Diary of a Mad Cubs Fan

It happened again

2011-10-28T22:49:00.002-05:00

Ever since the Cubs should have made the World Series in 2003 but blew it, every World Series winner has been in one way or another a kick in the teeth for Cubs fans.

2003: Marlins win. I ended up rooting for the Marlins since I hate the Yankees so much, but to have a ten-year-old team win its second World Series, and with the way the Cubs lost to them... ugh.

2004: Red Sox win and are no longer our partners in "curses" (though at least they beat the Cardinals and Yankees on the way).

2005: White Sox win and are (a) the White Sox and (b) another team breaking a very long streak of not winning.

2006: Cardinals win, and with a horrible 83-win team no less.

2007: Red Sox win again, and in just a handful of years go from being our "twin" franchise to looking more like a modern dynasty.

2008: Phillies, the only pre-expansion team with fewer World Series titles than the Cubs, win their second World Series to equal the Cubs.

2009: Yankees win. Ordinarily whatever, I doubt most Cubs fans hate the Yankees as much as I do, but the icing on the cake was how all the Yankees players talked about how it had been so long for their fans since their last World Series win in 2000. FUCK Yankees fans.

2010: Giants win, ending the third-longest title drought in MLB and leaving only the Cubs and Indians as the last pre-expansion teams not to have won a title in the expansion era.

2011: Cardinals win a-fucking-gain. The icing on this one? The fact that Ryan Theriot was hitting leadoff for the Cardinals in the clinching Game Seven. Ryan Theriot shouldn't be hitting leadoff for anyone at any time, least of all a team that's winning the World Series. What a joke. Also, it's the fucking Cardinals.

Your move, Theo.

Scared Miklasz

2011-10-24T11:51:00.002-05:00

There are two types of rivalry in the sports world: the kind that spring up between two great teams - Lakers/Celtics in the NBA, for one key example - and the kind that spring up for simple reasons of geography and playing each other a lot. Yankees/Red Sox is perhaps the key example of the form - it only turned into more in the last decade or so, really - but Cubs/Cardinals is perhaps an even better illustration. The two teams have been in the same division since the Cardinals (then the St. Louis Browns) joined the National League in 1892. But post World War II, as the Cubs' fortunes dropped, that aspect of the rivalry tailed off. For two decades, between 1925 and 1945, the Cardinals and Cubs were perhaps the two most dominant franchises in the National League. The Cardinals played in eight World Series and won five. The Cubs didn't win any but represented their league in the Fall Classic fully five times in that span. Between 1942 and 1946, the Cardinals won four pennants; the one they didn't, in 1945, was won by the Cubs. (To be fair, those WWII years were a bit goofy.)

Obviously, however, the rivalry has been a bit different since then. It's more about a rivalry between two major Midwestern cities, and two teams that simply go back a long way and have played each other well over two thousand times. The Cardinals have won nine more pennants and four more World Series since 1946; they could add a fifth World Series this year. The Cubs, I don't need to tell you, have won none of either.

But this is clearly still a rivalry. And what's more, it's clearly still a rivalry that matters even to the more successful team in it. Why else would Bernie Miklasz, long-time columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch write a column - during the World Series that his team is playing in! - like, well, this?

The St. Louis Cardinals have been so dominant in the NL Central, it looks like the rival Chicago Cubs are hiring two general managers in a desperate attempt to topple their rivals.

I just got done enumerating how much more successful the Cardinals have been over the last 65 years. However, ten points for answering the following question: in the last five years, who has won more NL Central titles, the Cubs or the Cardinals?

Of course, the answer is the Cubs, who won in 2007 and 2008. The Cardinals won in 2009 but finished second to the Reds in 2010 and to the Brewers this year. Really, over the last five years, the Brewers have at least as good a claim to NL Central "dominance" as the Cardinals. I know the Cardinals are in the World Series having beaten the Brewers, but this is about the division, right?

Anyway, this is a stupid argument regardless. Aside from the fact that the announcement of Theo Epstein's hiring happens to have come during the playoffs, and that the Cubs simply would have to do better than the Cardinals to win a division title, what do the Cubs' moves have to do with St. Louis that they don't have to do with "it's been 103 years since we won the World Series and we would like to win one at some point in the not too distant future"? Get a hold of yourself, Bernie.

The boy wonder, Theo Epstein, is defecting from Boston to take over the Cubs. He'll be given the title of team president and $18.5 million over five years. According to media reports, Epstein is hiring his buddy, Jed Hoyer, away from the San Diego Padres. If and when that becomes official, Hoyer will leave the GM post in San Diego for the GM title with the Cubs.

Adorably pejorative use of the term "boy wonder." Epstein does have two World Series teams under his belt, at least. It's not like he has Billy Beane's track record, say.

The Cubs are obviously desperate to win a World Series. They haven't played in one since 1945, or won one since 1908. The Cardinals, currently competing in their 18th World Series, have been in three of the last eight Fall Classics.

Yes, I'm sure the Cubs would rather have the Cardinals' record. So would a lot of teams. Even the Yankees haven't played in three of the last eight World Series.

Since Bill DeWitt Jr. bought the franchise in 1996, which is also the same year Tony La Russa arrived as manager, the Cardinals have qualified for the postseason nine times.

They won the NL Central five times in seven years between 2000 and 2006, which is pretty impressive, although since then, as mentioned, they've only won it once in the last five years. But yes. They've been fairly successful the last 15 years.

Going into Game 3 of the World Series on Saturday night at Rangers Ballpark, the Cardinals have won 11 postseason series and 47 postseason games during the La Russa Era.

The other five teams in the NL Central, combined, have won only five postseason series and 27 postseason games while competing against La Russa.

The other NL Central teams don't tend to compete against LaRussa in the postseason, this year notwithstanding. The Cardinals certainly have had more success than their NL Central counterparts in the playoffs - in the seven seasons since 1996 that they won the division, the Cardinals won at least one playoff series in six of them (a 2009 NLDS loss to the Dodgers the exception) and made the World Series twice. The combined power of the teams that won the NL Central in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011, meanwhile, yielded exactly zero trips to the World Series and seven first-round losses out of nine (the 2003 Cubs and this year's Brewers were the only ones to make it as far as the NLCS).

