#Rob Zastryzny

[baseballjerseynumbers]

Rob Zastryzny takes 58. Last assigned to Joel Kuhnel earlier this week. Last worn on the field by James Meeker earlier this season.

[toakatdot]

MetsJunkies Recap: Davis Struggles at Third as Mets fall to Astros

The Mets dropped to 3-3 on the Spring after the Mets lost to the Astros 2-1. The Mets pitching held up very well against a lineup that featured Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Yordan Alvarez and others. Unfortunately the defense wasn’t up to par and JD Davis struggled with 2 errors at third. The errors cost Megill two unearned runs in his solid outing. The righty went 3.2 innings, allowing 2…

[designondeck]

2017 SPIRIT BOX BREAK - PACK 1

165. Noah Syndergaard 82. Drew Pomeranz 131. Jake McGee 170. Alec Asher 35. Nate Karns 63. Rob Zastryzny (RC) 149. Logan Forsythe 188. Matt Wisler 295. Delino DeShields 57. Odubel Herrera (Gold Parallel) TL20. Evan Longoria - Team Leader (TBR Hits)

Since this is the first look at the base design, I’ll dissect it a little bit. As usual, each card is borderless with full-bleed photos and team-color design elements. The team logos are placed in a baseball diamond-like square and player names are in bold, white lettering for readability. Having the color fade behind the last name helps keep things from getting too boxy or claustrophobic. Along the right, next to the logo diamond is the player position as well as a repeating 2017 pattern fading towards the edges to help balance things out. 

There are a couple of elements that come and go depending on who’s card it is. For players that made the 2016 All-Star squads, they get an extra fade of color above the solid bar with their respective league honor listed. Pomeranz’s may look weird because he made the NL squad before being traded to the Red Sox. And for guys that made their MLB debut after the July 1, 2016 deadline, the RC logo makes an appearance (Zastryzny up there.) There’s at least one RC on average per pack.

Additionally, each pack contains a Gold Parallel card as well as an insert. You can see on the Odubel that the solid color portions of the regular base design get a gold foil stamping, along with the player name and position. The Pack 1 insert is a rather expansive insert set featuring the team leaders of each club in four different stat categories (2 pitching, 2 hitting.) So that 120 cards. Needless to say, these will be the most-featured insert of the box. Design-wise, I structured it so the bold type works kinda like a drop-down menu or something. The three categories not featured are screened back as to not impose too much on the player image. Since this is the “Hits” card, the HITS type and Longoria’s total are solid white along with his name, team, and the card title. You’ll see how the other stat cards look in subsequent packs.

Okay, that’s a lot of words. I promise the rest of the box won’t be as text-heavy. Expect the list of cards and then maybe a paragraph if a new insert is unveiled.

[thasportsjunkies101]

What Tyson Ross Would Mean For The Cubs

MLB Could Tyson Ross be the key to the Chicago Cubs success in 2017? After Jason Hammel departed this off-season, the Chicago Cubs are once again in the market for a starting pitcher. Tyson Ross is the pitcher that the Cubs are going after this off-season. Ross is a perfect fit for the Cubs; he is only 29 years old and would be cheap as he missed most of 2016 with a shoulder injury. With Ross…

[ravensale46-blog]

Did The Cubs Miss Their Chance To Be A Dynasty?

In addition to being one of the great sports stories of the 21st century — breaking a 108-year championship drought in extra innings of World Series Game 7 — the 2016 Chicago Cubs were legitimately one of the best baseball teams of all time. With a championship core of young talent that included Kris Bryant (age 24),1 Anthony Rizzo (26), Kyle Hendricks (26), Addison Russell (22), Javier Baez (23), Kyle Schwarber (23), Willson Contreras (24) and Jason Heyward (26), Chicago seemed poised to follow up that magical run by becoming a dynasty in the coming seasons.

That’s not quite how things have played out. The 2017 Cubs stumbled out of the gate and never quite clicked, eventually losing to the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The 2018 version squandered the five-game division lead they held over the Brewers on Sept. 1, lost the division tiebreaker in Game 163 of the regular season and then promptly lost the wild-card game against Colorado. And the Cubs’ grip on the Central figures to loosen even further this season. According to a preliminary version of our 2019 MLB Projections, we give Chicago only the third-best projected record (84 wins) in the division, with a mere 24 percent chance of winning it.

