Welcome to the Cubs, Dansby Swanson

In Better Know a Cub by Rice Cube76 Comments

Yeah this is pretty officially official now:

And also out on the Wrigley Field marquee:

While the Cubs couldn’t swoop in and sign Carlos Correa too because Steve Cohen is a rich crazy bastard, this roster has a chance to be more respectable than the last one we were led to believe would also be respectable (spoiler: it was not, but at least they finished the season in a more entertaining fashion). There needs to be more additions, but the Cubs at least have changed the narrative somewhat to broadcast that they have money to spend and that they intend to compete in one of the worst divisions in baseball, as they well should. Now we wait for spring training and Opening Day to see what this team ends up doing and whether there will be motivation to add at the trade deadline for a change. Taking a wait and see approach.

Cover image thanks to Marquee Sports Network.

UPDATE: The Marquee folks have a bunch of these snippets up and I’m sure there will be a video soon, here’s Dansby on being able to work in the same town as the wife:

UPDATE AGAIN: Oh hai video

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  1. berselius

    I miss our old “Welcome, who the fuck are you” banner we had for new signing posts here (dying laughing). Or maybe that was ACB. I went looking for it recently (in the OV sense) and couldn’t find it.

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  2. Author
    Rice Cube

    They already did the conference and everything so Jon Heyman can’t hurt us anymore, but numbers are good

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  3. andcounting

    He did tell a cool story about his grandpa, who died the day after Dansby’s wedding, loving the Cubs because of WGN. That was pretty cool.

    Crane Kenney later told reporters if it were up to him no child outside of the greater Chicago metropolitan area would ever be able to tell such a story again.

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  4. andcounting

    Rice Cube,

    I don’t think, barring an injury or other physical development keeping Correa from playing this season, there’s any way the Giants emerge unscathed from this one. They just look so stupid. They look like they bid $350 million on a yacht but had to back out because they didn’t think they’d win the auction.

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  5. andcounting

    I mean, if you’re a free agent right now, are you returning calls from the Giants? Granted, there’s nothing they can say about what gave them pause, but they’ve let the most media-savvy agent in the sport craft the narrative without any interference. And the story he’s telling matches what we all watched: total silence from the Giants from the cancellation of the press conference on. How embarrassing.

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  6. BVS

    Rice Cube,

    As a regular MiLB attendee, I’m 100% behind the pitch clock. It’s a vast improvement not just for time of game, but for pace and action.

    Might have even made Steve Trachsel watchable.

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  7. Author
    Rice Cube

    BVS,

    I suppose my follow up question is whether you noticed any apprehension on the part of the batter since, relatively speaking, every pitch is now a quick pitch? Or since they’re brought up on this pitch clock early anyway, they’re used to it and it doesn’t matter?

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  8. BVS

    I noticed a lot less preening from batters.

    Their pads magically stayed tight enough between pitches.

    None of the pitchers had issues that I saw. But it was all low A. However, I announce HS bball without a pitch clock, and MiLB pitchers work faster than some HS pitchers. I think the conditioning thing that Suter talked about in the link is legit.

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  9. Author
    Rice Cube

    Aaaaaaand just saving this for myself so I don’t forget once we get this one done before the holidays…

    IIRC whatever podcast plugin we have on wordpress did the heavy lifting.I think all I had to do to get the first of the new podcasts to show up was

    1. Mark it as a ‘podcast’ category in the post
    2. Upload the mp3 of the podcast to our media library
    3. Add that mp3 file to the post content body (I think I just dragged it in or something?)

    Then apple podcasts picked it up.

    It looks like Rice’s PodBean embedder code does not get picked up by apple – I think that wordpress needs to know where it is and be the one that hosts it to appear in the RSS. I tried doing this after the fact with the last podcast and the feed didn’t catch it – I think it must get triggered with a new post.

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  10. Author
    Rice Cube

    BVS,

    I imagine if they now have the advance warning and they have all of spring training to work out the kinks, that should alleviate some of the issues and growing pains, so to speak.

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  11. berselius

    This was good ($)

    https://theathletic.com/4024383/2022/12/21/giants-carlos-correa-disaster/

    The Giants needed to buy goodwill with fans this offseason. They poured gas on whatever goodwill was left and set it on fire.

    The Giants had a clear goal this offseason, and they managed to do the exact opposite. Even worse, they somehow managed to claw through the floor of the worst-case scenario and head straight for the molten core of an existential crisis for the entire fanbase. Somehow, the Giants managed to exceed the expectations of the most cynical Giants fan alive. It’s almost impressive.

