The late-night/early-morning spot for Cubs fans asks if the Cubs should sign one of the recently non-tendered former closers.
It’s the start of a holiday week here at BCB After Dark: the grooviest gathering of night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. I hope you had a terrific weekend. We’re so glad you decided to spend part of the week with us. There’s no cover charge this evening. Come on in out of the cold. We still have a few available tables. 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 the Cubs should try to trade outfielder Cody Bellinger. The vote was close, but 39 percent of you said not unless they got an offer they can’t refuse. Presumably minus a horse head. Another 38 percent thought it might be a good idea to trade Bellinger, but only if it opened up salary for a bigger free agent signing. The final 23 percent thought the Cubs should get what they could for Bellinger to open up a spot for other players.
Here’s the part where I discuss music and movies. You don’t have to read that and you can skip ahead if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.
I said we were going to start Christmas jazz tonight, but I figured that maybe I could try to sneak in some Thanksgiving jazz before we start with that. I also missed that we lost saxophonist Lou Donaldson two weeks ago at the age of 98. So in tribute to that, we’re featuring Donaldson’s 1962 classic “Gravy Train.” Is it a Thanksgiving song? Well, it’s not not a Thanksgiving song.
I’m going to try to start our BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic on Wednesday. No guarantees—I do the cooking for my family and I’m certainly going to be well into cooking Thanksgiving dinner by Wednesday evening. So it’s going to depend on how that goes. But at worst, on Monday we’ll have our first matchup which just happens to pit Alfred Hitchcock’s first two American films up against each other: Rebecca (1940) and Foreign Correspondent (1940). That’s purely a coincidence. I didn’t intentionally match the first two films Hitchcock made in America up against each other.
The second matchup will be a faceoff between 1944’s Lifeboat and 1955’s To Catch a Thief. So if you’re looking for something to watch this weekend, there are some suggestions.
I want to say a little about the role that Alfred Hitchcock plays in the history of cinema, with the caveat that my knowledge of film studies is almost entirely self-taught. But until near the end of his career, Hitchcock’s reputation amongst critics and the general intelligentsia was very different that it is today. Vertigo was recently (2022) voted as the second-greatest film ever made by the BFI Sight and Sound poll, which is often considered the most prestigious of such rankings. In the 2012 poll (they only do the poll once a decade), Vertigo ended up at number one.
In that 2022 poll, Psycho was ranked 31st, Rear Window came in at 38, North by Northwest at 45, Notorious at 133 and The Birds at 185. So a poll of film scholars, critics and journalists throughout the world thought that Hitchcock directed four of 50 greatest films of all-time and two more in the top 200. So there is little question that he is considered an inner circle Hall of Fame director, to put it in baseball terms.
That wasn’t always the case. In the 1950s, Hitchcock’s films were considered well-crafted, entertaining and popular, but not serious works of art. They were considered light fluff that didn’t really have much to say about the human condition. (Rebecca, which did win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941, is perhaps an exception.) Hitchcock was nominated for an Oscar five times and never won, even in the year Rebecca won Best Picture. They were mostly considered cinematic junk food—maybe tasty, but not filling and definitely not good for you.
That all changed in the mid-sixties thanks to the French and in particular, journalist and director François Truffaut. I’ll be going into this more as we go on in the tournament, but Truffaut was a journalist and eventually editor at Cahiers du cinéma, the French film magazine that helped revolutionize the way the world looked at the movies. Truffaut would eventually become a director himself with the semi-autobiographical film The 400 Blows in 1959. The 400 Blows was recognized, then and now, as a masterpiece. And when this now celebrated director was asked for his influences, he invariably mentioned Hitchcock at the top of the list.