So, yes. Job well done. The Cardinals are currently playing in the World Series, you know. Did you really need to whip their dick out and ask the other teams in the division if anyone wants to compare lengths?

The Cubs obviously believe that Epstein, 37, can break the many curses in Chicago, whether it be the Billy Goat, the black cat, or Bartman. To attain success, Epstein must also break the Cardinals' firm hold on the NL Central.

One division title in the last five years. And the Cubs could easily finish second to the Cardinals and still win the World Series as a wild card, as Epstein's Red Sox did in 2004 and as the Cardinals themselves are attempting to do this year. But yes, it is likely that in order to do well, the Cubs will have to be better than the Cardinals in the long term.

After all, Epstein put an end to the curse — and cursing — in Boston by guiding the Red Sox to World Series championships in 2004 and 2007. The Red Sox had gone 86 years without capturing a World Series until Epstein ended the torment.

Factual statement. Although is anyone else getting the feeling that Miklasz legitimately believes in "curses"? What a maroon.

In the AL East, Boston ownership cast the New York Yankees as the "Evil Empire" that had to be taken down. The Cardinals are to the Cubs what the Yankees are to the Red Sox. So Epstein's hiring should increase the competitive intensity of a Cubs-Cardinals rivalry that's turned into a baseball-and-beer happy hour.

Pretty much what I said earlier. Although the Cardinals definitely do not have the Yankees' money, which is likely to prove one big difference should the Cubs succeed in righting their operational ship.

Mozeliak respects Epstein and thinks the Cubs have made an impressive hire. But it's not as if the Cubs are the first team to step up and take aim at the Cardinals.

Houston had a positive run between 1997 and 2005. Milwaukee GM Doug Melvin won the division this year and has led the Brewers to two postseason berths in the last four years. The Pittsburgh Pirates are improving. And former Cardinals GM Walt Jocketty revived the Cincinnati Reds, at least for a season (2010). The Cubs won the division in 2007 and 2008.

I see one big similarity between the Yankees and Cardinals - they both feel like it's divine right that they win the division every year. Houston had a "positive run" between 1997 and 2005? Hey, if you just want to completely discount nine-year stretches, what say we ignore everything between 2000 and 2008? Now the Cardinals have just two division titles to their credit and a single WS appearance. And of course if you correctly parse that last paragraph, you can see what Miklasz is obviously avoiding but what I already pointed out: the Cardinals have won the division once in the last five years. That is not a stranglehold. Aside from Albert Pujols and Chris Carpenter, there is almost no resemblance between the current team and even the 2006 Cardinals, the last year of their most dominant stretch between 2000 and 2006 when they made the playoffs six out of seven years and won a World Series.

Cardinals fans have seen this before; his name was Andy MacPhail. Remember that? MacPhail was the young GM behind the Minnesota Twins' two World Series titles, in 1987 and 1991. The Cubs hired MacPhail to lead them out of the poison ivy. How did that work out? Other baseball saviors included Dusty Baker and Lou Piniella.

"Hey, I know my team's in the World Series, but what if I wrote a piece just making fun of the Cubs? Now that's serious journalism."

The Cardinals will have to work harder, and be even better, to ward off challengers. And the franchise must confront a major issue — the future of free-agent Albert Pujols in a matter of weeks.

Will Pujols stay, or will he go?

Either way, Mozeliak is confident of maintaining the winning tradition.

Replace Pujols with a replacement player and the Cardinals aren't in the playoffs this year, nor in most years. I would expect he's probably not going anywhere, though, if only because I can't imagine other teams lining up to pay him what he wants, and if he's not going to get a massive contract, he'll probably stay in St. Louis for a merely very large contract.

It starts with a 2012 rotation that will feature the return of Adam Wainwright from elbow surgery. He'll join his co-ace Chris Carpenter, promising lefthander Jaime Garcia, Kyle Lohse, Jake Westbrook and a couple of intriguing rotation candidates in Lance Lynn and Marc Rzepczynski.

"There's definitely going to be the Pujols factor. But putting that aside, I like what we have in place," Mozeliak said before Game 3. "When you look in our rotation for next year, you can see the quality there, and the depth. On the pitching side, we have a very positive outlook for 2012."

Re-signing corner outfielder Lance Berkman to a one-year deal for 2012 provides a backup plan should Pujols depart. And if Pujols leaves, that would create an opportunity for Allen Craig to receive hundreds of additional at-bats. If Pujols goes, the Cardinals would have some money to spend on other free agents. But Mozeliak certainly will make an effort to sign Pujols.

"When we look at our everyday lineup, obviously we have a question mark with Albert, and at shortstop," Mozeliak said. "And if we can fill those in the offseason, and re-sign Albert, the St. Louis Cardinals have a very bright future."

There's also a chance of La Russa deciding to retire at the end of the season, but the internal expectation is that La Russa will return in 2012.

Wow, you actually talked about the Cardinals for a while! Congratulations. I love the idea that Pujols leaving could be okay because at least it would mean Allen Craig could get some more at-bats.

Could the Cubs emerge as a player in the Pujols sweepstakes? Media insiders in Chicago downgrade the possibility, insisting that Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts wants to rebuild through the draft, player development and an expanded scouting presence in the Dominican Republic.

The Cubs are still trying to get out from under some toxic contracts handed out to Alfonso Soriano, Carlos Zambrano and others. The Tribune Co., which sold the Cubs to Ricketts, pushed a win-now approach that turned Wrigley into a vast money pit, filled with wasted dollars.

Still, I wouldn't rule the Cubs out on Pujols.

"Could one plus one equal three? All evidence suggests that combining one and one will get you two. Still, I wouldn't rule out that one plus one could equal three."

The Cubs had a $125 million payroll this season, and for all of the hype over Epstein's sabermetric-based, value-driven philosophies, he developed expensive tastes in Boston. The Red Sox failed to make the playoffs in 2010 and 2011 despite spending $331 million in player payroll over the last two seasons. Epstein signed off on nonsensical free-agent contracts for pitcher John Lackey, left fielder Carl Crawford and setup reliever Bobby Jenks, among others.

