Outbursts of, reactions to and hostility towards the big trade in Yu Darvish and Victor Caratini

Outbursts of, reactions to and hostility towards the big trade in Yu Darvish and Victor Caratini

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I’ll have the normal Cubs Bullets later this morning, but I have so many pieces to walk through that deal with the big deal that I think I should put them in their own place.

If you missed the news, Cubs swap Yu Darvish and Victor Caratini against the Padres for four very young prospects and Zach Davies. It is less shocking that the Cubs are trading with Darvish at this stage, but much more shocking that the focus of the returns in the long run was such a high risk. I suppose an easy answer is that the Cubs decided that they absolutely had to dump a significant salary, and that this was the best return they could get on Darvish (which has one of the most important salaries they could draw) . This is not how the Padres MUST give the Cubs CLOSER pieces. They could just keep saying no. Maybe they did.

The deal is still pending the review of medical information, which is a non-zero factor when you talk about so many players (do not forget that it was AJ Preller and the Padres who had serious problems hiding medically) trade information (one important factor was a trade that Colin sent Rea to the Marlins and had to be recalled (and now Rea is with the Cubs!)). It’s rare for medicine to get a deal like this right, but it can sometimes lead to a little jocks along the sides to include a little extra.

Other thoughts and reactions and notes …

• The prospects are put together in discussions for quite good reason – almost everywhere you look, they are all in a fairly short range in the Padres farming system. FanGraphs’ mid-season rankings had the widest series (8 to 26), but MLB Pipeline had the foursome from 11 to 16, and Baseball America was ready to place them in the same kind of short series:

• In the Cubs system, it’s likely to end up in a similar series, because that’s where you’ll find recent IFA records like Ronnier Quintero and Kevin Made, as well as recent 2nd round talent concepts like Burl Carraway and Ethan Hoor. Bryan will soon have a lot more on the new Cubs outlook.

• Luke makes a good point here about what may have been a SMALL factor in the return:

• More traditional prospects will give you almost no recent exploration information, which means you will have a huge disadvantage of information in a trade with the Padres (we have already discussed this issue in general when it comes to prospects). For the IFA and draft prospects, however, the information disadvantage will be much smaller, as the Cubs would have explored the players at an initial level very close to the same time as the Padres. It is reasonable to assume that the Cubs know all four of these prospects relatively well, and may even want to draft for Caissie and / or sign some of the IFAs.

• If you see that one of the four prospects would be a reasonable return for Victor Caratini (I do not really know, but let’s say it is), then you are talking about Davies and the other three for Darvish. Oof, right? These are also good prospects that could very well become studs. But teams are able to add this prospect organically into IFA and the concept every year. It’s basically as if the Cubs have traded Darvish and Caratini for some extra top IFA signings and another second-round draft pick. Good pieces to have, but you know the risk profile there is extreme.

• Bruce Levine was on 670 The Score just as I was writing it down, and I take notes to describe his comments: I do not think this is a reconstruction, because some of the money saved all these off-seasons is not necessarily just going to be wasted. Some of the money could be used to contribute until 2021. But the focus was on adding young talent. But I think they have money to spend, and they want to put together a team that can compete in an impressive division. It’s not like the Cubs are going to pocket all that money. I just do not believe it. One team wanted Darvish so much, and that was the Padres. And that was the best price the Cubs could get, given the financial situation in the game and the contract.

• In contrast, Dave Kaplan points almost exclusively to money as the reason for trading:

• Gordon Wittenmyer took a moment to download and see how the Cubs are doing in the 2021 season tank:

• Wittenmyer even went so far as to include this passage:

But by owing most of the $ 60 million to Darvish over the next three years, the Cubs’ billionaire owners have been given more breathing space to pay on the business loan they took out to buy and sell Wrigleyville over the past year. redeveloped.

One source told David Kaplan, NBC Sports Chicago, that the loans amount to about $ 1 billion in debt to the Rickettses at the franchise and related businesses, such as Hickory Street Capital, their real estate company.

Whether it is structured and connected to the franchise in a way that technically violates the MLB’s debt service rules, it certainly seems to violate the intent of these rules (which are negotiated jointly with the players’ union).

• The implication there is that MLB prohibits owners from incurring too much debt, relative to the income, so that it does not hinder their ability to compete / pay out sufficient compensation for players. I do not know if we can still know if anything has to do with this trade, but I think it seems like an agreement that is sufficient salary to ask a question. Of course, no one with the Cubs will answer them. But it’s worth asking. And then we’ll see if the behavior of the team in the free agency offers any answers the rest of this season.

• This was my recording at the moment of this element of trade, which relates to 2021:

• I think I stand by it ten hours later. According to Gut, it is likely that the Cubs are now trying to turn $ 10 million into a trio of annual, low-dollar, big league signings. Maybe a handyman / second baseman, a fielder and a starting pitcher? No one is going to take off your socks, but these are perhaps types that bounce back, if you hit one or two, you cover a portion of what you lost in the Darvish trade (in terms of performance in 2021). I could see it. I may not think that the cubs Yu Darvish had to deal with freaking to precede those movements, but that does not mean that I can not accept reality now and can say: OK, I think that is what they are likely to do. The NL Central is just as bad, and the Cubs have many other talented players who, realistically, are not going to trade now.

• Meanwhile, the Padres and Preller deserve all the praise they are going to get for this trade and the Snell trade (and the signing of Kim) for doing so without fundamentally changing their absurdly good farming system:

• Bet it’s cool to be Padres fans right now, right?

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