Cubs sign George Kotarras and other notes

In Commentary And Analysis, News And Rumors by dmick89201 Comments

The Cubs have signed backup catcher George Kottaras.  George Kottaras settles with #cubs. $1.075M plus incentives. — Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) December 3, 2013 The Cubs acquired Kottaras the other day and Myles wrote about him shortly thereafter.  When you combine a poor batting average with an a noodle at backstop, you can make the case that Kottaras should linger in …

In What Passes as Breaking News, Cubs Have Acquired George Kottaras From Royals

In Commentary And Analysis by aisle42444 Comments

The Cubs have traded cash to the Kansas City Royals for George Kottaras per Jon Heyman: catcher George Kottaras has been traded to the #cubs — Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) November 26, 2013 Apparently, nothing is official and I'm not sure if all the media members tweeting about it are simply going off of Heyman's tweet or have their own independent …

If you had Luis Valbuena in the office pool, raise your hand

In Commentary And Analysis, Minor Leagues, News And Rumors by dmick8935 Comments

It’s June 19th and the Cubs are 69 games into their season. You and I probably picked Anthony Rizzo as the most productive position player on the team through this many games, assuming he remained healthy. I think most everybody would have taken Rizzo and almost no one would have taken Luis Valbuena. Well, Valbuena has had a surprisingly good …

Cubs catchers are terrible at defense

In Commentary And Analysis by dmick8937 Comments

I don't know if you've been paying attention or not, but if you have, you've noticed how terrible the two Cubs catchers are on defense. Dioner Navarro may be the worst defensive catcher I've ever seen. Welington Castillo isn't far behind. I was curious how many times per game these guys have screwed up. Wild pitches, passed balls and errors …

2013 PECOTA Projections

In Commentary And Analysis, Projections by dmick8972 Comments

The 2013 PECOTA projections are out and I thought I'd post some of the Cubs below. Since you have to be a subscriber in order to download the spreadsheet, I'm only going to include PA and wOBA, which I calculated using the basic formula. For pitchers I'll only show IP and FIP (I calculated this too). 2013 PECOTA Projections for …

How many games will the 2013 Cubs win?

In Commentary And Analysis by dmick8931 Comments

Over at The Cub Contrarian, Kyle used an estimated WAR for players to get a team win total. I thought I'd do the same thing, but I'm going to do it two ways: projections and my wild ass guesses. Wild Ass Guess Catchers: Welington Castillo (1.0), Dioner Navarro (negative infinity) I could easily see Castillo being a 2 WAR player, …