While the entirety of the Crawford deal was pretty ludicrous, Crawford was worth between 7 and 8 wins in 2010. The fact that he played poorly in 2011 does not seem like something you can pin on Epstein. In addition, one of the reasons why Epstein "developed expensive tastes" in Boston was because it was DEMANDED by an ownership and fanbase that loved the rings and wanted more, and in the AL East the easiest way to compete with the Yankees is to splash the cash. (Yes, the Rays, but think about this: if the Rays had $100 million to play with, wouldn't they just win the division every year?) This year's and last year's Red Sox teams both had injury issues, and this year's team was the highest-scoring in the AL. Unforeseen things happen in baseball. It's easy to second-guess Epstein in hindsight, but if the Red Sox pull one more win out somewhere along the line, they could easily have found their way into the World Series (since it's not like great pitching has been a theme of this postseason), and then what would everyone be saying about Epstein?

How much credit should Epstein get for the two World Series titles in Boston? Obviously he made some good moves. He hit it big on some draft picks, including Dustin Pedroia, Jonathan Papelbob [sic], Jacoby Ellsbury and Clay Buchholz. But even with the second-highest payroll in baseball, Epstein's creation went sour.

No doubt all attributable to Epstein's presence.

Moreover, Epstein took over a 93-win team when he became Boston GM in 2003. His challenge in Chicago is more challenging, and vexing.

True for a number of reasons, almost none of which have anything to do with St. Louis, the team you cover that is in the World Series right now.

And the Cardinals aren't moving out of the division.

Well, I guess the Cubs will have to figure out a way to finish ahead of the Cardinals, like they did in 2007 and 2008, when they were winning more division titles in those two years than the Cardinals and their division stranglehold have won in the last five. I mean, honestly, I would expect this kind of arrogance from the Yankees, but the Cardinals haven't exactly earned it of late. Yeah, they won the World Series in 2006 and made it again this year, but in between those two they did exactly jack squat, making one playoffs and winning zero games in it.

Besides, if Epstein could survive in a division with the Yankees (and, for that matter, Tampa), do you think he's worried about the Cardinals? Once the organization is, hopefully, strengthened, if the Cubs have a strong front office AND more money than the Cardinals, don't you think the Cubs will have a pretty good chance to dominate? Which is why this reads, in the words of Hire Jim Essian's Bad Kermit, like "whistling past the graveyard." St. Louis has already lost the iron grip they held on the division from 2000 to 2006, and if the Cubs' organization can get its act in gear for the first time since World War II, that iron grip may just pass to the Cards' biggest rival. I'm not saying it's going to happen. But I'm saying it could happen, and Bernie Miklasz is clearly terrified that it will.

Q rating

2010-10-22T19:12:00.004-05:00

It's okay to think that Ryne Sandberg should have been made the next Cubs manager. It's not okay to think it the way Gene Wojciechowski thinks it, however.

Maybe this will work. Maybe a guy who would have never gotten a sniff at the full-time job if Lou Piniella hadn't flamed out will break the Chicago Cubs' 102-year starvation diet. Maybe Mike Quade is the next Jim Leyland or Earl Weaver, a nobody who became a baseball somebody.

But I doubt it.

I also doubt it, but mostly because the Cubs are not a great team right now. Other managers who I doubt could lead the Cubs to a World Series title next year: Ryne Sandberg, Joe Girardi, Joe Torre, the ghost of Frank Chance.

If it happens, if Quade can lead the Cubs to their first World Series championship since 1908, then I'll believe anything -- that Barry Bonds hit all those home runs because of flaxseed oil, that Wade Phillips will be the 2010 NFL Coach of the Year.

Ha ha! Take that, Barry Bonds and the Cowboys! Wait - what is this article about again?

There are reasons why the Cubs are the Cubs -- and the decision to hire Quade is one of them. I'm not saying it's a terrible choice; just the wrong choice.

Nothing personal, but Ryne Sandberg, not Quade, should have been introduced Tuesday as the 51st manager of the Cubs. It would have made so much sense.

I mean, I guess. Sandberg had been managing in the Cubs' system for four years. Quade was a minor league manager as early as 1985 and managed the Iowa Cubs for three years. In 2004 he took them to the PCL finals, for whatever that's worth.

Sandberg isn't some Mark McGwire big-timer whose first coaching job was on the major league level. Sandberg grinded for four years as a manager in the bus and drive-thru-window leagues of the minors. He did his time for the Cubs in Class A, Double-A and Triple-A, earning Pacific Coast League manager of the year honors this past season.

He's done a nice job. He also has four years of minor league experience to Quade's 17, and zero years of big league coaching experience to Quade's four, so trying to sell him as someone who "paid his dues" as though Quade hasn't is just kind of stupid.

He also has a bronze plaque in Cooperstown, which should count for something. And he's wearing a Cubs cap on it.

The last guy to be a Hall of Famer as a player and then win a World Series as a manager: no one. It's never happened. The closest we come - ignoring player/managers, of whom there were a few in the first half of the 20th century - is Red Schoendienst, who led the 1967 Cardinals to the World Series title four years after retiring. Of course it also took Red until 1989 to make the Hall, getting in only via the Veterans Committee, and you could certainly argue that he's one of the weaker members of the Hall. On the other hand, he was also a second baseman! Draft Sandberg!

Sandberg was the consummate professional as a player, and he would have been the consummate Cubs manager. He spoke with his bat and glove when he played those 15 seasons in Chicago. But once out of uniform, he spoke from his heart.

What Sandberg's playing career has to do with his potential managerial career: little to nothing.

Go back and listen to his HOF induction speech in 2005, when he vaporized a certain unnamed former teammate (hello, Sammy Sosa). Sandberg has always been about playing the game the right way. You think he would have been intimidated managing the bizarre and undependable Carlos Zambrano? Something would have had to give, and it wouldn't have been Sandberg.

This seems to imply that someone else was intimidated by Zambrano, but Piniella was only too happy to send Zambrano home and Quade didn't have to deal with Z at his angriest or flakiest anyway. So, what are you talking about?

Sandberg would have been good for the Cubs and also good for business. If you don't think that matters, then you weren't at Wrigley Field during the final month or so of another lost season.

