The Future is Coming: Javier Baez Makes the Bigs

Twitter followers of mine and readers of this blog have heard a lot from me about how much I dislike the rebuilding plan executed thus far by the Cubs’ front-office team of president Theo Epstein and GM Jed Hoyer. I’m not going back on it - I didn’t like that they essentially sucked on purpose for three years, missed on signing free agents that seemed to fit the profile of what they were looking for (although missing Masahiro Tanaka may have been a blessing in disguise), and whiffed badly on the only semi-major free-agent signing they’ve made, Edwin Jackson.

That being said, we’re about to start seeing the fruits of that labor. Tonight, Javier Baez will make his Cubs’ debut, joining Arismendy Alcantara as highly-touted prospects that are now on the big club. Baez had been playing shortstop for the majority of his minor-league career, but got work at second base over the last few weeks and evidently impressed enough to earn the call-up. He will play second for the MLB Cubs and presumably will continue to as long as he and shortstop Starlin Castro share the infield.

Now, both Baez and Alcantara were actually acquired by former GM Jim Hendry, the latter as an international free agent, in 2008, and the former with Hendry’s last first-round draft pick, in June 2011. So as poor a job as Hendry did with the Cubs at times, he certainly deserves credit for the two of them, as well as the new brain trust deserving credit for helping shepherd the pair of them to the bigs. Theo’s true influence as far as minor leaguers won’t start to be felt until Jorge Soler, the one major Cuban expat who the Cubs were able to bring in (who’s currently decimating AAA), makes his MLB debut, likely next month. Kris Bryant, the top draft pick from 2013 who is putting up video-game numbers in the minors, should join him early next season.

Baez’s arrival is interesting on a number of levels. It speaks, first of all, to the idea that the Cubs may plan to at least try to have a good MLB team in 2015. I say this because Baez has exhibited a propensity to struggle at each new level for the first couple of months after arriving before adjusting and turning into a stud again. (Most recently, Baez was horrific his first 6 weeks at AAA, with a .484 OPS, but since mid-May has compiled a .931 OPS, and even with his early struggles has eclipsed the 20-HR mark for the season - perhaps just as encouraging, Baez's K rate has fallen and his contact rate risen each month of the season so far.) By allowing Baez to get what we assume to be his typical early struggles out of the way now, the front office surely hopes that he will have morphed into Super-Javy again by next spring.

Somewhat related to that, it burns a year of service time for Baez. Most baseball fans are aware of the service-time game played with many prospects, especially in the first half of the season. In layman’s terms, a player’s service-time clock is started when he’s brought up from the minors, with him becoming a free agent six seasons later, but by holding a guy down a certain amount of time after Opening Day, a team can knock that free agency back another year. It’s why projected studs like George Springer, Mike Trout, Gregory Polanco, Anthony Rizzo and several others have come up in May or June in the last few years rather than when they were clearly ready to. It's also why Bryant likely won't be up until next May. (Soler was signed to an MLB contract out of Cuba, so service time is less of a concern with him.) The Cubs could have stashed Baez for a few more months in a similar way and gained an extra year of team control on the back end, but elected not to - more evidence that they may view 2015 as the first year of the climb back up from the bottom. (It's also evidence that they may like their chances of getting Baez to agree to a team-friendly contract extension before too long, as they did with Rizzo and Castro, but that's another blog post.)

On the field, Baez’s arrival should be of further interest because there’s hardly anyone like him in baseball - a middle infielder with legitimate 30+ home run potential. Baez drew a lot of eyeballs in spring training, when he was pounding home runs regularly, and this coming off a year in which he’d led AA in OPS despite also being the youngest player in the entire league. Now he will see the chance for his potential to come to fruition, and fans will get the chance to see a guy whose bat speed is often compared with that of Hall of Fame-caliber bat Gary Sheffield’s.

Baez is not a Jeff Kent type all-hit no-glove man at second base, though. He is reasonably speedy and very athletic in the field and has the potential to be a plus defender. He has been known to make the occasional error, especially with his big arm, so the comparison to his presumed double-play partner Castro, who possesses both the potential and mistake-prone qualities of Baez in the field, is an easy one to make. However, like Castro, who has improved defensively in his 4 years in the bigs, Baez should become a solid defender.

Many will note that Baez’s improvement also coincided roughly with the arrival of Manny Ramirez, who was hired as a player-coach a couple of months ago in the organization and has been at AAA working with the hitters, especially Baez, Bryant and Soler. Bryant in particular has been quoted as being impressed with Ramirez’s acumen at the plate and claims he’s been a huge boon to the Iowa Cubs. If Baez, Bryant and Soler come up and are the power-laden monster hitters Cubs’ fans hope they become, Manny’s involvement in their development may be a neat side story.