Truffaut reported that his praise of Hitchcock was inevitably met with scorn from other journalists, so he took it upon himself to try to demonstrate why Hitchcock’s films were works of genius. Truffaut convinced Hitchcock, his idol, to sit down with him for over 80 hours of interviews about Hitchcock’s life and films. The resulting book has gone by a few different names over the years, but today it is known as either Hitchcock by François Truffaut or more commonly as Hitchcock/Truffaut. It is widely considered to be one of the two or three greatest books ever published about film. I will be quoting extensively from that book as we work our way through the tournament.
One thing that both Hitchcock and Truffaut spend a lot of time explaining is the concept of “suspense.” Hitchcock was known as the Master of Suspense, so it makes sense to define it. In his introduction, Truffaut writes:
Suspense is simply the dramatization of a film’s narrative material or, if you will, the most intense presentation possible of dramatic situations. Here’s a case in point: A man leaves his home, hails a cab and drives to a station to catch a train. This is a normal scene in an average picture. Now, should the man happen to look at his watch just as he is getting into the cab and exclaim, “Good God, I shall never make that train!” that entire ride automatically becomes a sequence of pure suspense. Every red light, traffic signal, shift of the gears or touch on the grake, and every cop on the way to the station will intensify its emotional impact.
That’s a someone banal example to make a point and Hitchcock has a better one later in the book, but I’ll save that for another time. But Truffaut’s point is that Hitchcock always found ways to invest the audience in even the most mundane of events on the screen. That Hitchcock was able to build sequence after sequence so as to demand the audience’s attention. Truffaut believed that at his best, Hitchcock never let the audience have a break from the suspense of the situation.
We’ll get to see how correct Truffaut was as we look at 24 of Alfred Hitchcock’s best movies over the next several weeks.
Welcome back to those who skip the music and movies.
Friday was the non-tender deadline for MLB players and invariably, some interesting names were not offered contracts by their now-former teams. This is of interest to the Cubs because there are three former closers who were non-tendered and the Cubs are in the market for relief help.
One of them is former Nationals closer Kyle Finnegan, who was actually an All-Star in 2024, thanks to a 2.43 ERA and 19 saves before the All-Star Break. Finnegan did save another 19 games after the Break to finish with 38 on the year. But his ERA in the second half ballooned to a whopping 5.79 and opposing hitters managed an OPS of .894, as compared to a .595 OPS in the first half. Finnegan is also 33 and his underlying peripherals didn’t really support a pitcher who saved 38 games with an ERA of 3.68.
Still, Finnegan has been getting the job done for a while, as his career ERA+ of 116 demonstrates. In fact, Finnegan has never had an ERA+ below 110 in his five-year career. So there is some consistency there that is lacking in a lot of relief pitchers.
Another non-tendered closer is former Blue Jay Jordan Romano, who was an All-Star in 2022 and 2023 when he saved 36 games in both seasons. But in 2024, his ERA jumped from under 3 to 6.59 and he only managed to pitch 13.2 innings and spent the final four months of the season on the injured list with an elbow impingement. If healthy, Romano is a very good pitcher. It’s unclear at this time if he’ll be ready for Opening Day. Still, Romano might be someone worthy of a two-year deal so that you get him under contract for 2026 when they would hope he’d be fully healthy.
Finally, there is former Rangers closer José Leclerc, although it should be mentioned that Leclerc was the Rangers closer in 2018 and 2019 and has mostly been a setup man with an occasional save since missing most of 2020 all of the 2021 season with Tommy John surgery. Still, he was an effective reliever in 2022 and 2023 before he struggled with a 4.32 ERA in 2024. But the underlying Fielding Independent Pitching and other metrics indicate that Leclerc wasn’t much different of a pitcher in 2024 than he was in 2022 or 2023. Maybe he’s not a full-time closer anymore, but Leclerc could be an effective setup man who can step into the closer’s job when necessary.
So tonight’s question is which of these non-tendered relievers should the Cubs try to sign? You can’t vote for more than one because of the nature of our polling, but I will give you the option of “none of them.”
Thank you so much for stopping by. We’ve enjoyed your company on this chill evening. Please get home safely. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow night for more BCB After Dark.