The NL Central has caught up with the Cubs

How our preliminary Elo ratings are forecasting the 2019 NL Central race

Avg. Simulated Season Chance to… Team Elo Rating Wins Losses Run Diff. Make Playoffs Win Division Win World Series Cardinals 1528 86 76 +42 45% 28% 4% Brewers 1525 85 77 +33 41 25 4 Cubs 1523 84 78 +31 40 24 4 Pirates 1502 79 83 -15 25 13 1 Reds 1497 77 85 -32 20 10 1

Based on 100,000 simulations of the 2019 MLB season.

Sources: Baseball prospectus, Fangraphs, Clay Davenport, Caesar’s Palace

How is it possible that the Cubs went from dynasty in the making in 2016 to a team struggling to stay atop its own division in less than three years? The answer lies in part with the team’s declining core and team president Theo Epstein’s inability to supplement it with effective reinforcements from the outside — particularly when it comes to pitching.

Few teams have ever undergone an overhaul as extreme as the Cubs did in the four years leading up to their championship season. Chicago improved from 16.6 wins above replacement2 during their dreadful 61-win 2012 to 56.8 WAR in 2016, with essentially all of those gains coming via newly acquired talent (rather than improvements from existing holdovers). As part of that process, Epstein made a number of shrewd trades, drafted several key contributors and increased Chicago’s payroll by 169 percent relative to the MLB average.

It all came together as a textbook example of tearing down and rebuilding a franchise. The 2016 Cubs had baseball’s third-most-valuable pitchers by WAR (including the No. 1 starting rotation) and the best defense by a country mile, on top of an offense that tied for the NL lead in adjusted on-base plus slugging percentage. The pitching side was expensive and creaky — one of the oldest ever to win a World Series, in fact — but Epstein and the Cubs seemed to be winning the battle of ideas about where to invest in order to build a ballclub with perennial championship aspirations.

Since 2016, though, the formula has broken down. The team’s net WAR on arrivals and departures — in which Chicago topped baseball from 2012 to 2016 — has dropped to eighth-worst in MLB. The Cubs haven’t added very many new faces, and what few acquisitions the team has made have largely flopped, particularly on the mound. Starters Tyler Chatwood, Jose Quintana and Yu Darvish all badly underperformed their established performance levels as members of the Cubs, for instance. As a result, Chicago has mainly had to rely on its existing core to keep the team in contention.

This makes some sense, to a certain extent. The natural maturation process of a championship team is to add talent in the lead-up to contention, then shift toward maintaining it once the roster finally reaches the top of the heap. But that hasn’t really happened, either. Not only have the new players underperformed, the team’s nexus of homegrown talent has, too. The Cubs’ holdovers are a net -14.8 WAR since 2016, which ranks fourth-worst in MLB. The multiyear plan to build a great core and then set it loose doesn’t work when that core regresses.

The rise and stall of the Cubs

Chicago Cubs’ net wins above replacement (WAR) added/subtracted by season from incoming/outgoing and existing players, 2013-18

Net WAR from… Season Previous WAR + Arrivals – Departures + Holdovers = Season WAR 2013 16.6 + 10.1 + 2.2 – 2.9 = 26.1 2014 26.1 + 7.8 – 6.1 + 2.2 = 30.0 2015 30.0 + 19.8 – 3.4 – 2.0 = 44.5 2016 44.5 + 10.8 + 0.5 + 1 = 56.8 2017 56.8 + 8.3 – 9.5 – 13.1 = 42.5 2018 42.5 + 7.5 – 6.2 – 1.8 = 42.1

Positive net WAR for departures means departing players cumulatively had negative WAR the previous year.

Sources: Baseball-Reference.com, FanGraphs

The 2018 Cubs shared some of the strengths of the 2016 club — both had top-5 defenses by WAR — but Chicago slipped to 14th in WAR from its starting rotation and was basically average offensively according to adjusted OPS. An injury to Bryant cost him 60 games, while Rizzo’s performance declined for reasons mostly unknown.