For now, though, all that matters is that there’s one more reason to watch Cubs’ games. Unlike last year, when a depressingly underperforming Rizzo and Castro were the only reasons to tune in unless Jeff Samardzija was pitching, there are several players on any given day that should be on the next contending Cubs’ team - the aforementioned Rizzo and Castro, Alcantara and Baez, on top of surprise stud pitcher Jake Arrieta, with a nod to Kyle Hendricks and the handful of decent Cubs’ relievers, each of whom may also end up contributing to the team's resurgence if things pan out.

The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t big, but it’s visible, and that, to this long-suffering Cubs fan at least, is exciting. Go, Javy, go.

Open Letter to Cubs' Front Office: Unless You're Getting a War Chest, Don't Trade Jeff Samardzija

Dear Theo Esptein, Jed Hoyer, Jason McLeod, whoever else in the Cubs’ organization is responsible for these things:

Don’t trade Jeff Samardzija.*

(* - I don’t want to type it out 20 times, so I’m going to knock it out up here: Any mention of not wanting to trade Jeff Samardzija is with the understanding that if some team wants to absolutely pay through the nose in top-tier prospects for him that I would rethink my stance. I don’t suspect any team would.)

There are a myriad of reasons why I don’t want the Cubs to trade their best pitcher. At least one of them, the first reason I’ll mention, is a selfish one.

The Cubs have a key 2015 asset in Jeff Samardzija, and
it should take a lot to give him up.

Samardzija has been a near-daily presence in my sports fan life for about a decade now. He’s atually been part of it far longer, dating back to when he almost single-handedly defeated my high school in a state quarterfinal football game in 2002. From there he went on to Notre Dame, my favorite college football team and far and away my favorite sports team, period. After two seasons of lack of use, “The Shark” exploded onto the scene in 2005 and remained there in 2006, a first team All-American wideout in both seasons as the Irish won 19 games in that time frame. His incredible hands, penchant for making the big catch and his occasionally cocky behavior on the field (skip to 1:15 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAh4MoQXq-g) made him one of my favorites, if not my favorite, player on those teams.

That’s what made me give an audible “WHAT?” when I was watching a Cubs game in the summer of 2006 (I vividly remember the game being at Houston and the camera being in the Cubs’ dugout at the time) and a WGN graphic came up listing Samardzija as the Cubs’ fifth-round pick in the MLB draft, which was going on during the game. I knew Samardzija was an accomplished baseball player and would be selected — it had simply never occurred to me that my team would be the team doing it. (In retrospect, given former GM Jim Hendry’s obsession with athletic ability, often at the expense of actual baseball ability, it probably shouldn’t have.)

After that, I followed, as closely as one can in short-season ball, the exploits of Samardzija as he spent the summer pitching in the Cubs’ organization, never dreaming he would ultimately choose to play for the Cubs. After all, he had an NFL future as a potential first-round pick.

It was a future that would never come to pass, as in January 2007, Samardzija made the stunning move to forgo the NFL and pitch for the Cubs. Hendry made what was at the time a seemingly insane gamble and gave Samardzija piles of money (a five-year, $10 million deal that until recently was the longest commitment ever given a player prior to playing an MLB game) to get him away from football. Of course, now it appears to have been one of Hendry’s very best moves as GM.

From a personal perspective, it was outstanding. No player in the history of sports had ever starred for my favorite sports team, Notre Dame football, and my second-favorite sports team, the Cubs. Samardzija was going to do just that.

“The Shark” made his first MLB appearance not too long after, joining the Cubs’ bullpen in mid-2008. Improbably, Samardzija was terrific in his short stint in the pen, but bounced around between the Cubs and the minors the next couple of years as he tried to make it as an MLB starter.

He exceeded expectations once he arrived as a starter in 2012, posting a solid 3.81 ERA, and was even better for most of 2013 until getting roughed up in some of his later starts, finishing with a 4.34. In 2014, he has been outstanding, notching a 2.83 ERA thus far that would be far less if not for one outlier start where Milwaukee crushed him. He’s not doing it with smoke and mirrors, either — his FIP (fielding independent pitching, purportedly a more ‘true’ indicator of a pitcher’s performance) is not much higher, at 3.06. He strikes out nearly a batter an inning and his walk rate and home run rate are at all-time lows.

Naturally, because the Cubs’ current front office is operating under a current philosophy of losing MLB games essentially on purpose and trading away anyone with any value every deadline to stock the farm system, talk has been that Samardzija will soon be on the move. It’s been reported that the Cubs are making such feeble efforts to re-sign him, barely offering him a bigger contract than the one they pissed away on Edwin Jackson, that you have to wonder why they’re even going through the motions.