The Cubs drew more than 3 million fans in 2010, behind only Philly, the Dodgers and St. Louis in the NL, and ahead of the other three NL playoff teams. (Only three other teams in baseball - the Yankees, Angels and Twins - drew more. The Cubs drew more than the Red Sox.) I'm sure Sandberg would be a popular enough manager, but business isn't really suffering. And you need only ask Dusty Baker about how popularity will dwindle when you're not managing a winning team.

There are no guarantees Sandberg would have won a division, a pennant or a World Series. But he couldn't have done any worse than Piniella, whose teams failed to win a playoff game in six tries. And after the magic and heartbreak of 2003, Dusty Baker never led the Cubs to another postseason appearance. Nor did Don Baylor before him.

Sandberg: he might not win, but hey, who has? Of course, I could just as easily say this of Quade, whom you're busy crushing. And for the record, Piniella's teams may not have won a postseason game but they did win the NL Central in back to back years, the first time the Cubs made two straight postseasons in literally a century. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that yes, Sandberg could have done worse than that. For all I've said about Dusty Baker over the years, he got the Cubs closer to the World Series than at any time since 1945. Sandberg could certainly have done worse than him.

There weren't a dozen baseball fans outside the city of Chicago who knew who Quade was when the Cubs asked him to pitch long managerial relief for the final 37 games this summer. I'm not sure there were a dozen fans in Chicago who knew who he was.

Ha ha hyperbole! Quade was the third base coach. Plenty of people who follow the team knew who he was.

Even after he was hired Tuesday, I had two baseball fans tell me, "You hear about the Cubs and Quade?" But they mispronounced his name: calling him, Qu-aid, instead of Quad-ee.

"Two non-Cubs fans I spoke to had only seen Mike Quade's name written down, therefore he sucks."

People know Sandberg's name. People name their kids after Sandberg.

Not a reason he should be hired as manager.

I'm all for rewarding loyalty. Quade spent 17 years managing in the minors and four years as a major league coach. On Aug. 22, he replaced the beleaguered Piniella, who called it quits and returned home to Tampa to care for his ailing mother.

Love how buried this was when he talked about Sandberg's four years of "grinding" at the top.

Quade finished 24-13 as interim manager and showed a nice, firm touch when handling players such as shortstop Starlin Castro, a gifted but sometimes brain-cramped rookie who needed the occasional tough love. Quade also got seven wins out of the revitalized Zambrano. And he earned the support of key Cubs veterans.

Douchebag. Shouldn't be hired.

That support, those 24 victories and the fact that the Cubs are on their second 100-year rebuilding plan likely had a lot to do with Quade's hiring. Plus, he's a likable, personable, grinder type of guy.

Wait, they're both grinders? How will we settle this grudge match? Quick: both go to the outfield and take turns shagging David Eckstein pop flies. Winner gets a football punted and then signed by Darin Erstad, and also the job as Cubs manager.

Still, Quade has only 37 more games of big league managerial experience than Sandberg. Now compare that to Sandberg's big-game experience. And with all due respect to Quade, those 37 games were played when nothing was on the line for the Cubs.

37 more games of big league managerial experience... plus 13 extra seasons in the minors. Might count for something. Also, at the risk of bashing my own team, what big game experience does Ryno really have? He has ten career playoff games under his belt and his team lost seven of them (though his personal playoff numbers are great, albeit in a very small sample). During his 15 seasons with the Cubs, he played on two first place teams, zero other teams that finished even as high as second, and three last place teams. I love the guy, but it is hard to find many recent Hall of Famers with less "big game experience."

Make no mistake: The Cubs' payroll isn't going to approach the $145 million the Ricketts family spent in 2010 to finish fifth in the NL Central. It is a roster with a handful of talented young players, but also a roster with the ball-and-chain contracts of Alfonso Soriano and Zambrano.

So, maybe it doesn't matter that much who the manager is, huh?

You wonder if owner Tom Ricketts liked Quade not only because of those 24 victories but also because he might have come more cheaply than Sandberg. He definitely was a less expensive alternative to Piniella, as well as to New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi, who told reporters Tuesday that he had considered the idea of managing the Cubs. No way would Girardi have signed the same contract as Quade: a two-year deal with a club option for a third.

Given how little value the average manager adds to a team, I'm definitely cool with not shelling out big dollars. As, again, you yourself mentioned just a few paragraphs ago, Lou Piniella and Dusty Baker - high-priced managers with pedigrees - couldn't get the Cubs to the World Series. If someone who has never managed in the big leagues couldn't possibly do worse, as you claim, why am I supposed to believe that Quade would do worse either?

Sandberg was slightly surprised and more than slightly disappointed when he learned he hadn't gotten the Cubs job. But that's baseball. It's like in "Bull Durham," when Nuke LaLoosh says, "Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. Think about that for a while."

It's exactly like that. Or something.

It rained on Sandberg Tuesday. By the end of next season, we'll know if Cubs fans got soaked too.

If the Cubs don't win next year, and they almost certainly won't, it's not going to be due to Quade vs. Sandberg. Okay? You wrote this whole article around why Quade was a bad choice and I don't see a single good reason. Pretty much all you have is "Well, Sandberg played for the Cubs and was good at it." That's not a reason not to give a guy a job, but it's certainly not a reason to give him a job without question, is it?

Jim's not so dandy

2010-04-21T20:43:00.002-05:00

As I write this, my mood is elevated. Carlos Silva is continuing to defy the odds and/or prove that the NL really is that much worse than the AL. Alfonso Soriano is 3-for-3 with a home run. The Cubs lead the Mets 5-1 in the 7th and look like they might actually win a game after losing four straight to the Mets and Astros, arguably the two worst teams in the NL at this exact moment (and not counting the Cubs).

Still, all is not right in Cub World. Today it was announced that when Ted Lilly returned, the starter moving to the bullpen would not be Carlos Silva or Tom Gorzelanny. It would, instead, be purported ace and 18-million-dollar man Carlos Zambrano. This decision irked me, to put it mildly.

