there's there's
not nearly as much unity unity that's old uh
rick james uh dave chappelle skit hit the ring and he punched charlie murphy in the forehead with it but anyway um
very much beside the point uh yeah i just it's it's so much easier for the league to present a unified front
just because and the thing is like guess what what's that what's the average player lifespan you know three or four
years like three years yeah three how long is that owner gonna have that team you know i mean that's that's a
there's just there's so much more and they're all at the end of the day right it's it's
like they're they're all in a wealthy gated subdivision
and they're having their homeowners meetings right they're doing that and then the you know the the players are
off in another part of town or various other parts of town in different neighborhoods in different places and
you know it's just it's it's much much easier for the owners so but again but again i also think they
are they're smarter or just more conniving however you want to put it
when it comes to this stuff because they know damn well what they're putting out those these information these leaks are so targeted
you know and they'll just sit down a little bit at a time like how often do we get all that information no it just
comes out a little bit at a time and we and then it finally comes into full picture well this last one was actually the war
one got a little bit better as we got more details on like initially they were like we're gonna base it on an
algorithm that was all we had and it was like what that's the dumbest thing and it's still it's still bad because it's like
it's set it's it will be x number of dollars for the and that's that's
the same thing as a salary cap because you were very literally capping earning power
each season now the player could perform better but it's a set algorithm now like there's no chance for them to really
blow that out of the water and i'm sure they'll be it'll be relative like the owners aren't going to put anything in
there that's going to help those players make more money earlier unless
unless they give them a little bit more money early so that they can justify taking
more money away from them later right that's that's kind of the whole thing so
but they you know they they do a good job of getting out in front of the news cycle i'll tell you that the owners they do
their pr team is way better than the players association uh i had a dream last night i literally
i don't dream about baseball that often um but last night i had a dream and it was super realistic
that the cubs signed chris bryant and uh it was like a he just wanted to come back and i do think that you know like
when you when you see chris bryant and you know seeing him as a giant and everything like he was you know seemed like he fit in
real well and you know kind of they tried to make it like you know oh he's a giant now forever type of thing and and
now you hear the giants are saying well maybe he wasn't that great for us and all this stuff which seems like
gamemanship at best um but and then i you know you see the
projections out there like kylie mcdaniel had him at five years
90 million dollars that is the stupidest who is kylie mcdaniel and and does this
why are we even talking about an 18 million dollar contract right
that's stupid yeah the other ones were waiting and he was way lower than anybody else yeah he
he skewed the whole the whole analysis well between that and hobby buy as he had javi going one year 25 million and
basically doing a show me deal which you know and he's like well it could have been nine figures but i don't know yeah
it um i don't think zayn was like was he um was he fan graphs before i know he was i
think he was with fan graphs he's like the prospect writer so he's largely a prospect guy and
i don't know that that one just seemed a lot like 15 million dollars a year you
think chris bryant is going to sign a five-year 90 million dollar contract and boris is his agent you're smoking
crack there's no way on earth he's signing that not even with the cubs but
that would be the only team that i think could have a chance of pulling anything close to that off but i don't even think that's possible yeah no i don't think so
and he was generally lower than of course then he got like jim bowden on the other side he was like kind of going hog wild on some stuff and and you know
again i i included him which is funny because like that's the only way i can see his stuff if i log into the athletic because he's blocked me on twitter uh mostly
because i called him out because he got you know he's no longer a gm in baseball because he was skimming international pool money from uh from international
free agent prospects but anyway um you know and and he does he's just
yeah it's not good but um i i do think it's it's important to
draw from it you know i had like four different different prediction sources that i went with
and that was one of them because it was easily accessible but yeah i mean i think brian will get more although you know at the same time
i think he's a guy who and it's still so funny because he's gonna go where the money is he uh i'm like yeah
you know i don't think that's the case i mean if a team does offer him a ton of money and just
blows everything out of the water could i see him doing that yeah absolutely but i think he's one of them who would i think a team would be better
off even if they didn't offer him as much total money of saying hey here's you know we're gonna like when the cubs
signed john lester part of the deal was like you get x number of hours on the private jet to be able to fly back and