My problem with trading Samardzija isn’t because I think the Cubs should pay a premium to re-sign him. There have been several reports that Samardzija wants a monster deal of five or more years at over $100 million, and I can easily understand, given the fact that this is his first season performing as a true premium-talent starter and the fact that he’s approaching 30 years old, why you wouldn’t want to make that move. But if the Cubs want to make any effort to compete in 2015 (and a friend of mine recently outlined a perfectly plausible plan under which they might have a chance to do it which I recommend reading), their best chance is keeping Jeff Samardzija for that season, barring a massive overpay by another team. Samardzija will enter his final year of arbitration next year and is likely to earn in the neighborhood of $10 million. Even if Samardzija regresses and becomes closer to the pitcher he was in 2012 and ‘13, he could easily be worth that. Even if you assume Travis Wood and Edwin Jackson will be better in 2015 than they are now, and even if you assume Jake Arrieta will continue pitching well and remaining healthy, AND even if you assume the Cubs can unearth another short-term gem as they did with Paul Maholm, Scott Feldman and Jason Hammel the last few years, the Cubs will still need at least one more starter to compete, and Samardzija fits the bill.

Again, I reiterate: if the Cubs can get someone to hand over big-time, big league ready pitching prospects, preferably more than one of them, for the services of Jeff Samardzija this July, then go for it. I don’t think that will happen. And in the absence of such an offer, the Cubs’ best chance to succeed in 2015 is to keep him. Unlike prior seasons, there is a road map for the Cubs to not be atrocious next year, and I don’t think it should be abandoned nine months before that season begins in the service of yet more lottery-ticket prospects.

Sick of Tanking

I, and many others in my camp, have received a lot of grief lately for beginning to voice the opinion that this grand "Cubs Way" plan executed by the Cubs' current front office is misguided at best and a joke at worst. As of the end of tonight's most recent loss, the Theo Epstein era has resulted in a .386 MLB winning percentage.

People who claim to have a view of the big picture will tell us that the Cubs have increased their farm system ranking from consensus bottom 10 to consensus top 5 in that time frame. This is indisputably true. The Cubs have more talent in their minor league system than they've had in a while. However, the issue I have is that it's not that difficult to increase the talent in your system when you lose games a lot at the MLB level. It gives you more high draft picks, more international spending money, and more incentive to sell off anyone on your major league team who has the audacity to not suck. Pretty much anyone can increase the talent in a minor league system if they make absolutely no effort to win games at the MLB level.

So why, then, did Tom Ricketts shoot for the moon and go after Theo Epstein, one of MLB's most famous and successful general managers of all time from his time with Boston, to run the Cubs as team president? If the plan could be summed up as "You know that thing where the Astros are tanking seasons? Let's just do that for a while and get more talent," why hire the guy once known as Boy Genius to do it?

The answer to that is unclear, although there's text from an interview running around somewhere (I tried but could not find it) where Theo Epstein gushed about how, when they were both in Boston, he and Jed Hoyer (now the Cubs GM) would muse about the idea of eschewing free agency almost entirely and building a contender with only homegrown talent. For people like me who are sick of losing, this discussion is a little worrisome with the knowledge that through 3 offseasons, Epstein and Co. have made exactly one long-term free-agent signing - pitcher Edwin Jackson (4Y/52M). Jackson outperformed his peripherals most of his career and is now underperforming them (and doing so in spectacular fashion, I might add).

Anyway, one of the pro-tanking crowd's favorite go-to arguments is that the Cubs' farm system was a gaping hell-hole when Theo and Co. arrived to save us with three consecutive 100-loss seasons. (The funny thing is, every year the Cubs suck under Theo, the more terrible the Cubs' system apparently was when he got here.) While it's true the system was in lamentable shape, the school of thought that the only way out of it was to tank is, in my opinion, flat-out wrong.

Don't take my word for it. Check out this selected list of teams who had bad minor-league systems and bad MLB teams in the same season in recent years, only to rebound quickly and have success.

2010: Arizona Diamondbacks. Arizona lost 97 games in 2010. DeepLeagues.com ranked their farm system 28th. The following season, Arizona, despite the fact that they hadn't tanked any seasons, won the NL West. They're terrible now, of course, but that can be largely chalked up to a bevy of stupid deals that new GM Kevin Towers has made, shipping out Justin Upton, Trevor Bauer, Adam Eaton and probably several other good or talented players I'm forgetting.

2011: Oakland Athletics. Oakland lost 88 games in 2011. Baseball America ranked their farm system 28th (12 spots BEHIND the Cubs' system that was supposedly so bereft of talent) going into the season. The A's have won the AL West the 2 seasons since then, and are projected to do so again this year by Fangraphs. They didn't tank any seasons in the interim. They did trade Gio Gonzalez after the '11 season for a collection of talent that's helped set the stage for their run.

2011: Baltimore Orioles. Baltimore lost 93 games and held the 21st-ranked farm system according to Baseball America that year. The O's made it to the playoffs the following year and were a solid team in 2013, with 85 wins. No tanking involved.

