BCB After Dark: Caissie or Alcántara?

The late-night/early-morning spot for Cubs fans asks: Owen Caissie or Kevin Alcántara?

It’s Wednesday night here at BCB After Dark: the hippest hangout for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and grab a table. New friends and old, all are welcome. Let us check your coat. Let us know if you need anything. 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 night I asked if the Cubs should keep outfielder Mike Tauchman around for the start of the 2025 season. By a clear majority of 70 percent to 30 percent, you want Tauchman around for another season.

Here’s the part where I talk about music and movies. Those of you who skip that can do so now. You won’t hurt my feelings.

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We’re wrapping up our tribute to Quincy Jones tonight and I suppose it would be a crime to not feature Jones’ well-known version of the Benny Golson song “Killer Joe.”

Finally, I don’t think we can say goodbye to Jones without mentioning the arrangement of the Bart Holland standard “Fly me to the Moon” that he did for Frank Sinatra. Go listen to the original version of the song by Kaye Ballard and see how different it was from the Sinatra version that we’re all more familiar with. Sinatra asked Jones to make the song “swing” and among other things, he changed the song’s time signature from ³⁄₄ to 4/4.

Here’s Sinatra performing the song in St. Louis in 1965. Count Basie is on piano. Jones is conducting the orchestra in back, but you can only see the back of his head in this clip.

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Ladies in Retirement is a bonkers 1941 gothic film noir directed by Charles Vidor and starring Ida Lupino. Based on a stage play, Ladies in Retirement could have been a disaster. Instead, a great director and a great cast turn it into something special. It’s a slow burn of a film that takes a while to get up to speed, but once it does, you’re glad you stuck around until the end.

Lupino plays Ellen, a housekeeper and personal assistant to Leonora, an older, retired and very wealthy former showgirl who lives out in a big mansion in the marshes in the English countryside. Of course she does. All great gothic noir takes place out in the English moors and most of them involve a creepy Victorian mansion. This one is only partly creepy, except when Vidor decides to shoot it in a really creepy way.

While Lenora is away, Ellen gets a letter stating that her two sisters Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett) are being evicted from their home in London for being a public nuisance. Both women are, to be clear, not normal. I’d call them insane except that Ellen gets very angry if you call them that. But if Ellen doesn’t find another home for her two sisters, the police will take them away to a sanitorium.

With no other options, Ellen tricks Lenora into letting her bring Emily and Louisa out to the mansion for a stay. Lenora thinks it’s only a visit for a weekend, but of course, Ellen is plotting to have them stay there permanently.

While Ellen is off getting her two sisters from London, Albert (Louis Heyward—who was married to Lupino at the time) shows up at the mansion. He claims to be a nephew of Ellen’s and while we never get an answer as to whether he really is or not, he is certainly in some way connected to Ellen’s family. He’s a general ne’er-do-well and wants to hit up Ellen for some money. Instead, he manages to get five pounds out of Lenora, who takes pity on him. He also flirts with Lucy (Evelyn Keyes), the maid.

Albert tells Lenora that Ellen’s sisters are harmless but quite odd. He also convinces Lucy to not tell Ellen that he’s stopped by.

Spoilers to follow:

As predicted, Emily and Louisa are a handful, tearing up the house with their obsessions and odd behavior. After six weeks, Lenora has had enough and orders Ellen to kick them out. Knowing that without a place to live her sisters would be sent to an asylum, Ellen decides to kill Lenora, pretend she’s gone on a long voyage and keep her sisters at the mansion. She makes sure Emily, Louisa and Lucy are out when she commits the murder.

This goes OK for several months, but eventually Albert shows back up. Apparently, he’d been stealing money from an employer, went on the lam and had been living out in Lenora’s shed for several weeks.

Albert also plans to steal money from Lenora, but he discovers that the hiding place where she kept her money and jewels before were now all bricked off. Albert, having a criminal mind himself, immediately starts to suspect the truth. Alongside Lucy—whom he’s now carrying on a romantic relationship with—he schemes to blackmail Ellen over the murder.

