Taking The Little Boy to Chicago this weekend for a little fun. We were doing it regardless of the Cubs’ postseason chances – he’s got a mini fall break kinda thing – but yes, it would’ve been nice if it JUST SO HAPPENED that the Cubs had made the playoffs and were still going this weekend …
- Dansby Swanson’s first half struggles at the plate were extremely well-discussed at the time, and although his turnaround in the second half did get a reasonable amount of attention, it suffered from (1) the Cubs never quite getting back into playoff position (so it “didn’t matter”), and (2) baseball’s extreme primacy bias (we just straight up remember and feel things more strongly when they happened first in a season; hell, the entire All-Star Game is built upon it!). And I do think it’s fair to point out that Swanson struggled at a time when the Cubs, as a whole, were falling off the table. It hurt.
- BUT, I think it’s also fair to evaluate a player on the whole of a season, not just when he was slumping. For the year, Swanson’s numbers weren’t where he’d want them to be – .242/.312/.390/99 wRC+ – but he was still so good defensively (a deserved Gold Glove finalist again) that his total value to the team was quite strong. His 4.3 WAR was the third highest of his career, and, as The Athletic points out, his 3.1 WAR from July 10 through the end of the year was 10th highest in all of baseball. That 4.3 season-long mark was also the 7th best among all shortstops. Like I said before, this was a perfectly good season overall from Dansby Swanson.
- (And if you say that defense doesn’t matter as much as offense or whatever, look no further than the performance of the Cubs’ pitching staff this year. They were great in a whole lot of ways on their own, but would you like to tell them that Swanson’s defense doesn’t add direct value to the team? Or directly help preserve their ERAs? We can’t have it both ways, and go ga-ga about how so many Cubs pitchers out-perform their FIP … but then also poo-poo the WAR evaluation of how much Swanson’s defense mattered!)
- Craig Counsell with the reminder that the knee issue was absolutely a factor, too (The Athletic): “Dansby had an injury this year and that kind of derailed him in late April. It derailed him for a while, there’s no question about it. So that’s just what happened to him this season. I think that hurt him offensively. He was not in a great spot physically.”
- It’s pretty amazing to see the offseason narratives about Walker Buehler changing in real time with every pitch he throws. I’m not even saying it’s silly necessarily, as teams will have to extrapolate as much as they possibly can to decide what kind of free agent deal he’s worth (and he and his reps will have to do the same). A great postseason run for him could absolutely mean a big difference in his options this offseason, as teams perhaps dream on him – more fully healthy – returning to the guy he was in 2021 and before. I wouldn’t hate the Cubs being involved, though I’d surely prefer a less reclamation’y feel if they were adding only one starting pitcher.
- The Dodgers finished things off last night by getting a couple dominant innings from Ben Casparius, a guy I’d honestly not heard of until that moment. The 2021 5th rounder had a decent year split between Double-A and Triple-A, but didn’t come up to the big league team until very late in the year as a long reliever. The 25-year-old had just three appearances and 8.1 innings in the regular season. And now here he is throwing dominant relief innings in the NLCS.
- The kind of breakout you dream of for a prospect who’d been in the 20 to 40 range in the system, and it reiterates a continued discussion point about knowing how and when to move still-kinda-decent starting pitching prospects into a reliever role to see if they can really explode. The Cubs have absolutely been quicker on the trigger on that in recent years (Porter Hodge, Luke Little, Daniel Palencia, for examples), but mostly with relatively early-career conversions. It feels like they still haven’t been as quick to make the switch for guys who’ve shown decent starting ability at Double-A/Triple-A. Or maybe I’m just still hung up on the idea that Caleb Kilian could’ve/should’ve been given a real run as a one-inning reliever at some point over the last two years.
- Yes, it is:
- And it’s not like the NLCS match-up is particularly uninteresting this year. The two largest markets in the country. Some of the biggest superstars in the sport. If ever there were a time when Fox would consider trying to maneuver to get more eyeballs, it’d be this year. But they aren’t, and that’s a pretty damning reality for the league. (And, yes, I know that they’ve almost certainly sold a whole lot of ad inventory specifically against ‘Masked Singer,’ but if they thought baseball would dramatically outperform that show in the ratings, they’d talk to their partners about it.)
- This is very cool, even if not a surprise given the teams/players involved:
- A very good night for Moises Ballesteros in the AFL at the plate, as discussed earlier, but it’s only fair to note that the other team did steal four bases on him (with two different pitchers on the mound) and he did have a throwing error. Nothing shocking in that – we know that development is still needed on the catching side – but it’s the kind of thing that I’m sure the Cubs are watching this fall as they make plans for next season behind the plate. (And I’ll continue to say that no matter how infatuated you might be with Ballesteros, you CANNOT strictly contour your offseason plans around the idea that he’ll come up and catch meaningful innings in 2025. Hope for it, sure. But do not expect it.)
- Another scoreless inning for Vince Reilly in that one. Be really fun if he suddenly broke out as a relief prospect for the Cubs heading into 2025.
- Apparently Luis Arraez was playing through a thumb injury for the entire second half, and just had surgery to address it.
- And an unfortunately timed, but very good piece at FanGraphs on how Arraez’s ability to hit a ton of singles and never strike out … continues to be extremely overvalued by our lizard brains. It wasn’t necessarily the intended takeaway from the piece, but something that nevertheless absolutely stood out: if you have a high batting average, high singles, low strikeouts, low-ish walks hitter type like Arraez, you are actually REDUCING his value by batting him leadoff (the short version is that you want a hitter of that type to bat as FEW TIMES AS POSSIBLE with the bases empty). Counter intuitive for a moment, perhaps, but think about it a little more deeply and you realize: when is it most valuable to have a guy put the ball in play, regardless of outcome? When there are runners on base. A single moves them an extra base, or an out might move a baserunner up or score a run. If you do those things with the bases empty, however, you either did something that is no better than a walk, or simply flew out to right field or whatever.
- Not sure if anyone else has seen a dramatic uptick in intolerance directed toward LGBTQ youth in their personal life, but it feels like an especially good moment to speak up. Sports can do only so much, but proudly being a welcoming space can’t hurt: