Darvish Slighted, Bryant’s Future, Oopszuna, Happy Miggiversary, and Other Cubs Bullets

About a week ago, Anker stuff was a Deal of the Day at Amazon and that included their wireless phone charger. It was cheap, so I pulled the trigger, not necessarily thinking it was going to be some kind of big great thing. I just wanted to try. And now I don’t know why I never did this before. My phone was always just sitting there next to me when I slept anyway, and now I just park it on the charger. It’s fully charged in the morning, and I never have to charge it throughout the day.

Anyway, I mention this not only because I am now going to be all about wireless chargers, but also because that sale was apparently a prelude to a full-time price drop. The charger is now even cheaper than when I bought it. Shrug. No regrets. Anyway: it’s really cheap, I love it, and we have a relationship with Amazon, so here’s me telling you about it.

  • WHATever that Yu Darvish is not in this trio:
  • Ryu I totally get, given the injury he came back from and how incredible he was this year. Donaldson, too, dealt with injury issues and came back to brilliance. But Gray? Yeah, he was REALLY good this year, but he was nearly a league average pitcher all of last year, and he was healthy. He just kinda sucked for a bit. Darvish came back from sucking AND a serious elbow injury AND surgery.
  • Jordan Bastian takes a look back at Kris Bryant’s 2019 season, as well as affording Bryant an opportunity to look ahead: “Coming back from last year, yes, there is plenty to be proud of for me,” Bryant said. “But, there’s always going to be things that I want to do better. That’s how I’m always going to answer that question, whether it’s an MVP year or the worst year in my career. I’m always going to say I want to be better until I’m done playing this game.”
  • Bryant is under team control for two more years, and it’s no secret that the Cubs will listen if teams are out there looking to acquire one of the most potent bats in the game. For the Cubs, I don’t think there’s going to be any urgency to deal Bryant, but the rationale is not hard to lay out: Bryant is likely to hit free agency in two years rather than extend, he is an offensive force but is the type of hitter the Cubs are trying to diversify away from (i.e., lower contact rate, exploitable by well-executed offspeed, reliant on power, etc.), and the Cubs might be able to improve for the long term (without losing too much in the short term) by way of a combination of moves involving Bryant and others. As always, the point is not to predict anything, but only to urge the front office to truly consider everything. (And they will.)
  • This was quite bad, and quite funny:
  • Good early ratings signal for baseball:
  • It was the single best non-World-Series moment in Cubs history:
  • Underrated there is just how completely Miggy destroyed that pitch. Obliterated so much that the folks behind the plate knew *immediately* what had just happened. The entire neighborhood was shaking. Literally shaking.
  • written by

    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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