Kris Bryant and the Cubs

I have been a Cubs fan for a long time.  And this year it looks like the Cubs are going to be a fun team to watch.  A new manager, good young players, and John Lester.  I'm still waiting for the Cubs to make it to the playoffs.  This year it looks possible and it actually might happen.

From Yahoo Sports I read the following regarding Kris Bryant.

Baseball’s service-time rules dictate this conversation. They are stupid, worthy of the finest minds in the sport getting together before the next collective-bargaining agreement and figuring out how to allow teams to break camp with their finest 25 players and without being penalized for it. They are the rules, though, and they are rather simple: While there are 183 days in a baseball season, a player accumulates one year of service time with 172 days on the major league roster. A player with six full seasons in the big leagues earns free agency. Thus, by waiting just 12 days to promote Bryant, the Cubs will delay his free agency by an entire season.

Over the first 12 days of the season, the Cubs play nine games. Surely over those nine games Bryant could hit a half-dozen home runs; the prospect of him swinging for the middle three at Coors Field is indeed tantalizing. He also could hit none. That is the problem with parsing an issue like this. Only a soothsayer knows, and those in the baseball industry are just guessing.

They’re educated guesses, though, and those educated guesses demand data points. Projection systems exist all across baseball, and most of them peg Bryant for around three wins above replacement this season. WAR may be a flawed metric, but it’s reasonable enough to use here. The highest project comes from Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS, which calls Bryant a 4.2-win player. Nine games over a 162-game season equals 0.2 wins. While no player distributes his production evenly, it’s the fairest way to look at it without knowing whether Bryant would go off or struggle over those three series.

This is why Theo Epstein was hired I guess.  In the long run I guess he will be worth more than the 12 game short run. Business is business. If this guy pans out he will make Giancarlo Stanton's contract look like a bargain, especially if the Cubs can win a World Series or two in the process.