It’s another week here at BCB After Dark: the grooviest gathering of night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and sit with us for a while. You’re always welcome here. The show will start shortly. The hostess will seat you now. There’s no cover charge, but there is a two-drink minimum. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you if you thought it was a good idea for managers (or coaches) to have access to PitchCom to facilitate calling pitches from the dugout. It seems most of you were either against the idea or didn’t have an opinion, as 46 percent said you were against it and 18 percent didn’t have an opinion. The other 36 percent thought it would be fine.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. But you’re free to skip ahead if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.
Here’s some (rare?) video of saxophonist Hank Mobley on Danish television in 1968. Joining Mobley is an all-star backing group of Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (NHØP) on bass and Albert “Tootie” Heath.
You voted in the BCB Winter Science Fiction Classic final between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terminator 2: Judgment Day and 2001: A Space Odyssey is your champion! That’s not a real surprise. It was the number-one seed coming into the tournament and it’s certainly the most-acclaimed science fiction film of all-time, coming in as the number-six film of all-time (in any genre) in the most-recent BFI Sight & Sound critics poll. The film does have its critics—Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky (of Solaris and Stalker fame) in particular didn’t like it—but most critics and scholars see it as a film that changed the way we think about what a film can be.
As I said in my original essay on the film, 2001 is the first film to really capture the sheer awe of outer space and maybe no film since then has even approached it. It’s also a film that leaves you with a lot of questions at the end, even if director Stanley Kubrick was more than happy to explain it when asked. It came out at a time when the “New Hollywood” movement, freed from the restrictions of the Production Code, really pushed the boundaries of what film could be. And luckily, there was an audience for this kind of new expression in 1968.
So here’s the final bracket with everything filled in.
Running the Science Fiction tournament was more difficult than our previous tournaments. For one, I was willing to cover the entire 20th Century this time, whereas the Film Noir was limited to 1941 to 1959, the Western tournament was limited from 1939 to 1972 and the Hitchcock one was limited to Hitchcock’s career which went from the 1920s to 1976. Secondly, there are always some disagreements about what counts as science fiction. Genres are always difficult to nail down, but science fiction is a really broad category that has changed a lot from 1902’s A Trip to the Moon to 1999’s The Matrix. Thank goodness I didn’t include 21st Century films in the tournament or I would have gone nuts trying to figure out what counted.
I just want to thank everyone who participated and voted. I especially thank those of you who carried on the comments in the discussions. What really makes it worthwhile is the way that we share the ways we interact with the films. That’s the way I learn new things. Even those of you whom I disagreed with—heck, maybe especially those of you whom I disagreed with—taught me to look at the films in different ways.
But you’re all still wrong about Back to the Future. It’s very so-so. Just like Huey Lewis and the News. And Repo Man and Brazil should have done better. So should have Stalker, but that’s my own fault for putting it up against Blade Runner in the first round. I also saw The Incredible Shrinking Man for the first time for this tournament, and it turns out I loved it. So that was a nice moment for me.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
The Cubs signed Michael Conforto to a minor-league deal today and that is just another indicator that the Cubs consider their biggest question in Spring Training to be who is going to be the fourth outfielder. The Cubs already had non-roster invitees Chas McCormick and Dylan Carlson in camp as well as prospect Kevin Alcántara and waiver claim Justin Dean. Prospect Brett Bateman is also in camp as a non-roster invitee, but he’s not considered a serious candidate to claim the 4th outfielder job, at least not out of Spring Training. Maybe in August.
So tonight, I’m going to ask you which one of the non-roster invitees is most likely to be a contributor to the Cubs this season. Not necessarily right out of Spring Training, but over the course of the season.
The model here is Mike Tauchman, whom the Cubs signed to a minor league deal with a Spring Training invitation in 2023. Tauchman didn’t make the Opening Day roster, but accepted an assignment to Triple-A Iowa and got called up to the majors in May. Of course, Tauchman was an important player on both the 2023 and 2024 Cubs.
Two pitchers in recent years were NRIs and ended up making major contributions to the team were Mark Leiter Jr. in 2021 and Brad Keller last season. It’s easier to make the roster as a reliever than as an outfielder. If anything, the other relievers are more likely to get injured than other outfielders.
So let’s quickly review the three NRIs. We’re going to bypass Dean, since he’s on the 40-man roster and is likely ticketed for Iowa. He could certainly see some time in the majors if he does well down there and there’s an injury in the majors. But he’s got options and the Cubs won’t have to make a decision on him in March. We’re not going to count Kevin Alcántara, because he’s a top prospect and in the Cubs long-term plans at the moment. They hope he’s more than a fourth outfielder. The same goes for Brett Bateman, although he’s not as well-regarded as Alcántara.
The first candidate is Dylan Carlson. Once upon a time, 2021 to be exact, Carlson was one of the top 20 prospects in baseball and was expected to be a star for the Cardinals. His rookie season of 2021 was pretty good. He hit .266 with 18 home runs and a .343 on-base percentage. Carlson finished third in Rookie-of-the-Year balloting. He didn’t set the world on fire his rookie year, but it was promising enough that you could easily predict stardom for him down the road.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Carlson suffered a series of injuries that cut into his playing time and his power. In particular, he suffered a shoulder injury after colliding with Jordan Walker in Spring Training in 2024 and he never really seemed to be himself since then. Last year with the Orioles, Carlson hit just .203/.273/.336 with six home runs over 83 games. Hamstring and oblique injures have also cost him enough speed that he’s no longer an acceptable center fielder except on an emergency basis.
On the plus side of Carlson, he’s still just 27 and if he ever got healthy, that top prospect that used to be there is probably still in there somewhere.
Al covered Conforto pretty well earlier today. Just last year, the Dodgers thought enough of Conforto to give him a $17 million, one-year deal. That was coming off a two-year, $36 million deal with the Giants. And as Al wrote, Conforto was a pretty good outfielder for the Mets from 2015 to 2021. But he missed the entire 2022 season with a shoulder injury and hasn’t really been good since, although he was solid enough for the Giants in 2024 that the Dodgers took a chance on him with that one-year deal.
The other downside on Conforto is that he turns 33 on March 1. He also hasn’t played center field since 2019.
Finally, there’s Chas McCormick, who has spent his entire career with the Astros until now. He made his major league debut with Houston in 2021 just shy of his 26th birthday. From 2021 to 2023, McCormick was an excellent fourth outfielder. He played over 100 games in all three of those seasons and hit 50 home runs in those three years combined. McCormick had a 117 OPS+ over those three seasons and was a solid defender at all three outfield positions.
Then McCormick suffered a hamstring injury early in 2024 and hasn’t been right since. He hit a poor .210/.279/.290 last season and put up almost identical numbers in 2024. McCormick also turns 31 in April, so his decline might be as much age-related as injury-related.
On the plus side to McCormick, he’s still a solid defender at all three outfield positions. Unlike Carlson and Conforto, McCormick still has minor league options, so he could be sent down to Iowa to start the season. However, most of these minor league deals with an invite to Spring Training contracts have an opt-out clause where a player can leave the organization if they aren’t on the major-league (or 40-man) roster by a certain date. So there may not be as much flexibility on McCormick as it might seem initially.
Obviously none of these outfielder are without warts. If they were, they wouldn’t have signed a minor league deal. Teams would be fighting for their signature. But all three of these players were very good once and not too long ago. Which one do you think is most likely to be good again in 2025?
Thanks for stopping by tonight. Please get home safely. If you braved the snow to get here, be extra safe. We want you healthy enough to stop by again. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow for more BCB After Dark.