This is not to say that Zambrano has been pitching great; his ERA is 7.45 and in fact he's allowed more earned runs (16) than Dempster, Gorzelanny, Silva and Wells combined (15). With that said, he's made more starts than anyone else on the team, with four already, and only one of them was notably awful (the Opening Day 8 ER in 1.1 IP debacle). In fact, two of the other three were quality starts and his K/9 and K/BB are at historic highs. He hasn't pitched in the bullpen since 2002. Oh, and he makes eighteen million dollars. To give you some perspective, the highest-paid relief pitcher is Mariano Rivera at 15 million; the highest-paid non-closer is Fernando Rodney at a mere 5.5 million. Also bear in mind that despite his poor start, Z is most likely to return to his career average, which is 3.56. He's never had an ERA over 3.95 in a full season. By comparison, Gorzelanny's career ERA is 4.80 and Silva's is 4.67. I know I complained about the bullpen needing to be fixed, but this wasn't exactly what I was talking about.

Do you start to wonder if maybe Piniella and Hendry just don't have a clue what they're doing? Because I do. When Piniella came in, people thought he was a potential savior. He was a big name and he'd had success. So we all overlooked things. He won a World Series! (In 1990, and hadn't even been to one since.) He won 116 games with the Mariners! (They didn't even get to the World Series that year.) His Tampa teams were lousy... but that wasn't his fault. And when the Cubs won the division in 2007 and then 97 games and another division title in 2008 for their first back-to-back playoff appearances in 100 years... who could say Piniella wasn't a great manager?

But I've heard it said that managers don't do as much to win games as they can do to lose them. The players will play and win without the manager, but the manager can make dumb decisions that compromise the players' ability to win. And you have to wonder about Piniella a little bit. I mean, he honestly thinks that putting Zambrano in the bullpen is the best thing for the club. I like to think that if another starter struggles Z will be back in the rotation... but I don't know. Piniella seems like a pretty old-school baseball guy, the type who plays hunches and judges players by the look in their eye and thinks that Joba Chamberlain is more valuable pitching 60 innings a year than 180. He gave Tom Gorzelanny the starting job over Sean Marshall even though Marshall is pretty much inarguably a better pitcher. He can't decide where to hit Ryan Theriot. He has, in the past, seriously suggested trying to play Soriano at second again even though Soriano has spent less than four innings at the position since 2005.

But then I wonder how much of it is really Lou's fault. I mean, I'm not convinced he's a great manager. But isn't he doing pretty much the best he can with the pieces he's been handed? And then I think about Jim Hendry, and how I'm pretty sure he's a lousy GM. I did a post in June of 2007 on Hendry's GM tenure as a trader, concluding that he had been basically average, at least if by average you meant that he'd basically made as many bad deals as good ones (though I would argue that his two best trades to that point, for Ramirez and Lee, pretty much outweighed all the bad ones with the exception of the Juan Pierre deal). I think that's pretty much still true - the Kevin Gregg deal was lousy, but the Rich Harden one was pretty good, at least from the standpoint that no one traded away in it has done anything for Oakland (in fact, only Eric Patterson plays for their major league team, and not well - Sean Gallagher is mopping up for the Padres and Matt Murton currently plays in Japan). Et cetera.

Of course, Hendry has been pretty lousy when it comes to free agents. His major signings since taking over the GM job in July of 2002, from oldest to most recent:

Mike Remlinger
Shawn Estes
LaTroy Hawkins
Todd Walker
Ryan Dempster
Greg Maddux
Glendon Rusch
Neifi Perez
Henry Blanco
Jeromy Burnitz
Scott Eyre
Bob Howry
Jacque Jones
Mark DeRosa
Alfonso Soriano
Ted Lilly
Daryle Ward
Jason Marquis
Cliff Floyd
Kosuke Fukudome
Jon Lieber
Reed Johnson
Jim Edmonds
Aaron Miles
Milton Bradley
Marlon Byrd
Xavier Nady

Granted, calling some of those "major signings" may be a stretch - Ward, for instance, had 212 at-bats over two seasons with the Cubs. But I included everyone I thought had made a difference to the Cubs, either positively or negatively; guys like, say, Chad Fox, I didn't bother counting because they were so insignificant overall (though Hendry's love affair with Fox could be another whole post). The point is, look at that list. Now tell me, who on it was an unqualified success as a signing? I vote for the following: Walker, Dempster, DeRosa, Lilly, Johnson, Edmonds. Six out of 27 (though granted the jury is still out on Byrd and Nady, technically). Now, who was an unqualified disaster? I vote for Hawkins, Perez, Jones, Miles and Bradley. That's only five, but really, isn't a ratio that close pretty lousy? Plus a lot of people would probably argue I was being generous with Soriano and Fukudome (mostly due to the size of their contracts), and potentially Marquis as well.

You also have to consider JUST HOW awful the Perez, Miles and Bradley signings were. Perez is one of the worst baseball players of all time. In 2002 for the Royals, his OPS+ was 44. The next year in San Francisco, it was 65. In 2004, it was 48, and the Giants had finally had enough and released him. The Cubs snapped him up for some reason, and over a tiny, tiny stretch sample of 23 games, he hit .371/.400/.548. So they brought him back for 2005, and he turned back into a pumpkin with a .274/.298/.383 line. Yet Hendry re-signed him for 2006, possibly because Dusty Baker loved Neifi for no good reason and insisted on hitting him first or second a lot of the time and giving him 609 PAs. No wonder the '05 team couldn't finish .500 even though Derrek Lee had an MVP-type season. (And no wonder Lee only had 107 RBI despite hitting 46 home runs - Neifi and Corey Patterson had a combined 1,090 plate appearances, many in the leadoff and 2nd spots, despite a combined OBP of .275.) He continued to suck in 2006, and was finally, mercifully traded to the Tigers in August.

Miles was coming off a career year for the Cardinals in 2008, with a .317/.355/.398 line. He was intended to be a cheaper Mark DeRosa, in that he could play a lot of different positions but for less money. As it turned out, there was a reason he was cheaper. Miles' line for the Cubs: .185/.224/.242, for an OPS+ of 20, which makes Neifi Perez look like fucking Ernie Banks.