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  12. Author
    Rice Cube

    andcounting,

    In all seriousness a subscription based model is what newspapers used to rely on and if one is to have a media not completely beholden to corporate overlords, they do need some support (dying laughing)

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  13. andcounting

    Rice Cube,

    The Athletic is owned by the New York Times. It was founded with the unmasked intent to put local papers and their sports pages out of business.

    “We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” Alex Mather, a co-founder of The Athletic, said in an interview in San Francisco. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

    The sportswriting is good. You might be confusing that with the company being a good business or its writers depending on your subscription money.

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  14. andcounting

    Rice Cube,

    It’s very disorienting. It really is a great source of journalism. I very recently let my subscription expire. It’s no moral objection I’m just broke. (dying laughing)

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  15. BVS

    Rice Cube: back up Rutschman, I guess?

    Only had one C on the 40man, so yes, I guess.

    Honestly I’d have taken McCann as a backup or timeshare with Gomes for $5M, especially since I’d only be sending a PTBNL to the Mets.

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  16. BVS

    andcounting,

    I didn’t know that history from the Athletic either. But if their goal is to kill local sportswriting, they have a ways to go. They don’t cover Coastal Carolina worth squat, and that’s our local team. So is the Pelicans and the Athletic doesn’t cover MiLB. Plus SC is crazy about HS sports and that isn’t covered, but the local paper covers it almost more than other news.

    Sure, the local paper has little coverage on Clemson or USC or the Carolina Panthers and whatever NBA team is in Charlotte, but you can get that online lots of places. I think most rabid CU Tiger fans follow blogs.

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  17. andcounting

    Yeah, I think it was a bit of bravado to think they would really do it. Mainly I think they just poached a lot of good talent from a lot of major markets. It’s almost like the road to the good place was paved with bad intentions. (dying laughing)

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  18. berselius

    andcounting,

    The quote above is barf, but hard to quantify how much is poaching. IIRC a lot of folks were laid off before the athletic hired them, including Robothal. ESPN at least is much more video focused than it used to be, and it’s not like people went to Fox Sports to read anything. To me it felt like TA was moving in to fill a niche that most of the other media companies didn’t seem to value that much anymore, and has been a lifeline for a lot of reporters.

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  19. berselius

    Getting bought by NYT was great for them but I’m still not sure of the long term viability. It’s not like I can open their books but it sure feels like they’re doing the usual SV model of operating at a gigantic loss for a few years and hoping they grab enough audience share that they can squeeze later. I’m still not convinced of its long term viability at the scale they are operating at even with the much larger NYT as a buffer. I’d be happy to be wrong though!

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  20. andcounting

    berselius,

    Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply poaching writers was the sole recruitment tactic, just that it was the closest thing to “bleeding local papers dry” that happened.

    Overall I think it’s a great product in a sports journalism world that largely pivoted to video and hasn’t looked back. I don’t think they’re the worst people in the world, and a subscription with them is a fair exchange. I just don’t ever look at them as someone I would or should support and won’t ever lose a blink of sleep over reading the occasional article for free.

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  21. andcounting

    Rice Cube,

    I get that, but if this person identifies as a collusion denier, why would they, even anonymously, say any of the rest of that? I have severe abdominal laughing cramps. That’s like saying, “There’s no climate change, but there’s a reason the polar ice caps are melting.” Or, “No, we didn’t have an affair, but there’s a reason she’s pregnant.”

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  22. berselius

    andcounting,

    I’m probably their dream subscriber – I signed on way back in the day as a show of support for Sahadev and have mostly kept it up, but barely read anything and only really consume their free podcasts (dying laughing)

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  23. andcounting

    Like, if it were a person who was disgusted with the whole thing I would understand. It’s the “there’s no collusion” part that is throwing me because it doesn’t sound like intentional irony, you know? This sounds like someone who is simultaneously licking the owners’ boots and unintentionally stabbing them in the back with a quote that could end up doing more damage to them than he foresees being done to Cohen. It’s wild.

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  24. BVS

    The nice things about the Athletic picking up Sahadev is that it kept his voice in the game. Bruce Miles retired. Rick Morrisey was still blathering on. Meanwhile, the Tribune continued to employ whatever hack they had, who we complained about re MB21, Jacque Jones, etc.

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  25. Author
    Rice Cube

    BVS,

    I think it was Meghan Montemurro for a bit before she moved on and now it’s Maddie Lee, I can’t read because most of the time it’s behind a paywall but I don’t see nearly as much complaining about them as I think they both do a fine job

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