forth to you know to atlanta or whatever you know where he had his offseason home at the time
and uh you know so so his family could do so i think bryant would be more enticed like hey no trade clause so he knows he's not
going anywhere during the term of that contract unless he so chooses you know um i think he would
prefer if the option was out there to be closer to his off-season home in las vegas
right and that's it again where i looked at seattle versus the mets right you're talking about half the distance
uh almost exactly half the distance to get to uh to vegas so you talk about cutting a couple hours off a flight
which you know not a big deal if you're going to vegas for the weekend because it's a bachelor party or you know just a
getaway weekend but if you're making that trip multiple times in a year uh and you got a young family you know
hey cutting two or three hours off a flight that's pretty nice and dude is that his offseason he lives he lives
in vegas and so do you think there's any chance the cubs
are having conversations with chris bryant um i mean if if they are it'd be just about
as much as they did when they uh didn't extend him right when they said i mean i think i think he would be open to coming
back if they so chose that but i just don't know that that's the direction at this point uh that they
would want to move i can't believe he's 30 years old it's like that's baffling it's like he still seems
so young like all those guys it's hard for me to believe that they're close i mean him and javi and wilson contreras
they're you know getting up there yeah it's like wait wait a minute you guys were just and then he said they're like well
2015 was a long time ago you know like that was exactly okay you know
seven years ago in in terms of the actual season you know because we're approaching the 2022
season it's like oh wow okay yeah i guess that was kind of a while ago um
but yeah i mean i think there are you know you look at some situations where and you know i think i think bryce
harper is not unhappy by any stretch but i also don't think that harper wanted to end up with the phillies
i know he didn't because i mean he he would have really loved to have been in chicago right i mean we we saw that um or we
at least it's been reported in this multiple times by multiple people but at the end of the day
the phillies came so strong was such a big deal that i think it was impossible to pass up and so i think you do have a measure
of that but but i think bryant saw that too and was like you know
maybe just taking the biggest deal that's available is not what's best i mean i really do think he's going to
value what's in it for his family and uh and i mean that could that could be
with the phillies you know because then he hey you got another another guy from vegas uh they're gonna pay you some
money and it's a cool setup and harper's like yeah it's great maybe that makes sense i'm just throwing a hypotheticals um obviously he's you
know loved his time in chicago as familiar with the city and i think that security and familiarity i think those are things
that are great for him and i do think it was very interesting while our facebook page will still show
you uh plenty people and and we've got some very spicy comments directed toward me in particular on the actual site
itself uh when it comes to bryant but uh i think overwhelmingly
we saw either a shift or um an increase from those people who
already knew how good bryant was when he came back like once he was traded it was kind of again you don't
know what you got till it's gone and and they saw all this stuff and then i i think the the tide turned a little
bit so i do think there's something about that and and honestly i think a lot of it
i know a lot of it whether people actually understand it themselves or not they look at to say i love this baseball
team why does this player not want to spend the rest of his career playing for this baseball team that i love he should
love them just the same he should want to take a discount to play here because the cubs are awesome because they are my favorite team and if he doesn't then
he's a disloyal and it's like well that's really dumb because it's a business for him he didn't grow up
loving this team necessarily however what if he came back and signed with the cubs as a free agent well then he he
made that choice now it's like oh he does love the cubs whoa maybe that's not from before oh okay you know so i
mean i think that changes things a little bit it's just kind of funny um if it were to come around i do think
that would change the narrative uh from some of those folks but at the same time
i i i just don't know i if i'm him man
that'd be tough just because i don't think i just don't i don't know that he can
truly uh live up to still what people would want to see from him and i you know i
wonder if it's just better to kind of start fresh somewhere and to be able to kind of establish a new legacy now that
this one's already been kind of tainted um but at the same time i i think you'd listen
yeah it also depends if he wants to win a world series or not right because i mean
he he's going to want a long-term deal he he's this is going to be he's he's just now a free agent at 30 which is
just mind-boggling to think you've got a guy who was a rookie of the year mvp you know what a world series
and is several years later in his age 30 season just becoming a
free agent after he's had to deal with some tough seasons after he's had some injuries after he's been traded
and and you know and and now you see the giants or sources from the giants saying that
you know oh well uh you know yeah he was good anyways he's all right he's not i really like
