I’d have had my first beer and/or White Claw and/or 2 and/or 3 by now, and I’d be chatting with some friends about how the Brewers series went, and about how Jose Quintana or Jon Lester matched up today against the Pirates. It was gonna be so good to get back to Wrigley Field, and even if it was gonna be 40-ish degrees, hey, at least it wasn’t going to be rainy this year.
Some day, perhaps. Some sunny summer day in July, maybe.
In the meantime …
Because of his Tommy John surgery and the unknown fallout from the coronavirus-altered 2020 MLB season, the Mets suddenly have a tough decision to make about Noah Syndergaard, as Buster Olney discusses. Syndergaard, 27, is making $9.7 million this year, and figures to make about $10 million next year in his final arbitration season before free agency. But if the Mets aren’t going to get him back until April or May, and he’s coming off surgery, and if budgets are artificially extremely low in 2021, is it possible that he could be non-tendered after this season? There are only so many areas where teams are going to be able to cut significant costs on the fly, and guys in their arb years like Syndergaard might be a surprising area. Unthinkable at one time, but now this has me wondering.
And frankly, it is going to make you wonder about a whole lot of other final-arb-year players in 2021 … you know, like the Cubs’ impactful trio (Kris Bryant, Javy Báez, Kyle Schwarber. If budgets wind up so crushed by this season that top-tier 2021 payrolls are in the $150 million range, but if arb raises stay with historical trends regardless of what happens this season, the Cubs could wind up having their financial flexibility disproportionately impacted by these three (guys whose trade value, in such a world, would be decimated, too). Obviously there are greater worries than this, but yeah, this has the potential to be extremely challenging for the Cubs, because it’s impossible to imagine a scenario where most of this season is lost, and then they’re out there looking to trade the final year of Bryant, Báez, or Schwarber for pennies on the dollar.
Random fun with old videos and data:
Bo knows throws.
This is fantastic stuff, and I am going to have to read closely for the nitty gritty:
I like one of Folden’s blanket philosophies as a coach: “Players have things that they are naturally going to be good at just because they have national patterns of movement and, without taking those away, how can we accentuate what they do well and then also try to minimize their weaknesses at the same time. That’s been an evolution for me because I think you know our natural inclination as coaches is we want to coach, right, we want to immediately jump in and say, ‘This is what you doing wrong, this what you’re doing wrong.’ But we don’t really ever approach things and say, ‘Hey, here’s what you do really well.’ And as my coaching career has evolved, I think it’s a lot more beneficial to stick with what they’re doing well and then try to make them do that more often. And that’s how I like to approach things and I’ve seen a huge jump in players’ performance.”
Yes, we want to see players improve in the areas/ways they struggle, but don’t forget: they all have different natural inclinations, so why not also try to accentuate the idiosyncratic stuff they already do really well? You might find it’s easier to improve Javy Báez’s power by 10% than it is to improve his plate discipline by 2%, and maybe both improvements are just as valuable to his overall production.
A reminder that there are a lot of heroes out there right now – from Rizzo to the people helping at his foundation to, most importantly, the people on the front lines of the health care needs at the moment:
One of the best Seventh Inning Stretch renditions ever:
OK, I’ll admit it … Michael executed this exceptionally well:
NEWSLETTER
