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April 6, 2021 This is Justin’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Justin has always been a baseball fan and a writer, but it wasn’t until Hyun Jin Ryu began dominating in 2019 that he started to fuse those interests together. He’s written for a few places since then, including Prospects365 and Dodgers Digest, and is now hoping to pester the good people of FanGraphs with his deep-dives into niche topics. Outside of the baseball blogosphere, he’s a student at Washington University in St. Louis. Jack Leiter has been outstanding. So far this college baseball season, the sophomore fro...

Yesterday, Michael highlighted five free agent starting pitchers Jordan Bastian had brought up as potential fits for the Cubs (given their self-created constraints). While we know the Cubs are unlikely to offer these five the highest dollar amount, you can bet part of the sales pitch is that a year with Tommy Hottovy, Craig Breslow, The Pitch Lab, and the rest of the Cubs pitching infrastructure team will help rehabilitate value for the next contract. I know in the past, the Cubs have gone to their free agent pitching targets with specific plans on how the organization would go about honing ...

We should know going in – it should be baked in as an assumption to this post! – that the odds of any Cubs big league Rule 5 selection sticking long-term in the organization is very unlikely. Rule 5 pick Gray Fenter probably ends up a trivia question answer and not a significant contributor, but what’s the fun in pointing out the realities? And, hey, the Cubs did pick him for a reason, right? I find it more fun to go through the process of attempting to reverse engineer the Cubs fascination with the Orioles prospect. What drew them to spend $100,000 to select him? Unfortunately, just th...

If there is one aspect of the Winter Meetings that isn’t hampered at all by the lack of actual meetings, it’s the Rule 5 Draft. Major League teams enter today with the knowledge of both whether or not they will make a pick, as well as who their selection would be. With a 40-man roster containing only 34 names, and a front office history of giving the Rule 5 the old college try, my bet is that we do see the Chicago Cubs make at least one selection today. Below this introduction, I’m live-blogging the draft as it rolls on.