his defense we started him we started him in center field i know the deciding game of the nlcs
and that's the thing that i think is if anything is hurting chris bryant's value well which shouldn't is the fact that
he's moved all around and the thing is to me and i think to you it shows his versatility
to be able to play all these different positions but the problem is that he
doesn't play any one of the positions spectacularly well he's a third baseman
and he just hasn't played third base really at all i mean he played it with the did he play he played with the
giants right a little bit a little bit more than he did with the cubs um but they moved him all around and the
thing is is that that's there's value in that but what people are using right now is they're saying oh
no way well because he played these positions his defense is bad because he's not a you know a top 10 defender in
the outfield and so uh so he's a bad defender yeah i mean i and and i think that's
kind of the issue you know it's it's good bad right it can go both ways on one like you like you
mentioned the one side you can look at it and say well he's very versatile so if we have an injury or if there's some
other issue we don't fill this spot somehow in free agency we know he can play over there or if we've got a young
guy coming up who who needs a little bit more time here we have this uh you know we've got
a left-handed hitting third baseman and on some of those games when we're when we're facing a
righty we can have that guy play in there which would be more of the games but if we're trying to bring him along and we can move chris out to
any one of the literally any outfield spot and then first and third you know he could play all over the
place and i and i think that's there's i think where we get in trouble is if we look at that and say
his value personally because of his defense is not as good well okay but what if
or what if it's a defensive replacement you've got here you've got another a left fielder who's maybe it's nick castiano's level right
well brian's a much better defender than him so then in late games if that went there and castiano's moves to dh or
whatever and then you get a third baseman who's uh who's just you know nolan aaron auto level glove i'm kind of
throwing this out there the what people make the mistake of is looking at a player and and just looking
straight up at his value as an individual when it's not fair to do that in a team
setting because a lot of the value has to do with how that enables the team to
then set up not only the lineup itself but the defensive positioning and alignment and everything
else and how can you move those other guys around so bryant's value uh is greater than just what he
personally brings to the table as both a hitter and a and a defensive
player so i think that's what's important as you can look at that then and to a team that is looking to bring him in
depending on what their needs are he's going to present a much greater value because of that versatility i mean
similar to what a chris taylor brings he can play all over the field you know you could even look at cody bellinger you know again there's a guy who starts out
a game at first base and moves out to center field and makes a you know a leaping catch at the wall and that sort
of thing so uh that stuff helps because then that enables you again somebody gets hurt
there's a pitching change whatever you're not stuck going oh crap uh i can't move these guys around you can do
that without having to make massive lineup changes and so so yeah the the perception of the
outside world in terms of his value i think is a lot different than the perception of what his manager may feel
his value is yeah and i i think that's it depends on
who you've got too right like there might not be if a team either has a ton of different needs
or you know i i don't know that that he's the right fit for every team in that
regard but if you do have one that's maybe it's a younger team kind of coming up and just getting ready to compete
because we also got to consider like what does he bring to the table in terms of okay great dude
you know quiet you know doesn't show up in any headlines he's not flashy in any way
which is is either good or bad you know some teams want that um that's part of the reason i don't know
that he'd fit really well in new york um but i mean he's just a good dude to have around he's won a world series he's won
all these other things you know quiet family man who just wants to get done with and go play board games or whatever when the when the game is over so
you know that's kind of something that you can add in there as well and you know when when they talk about risk you know
and mcdaniel wrote about this i think was it mcdaniel that was uh maybe somebody else that they were worried
that the that the swing wouldn't age well that all this other stuff i think it's fine i mean he had a couple of
injuries in there but i think that plays fine he actually hit really well against high velocity this last season
um you know and he's he'll be able to make some adjustments i think a lot of it was psychological and i i mean i
could point out a couple other players who are in that same realm like when you don't know what's gonna happen
and especially if you're waiting on something bad to happen i.e a trade or you know whatever
it then that's very difficult for for some of those guys to to go
through and a lot of people was mentally weak like i mean i don't know man you just
what if what if your wife calls and she's like i i got some really bad news um but i can't talk right now i'll tell
you when i get home oh but i got a meeting afterwards so i won't be home until seven and now you're sitting there the rest of the the rest
