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Will try to squeeze in some spring training baseball stuff. And I'll take requests. I rarely have revelations of any kind, but in 2008, I actually had one. In late February or early March, I was sitting in a breakfast place on the road between Peoria and Surprise, Ariz. I...
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Very interesting. I’ve had the same feeling about the Cubs, that they caught lightening in a bottle for a couple of years, but have regressed and really aren’t that good anymore. It appears that the Braves made one of the best moves in team history by letting Heyward walk. What’s bizarre is that I saw him in spring training the year before he came up and I would have sworn he would be a star for years. Now he’s an average at best player, with almost no power. The pitching is old and basically mediocre at this point. I do suspect that Bryant will recover and become a top player again, but it’s a much more difficult division these days.
What’s interesting to me, though, is how the fans and even the Cubs players are lashing out at PECOTA. It amazes me how fans get so bent out of shape at predictions that their team will not do well, as if the negative prediction will somehow inpact how the team actually plays. Or maybe it’s like someone insults a family member. When ESPN still took comments, it was crazy how fans would react to the weekly power ratings if they listed their team below where the fans felt it should be. Why do people care so much about predictions?
I mean, the flippant answer is “Breaking news: fan(atic)s are irrational.” And that may be the best answer. I like the comparison to an insult to a family member (or friend, or anyone else you would consider close). There’s always that feeling of how you may have some friction or back-and-forth with them, but someone from the outside doing the same is not OK.
When you add in the feelings that many people have towards the turn to statistical analysis, that just makes it worse. Plus, a computer is an easy target for response attacks, since it isn’t going to push back and escalate things.
With Heyward, I think he came up with some real natural ability and maybe the swing wasn’t perfect. But the Braves insisted in constant tinkering with it, never seeming to settle on a style for him. I also remember Freddie Gonzalez musing that Heyward “walked too much”. I guess they wanted him to swing at bad pitches so he could theoretically drive in more runs. He seemed to listen, then he walked less. I’m not certain why the Braves thought fewer walks were a good thing. Probably the last vestiges of the Bobby Cox era of old school managing the team by gut feel stuff. I honestly feel like the Braves messed with his swing and his approach way too much. Freddie Freeman was very close to Heyward, and I’ve caught little snippets of the fact that Freddie does his own thing with his swing and his prep and is not going to listen to anyone about tweaking his swing and approach, in that he likes to use more of his natural ability to locate and hit the ball & doesn’t like to do a ton of prep for specific pitchers. He doesn’t want to be thinking too much, in other words, he wants to go out there and hit the ball. The only real thing the hitting coach has done was more a mental adjustment to think about hitting the ball up the middle…. which is hardly ground breaking. I was taught to do the same thing in Little League. I’m thinking Freeman learned from watching his buddy Heyward. If you try to be the guy that’s open to lots of critique, they’re just going to endlessly mess with what you do. Less is more.
Bottom line, I think Heyward listened to the coaches way too much and went from a guy who was natural and good to a guy that didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing anymore. Thank God that Braves regime is history.
As a Cubs fan this all should worry me that they won’t break their now 111 year streak without a world series…. what’s that? They won only 3 years ago? I think I’ll be fine.
Honestly, after they won the world series I would have been happy if they would have brought back the exact same team for 3 years or so as a victory lap celebration.
It really is remarkable how easily a potential dynasty can fall apart. As Joe said, the Cubs still could be fine, but in 2015 they had a seemingly endless pipeline of young position player talent and a superstar core already in place. Then Schwarber, Soler, Almora, and Happ all fail to meet expectations and Torres is traded for Chapman and without the high draft picks to replace them, the pipeline dried up. A couple of their core in place falter and their pitching ages and suddenly the potential dynasty is just another solid/good team in the middle of the pack.
Right now it seems like the Astros are a potential dynasty with many of the same types of assets in place that the Cubs had in 2015. It will be interesting to see if they can avoid some of the same pitfalls.
The Astros are my team, and I can tell you they won’t be trading a minor league stud for a reliever :). It is a little worrisome to me that they don’t seem to have any star batters in the minors. Kyle Tucker is their best hitting prospect (he was a #5 draft pick), and did well at AAA in 2018, but stunk it up in the majors, and he’s 22, so this is his last year of being a prospect. We do have a couple of pitching prospects (Whitley and Bukauskas), and we’ll see how Whitley does this year.
As an A’s fan, the net trade of Russell for Semien plus the rental of Samardzija is looking pretty good. Semien is a way better offensive player at this point and has gone from a liability in the field to a gold glove finalist (aided substantially by Matt Olson the human vacuum cleaner at first). Plus without Shark the A’s likely miss the playoffs in 2014.