2012: Cleveland Indians. Cleveland lost 94 games in 2012. Fangraphs tells us that the Tribe's farm system was third from the bottom in baseball that year. The following year, bolstered by some shrewd moves and new manager Terry Francona, Cleveland made the playoffs without tanking any seasons. Early returns on 2014 are mixed with an 11-13 record, but the AL Central is mediocre enough that Cleveland can still expect to be in the race all year if things don't go south.

That's four examples just from the last four off-seasons of teams, none of whom are big-market squads that can erase mistakes by spending out of them, who had bad years and had bad systems - all worse than the 2011 Cubs' system that was supposedly so empty - and did not tank any seasons, yet got better quickly with smart moves and some luck. (In the case of Arizona, quickly undid that improvement with stupidity.)

And by the way, early returns are pretty good on the 2014 White Sox, who haven't had a decent farm system in a gazillion years and lost 99 games a year ago. It is, of course, only April, so we'll see, but they're threatening to add their names to this list.

Look. I'm not saying that Theo's Tankapalooza plan won't work. It probably will have some success just due to sheer volume. I'm also not saying it's necessarily all his fault. There's been a lot of chatter that the Cubs' frugal ways of the last few years have had a lot to due with a complex (and stupid) debt structure the Ricketts took on as a condition of their purchasing the team.

What I am saying is that I don't think Tankapalooza was necessary, nor do I think it was becoming of a guy who supposedly was Boy Genius (and did a lot of talking about 'dual fronts' and building a winning organization AND a good farm system at the same time). Those who tell you the Cubs had to do this are creating a false choice. The Cubs didn't have to be bad. They chose to be. And while the Cubs might hypothetically be good in 3 or 4 years due to that, it's very not hypothetical that they blow chunks right now. They've blown chunks for years. And there's no clear end in sight right now. And that really, really sucks.

The Return of Everett Golson

It's been 8 months since I posted in this blog. There just hasn't been much to say. The Cubs suck, Notre Dame sports have disappointed, the Bulls tried (and failed) to tank the 2013-14 season. I guess I could have written about Carolina's playoff season, but most of what I had to say ended up on my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

This weekend is the Notre Dame spring game, the first time Everett Golson will be in a game situation in a Notre Dame uniform since Jan. 7, 2013. It seems like forever and no time at all since that day, a thud ending to a magical season that saw Alabama play a masterful game and crush the Irish 42-14 in the national title game. There was an SBNation article before the 2013 season (which I can't find right now, otherwise I'd link to it) that said that, adjusting for opponent, the Tide's performance in that blowout was the single best college football game played by any team in over a decade. Alas.

Since then, ND played a decent but disappointing 2013 season. They won 9 games, handing Michigan State their only loss and Arizona State one of just two regular-season defeats, and yet they crapped the bed in losses to mediocre Pittsburgh and Michigan teams and had to battle into the fourth quarter to edge out a garbage Purdue squad. The 2013 Irish were an enigma, probably because we and they knew they weren't whole.

That changes in 2014, as Golson returns from a year-long absence necessitated by his suspension from the university for reportedly cheating on a final exam. He has not been anointed the starter just yet, as coach Brian Kelly is giving redshirt freshman Malik Zaire a chance to compete for the job, but it seems clear that Golson will be under center when ND plays its first offensive snap against Rice on Aug. 30. After all, he was probably his team's best player in a national championship game (people remember ND getting blown out - few remember that Golson threw for 270 yards on 7.5 yards per attempt, with no help from the running game, and was responsible for both Irish touchdowns, window dressing though they were). Hard for Zaire to compete with that experience.

There will, of course, be jokes made on social media about Golson all season long regardless of what he does. This comes with the territory of what he did, and ND fans, as well as Golson, know that this is inevitable. However, I'm rooting for him.

Outside of the 'rooting for laundry' thing where Irish fans simply don't have much choice but to root for the junior signal-caller, Golson's return shows a maturity that what got him booted from school didn't. It would have been easy after the embarrassment of what happened for the QB to run off with his tail between his legs and pursue a transfer to a less academically rigorous school (SBNation reported that at least one SEC team inquired about him before he reaffirmed his commitment to play at ND) where he could redeem himself on the field. Instead, he chose to return to the scene of his previous failure and try to atone for what he did. It remains to be seen how that turns out, but I give him credit for choosing to stick it out.

So far, Golson has said all the right things regarding his second chance. How he performs on the football field will go a long way towards what his ultimate legacy will be at Notre Dame. But to many Irish fans, myself included, Golson eventually getting his degree will be just as important to that legacy. The school has always been about trying to compete on the highest level athletically and academically. Golson didn't get that the first time around. Maybe, this time, he will.