Good morning and welcome to episode 383 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from baseball

prospectus. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindbergh. We continue our tour of the league. Today we're

going to be talking about the Cubs and we're blessed we get to have a discussion with both the

comments writer who is Ken Funk and who is here with us hello Ken. As well as Bruce Miles

who covers the Cubs for the daily herald and who wrote the essay and he will be talking to Nick

after we conclude with Ken. So Ken Ben was just saying before we came on that the Cubs are a team

that he has no interesting questions about. Is there something about this team that is

you really know how to sell selling episode to everyone listening? I just want everybody to be

aware when you're stammering that it is for lack of design. Is there is there anything about this

team that is going to be particularly interesting to watch in 2014 and I ask that because the

Cubs seem to be a team that unlike a lot of really bad teams you're not sort of watching and waiting

to see how they're going to dig themselves out of it. It seems almost inevitable that in 2016

or so maybe a year earlier maybe a year later they are going to be a fantastic team. This

this seems like a club that has all the pieces lined up to make you know to make a big run at some

point. They've got the front office they've got the young talent they've got the plan they're

doing smart things they've got the money and so really there's not even like this sort of

interesting like oh well you know what's the character of this team going to be like they're

just going to play out this season lose a bunch of games and then move on to the winning. So

if you're a Cubs fan what's fun about this year? Oh I don't know if fun's the right word but

there's definitely interesting things about the big league club this year as you say definitely

the future looks set at least with the lineup. One of the questions is going to be what other

Cubs going to do to get the pitching that they're going to need but when you look at the Cubs

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