#CubsCon Begins, Rizzo Wants a Repeat, the Dodgers Look Good, and Other Bullets

The Cubs Convention starts today! I’ll be at the Sheraton at some point in the afternoon, surveying the landscape, and almost certainly doing a live stream at the BN Facebook page, and also on Twitter. Make sure you’re following those accounts if you want to see all the glory that there is to see (that my phone and cell service allow me to stream, of course). Otherwise, I’ll look to see many of you fine folks there – I’ll be wearing blue and red shoes, this beautiful BN shirt, a “CHICAGO” jacket, and a smile the size of the World Series Trophy. Say hey if you see me, even if I’ve got my face in my phone.

  • Anthony Rizzo talks to Mark Gonzales at the Tribune about the desire to win another one, and how he is preparing differently (and also the same) this offseason. I especially appreciated Gonzales speaking to Giants catcher Buster Posey, whose team famously won the World Series three straight even years until the Cubs ousted them in 2016. Posey notes that one of the big challenges is that the postseason is so long and so intense, that you’ve then got to be prepared to get back into the grind of the regular season, where the games are admittedly much less intense.
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  • Craig Edwards kinda blew my mind this morning with this piece at FanGraphs about the (apparent) lack of a relationship between pitcher exit velocity and pitcher BABIP. That seems extremely counterintuitive, and there are definitely caveats, but this is something to keep an eye on when we’re evaluating pitcher results through the lenses of overperforming peripherals, batted ball data, and defense.
  • The long-awaited (by me, at least) Dodgers ZiPS projections are out. As expected, LA looks like a very deep, well-rounded team, with a strong rotation, and robust positional group (even without the long-rumored Brian Dozier trade). The class of the National League? You can still make an argument for the Cubs, because obviously, but it might be the Dodgers on paper right now.
  • Speaking of the LA Dodgers, Luis has more on the football side of this Chargers stuff over at our Bears site TYL, but for our baseball purposes (and hockey, too! so many sports intersections!), you must see the best team tweet I’ve ever seen. I say that with full apologies to the Cubs Twitter account, which is fantastic. It’s just that, well, this tweet from the Tampa Bay Lightning is incredible, in response to the Chargers moving from San Diego to Los Angeles, and then yesterday updating their logo:
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  • #AtCubs didn’t care for my suggestion about the Lightning’s tweeting prowess, though:
  • And one more thing about that Chargers move – I knew it was a rarity in baseball, but I hadn’t really thought about just how rare:
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  • Some Cubs singing, featuring some talented gents at last night’s Rizzo Foundation Laugh-Off for Cancer event:
  • The Cubs also did some giving back yesterday with the Cubs Caravan:
  • Michael made a funny, but it requires sound on:
  • I see that a bunch of the Anker charging products are on sale today at Amazon, which I pass on to you because, in our Taylor Family home experience, our Anker speed charger really is much faster than the ones that came with our devices. One of my favorite smaller purchases from 2016.
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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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