Bryzzo wasn’t alone in its combined downturn. Sixteen players appeared on the 2016, 2017 and 2018 Cubs. Some of them — such as Contreras, Baez and Schwarber — have flourished in expanded roles since 2016. But in more cases than not, this core group has produced less despite being asked to carry more of the load over time:3

The Cubs are relying on the same core … and getting less

For players who were on the 2016, 2017 and 2018 Chicago Cubs, share of team playing time logged* and wins above replacement (WAR) by season

Playing time WAR Player Pos 2016 2017 2018 2016 2017 2018 Anthony Rizzo 1B 6.6% 6.8% 6.4% 5.2 4.2 2.8 Kris Bryant 3B 6.8 6.5 4.4 7.6 6.4 2.1 Ben Zobrist 2B 6.2 4.8 5.0 3.8 0.4 3.4 Jon Lester P 5.7 5.1 4.9 4.9 2.0 2.4 Javier Baez IF 4.4 5.0 6.2 2.7 2.6 5.7 Jason Heyward RF 5.8 4.7 4.7 1.1 1.6 1.8 Kyle Hendricks P 5.3 4.0 5.4 4.8 2.8 3.0 Addison Russell SS 5.8 3.8 4.5 3.7 1.9 1.7 Willson Contreras C 2.8 4.2 5.2 1.9 3.6 2.7 Kyle Schwarber LF 0.0 4.8 4.9 -0.1 0.8 2.3 Albert Almora CF 1.1 3.2 4.6 0.6 1.1 1.4 Mike Montgomery P 1.0 3.8 3.1 0.2 1.9 1.2 Pedro Strop P 1.5 2.1 2.2 0.8 1.0 1.4 Carl Edwards Jr. P 1.1 2.4 1.8 0.4 1.2 1.2 Tommy La Stella IF 1.7 1.5 1.8 0.6 0.5 0.1 Rob Zastryzny P 0.5 0.3 0.2 0.5 -0.2 0.0 Total 56.3 63.0 65.3 38.7 31.8 33.2

* Through plate appearances or (leverage-adjusted) innings pitched.

Sources: Baseball-Reference.com, Fangraphs

It also bears mentioning that Epstein and the Cubs have been hamstrung in how much outside talent they can add by a massive payroll bill, which has affected the team’s depth all across the diamond. In terms of marginal payroll per WAR, Chicago went from being the second-most cost-effective playoff team of 2016 to the least cost-effective playoff team of 2018.

Trade pickup Cole Hamels was one of the few pitchers who didn’t underwhelm in Chicago (he was very good upon joining the Cubs at last year’s deadline). And in the field, rookie David Bote was a pleasant surprise last season. Both will be back for 2019, along with practically all the rest of the aforementioned core.4 The Cubs were briefly rumored to be in on the Bryce Harper derby, but for now Chicago’s biggest offseason acquisition is utilityman Daniel Descalso. And the lack of upgrades is part of the problem heading into 2019.

Although FanGraphs projects the Cubs to have a top-5 lineup, the site sees the pitching staff dropping outside MLB’s top 10 — and with an 88-win prediction for the Cubs, FanGraphs is one of the forecasters most bullish on Chicago’s chances. If the Brewers caught the Cubs on talent last season, the Cardinals might have passed them both by now. Meanwhile, manager Joe Maddon is in the final year of his contract, with no extension in place going forward. From team leadership to the core of the roster, many of the factors that played a key role in Chicago’s rise now look shockingly uncertain three years later.

The good news for Chicago, though, is that the potential still exists for an exciting summer at Wrigley Field. Even if 2016 was an outlier, a team as talented as the 2017 and 2018 Cubs — which was, after all, good enough for an average of 93.5 wins per season — remains a contender. It might not be the kind of dynasty that either Epstein or fans on the North Side had in mind when they were celebrating their curse-breaking World Series victory. But hey, at least it’s far better than all the bad Cub teams of the 1980s and ’90s that many of us grew up watching on WGN.

Jay Boice contributed research.

Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-the-cubs-miss-their-chance-to-be-a-dynasty/?yptr=yahoo?src=rss

[baseballjerseynumbers]

Spring Training:

Christian Arroyo assigned 25

Austin Nola assigned 36

Rob Zastryzny assigned 58

Yonny Hernández assigned 63

Brian Navarreto assigned 66

Enoli Paredes assigned 67

Jared Koenig assigned 72

Easton McGee assigned 73

Brewer Hicklen assigned 75

[toakatdot]

Mets Recap: deGrom was O. (5)K

The Mets beat the Astros 2-0 yesterday with Jacob deGrom getting his first Grapefruit League Action. deGrom went 2 innings, allowing one hit with 5 strikeouts. deGrom looked free and easy, hitting 99mph on his fastball. Jake threw mostly fastball and sliders, but ended his outing with his only change up for the K. He threw 30 pitches and is expected to throw around 45 next…

[awaygamespodcast]

#117 Rob Zastryzny talks 2016 Championship, Parade, Fun Rookie Hazing & More!

Rob Zastryzny comes on to talk about the 2016 World Series Champion Chicago Cubs, making his MLB debut on the league’s best team, fun rookie hazing (involves singing, and a bus bathroom), the world’s biggest victory parade, and the most famous rain delay speech in history. This is really a can’t-miss talk with Rob, who’s now with the Orioles.

Follow us!

Instagram & Twitter: @awaygamespod

Follow Rob! Insta: @robzastryzny Twitter: @robzastryzny_8

New Episode of Away Games: A Chicago Cubs Podcast

[dizzedcom]

Tim Kurkjian's baseball fix: Can you please spell 'Zastryzny' again, please?

Tim Kurkjian’s baseball fix: Can you please spell ‘Zastryzny’ again, please?

All his life, Rob Zastryzny has had to listen to and watch people butcher his name. From lineup cards to public address announcers … what a mess.

[browanger55-blog]

Getting Off to a Good Start, Hoyer Speaks, Happ Goes Deep, and Other Bullets

OK, Brett. You can do this. Get through the Bullets like every other day. The HYPE HYPE HYPE can be reserved for other places. Go …

Cubs GM Jed Hoyer sat down with Jon Greenberg for a long, two-part interview, which you can and should read here and here. There’s simply too much good and interesting stuff to fairly delve into here, so I strongly recommend you just read them.

I do want to touch on one thing that Hoyer admitted that really stuck out to me here on Opening Day. After talking about how the losses late last year were probably the best outcome for the Cubs if they weren’t going to win the World Series, Hoyer conceded that getting out to a hot start this year is probably more important than most: “It’s important we get off to a good start. I’ll say that. There are seasons where I feel like OK, let’s get into the season and see how things go. Sort of get conditioned to the season and then you take off. I feel like this is a year that I’ll be disappointed if we don’t kind of hit the ground running. I think it’s important for this division and I think it’s important for the psyche of this group after last season. Getting off to a good start is something that I think is really important.”

We’ve seen that the past couple years, since the insanely hot start in 2016, where it felt like the Cubs were resting on their talent, knowing the wins would eventually come (and, to their credit, they did). But that missing sense of urgency might have cost them an early-season win or two, which is obviously something the front office has worked tirelessly this offseason internally to try to avoid this year. Given the very, very competitive division this year, every win is going to project to be critical.

It’s also pretty critical that the Cubs get off to a hot start this year because the early part of their schedule features a whole lot of winnable out-of-division match-ups: Rangers, Marlins (twice), Diamondbacks (twice), and Mariners, all before May 2. You’ve just gotta crush those games.

Ian Happ has started doing the minor league thing again, and he wrecked one:

I hope Happ makes the adjustments he needs to, improves on his contact ability, and is back contributing to the Cubs by May.

Speaking of working on contact up in the zone, David Bote’s issues there last year were REALLY pronounced, and he has worked to alleviate that.

What a freaking bummer: the news originally reported by Cubs Insider is confirmed, and 37-year-old Cubs pitching prospect Luke Hagerty’s season is over. Elbow surgery. The incredible comeback story just got a really long new chapter, I suppose.

This is very awesome and important:

Now former Cubs pitching prospect Rob Zastryzny penned a farewell:

Source: https://www.bleachernation.com/2019/03/28/getting-off-to-a-good-start-hoyer-speaks-happ-goes-deep-and-other-bullets/

[jodyedgarus]

Did The Cubs Miss Their Chance To Be A Dynasty?

