In attendance

Today was the coldest day in weeks, so of course it was the game Drew and I had tickets for. Fortunately, the following things were true:

(a) It was a Cubs win (most important)
(b) Marshall pitched well
(c) It was over in not much more than two hours (not as important as the win, but pretty nice)

I was almost surprised by how confident Marshall seemed. He gave up a couple hot shots, and possibly if the wind hadn't been blowing in he could have given up a homer somewhere, and sure it was the Marlins, but the bottom line is he gave up just two hits and two walks in seven innings, with seven strikeouts. He didn't allow a run and brought his ERA all the way down to 4.22, and if he keeps pitching like this, I think there's a very good chance that he could hang around as a fifth starter even after everyone comes back.

(I mean, say Prior, Wood, and Miller are all back by the end of May - but say that Marshall is something like 6-1 with a 3.25 ERA at that point. You'd really send him to the bullpen or Iowa? I sure wouldn't. Not that a six-man rotation would be the worst thing in the world either, especially with half the starters coming off of injuries.)

Three runs on five hits isn't tremendously impressive, but this team seems to be finding ways to win in a lot of its games (usually only failing to do so when the starting pitching seriously falters). Yeah, it's only the Marlins, but you have to love Murton's big hits, and the squeeze play in the seventh was a ballsy call that paid off. (You can't always tell that well from the bleachers, but the Cubs' runners seemed to be just safe in at least three cases today, that being one of them.) I may have said it before, but I love - love - that this team has speed now, and I like that Baker actually appears to be using it. (I never thought he'd call a squeeze.)

Oddly, Baker appears to have taken past criticisms of his managing style to heart. The Cubs are stealing bases - you could argue that this is due to finally having some personnel with speed, of course, but Baker's teams have never been that big on the stolen base - he hasn't managed a team that finished in the top half of the NL in swipes since the 1998 Giants, back when Barry Bonds was still a 30/30 guy. (In what is most likely not any kind of coincidence, the '01 Giants finished dead last.)

Plus, early in the season he was yanking starters at the first sign of trouble. The middle relief is much improved, but if Dusty was worried about gassing the starters, it seemed for a while that the relief corps had equal potential to be worn down too soon. Fortunately, Cubs starters have now gone at least seven in three straight games, which you'd like to see more of. (With Guzman taking the mound tomorrow just after being called up, I don't know if that streak will last, but let's hope it does.) Though it is of course richly ironic that just after this team finally starts to gain some pitching consistency, their best hitter goes down. Grr.