of the day that's just one day and now you're sitting like oh god what what's gonna happen here now take that over three years
because every winter and every spring is all this stuff about how
he's gonna get traded how they gotta move on from him how he turned down this offer all this stuff
all this negative publicity and all these waiting for the other shoe to drop and then you start seeing these guys get traded so i mean i just
you remove all that and and give a guy a no trade clause and and give him a place where you know he's
wanted i just think that'll help him tremendously just just for what it removes from an anxiety perspective so
it'll be interesting to see it play out that's for sure meanwhile you've got carter hawkins like a kid in a candy shop
some of his comments from the from the gm meetings he said i've realized very quickly the depth of
resources this organization has the depth of tools and now we just need to deploy these uh tools
and it's kind of like when he says that is do you think he's really like blown away by the by the
depth of of tools and resources the organization has is he just playing paying kind of lip
service to ricketts is you know is it a a comparison of the cubs and
where did he come from the the indians the the guardians the guardians yeah
um how much of that is fact and how much of that is just him kind of posturing
uh i mean i think it's there's some of both right i mean i think the i think the process
the processes as he would say um are maybe a little bit different but you
know again you have the cubs have made much larger investments i mean that's something that goes back to now did they
they use those investments properly um but they've made a lot of investments on
the technology side you know on the data and analytics side and
i think to a greater degree than what other teams have so i mean it's
i'm trying to think of of how to put it but it's really like if you know i might have my computer with you know two
monitors set up and i think that's pretty cool and then i go over and check out somebody else's home office and they've
got four monitors and they're all bigger and they've got two vr yeah they're doing that
you know better speakers and a whole system you know so it's like it's the same stuff
at its core right i could still they can't you know find any new websites that are that are inaccessible
to me uh but they can just pull up more information at once and i think have a
have a larger infrastructure uh i think to where it's probably and again it's probably
like one of those situations where are you doing your own work on all this research stuff or do you have a personal assistant who's helping you out with
more stuff so i think the the team uh of people to which hawkins has access
now is probably greater than what he experienced before so i think it's more
a lot of that stuff you know that that he'll be and i mean he'd get to you know whether it's the offices
you know because those are brand new right the facilities look great uh what he and hoya were out in mesa so as
you're very familiar you know the facilities there at sloan park are second to none especially relative
to some of the other ones that are out there that have maybe with a hohokam or something and i know it's been updated but um but you know sloan
is significantly better than what a lot of other places have access to so i think it's a lot of those things
yeah it'll just be interesting to see if you can actually deploy this stuff and actually you know i mean where you've got organizations you've got 30 baseball
teams and you've got some like the cubs for example who have gone out and and just
basically just made everything really really great really nice the problem is they forgot about the team along the way
maybe they didn't forget about the team but but something broke along the way and we can blame a whole bunch of
different people whether we want to say it's theo's fault or tom rickett's fault but there is one one person that's been
there the entire time and that's tom ricketts so you have to point to tom ricketts and i guess
it's hard to do that though when you look at the facilities that he's built and everything else it's like all right you built these
facilities but then like you do realize you have to get players to good players to play in order to like
really so it's like it's hard to blame ricketts because you see he's he's built kind of this thing
you know but in the same sense it's easy to blame him because where are the player signings and why
didn't they happen i guess we'll really find out over the next two to three years
depending on what happens with jet hoyer carter hawkins and team um but it's i
think it's just interesting to think that you know carter's it's new it's a shiny new toy for him
and uh i'm interested to see what they do in the off season i just wish that you know
it's kind of crazy with all this uncertainty that's happening because of the cba
you've got this new executive team in place it sure would have been nice if that that this would be happening in a
time that the cba wasn't expiring so we could actually get a real view of what
these guys are going to do versus them having to not only navigate free agency and try to you know sign
guys and develop guys and then deal with the cba too it's just
you'll never really know what that looks like i mean i guess you know we'll go through whatever happens this year and then maybe next year you get a good
sense of it but i don't think this is this off season is necessarily going to be a true reflection of what these guys
can do together but maybe it will be i mean maybe they come together and they do things that you know just