In addition to being one of the great sports stories of the 21st century — breaking a 108-year championship drought in extra innings of World Series Game 7 — the 2016 Chicago Cubs were legitimately one of the best baseball teams of all time. With a championship core of young talent that included Kris Bryant (age 24),1 Anthony Rizzo (26), Kyle Hendricks (26), Addison Russell (22), Javier Baez (23), Kyle Schwarber (23), Willson Contreras (24) and Jason Heyward (26), Chicago seemed poised to follow up that magical run by becoming a dynasty in the coming seasons.

That’s not quite how things have played out. The 2017 Cubs stumbled out of the gate and never quite clicked, eventually losing to the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The 2018 version squandered the five-game division lead they held over the Brewers on Sept. 1, lost the division tiebreaker in Game 163 of the regular season and then promptly lost the wild-card game against Colorado. And the Cubs’ grip on the Central figures to loosen even further this season. According to a preliminary version of our 2019 MLB Projections, we give Chicago only the third-best projected record (84 wins) in the division, with a mere 24 percent chance of winning it.

The NL Central has caught up with the Cubs

How our preliminary Elo ratings are forecasting the 2019 NL Central race

Avg. Simulated Season Chance to… Team Elo Rating Wins Losses Run Diff. Make Playoffs Win Division Win World Series Cardinals 1528 86 76 +42 45% 28% 4% Brewers 1525 85 77 +33 41 25 4 Cubs 1523 84 78 +31 40 24 4 Pirates 1502 79 83 -15 25 13 1 Reds 1497 77 85 -32 20 10 1

Based on 100,000 simulations of the 2019 MLB season.

Sources: Baseball prospectus, Fangraphs, Clay Davenport, Caesar’s Palace

How is it possible that the Cubs went from dynasty in the making in 2016 to a team struggling to stay atop its own division in less than three years? The answer lies in part with the team’s declining core and team president Theo Epstein’s inability to supplement it with effective reinforcements from the outside — particularly when it comes to pitching.

Few teams have ever undergone an overhaul as extreme as the Cubs did in the four years leading up to their championship season. Chicago improved from 16.6 wins above replacement2 during their dreadful 61-win 2012 to 56.8 WAR in 2016, with essentially all of those gains coming via newly acquired talent (rather than improvements from existing holdovers). As part of that process, Epstein made a number of shrewd trades, drafted several key contributors and increased Chicago’s payroll by 169 percent relative to the MLB average.

It all came together as a textbook example of tearing down and rebuilding a franchise. The 2016 Cubs had baseball’s third-most-valuable pitchers by WAR (including the No. 1 starting rotation) and the best defense by a country mile, on top of an offense that tied for the NL lead in adjusted on-base plus slugging percentage. The pitching side was expensive and creaky — one of the oldest ever to win a World Series, in fact — but Epstein and the Cubs seemed to be winning the battle of ideas about where to invest in order to build a ballclub with perennial championship aspirations.

Since 2016, though, the formula has broken down. The team’s net WAR on arrivals and departures — in which Chicago topped baseball from 2012 to 2016 — has dropped to eighth-worst in MLB. The Cubs haven’t added very many new faces, and what few acquisitions the team has made have largely flopped, particularly on the mound. Starters Tyler Chatwood, Jose Quintana and Yu Darvish all badly underperformed their established performance levels as members of the Cubs, for instance. As a result, Chicago has mainly had to rely on its existing core to keep the team in contention.

This makes some sense, to a certain extent. The natural maturation process of a championship team is to add talent in the lead-up to contention, then shift toward maintaining it once the roster finally reaches the top of the heap. But that hasn’t really happened, either. Not only have the new players underperformed, the team’s nexus of homegrown talent has, too. The Cubs’ holdovers are a net -14.8 WAR since 2016, which ranks fourth-worst in MLB. The multiyear plan to build a great core and then set it loose doesn’t work when that core regresses.

The rise and stall of the Cubs

Chicago Cubs’ net wins above replacement (WAR) added/subtracted by season from incoming/outgoing and existing players, 2013-18

Net WAR from… Season Previous WAR + Arrivals – Departures + Holdovers = Season WAR 2013 16.6 + 10.1 + 2.2 – 2.9 = 26.1 2014 26.1 + 7.8 – 6.1 + 2.2 = 30.0 2015 30.0 + 19.8 – 3.4 – 2.0 = 44.5 2016 44.5 + 10.8 + 0.5 + 1 = 56.8 2017 56.8 + 8.3 – 9.5 – 13.1 = 42.5 2018 42.5 + 7.5 – 6.2 – 1.8 = 42.1

Positive net WAR for departures means departing players cumulatively had negative WAR the previous year.

