Welcome to Rates and Beryls presented by Tops Checkout Tops Project 70 70 celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards.

Derek Van Riper, Inoceris, here with you. It is Wednesday, September 29th. Today, we say goodbye to our pleasant surprises series.

It is part four of an ongoing series we've been doing since last week, going team by team, digging into some of the more

pleasant surprises from this season and trying to make our first attempt to find some pleasant

surprises for the future.

So we are going to dig into the remaining teams in the NL Central and the entire NL East

over the course of this episode.

We knocked out the Pirates in our last episode, Part 3.

So we begin one spot above them with the Cubs.

And I didn't think they'd be quite this bad,

even if they moved on from most of that core that led them to the World Series.

And I keep looking at this team and wondering, what are they really going to do in the

offseason?

Because when you boil it down, the Cubs, most pleasant surprises are guys like Frank Schwendell

and Patrick Wisdom.

We talked about our preferences between those two, which profile we'd bet on in the

future in a previous episode,

because of the K rate, it's Schwindel. But then there's also like Rafael Ortega. And is this,

is this a team that's going to be actually aggressive with the second tier free agents and trying to

patch together something that is at least somewhat competitive going into 2022,

or is this Cubs roster going to be a land of opportunity where it's guys like those three

and maybe a few other minor league free agents and pillow contract guys all trying to carve out

...