S.

Glad he managed to work out of that, but good lord, I am not looking forward to 5 innings of bullpen

"he's built like a...gymnast." Someone get Smalley the hell out of the booth and get Morneau back please.

Sometimes when you have Buxton on your team, you forget other players are fast too.

Hawkins is good. I'd be happy to have him and Morneau splitting a season and none of the other fill in color guys.

I'm liking Morneau in the booth. Have they said how many games the different fill in guys are each getting this season?

Not the prettiest inning by the field, but nice recovery by Berrios to hold it to 1 run. I hope the ump calls that outside edge of the strikezone all night

Is Polanco injured? That was a little league throw

While we're at it, why don't we just trade Berrios too? Then we'll be ready for 2022 when our next round of prospects pans out as well as the current batch!

Why is this exciting? We never gave him a real shot as a starter in the majors and I'm supposed to be glad that we moved him to the pen to make room for Martin Perez?

Your response just ignores the entire point of my post. Sure, Cubs fans are probably upset with him at the moment. If he puts together 4 or 5 good years for the rest of the contract, they won't be. And whatever projections you're looking at don't mean anything to me, and neither do the opinions of some upset fans on some random forum. Perez career:::: 4.63 ERA, 1.479 WHIP, 97 ERA+, 4.44 FIP, 5.1 WAR in 7 years. Darvish career: 3.49 ERA, 1.19 WHIP, 124 ERA+, 3.38 FIP, 10.7 WAR in 6 years. Who cares if Perez is projected to have 1 more win?

It is a bit early to judge how it turned out. Plenty of pitchers lose a year of a contract due to injury. As do plenty of non-pitchers. If he puts together 4 or 5 solid years for the rest of the contract, do you think the Cubs are going to be that upset about the one year they lost?

I should've clarified, I don't disagree on the Sano and Buxton parts and certainly wouldn't offer either of them any long term contracts at the moment either. I do agree, Kepler is likely to maintain what he is, but I'm not in any particular hurry to lock up a 95 OPS+ outfielder to a long term contract. Though I could live with a 2 or 3 year deal if the price is right. I would not be happy if they gave him longer than 3 years, and I think the cost is going to need to be pretty team friendly. I'd rather have them go outside the org if they're going to give him more years or big dollars, but I know some people are higher on Kepler than me and think he's still going to break out.

Why would you want to lock up a consistently 95 OPS+ player on a long term contract unless it is incredibly team friendly?

Performance didn't measure up last year. How come we didn't take any steps to enhance this team's future? Signing players that got DFA'd from their previous teams to one year contracts is not enhancing the team's future.

How exactly does one "open the window to contend" when you don't do anything to build a team that can contend? Are they trying to pretend that if we have a good year, they're going to go out the next year and spend $200M because the window is open? If that was the case, wouldn't they have spent some money in 2018 since we looked decent in 2017 even with our mediocre roster? How do they expect this window to stay wide open if your roster is built of cast-offs and one year deals? Even if we exceed expectations this year and make it to the playoffs where we're swept in the first round, you can't build on that when half your 2019 roster is going to be gone in 2020. In all honesty, why the hell do Falvey and Levine even open their mouths? Every time they make any sort of statement, they just make themselves look more like Terry Ryan 2.0, while trying to pretend they're something different. The Pohlads and the entire FO can **** off, because clearly all they care about is maximizing their profit and they have 0 intentions of fielding a legitimately competitive team. And their PR guys must be trash too because even they can't help Falvine spin it. And by legitimately competitive, I mean a team that has even the slightest chance of surviving a playoff round. Not a team that has a minuscule chance of maybe winning the weakest division in baseball in decades, if everything goes right for us and simultaneously everything goes wrong for Cleveland, and then getting mashed by an actually decent team. I love baseball, but this organization is a joke and we all got ****ing swindled with our tax dollars paying for Target Field.

You look at our current roster and think we could compete with New York, Boston, Houston, etc in the playoffs? Or you think we could be competitive against the White Sox, Detroit, and KC in the Central? Because there is a huge difference between the two.

Christ, those are disgusting.

If Martin Perez is the left handed starter you're counting on to carry you deep into the playoffs, then you're probably going to be pretty disappointed.

Trust us though, this batch of prospects that are going to be coming up in 2022 are the real deal this time and not like all the other failed prospects of the last 20 years, so start planning the parade!

You say "rebuild yet again" but when was the last time we did an actual rebuild? The last decade plus has just been various flavors of, "we're going to be competitive in 2-3 years once our prospects get here" and then 2-3 years later, those prospects don't pan out and we hear the same thing. They never actually rebuild.

The issue is that we don't sign big FAs, we don't trade any of our highly rated prospects for established players, and we haven't been successful developing many of our prospects for ages. It makes it challenging to build a solid core when your team isn't doing any of the things that would lead to said solid core. They seem to be operating under the hope that maybe one year all of our prospects will pan out at the exact same time, and also all of our bargain bin deals will work out that same year too. But with all the short term deals and no real established players, even if your team does decently 1 year (see: 2017), then the next year is just another crapshoot. They can talk about the long term plan, but lets be honest, what is the long term plan? To me, it just seems like hoping and praying and not actually doing any of the work to acquire players that would constitute a solid core.

But we aren't even doing a rebuild, we're just wallowing in mediocrity.

Honest question, because I don't read a lot of minor league news/stats/etc outside of stuff posted on here, but is there a reason people are so quick to push for Romero to the pen? It isn't like our starting staff is stacked and it still seems like he has the potential to be a solid starter. Am I missing some other info or what is the reason people want to move him to the pen already?

I agree, and I'm guessing very few people here would be upset if both of those IFs come to pass and we grab some other better RPs and this isn't our "late inning, high leverage" pitcher signing for the offseason. But those are two big ifs and I think it's a very reasonable worry that neither of those will be the case.