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[Matt Clapp] I was curious, so I checked… and not exactly surprised by the numbers.

  • December 8, 2022


[Matt Clapp] I was curious, so I checked… and not exactly surprised by the numbers.

8 comments

  1. Willson was always incredible with the highlight plays he was capable of. But yeah he honestly wasn’t a very good defensive catcher, and when it comes to catchers defense > offense

  2. It wouldn’t bother me so much if we had a plan after letting our best player go to a rival. He was our best player IMO. It’s embarrassing when ownership feels the need to leak rumors about them wanting to spend. Just do it. Sign a couple all stars and some proven MLB players. It’s always middle rotation guys and reclamation projects.

  5. What’s so interesting about this is guys who have their own game plan and don’t need a catcher to call pitches don’t really have issues (Lester, Stroman) and younger guys need someone more in tune with scouting reports and cold/hot zones of hitters.

    The outlier though is Hendricks. What the fuck is going on there?

  6. Clapp is a good follow. Nice guy and lots of good Cubs content.

    This is telling. Love Willson but it was right to move on. Just wish he wasn’t a Cardinal.

  7. There’s gotta be a reason our FO let an all star catcher go without putting up any type of fight. Our 2016 WS roster is history. This is part of it but there’s some underlying issue no one wants to bring up.

  8. [When you look at total splits by catcher last year](https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/split.cgi?t=p&team=CHC&year=2022) we see that there was a difference but not as pronounced as this:

    * Contreras: 3.96 ERA/.735 OPS/101 tOPS+

    * Gomes: 3.66 ERA/.710 OPS/93 tOPS+

    So enough to be noticeable but not enough to go in expecting the corpse of Yan Gomes and a stopgap like Christian Vazquez to be serviceable.

    They’ve kind of backed themselves into a corner here, either the pitching has to *markedly* improve to justify replacing our best batter with a black hole, or they have to shell out significant prospect capital for Sean Murphy or slightly less for Danny Jensen.

    The main issue is we just don’t have a replacement for Contreras. And if all we do is sign Swanson, it’s hard to think of 5 worse offenses in the league next year

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