When Baseball America released their Top Ten Prospects list for the Cubs organization back in November, Eddy Julio Martinez didn’t feature anywhere. When Fangraphs followed up with their list in January, he didn’t show up in the top ten there, either. John Sickels over at Minor League Ball kept the shutout going when he released his top twenty list in January, and MLB.com put […]
Author: Rian Watt
Tested in Crucible of NLCS, Cubs Move Forward With Single Purpose
It was Shane Victorino who set me down this path. Last Thursday, reports emerged that the 35-year-old outfielder had agreed to join the Cubs in camp in Mesa in exchange for a shot at the big-league roster on Opening Night in Anaheim. There’s a number of reasonable ways to react to that news, of course, but […]
From BP: Transaction Analysis — Fowler Comes in Way Under Budget
Over at the Baseball Prospectus main site, BP Wrigleyville’s Editor-in-Chief, Rian Watt, analyzed the Dexter Fowler deal. We thought you’d enjoy a preview here. Well. There is a great deal to talk about with respect to this transaction, and only some of it has to do with the deal’s baseball implications. There’s the fact that, a […]
“I Want Us To Think Well”: Joe Maddon’s Biggest Spring Concern
Something is different in Cubs’ camp this year. For the first time in recent memory, Chicago has a team that can reasonably be expected to win a World Championship when the book closes on 2016. If they don’t win a championship, in fact, it’ll be because something went wrong with a very good team (as it […]
Javier Baez, Eye Level, and Guessing at the Bottom of the Zone
Two years ago, Javier Baez was not a good major-league hitter. Over 229 plate appearances in 2014, he put up a .169/.227/.324 triple-slash line, with nine home runs and a glaringly awful 41.9 percent strikeout rate. That’s really, really bad. But things got better. Last year, although he hardly reached his ceiling, it’s fair to say that […]
Torres and Jimenez Ascend Together Through Ascendant System
Halfway through the summer of 2013, the big-league Cubs were in full-blown rebuild mode, stumbling through a summer schedule that contributed mightily to the team’s 96 losses that season. It wasn’t a pretty time in Chicago, and it was stuck smack dab in the middle of a series of seasons that, at least at Wrigley, featured little to get excited […]
A Little More Clarity: BP Wrigleyville’s New Staff
Two weeks ago, I put out a call for applications on behalf of BP Wrigleyville. I said that I was looking for “smart people who can write.” In response, over 170 people took time out of their lives to send me a note, sharing in the process their love of this beautiful game, their dreams […]
Life at the Margins in the Cubs’ Outfield
The Cubs, it appears, are done with their major offseason moves. That’s not a bad thing—lord knows they’ve done enough already—but it does mean that the present period, running roughly between the end of Cubs Convention and the beginning of Spring Training, lacks a certain something when it comes to news. Namely, news. But that doesn’t mean that […]
The Consequences of Clarity
On the final day of March, 2015, I got an email that changed my life. I was a grad student then, living in London and only periodically achieving a level of wealth which allowed me to rub two pennies together. About three weeks earlier, I’d sent a guy I’d barely heard of—Sahadev Sharma—an email out of the blue, asking for a job […]
The Rich, the Richer, and the Precedent for a National League Elite in 2016
Here at Baseball Prospectus, we hold ourselves—and the work that we produce—to a high analytical standard. Claims made without appropriate warrant or evidence are unacceptable on our sites, and we expect our writers to construct arguments which flow neatly from logical premises to sound and replicable conclusions. It’s the way we’ve done business here since 1996, and it’s in […]