Sources: Baseball-Reference.com, FanGraphs

The 2018 Cubs shared some of the strengths of the 2016 club — both had top-5 defenses by WAR — but Chicago slipped to 14th in WAR from its starting rotation and was basically average offensively according to adjusted OPS. An injury to Bryant cost him 60 games, while Rizzo’s performance declined for reasons mostly unknown.

Bryzzo wasn’t alone in its combined downturn. Sixteen players appeared on the 2016, 2017 and 2018 Cubs. Some of them — such as Contreras, Baez and Schwarber — have flourished in expanded roles since 2016. But in more cases than not, this core group has produced less despite being asked to carry more of the load over time:3

The Cubs are relying on the same core … and getting less

For players who were on the 2016, 2017 and 2018 Chicago Cubs, share of team playing time logged* and wins above replacement (WAR) by season

Playing time WAR Player Pos 2016 2017 2018 2016 2017 2018 Anthony Rizzo 1B 6.6% 6.8% 6.4% 5.2 4.2 2.8 Kris Bryant 3B 6.8 6.5 4.4 7.6 6.4 2.1 Ben Zobrist 2B 6.2 4.8 5.0 3.8 0.4 3.4 Jon Lester P 5.7 5.1 4.9 4.9 2.0 2.4 Javier Baez IF 4.4 5.0 6.2 2.7 2.6 5.7 Jason Heyward RF 5.8 4.7 4.7 1.1 1.6 1.8 Kyle Hendricks P 5.3 4.0 5.4 4.8 2.8 3.0 Addison Russell SS 5.8 3.8 4.5 3.7 1.9 1.7 Willson Contreras C 2.8 4.2 5.2 1.9 3.6 2.7 Kyle Schwarber LF 0.0 4.8 4.9 -0.1 0.8 2.3 Albert Almora CF 1.1 3.2 4.6 0.6 1.1 1.4 Mike Montgomery P 1.0 3.8 3.1 0.2 1.9 1.2 Pedro Strop P 1.5 2.1 2.2 0.8 1.0 1.4 Carl Edwards Jr. P 1.1 2.4 1.8 0.4 1.2 1.2 Tommy La Stella IF 1.7 1.5 1.8 0.6 0.5 0.1 Rob Zastryzny P 0.5 0.3 0.2 0.5 -0.2 0.0 Total 56.3 63.0 65.3 38.7 31.8 33.2

* Through plate appearances or (leverage-adjusted) innings pitched.

Sources: Baseball-Reference.com, Fangraphs

It also bears mentioning that Epstein and the Cubs have been hamstrung in how much outside talent they can add by a massive payroll bill, which has affected the team’s depth all across the diamond. In terms of marginal payroll per WAR, Chicago went from being the second-most cost-effective playoff team of 2016 to the least cost-effective playoff team of 2018.

Trade pickup Cole Hamels was one of the few pitchers who didn’t underwhelm in Chicago (he was very good upon joining the Cubs at last year’s deadline). And in the field, rookie David Bote was a pleasant surprise last season. Both will be back for 2019, along with practically all the rest of the aforementioned core.4 The Cubs were briefly rumored to be in on the Bryce Harper derby, but for now Chicago’s biggest offseason acquisition is utilityman Daniel Descalso. And the lack of upgrades is part of the problem heading into 2019.

Although FanGraphs projects the Cubs to have a top-5 lineup, the site sees the pitching staff dropping outside MLB’s top 10 — and with an 88-win prediction for the Cubs, FanGraphs is one of the forecasters most bullish on Chicago’s chances. If the Brewers caught the Cubs on talent last season, the Cardinals might have passed them both by now. Meanwhile, manager Joe Maddon is in the final year of his contract, with no extension in place going forward. From team leadership to the core of the roster, many of the factors that played a key role in Chicago’s rise now look shockingly uncertain three years later.