you never would have thought could have been done in the environment yeah i mean i still i i look at it and
think you know either way while it would give us some clues you know hoyer said kind of in that in an
initial press conference when when hawkins kind of made his first uh appearance in front of the chicago media
you know hoyer had mentioned that they're looking at something that's like a three to five year window right which does not necessarily mean hey it's going
to take up to five years for them to be competitive again but i think in terms of what he's talking about is because
they've revamped you know and this is they they got s and bakari in there as well and and some other folks in the front office you know jason mcleod's
gone uh randy bush is in an advisory role versus being the agm they've really had some difficulty
because you had a lost minor league season entirely in 2020 so then you've got guys like craig breslow who's he's
an agm now as well dan cantrovitz his first year in they only had a five-round draft right so i think a lot of this has
to do with how do they reset things and we when you talk about kind of a ground up uh philosophical shift in a lot of
different ways which had already begun a few years ago but now you're talking about kind of implementing some of that with entirely different uh
fresh perspectives right that it takes a while for that stuff to really filter all the way through the
entire level of the system but um no i am i am interested to see again
how that plays out as well you know and like you said it it could be one of these deals where we see a couple more splashes before
december 1st and then we go into a period of moratorium for a while uh and after
which then it'll be really really splashy all over again and it's just a matter of scrambling and
what i you know i almost wonder does that play more in the cubs favor uh
because now you're saying gosh some of these guys are going to be really itching to get with the team and
and they they're not doing as much research you know they're maybe willing to take a little bit less money um and if you know not that that should be
a thing for the cubs but if they have that kind of cachet and they can sort of uh you know talk to people about being part
of this next big core and that you know that's exciting to a lot of guys uh obviously a lot of people want to win
immediately uh whether you talk about max shares or clayton kershaw justin verlander you know guys like that who who have a very
finite window left but um as for some of these younger players you know who were
looking for a home for the next five to ten years it could be really exciting to be able to play i mean
come on man you get to spend every summer in chicago for the next uh how many years of your career and get paid pretty well to do it like that's
that's a pretty cool deal so they could sell that a little bit more easily but um
i'm i'm more interested i am so far though i'm disappointed in what we're seeing i
mean the wade miley thing is cool but the dude still only throws like 89.90 and we've heard you know hoyer's been
talking power arms power arms i've been harping on this because clearly the rotation just flat out
sucked there's no nice way to say it last year they were awful
and i haven't seen them you know if that's what they're saying they need to do and they brought in all
these guys who are more pitching experts and we know they've got some arms coming up they still haven't really developed those uh
you know to an extent that it's really been impactful and when you go out and say ah
we need power arms all right we're going to get a guy who actually throws slower than everyone else other than
i mean do you think they're relying on like braylon marquez coming up next year and actually playing
in the majors i don't know that they're relying on it although you know i think that could be helpful i mean caleb killian's and i
mean that dude's throwing 97.98 you know i mean he's sitting 95 96 and he's touching higher and he's got really good
control which you know i i think that's another thing that they've missed you know they walk too many guys or at least
it feels relative to um to what they've got otherwise and when you have a bunch of dudes who don't miss bats the last thing you can do
is walk people you know um and so i you know i'm interested to see how that plays out and
and i you know that's i i think i i don't remember if this is in a tweet or if i put this in a post
but if he is able to develop and i mean he started the fall stars game he didn't look great but he was he was solid and he
actually was like one bad call away from having a much better outing um but if you get a guy who's throwing mid
90s who touches upper 90s and who has impeccable control
well gosh that would be really nice to have and they might look at that as saying well hey
maybe we can get a little riskier uh you know in terms of maybe they can
go out and get a guy who's again whether it's injury history we know how they love that um but they they
might not need that picture they go out and sign to have that impact and if something happens with them okay it's not as big a
deal because we've got killian here we think we've got marquez coming up uh and then now you're talking power arms right
without having to exactly spend much yeah and so yeah i don't know how much
anybody should really be worried about next year i mean we all want the cubs to be competitive next year it seems like
it's a really steep uh steep way to go to be able to even get to competitiveness especially in the
uh well i mean there's not a lot of competition going on in their division but uh