A lot has been said about Bradley already, and there's no real need to rehash it here. His year for the Cubs could have been worse: .257/.378/.397. Bradley later complained the Cubs had expected him to hit home runs, and that since his career high was 22, this was misguided. This is probably true, but Bradley's below-.400 SLG (his first since 2001) shows that he wasn't hitting with power at all. Of his 101 Cub hits, just 30 went for extra bases (17 doubles, a triple, and 12 homers).

But what the Bradley signing really said to me was that Hendry just wasn't paying attention. The whole point behind the Bradley signing was that the Cubs wanted a left-handed-hitting outfielder, since Kosuke Fukudome hadn't fully panned out in 2008. Bradley, a switch-hitter, would surely fit the bill after he punched up a .436 OBP to lead the AL in 2008. This completely ignored:

1. that Bradley had mostly played DH in 2008
2. that even when mostly playing DH he had trouble staying healthy
3. perhaps most importantly, that Bradley was a better right-handed batter than left

Bradley, for his career, hits .264/.364/.430 as a lefty and .303/.384/.492 as a righty. This was the lefty bat we were missing? A corner outfielder who slugs .430 and can't stay on the field? Bradley may not have had as bad a season as some would paint it, and it may not have been his fault that he couldn't meet the inflated expectations - but the point is that for what Hendry was thinking he was going to get, it was clearly a botched signing.

So who's to blame for the mess the 2010 Cubs are in? Hendry has handed out huge contracts to aging players and has shown an alarming tendency to pillage an already thin farm system to obtain guys who aren't that good to begin with. Piniella has made some head-scratching decisions, but to the extent that he affects the games, he's only as good as what he has to work with. I just pray that Hendry doesn't ruin the 2014 Cubs' chances by trading Starlin Castro or Josh Vitters for Heath Bell or something stupid like that.

Bullshit pen

2010-04-15T22:54:00.003-05:00

I can't say I was especially optimistic before this season. The big offseason acquisition was Marlon Byrd, a career 98 OPS+er with a history of being unable to stay on the field. On the one hand, the pieces from the dominant '08 team were almost all still in place and many (Soto, Soriano, Ramirez) were candidates for rebound years; on the other hand, all were also two years older. Soto is the only everyday player under 30. Etc.

Yet so far, things haven't been quite as bad as maybe one would think. Derrek Lee has once again started strong. Byrd and Ramirez have three home runs each, even if they haven't hit much else yet. Soto hasn't really started hitting yet but he is getting on base. Fukudome is off to another pretty good start (although today he went 0-for-5 and struck out three times).

More importantly, the starting pitching has kept the Cubs in almost every game. In nine games so far, Cubs starters have five quality starts. Ryan Dempster and Randy Wells have both looked pretty good, and Carlos Silva and Tom Gorzelanny both had surprisingly effective outings in the Cincinnati series. Carlos Zambrano has been up and down so far, but he is 1-0 with a no-decision since the Opening Day debacle. No, the real problem here... is the bullpen.

You already know this, of course. Last year's Cubs bullpen wasn't exactly stellar. Angel Guzman was a revelation, but of course he's now injured. Kevin Gregg disappointed, perhaps predictably. Nobody liked seeing Aaron Heilman enter a game. Jeff Samardzija went from his seemingly revelatory August 2008 to a 7.53 ERA, which included a handful of mostly awful starts. The David Patton experiment was a complete train wreck. The team's total ERA was 3.84 even though the ERAs of the top four starters were 3.05, 3.10, 3.64 and 3.77.

So the bullpen was mostly turned over. Heilman is gone. Gregg is in Toronto. Carlos Marmol, coming off his iffiest year yet, was handed the closer's job that he should have been given in '09 and has so far thrived - granted, it's only been four games, but in 4.1 innings he's struck out nine, walked just two (and hit one), and allowed a single hit and no runs. Time will tell if he's going to be the shutdown closer we all thought he would eventually be following his 2007 season, but he's off to a good start.

The rest of the pen? Well, it features a lot of guys you haven't heard of but who have one thing in common: they probably don't belong in a major league bullpen.

Here is the list of players who have appeared in a relief role for the Cubs this season, by innings pitched:

Sean Marshall (6.0)
Carlos Marmol (4.1)
John Grabow (3.2)
James Russell (3.1)
Jeff Samardzija (3.1)
Esmailin Caridad (2.2)
Justin Berg (2.1)
Jeff Gray (1.0)

I suspect a lot of Cubs fans have only heard of three or four of these guys. I believe James Russell came over in the DeRosa trade, but that's all I know about him, if that's even right. Jeff Gray used to be an Athletic, which I only know because he's wearing an A's hat in his ESPN.com profile photo. I think Caridad and Berg are Cubs farmhands. That's all I know, pretty much. And I typically follow baseball pretty closely.

Oh, and here are the ERAs of these players:

Marshall: 1.50
Marmol: 0.00
Grabow: 9.82
Russell: 0.00
Samardzija: 16.20
Caridad: 13.50
Berg: 7.71
Gray: 18.00

Well, say this much: at least (Grabow excepted) it's pretty much gone in the right order.

Just to make this as long and obnoxious as possible, here's a quick breakdown of EVERY INNING the Cubs bullpen has pitched so far this year. You might sense a pattern forming.

Cubs @ Braves, 4/5/10, bottom 2: Sean Marshall comes in and records two outs.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/5/10, bottom 3: Sean Marshall 1-2-3 inning.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/5/10, bottom 4: Sean Marshall 1-2-3 inning.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/5/10, bottom 5: James Russell allows a single, no runs.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/5/10, bottom 6: James Russell allows a single, no runs.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/5/10, bottom 7: Jeff Samardzija walks the bases loaded and is eventually charged with six runs, four earned, while recording a single out. Justin Berg gets the last two outs (while also giving up a single allowing his inherited runner to score). The Braves bat around in this inning and turn the game from 8-5 to 14-5.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/5/10, bottom 8: Berg's turn to walk the bases loaded while getting just one out and giving up two more runs for the 16-5 final. John Grabow has to get the last two outs.

Cubs @ Braves, 4/7/10, bottom 7: Sean Marshall 1-2-3 inning.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/7/10, bottom 8: With the Cubs up one and one out, John Grabow gives up a double followed by a home run to put the Braves up 3-2 (the score they win by). Esmailin Caridad gets the inning's last out.