The good news for Chicago, though, is that the potential still exists for an exciting summer at Wrigley Field. Even if 2016 was an outlier, a team as talented as the 2017 and 2018 Cubs — which was, after all, good enough for an average of 93.5 wins per season — remains a contender. It might not be the kind of dynasty that either Epstein or fans on the North Side had in mind when they were celebrating their curse-breaking World Series victory. But hey, at least it’s far better than all the bad Cub teams of the 1980s and ’90s that many of us grew up watching on WGN.

Jay Boice contributed research.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-the-cubs-miss-their-chance-to-be-a-dynasty/

[bestsportswensites-blog]

Cachorros De Designar Lucas Farrell, Rob Zastryzny

http://dlvr.it/Qhpxbh

[baseballjerseynumbers]

Dauri Moreta takes 36. Last worn by Nick Mears in 2022.

Jason Delay switches from 61 to 55. Last worn by Roberto Pérez in 2022.

Jose Hernandez takes 61. Last worn by Jason Delay in 2022. 

Rob Zastryzny takes 62. Last worn by Johan Oviedo in 2022.

[goalhofer]

2023 World Baseball Classic Canada Roster

Pitchers

#6 Matt Brash (Seattle Mariners/Kingston, Ontario)

#20 Adam Loewen (free agent/Surrey, British Columbia)

#24 R.J. Freure (Lincoln Saltdogs/Burlington, Ontario)

#25 Noah Skirrow (Lehigh Valley IronPigs/Hamilton, Ontario)

#28 Mitch Bratt (Down East Wood Ducks/Newmarket, Ontario)

#30 Cade Smith (Cleveland Guardians/Abbotsford, British Columbia)

#32 Evan Rutckyj (Niigata Albirex/Windsor, Ontario)

#38 Philippe Aumont (free agent/Gatineau, Quebec)

#39 Trevor Brigden (Tampa Bay Rays/Toronto, Ontario)

#40 Rob Zastryzny (Indianapolis Indians/Corpus Christi, Texas)

#47 Cal Quantrill (Cleveland Guardians/Port Hope, Ontario)

#48 Scott Mathieson (free agent/Vancouver, British Columbia)

#52 Indigo Diaz (New York Yankees/North Vancouver, British Columbia)

#56 Curtis Taylor (Iowa Cubs/Coquitlam, British Columbia)

#63 Andrew Albers (free agent/North Battleford, Saskatchewan)

#77 John Axford (free agent/Norfolk County, Ontario)

Catchers

#14 Kellin Deglan (free agent/Langley, British Columbia)

#44 Noah Naylor (Cleveland Guardians/Mississauga, Ontario)

Infielders

#5 Freddie Freeman (Los Angeles Dodgers/Fountain Valley, California)

#13 Abraham Toro (Milwaukee Brewers/Longueuil, Quebec)

#15 Edouard Julien (Wichita Wind Surge/Quebec, Quebec)

#18 Damiano Palmegiani (Vancouver Canadians/Surrey, British Columbia)

#51 Otto Lopez (Toronto Blue Jays/Montreal, Quebec)

#74 Jared Young (Iowa Cubs/Prince George, British Columbia)

Outfielders

#7 Dasan Brown (Vancouver Canadians/Oakville, Ontario)

#8 Jacob Robson (Kansas City Monarchs/Windsor, Ontario)

#21 Owen Caissie (Myrtle Beach Pelicans/Burlington, Ontario)

#23 Denzel Clarke (Lansing Lugnuts/Toronto, Ontario)

#27 Tyler O’Neill (St. Louis Cardinals/Maple Ridge, British Columbia)

Coaches

Manager Leo Whitt (Canada Baseball/Detroit, Michigan)

Pitching coach Denis Boucher (Canada Baseball/Montreal, Quebec)

Bullpen coach Paul Quantrill (Canada Baseball/London, Ontario)

Assistant bullpen coach Jordan Procyshen (Canada Baseball/Calgary, Alberta)

1B coach Larry Walker; Jr. (Canada Baseball/Maple Ridge, British Columbia)

3B coach Tim Leiper (Canada Baseball/Whittier, California)

Assistant coach Greg Hamilton (Canada Baseball/Toronto, Ontario)