Smaller Moves Still Coming for the Cubs and Other Bullets

wrigley outfield warning trackIt’s interesting how certain songs lend themselves to producing many diverse covers for whatever reason. Some are obvious – Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is just begging to have lots of covers, and it does – but others are harder for me to figure. For example, When in Rome’s “The Promise” has been covered a bunch of times in a variety of styles, and they’re all pretty great. You might not even realize you know the song until you hear the particular cover you’ve heard before.

  • Cubs GM Jed Hoyer was on MLB Network Radio discussing the Cubs’ offseason and what’s coming, and among his comments, he reiterated the front office’s position that major moves are likely done for the offseason (transcript available at the CCO). Hoyer did say, however, that the Cubs will “almost certainly” make some smaller moves, which of course is subject to a debate on the relativism of “smaller” and “larger,” but I think you get the gist – the Cubs will probably bring in another veteran or two on a minor league deal, may bring in a depth/reclamation starting pitcher to compete for a rotation spot, and may bring in a reserve right-handed-hitting outfielder who can play center field.
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  • I’m pretty interested to see how the Cubs might round out the roster, but they’ve mostly got the thing set up really well, both in terms of the starters and the redundancies. Center field is probably the only spot where I get a little bit of heartburn when I think about what could happen if the starter gets hurt, but at least Matt Szczur is around (the bat might never translate in the bigs, but he can legitimately play very good defense and run the bases well), and Javy Baez continues to get work in center.
  • The Giants’ ZiPS are out, and it looks about like you’d expect: front three in the rotation is really strong, but the back is weak; the infield is really strong (despite ZiPS not buying any of Joe Panik, Matt Duffy, and Brandon Crawford’s offensive breakouts just yet), but the outfield is weak. I didn’t realize how potentially weak their bullpen could be, though. That could cost them some games.
  • A little more smoke from the NL DH fire, this coming from Red Sox ownership:
  • It always made sense to me that (1) players would be in favor of the NL DH (those are better paying jobs, and they also open up additional work for guys who might otherwise be squeezed out), and (2) AL owners would be in favor of the NL DH (they’re already spending a little more on those jobs, so why wouldn’t they want their brethren in the NL to share the load?). The question has always been, for me, (1) NL owners, who presumably would mostly not be crazy about it, (2) anyone who fancies themselves an NL traditionalist or a “baseball is more fun with differences in the leagues” type person (and those two groups could be found peppered within the ranks of the players and AL owners).
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  • Over at Baseball is Fun, if you could trade Adele tickets for Cubs tickets, you totally would, right? But would your girlfriend let you?
  • If you missed it earlier this morning, the Mets are indeed bringing Yoenis Cespedes back. It’s an interesting deal, probably good for both sides, and it leaves Dexter Fowler still looking for a job.
  • My kids are still too young to watch full ‘Star Wars’ flicks, but they are utterly obsessed with ‘Star Wars’ right now. That got me wondering if there was going to be a kids book version of ‘The Force Awakens’ soon, and sure enough, there is one coming in April. I’ll probably have to flip around there on Amazon to see if there’s something good available sooner, though. And I now realize as I’m typing that I should see about kids book versions of the other six movies.
  • Some stray tweets from this morning that I think are worth discussion – I’m not sure if the math on it works out, depending on how many NL teams can get up to the 100-loss threshold:
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    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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