Sure, what the hell. Simply accumulating replacement-level depth ensures we won't see a repeat of last season's starting pitching disaster.

I will be interested to see if Hoyer tries to get Anthony Rizzo.

Getting Rizzo would culminate a nice sequence of front office incest.

He's a nice prospect, but I'm still hoping they go after Fielder.

I'd be more interested if Theo tried to sign Prince Fielder. But what the hell, lets act like the A's or Devil Rays and be cheap.

I'd be more interested if Theo tried to sign Prince Fielder. But what the hell, lets act like the A's or Devil Rays and be cheap.

If the on field results are similar to the Rays -- three 90+ win seasons, three playoff runs, and a WS loss in the last 5 years, I really couldn't care less. Heck, even with the latest run of mediocrity - the A's have five 90+ win seasons in the last 10 years; the Cubs have one.

I don't care if the Cubs win with a 50 million dollar payroll of kids and reclamations or a 150 million dollar payroll.

But what the hell, lets act like the A's or Devil Rays and be cheap.

As zonk says, building like the Rays for a few years would be a huge step up. Then, because you have money, you actually hold onto Crawford (ok, maybe bad example) and Garza.

I have no idea how signing Andy Sonnanstine to a non-guaranteed contract will prevent the Cubs from signing better, more expensive players.

[6]As has been pointed out by everyone, you can build like the Rays while still spending on the major league team.

He’s a reclamation project, but at that age he’s got a much better chance to be productive than the retreads (Doug Davis, Ramon Ortiz, Rodrigo Lopez) that Jim Hendry signed last year.

I'm not sure I buy Sonnanstine as a big bounce-back candidate. He just doesn't seem to have the stuff to succeed against good hitters.

Also, wasn't Lopez a pretty decent placeholder last season? 97 2/3 innings with an 88 ERA+ seems fairly "productive" to me.

Also, wasn't Lopez a pretty decent placeholder last season? 97 2/3 innings with an 88 ERA+ seems fairly "productive" to me.

No, no, no -- that's disastrous... Rodrigo Lopez and his nearly 100 innings of only superficially cromulent baseball were in reality what kept the vaunted 2011 Cubs from besting the far inferior eventual WS champ Cardinals and division winning Brewers.

As has been pointed out by everyone, you can build like the Rays while still spending on the major league team.

Well, everyone except those who you have been arguing with.

The royal "everyone," you know the editorial...

#10 has made my day by using the term "superficially cromulent" in proper context. cromulent is such an awesome word that whatever chrome/windows spellchecker that perpetually hawks over my every typed utterance seems to think it isn't a real word. it suggests that i change it to "corpulent"

oh yeah, the topic.... as a kid who grew up in chicago with a cubs-fan family @ wrigley field and grew up to become a proud expos fan, alls i can say is that i thought theo was supposed to go trade blake dewitt for matt moore or something like that. the tribune put a giant ~2/3-3/4-page sized picture of theo on the front of the sports section and declared that chicago is "His type of town" so i'm expecting baseball jesus to floor us with the brilliance ASAP. the david dejesus epoch needs to be ushered in, dammit.

(i'd bet that sonnanstine has a ~4.50ish ERA when it's all said and done this year... preferably in long relief. at least there will be plenty of $5 lower-deck grandstand tickets this year!)

Well, if you aren't going to spend you might as well buy a bunch of lottery tickets with what little you do spend.

But I don't really understand some of these lottery ticket picks. If they turn out to go be good players they'll only have them for one year before they lose them and really do you want to spend big bucks on some guy that just put up a bounce back season? So then sombody will say they can trade them during the season to which I'll counter with it isn't 1992 anymore and these guys aren't going to fetch much. Perhaps someone is way more in love with C level prospects than me but I still don't think they'll ever get close to being of value to a major league club.

Sonnanstine should atill be arb-eligible in 2013, so he won't cost "big bucks".

For a guy in his final year of arb and having a history of putting up a sub 70 ERA+ whatever he gets is going to be "big bucks".