Spoilers over

At 23, Lupino was way too young for the part of Ellen, who was in her mid-40s in the play. She’s supposed to be the older sister who raised Emily and Louisa from childhood, but both Lanchester and Barrett were over a decade older than her. Vidor tries to make Lupino look older by giving her wear an old-fashioned hair bun, dowdy clothes and not much makeup, but she still seems much younger than her sisters.

Still, Lupino was incapable of giving a bad performance and she really shines here. She’s the protagonist and she plays it so sympathetically that we can sometimes forget she’s also the villain. Lupino really creates a character who, once we accept that she would do anything for her sisters, makes her seemingly dumb choices seem entirely reasonable. It’s also one of those restrained performances where the actress lets her inner monologue show through glances, expressions and tone of voice.

Lanchester and Barrett just need to act crazy and ham it up, and they do so delightfully. Barrett’s Louisa is ditzy and silly and Lanchester’s Emily is paranoid and rude.

Heyward plays the disreputable rouge with just enough charm that you can see how he gets away with stuff. But while his crimes aren’t anywhere close to Ellen’s, it’s clear that he’s the one in the film with the black heart.

Vidor was one of the great directors of the studio system and his film Gilda is one of the greatest noirs of all time. Ladies in Retirement isn’t on that level, but he and cinematographer George Barnes create the requisite setting for the film. There’s a well-kept but still kind of foreboding mansion. There’s the fog of the marshes outside the house. And there are lots of typical framing of shadows and odd camera angles that make a good gothic noir.

Ladies in Retirement isn’t a masterpiece. As I said, it starts out pretty slowly and twenty minutes in to it, I was wondering to myself if I was going to stick around to the end. But I’m glad I did because once the show gets running, you’re treated to great performances from Lupino, Lanchester and Barrett and an appropriately pulpy gothic noir.

There appears to be many copies of Ladies in Retirement floating around on YouTube and elsewhere, so I’m guessing it’s in the public domain. If you’re like me and are a big fan of gothic noir and Ida Lupino, then it’s a definite watch. Even if you’re not, you won’t waste your time watching it.

The trailer for Ladies in Retirement.

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Welcome back to those who skip the jazz and movies.

A lot of people are talking about this post from Jon Morosi earlier today.

I wouldn’t read too much into that except for what we already know. Caissie is now or close to major-league ready and there isn’t an obvious spot for playing time for him. Other teams know that and are asking if the Cubs might trade him. The Cubs would be fools not to at least listen to what other teams are offering for this slugging right field prospect.

There’s another issue with Caissie that I’ve mentioned before. The Cubs have another Top 100 minor league outfield prospect in Kevin Alcántara who is also now or close to major-league ready. Alcántara is a center fielder more than a right fielder, but he has the arm to play right and with Pete Crow-Armstrong establishing himself as perhaps the best defensive center fielder the Cubs have ever had, moving a guy with the range to play center and the arm to play right sounds like a good idea. (Yeah, I know that’s damning with faint praise to say PCA is the greatest defensive CF in Cubs history when you look whom the Cubs have dragged out there over the decades. But PCA is already really good out there and should only get better.)

If there’s not room for one of them, there certainly isn’t room for two of them. So that’s why teams are asking about Caissie. But if you were Jed Hoyer, which one would you be more willing to deal? Which one would you want to keep?

First off, they’re almost literally the same age. Alcántara is four days younger than Caissie. So age doesn’t play a role. They have almost the exact same number of games played in the minors—Caissie with 406 and Alcántara with 400. (And Alcántara has three games in the majors to make it even closer.) Caissie has more games in Triple-A and has climbed up the minor league ladder faster. In 2022, for example, Caissie was in High-A South Bend while Alcántara was at Low-A Myrtle Beach. But Alcántara caught up to Caissie in Triple-A this season and made his major-league debut before Caissie, although that was more of a function of him being on the 40-man roster while Caissie was not.