you know so maybe maybe there's an opening there who knows what happens with the birds reds are getting a lot worse the pirates are still gonna suck
so that's gonna be helpful so hopefully they'll at least be able to finish third something like something
like that but uh anyways okay so the next big date we've got coming up really is this friday it's the last kind of big date i
suppose which is uh when teams have to lock in the 40-man rosters by um and that's kind of setting
up for the rule five draft which is not going to happen uh you heard it here first
uh the rule five draft is not at least it's not gonna happen like but it so again there's another one what do they cram that in there with free agency you
know what i mean like that's hey rule five draft taking place on uh february 17th right you know like right before
camp like good luck minor league dudes who are and although if they if they push back the report
dates for minor league spring training you know it's a little bit different but most of those guys who would be selected are probably getting invites to major
league camp so i'm sorry continue i stepped on that one it might actually work out my my kids team is uh his
baseball team gets coached by a bunch of minor leaguers so uh it might work out for his baseball my son's baseball team
so if you care about eight nine ten year olds maybe it's better for them because your minor leaguers don't have to report
uh but in in any case we'll be uh circling back around i'm gonna be traveling but uh might be
able to do another show uh in a week so um you guys will have to go a whole
week without us maybe you know but but here's here's and and you should you know you really need to be list so
here's i do want to share something before we go because generally and i do try to but every once in a while i might
have a couple drinks going to facebook and look at the comments um i might even respond
to it get a little saucy um but it was funny because every you know you see a little preview like when you
look at the comments generally what i'll go in there and hit the little button just like mark all as red so i don't have the little red you know the little blurb that pops up um but we actually
got a really good one the other day and uh and it was it was funny because i thought i was like oh crap somebody's
gonna try to call me out here but i want to bring this up uh and i'm gonna i'm gonna put this look at that look at that big
by the way this is a comment i forget what it was also and then he didn't name you um so i apologize for that but uh
but i'm just kind of uh but we got it we got all caps the podcast the rant is superb
all caps two exclamation points one of the best cubs baseball podcast available i don't always agree with evan boom but
you'll walk away a smarter fan after listening to his podcast
that i i mean and i'm i'm not even blowing smoke that's probably the nicest thing anybody
could say like or has said well yeah and how long have you been
doing this for like eight years but i i mean i think to me to say you're gonna
walk away from this a smarter baseball fan i think is like the highest level of compliment we could possibly ever even
achieve you know it's not like oh it'd be cool to oh it's it's funny or it's entertaining or you know i i like
how they go off and yell about sometimes but uh no i saw that i was like oh
okay you know that that was pretty nice um which is not that's not always the case
when i talk about the the com because i've been called an idiot uh far too many times to count and so
uh so it was nice i was like well yeah much more yeah so this is this is cool uh yeah and and other things you can go
you can go see the comments lately for this dude named babalu who's been banned 55 times or so uh he doesn't like me
very much so it's it's uh good times but i thought that was cool i
wanted to share that so if you feel we throw this out there every once in a while if you feel like
this made you a smarter fan or maybe at least just didn't make you dumber um maybe go out and
and give us a five star rating on on itunes maybe you don't even uh pull it from itunes so how about you but you go
over there anyway and boy it sure would be nice for you to give us a nice little review there um you know rate it
subscribe if you're watching on youtube make sure you subscribe uh subscribe on apple you know on itunes or or whatever
platform you get these from uh because at the end of the day you know that stuff actually we we do this right now
as a hobby but it's still nice to be um i don't want to say recognized for it i
don't i don't like i don't think we do this for recognition but to feel like somebody benefits from it yeah it's it's
help anybody to have that yeah and if if we want to grow this thing um and and
you know enrich the lives of other cubs fans and baseball fans then uh then that is a good way for us to be able to do
that and to reach more people because then you know we get ranked a little higher and and that sort of thing maybe people will actually find us
uh outside of you know the five or six that normally watch so that would be nice
so hopefully we hopefully we enriched your lives today and uh if we didn't then join us on monday next week
yeah find another podcast [Laughter] see that's what gets you in trouble evan
so uh until next monday i can't say have a good weekend because i usually like saying that but uh just
have a good week okay make it real be nice to each other leave nice comments that should be your
goal for the week go to facebook and leave only nice comments no mean comments
that's that's helpful that's it that's all i got okay all right see ya bye
[Music] [Applause]
you