Cubs @ Braves, 4/8/10, bottom 7: Sean Marshall gets two outs and Esmailin Caridad finishes the 1-2-3 inning.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/8/10, bottom 8: Caridad gets two outs but gives up a single. John Grabow comes in and immediately walks the tying run aboard. Carlos Marmol enters and ends the inning with a groundout.
Cubs @ Braves, 4/8/10, bottom 9: Marmol gives up a single and a walk but allows no runs to get the save, striking out two.

Cubs @ Reds, 4/9/10, bottom 7: Justin Berg 1-2-3 inning.
Cubs @ Reds, 4/9/10, bottom 8: Esmailin Caridad loads the bases with no outs thanks to two walks and a bunt single, then gives up a grand slam to someone called "Drew Stubbs." The Cubs go from up 3-1 to down 5-3. Caridad proceeds to record three straight outs, proving that the magic was in him all along!

Cubs @ Reds, 4/10/10, bottom 8: John Grabow gives up one single but is otherwise unscathed.
Cubs @ Reds, 4/10/10, bottom 9: Carlos Marmol 1-2-3 inning (strikes out the side) for the save.

Cubs @ Reds, 4/11/10, bottom 7: Tom Gorzelanny, previously cruising, loads the bases with one out and gets pulled in favor of Sean Marshall. A run scores on a weak infield single, but Marshall strikes out the next two to end the inning with the score tied at 1.
Cubs @ Reds, 4/11/10, bottom 8: John Grabow loads the bases with one out. Esmailin Caridad comes in and walks in the go-ahead run, then gives up a sac fly for good measure. James Russell enters to get the the final out.

Cubs v. Brewers, 4/12/10, top 7: Ryan Dempster leaves with one out and a man on third. James Russell strikes out two of the next three batters, though he does allow a single that scores the inherited runner.
Cubs v. Brewers, 4/12/10, top 8: Jeff Samardzija 1-2-3 inning (his first as a reliever since September 2008!).
Cubs v. Brewers, 4/12/10, top 9: Not Carlos Marmol's neatest finish - walk, strikeout, HBP, double play - but no runs and a game finished (four-run lead, no save).

Cubs v. Brewers, 4/14/10, top 7: With one out, one on and the Cubs down two, Justin Berg and James Russell record an out each to end the threat.
Cubs v. Brewers, 4/14/10, top 8: Jeff Gray (called up in place of the now-injured Caridad) makes his first and to date only appearance, going out, single, RBI triple, RBI triple, walk, double play.
Cubs v. Brewers, 4/14/10, top 9: After the Cubs miraculously score four runs to take the lead in the bottom of the eighth after being down to their last strike of the inning, Carlos Marmol strikes out the side for his third save.

Cubs v. Brewers, 4/15/10, top 6: Sean Marshall loads the bases with one out, but at least holds Milwaukee to a sac fly (though one that gives them the lead at the time).
Cubs v. Brewers, 4/15/10, top 7: With the game tied again, Jeff Samardzija gets two quick outs, then gives up a walk, a stolen base and the go-ahead single before ending the inning.
Cubs v. Brewers, 4/15/10, top 8: Samardzija allows a home run to make it 7-5 Brewers but at least gets out of the inning with nothing more than a walk after that.
Cubs v. Brewers, 4/15/10, top 9: The Brewers score another run off John Grabow without ever getting the ball out of the infield - infield single, sac bunt (man reaches on a Grabow error), groundout, groundout, run-scoring infield single, HBP, fielder's choice to end the inning.

So let's do a quick count:

Innings in which the bullpen got at least one out: 28
Innings in which the bullpen did not allow a man they faced to reach: 10 (36%)
Innings, of those, pitched exclusively by Sean Marshall or Carlos Marmol: 6 (60%)
Innings in which the bullpen allowed at least one run to score (including inherited runners): 12 (43%)
Losses, of the Cubs' five, which the bullpen was directly responsible for: 4 (80%)

To sum things up, if the Cubs had a better bullpen they could be like 7-2 and in first place right now, they will allow someone to at least reach base nearly two-thirds of the time, and they are closing on allowing runs in half the innings they pitch.

In fact, of the 49 runs the Cubs have allowed in nine games, 22 - 45% of the total runs allowed! - have been charged to the bullpen. What percentage of the Cubs' innings has the bullpen pitched? Well, it's not 45%, I can tell you that. It is, in fact, 35%. 45% of the runs in 35% of the innings.

Of course, you don't need me, or all this, to tell you the bullpen sucks. So, what's to be done?

1. Can we please end the Jeff Samardzija thing already?

I get it. They spent a lot of money to tempt him away from football and so felt like they had to rush him to the pros, and now they feel like they have to keep him. But the bare fact is this: since the start of the 2009 season, he has given up 35 earned runs in 38 innings. He isn't good right now and I think it's pretty clear that he isn't learning how to pitch on the big club. I know it's hard because he's making $3 million - an obscene amount for someone so unaccomplished; Carlos Marmol is making $2.125 million this year, by comparison - on top of the huge signing bonus he got. But he SUCKS. Is this about trying to be right, Hendry, or is it about trying to win ball games? Oh, yeah.

2. John Grabow: mistake.

If there's one thing Jim Hendry likes it's pitching well for the Cubs for a month. Besides Samardzija's apparently unrepeatable 2008, there was Grabow coming from Pittsburgh in an attempt to shore up the bullpen last year. It didn't really work, but Grabow pitched well enough (3.24 ERA in 25 innings) and hey, he's a lefty. So Hendry signed him for two years, $7.5 million. John Grabow, who might pitch like 80 innings, makes more than the starting shortstop, the two second basemen combined... he makes nearly two million more than Sean Marshall, who is also a lefty and is a much better pitcher. Next year he'll make almost five million dollars, which will make him one of the highest paid non-closer relief pitchers in baseball. Oh, and he's already lost the Cubs two games this season and only once in six appearances has he simply recorded the outs he was tasked with and allowed nothing more. Hey, I'm left-handed - can I have a couple million to be bad at pitching?