But it’s eerie how similar Caissie and Alcántara’s line in Iowa were this past year:

Caissie: .278/.375/.473

Alcántara: .292/.378/.469

Now yes, Caissie played 127 games in Iowa last year and Alcántara only played 35, so Caissie’s line is more impressive in that sense. But Alcántara was also very good in Double-A before his promotion.

So with very little to go on with the basic numbers, we have to start going to the advanced data and the scouting reports. Both Alcántara and Caissie are tall—Alcántara is 6’6” and while Caissie is listed at 6’3”, I think he’s actually 6’4” and I’ve seen him reported as that on some sites.

At 6’6”, Alcántara is long and wiry, while Caissie is built like a tank. Scouts would say that Caissie has the more “mature” body while Alcántara still has room to grow into his frame. Of course, there’s no guarantee that if Alcántara added more muscle that that would mean more power and it certainly could cost him some of his speed.

As a hitter, Caissie is raw, left-handed power. He gets some of the best exit velocities in the minors. He’s a patient hitter that will wait for his pitch before swinging. He also walks and strikes out a lot. I wouldn’t call him a three-true-outcomes player, but I could see him developing into one if things don’t turn out the way we hope.

Alcántara, on the other hand, has been more aggressive at the plate throughout his career, although the two swung at pitches both inside and outside the zone at about the same rate in Triple-A last season. (Of course, Alcántara had a much smaller sample size in Iowa.) Alcántara is more of a free swinger than Caissie, but he’s made strides over the past year or so in strike zone judgement. Still, you’d have to give the clear edge in that to Caissie.

Caissie has better raw power than Alcántara, but it’s not like Alcántara’s raw power isn’t very good as well. And if he adds some more weight? It’s hard to say who will hit for more power in the big leagues.

Defensively, there isn’t much contest. Alcántara is a good defensive center fielder who covers a good deal of ground out there. He’s not Crow-Armstrong, of course, but he’s a major-league quality center fielder who could be very, very good in right.

Caissie’s range as a corner outfielder is limited. He’s made some strides recently in getting better reads off the bat and taking better angles, but he’s still a fringy defensive corner outfielder. He makes up for some of that with a terrific plus arm. Runners advance at their own risk on Caissie.

Alcántara’s arm is almost as strong as Caissie’s, but he doesn’t have quite the same accuracy and consistency. Still, it’s above-average.

That points to another difference between Caissie and Alcántara at this point. Caissie is just more consistent than Alcántara at this point in his career. If you look at Caissie’s month-to-month splits last year, you’ll see a player who is pretty close to the same player every month. Alcántara, on the other hand, will have months where he can’t do anything right and then have a month where he looks like the second coming of Ken Griffey Jr. OK, maybe not that good. But you get my point. The point is Alcántara tends to be streaky.

Alcántara is more “athletic” in scouting parlance, but you shouldn’t take that as a knock on Caissie. He’s not a lumbering body out there. He could become one ten years down the road, but we’re not worrying about that now.

If you ask me to sum up the difference, Caissie is closer to a sure thing whereas Alcántara has a greater superstar potential, but also more bust potential. But to be clear, both of them have the potential for greatness and both have the potential to be a bust. It’s just a matter of degrees here.

I don’t believe there is a right or wrong answer here. It’s dependent on your philosophy. If you want the potential superstar and are willing to take some risk to get it, you want to keep Kevin Alcántara. If you want more of a sure-thing power hitter and don’t care as much about defense, you want to keep Caissie.

So if the Cubs keep one Top 100 outfield prospect and trade the other one, which one would you rather keep? (And yes, I know it depends on the return. But assume they bring back about the same in trade.)

Thanks to everyone who stopped by this week. If you checked something, let us get that for you now. Please get home safely. Tell your friends about us. Tip your waitstaff. And join Sara Sanchez tomorrow night for her take on BCB After Dark.