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Monday, March 27, 2023
Second baseman Nico Hoerner and the Chicago Cubs are in agreement on a three-year, $35 million contract extension, sources told ESPN, locking up the team’s most productive player last season for an extra season before he was due to hit free agency.
Hoerner still will reach the open market after the 2026 season at 29 years old, and the ability to do so led to a shorter-term deal. With Hoerner making $2.5 million this season, his first year of arbitration, the deal will price the second and third arbitration years at around $15 million while giving him around $20 million for his first free agent year.
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1. Walt Davis Posted: March 27, 2023 at 10:18 PM (#6121545)Hoerner might be the most boring young NL player.
high floor, so-so ceiling.
I'd be surprised if this winds up as a disaster either way.
They want Morel playing every day. They must think he can improve his strike zone recognition with some work. He can do that in Des Moines. I don't know if they're right, but....
Hosmer is just a place-holder until they feel Mervis is ready. Perhaps this will change as I watch him every day and grow frustrated, but I am giving just about no thought at all to Hosmer and his role on the team.
Anthony22, you have somehow confused Eric Hosmer with Dan Vogelbach.
On Morel, mainly the Cubs seem to have painted themselves into an options corner with too many mediocre players they are still sifting through and not enough roster space. If I read it correctly, Mancini is slated for RF until Suzuki is back which might just be a week or two (he's ahead of schedule). Rios and Hosmer might be the 1B platoon except I think Rios might be the starting DH at the moment. All of this to hold onto Madrigal and Mastrobuoni (and Hosmer and Rios and ...) while ditching McKinstry. Also I think Suzuki gets officially DL'd soon which will open a spot for a bit, that might well be Morel since the Cubs seem to have only 3 OF on the 26-man right now.
I haven't paid much attention to the spring but it's bad enough that, despite Suzuki's injury, Brennen Davis couldn't make the team. Cubs are also apparently looking at a Happ extension which would be another obstacle for Davis.
Hard to have much confidence in Hoerner breaking out at the plate much beyond what he did last year - even 10 HR from him was a nice surprise, since he only had 11 in his previous MLB, MiLB, and college careers combined before that. He posted 4.4 bWAR last year, but that number figures to drop if he's playing 2B instead of SS, even if he matches his production on offense.
Which means we're looking at basically ... what, a 3.5-ish WAR guy at 2B? I guess Zobrist was an All-Star and World Series MVP doing that. And if we're being honest, he's a fair-to-decent bet to outperform Swanson, who's making many times the salary.
So, fine.
Offensively, he's the very boring version of Trea Turner -- less BA, half the power, half the speed. OK that's not even worth putting in the same sentence as Trea Turner but a boy can dream. More appropriate -- Nico is better younger but we seem to be looking at the next Mark Ellis which, since I'm not sure many remember the first Mark Ellis, tells you what you need to know about Nico. Or for the older Cub fan, a slightly better hitting version of Manny Trillo (whose TZ numbers don't live up to the rep).
this seems a really unfair thing to say or maybe I dont understand what you're getting at. He had a 5 WAR season last year and almost that much the year before if we extrapolate. And he's only 25 so what's his ceiling 6 WAR perhaps? there's only about 20 players in the league on that level so I think his ceiling is quite high.
Im not sure how hard we can be on Trillo or if indeed you are being hard on Trillo.
If we look at his 4 best seasons from age 27-30 he's averaging about 7 def runs per TZ. BUt he's also missing about 25% of the games so even by that metric he projects to be very good if he was a bit more healthy. And looking at his raw stats, his range always seems very good. And he has a lot of baserunner kills at this period probably about 11-12/season if he played the full season. That seems a good bit above average. TZ doesnt like his DP ability or at least makes him no better than average. He makes very few throwing errors (1/year) most of his errors seem to be on gb and catches which you would think would already be accounted for by his very good range.
TZ has a known bias to minimize both the very good and very bad through its methodology. I can see it being too hard on Trillo at least in his hey day. Perhaps more like a +15 defender for a whole season. I remember him at this time and my memory is that he had a very good reputation although I didnt really follow the Cubs. The rest of his career was pretty meh even though he hung on a long time.
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