Of course, that doesn't really answer the question of what's to be done. The sad answer is "nothing, because he was signed to a ridiculously expensive contract relative to his role and no one is going to want him unless the Cubs eat a bunch of the money and I think we've seen them make enough trades like that recently."

3. Call up Andrew Cashner.

The guy's already been to college - how much more seasoning could he need? I'm going to say without hesitating that he's better than Jeff Samardzija right now. He's got 20 Ks in just 10.1 minor league innings this year. Yes, his ERA is 4.35, but he also won't be starting in the pros - give him the 8th inning, right now, and see what he can do. I mean, why wouldn't you? Right now the bullpen is costing you games left and right. This could very well be the last year in this window for the Cubs - if indeed the window is still open at all - so you might as well take a couple risks to try and improve the team.

If I'm Lou Piniella, I'm pretty frustrated right now. It must be awful to be in a close game and have to pull your starter, knowing that half the time, whoever you call from the pen is going to give up some runs. (Take away Marmol's four game-finishing innings, all ninth innings with the Cubs ahead, and the bullpen allowed runs in 12 of 24 innings in which it appeared. Boom, 50%.) So what do you think, Jim? Can we take a chance on getting Lou some help in the pen? And I don't mean doing something stupid like trading Jose Ceda for Kevin Gregg.

Stove me up

2009-11-13T00:52:00.003-06:00

It's impressive that by May 24 I had already decided that the 2009 Cubs were (a) unlikable and (b) going nowhere, but both turned out to be completely true, so can you blame me? Hope springs eternal for 2010, of course, with (finally) new ownership and hopefully healthier and/or more productive seasons from Ramirez, Soriano and Soto, among others.

Still, it wouldn't be the offseason without the hot stove, and since the Cubs are supposedly doing everything in their power to dump Milton Bradley, they're coming up a lot. (This is a typical Cubs move, of course: try to sell a guy at the absolute low point of his value from both on-field and off-field perspectives. They did the same thing with Sammy Sosa and what did it get them? Jerry Hairston, Jr. and Mike Fontenot.)

But it's not just for that reason. The Cubs remain a big-market team, and with several mid-market teams supposedly losing money and needing to dump assets, the Cubs are suddenly coming up in trade rumors. Trade rumors that have been completely invented by Chicago sports columnists who lack anything else to talk about. But let's look at just one of these, which I saw today: Phil Rogers suggesting the Cubs should offer Carlos Marmol and Starlin Castro for Curtis Granderson.

Granderson's from the area, and he's a left-handed-hitting center fielder. But that's where the fit would seem to end. He turns 29 before the start of next season, and while that qualifies as youthful on the current Cubs squad, he peaked in the 2007 season and has dropped in each of the last two, falling to a league-average 100 OPS+ in 2009. Even Kosuke Fukudome (104) topped that, and Fukudome's bat plays better in center than in right.

It's also not clear why Detroit would want to trade Granderson now. His contract for 2010 is a still pretty affordable $5.5m, and while it leaps upward in following years ($8.25m in 2011, $10m in 2012, and $13m in 2013, although that's a club option with a $2m buyout), he's hardly the contract that's choking Detroit in 2010 - that would be Magglio Ordonez ($18m), Miguel Cabrera ($20m), Jeremy Bonderman ($12.5m), Carlos Guillen ($13m), Dontrelle Willis ($12m), Nate Robertson ($10m)... you get the point. Granderson's $5.5m, in those circumstances, is hardly unaffordable, and the only reason he might be traded is simply because he can be - who's taking any of those other guys? (Well, I can imagine someone taking Cabrera, even at 20 mil.) Still, I would hardly consider it a slam-dunk.

And then, would it make sense for the Cubs to trade Marmol and Castro? Sure, Marmol's ERA has been climbing, but isn't this guy supposed to be your closer in 2010? Who's the next option? And Castro doesn't even turn 20 until late in spring training; granted, you could argue that he wouldn't be ready in 2010 anyway, that the Cubs' window with its current core is closing fast, and that Castro's stock has risen due to hype to the point where he might be able to be dealt for much more than he'll end up being worth. (Of course, if he does live up to the hype, it has potential to be the Juan Pierre trade all over again.) On the other hand, you could also argue that the Cubs' organization is somewhat bizarrely swimming in shortstops with some promise - Hak-Ju Lee is even younger than Castro (having only just turned 19) and he OBPed .399 at Boise last year, and further up the chain is Darwin Barney, whose name I've at least heard before (although a glance at his stats isn't going to wow anyone as of now). So maybe Castro is expendable. Marmol, however, may not be.

If the Cubs are serious about winning in 2010 - and they should be, as the NL looks to be pretty wide open once more - it may well take a bold move. But I don't think this would be that move.

Unwatchable, that's what they are

2009-05-24T23:50:00.002-05:00

While it's still technically early, and while the 2007 Cubs dug themselves a much deeper early hole, the 2009 season seems to be slipping through our fingers before it could really even get going. The Cubs have followed a season-high five-game winning streak - which brought them to 21-14 and within spitting distance of first place - by losing seven in a row, including a six-game road trip on which they were swept by both St. Louis (somewhat understandable) and San Diego (somewhat unforgivable). Why? Well, it's pretty simple: this team has forgotten how to hit.

The streak has included the Cubs being outscored 28-10. Worse yet, half of those runs came in the first game of the streak, a 6-5 loss to Houston at Wrigley last Sunday. In the six games since, the Cubs have been outscored 22-5. 22 runs in 6 games really isn't that terrible. In fact, in the middle five games of the streak, the Cubs pitchers had an ERA of just 3.15 - but the Cubs only scored three runs in the entire five games in support. As a result, Ted Lilly, Ryan Dempster, and Randy Wells were all saddled with losses despite seven-inning quality starts during that stretch.

During the seven games, the Cubs have just 41 hits in 226 at-bats, a team batting average of .181. Take away their 11-hit "barrage" against Houston, and the six road losses featured just 30 hits in 187 at-bats, a team BA of .160. "But Flax," you might say, "batting average doesn't tell you the whole story!" True. The Cubs have walked 10 times in the six games, itself not a huge number - and when I tell you that six of those came in one game, suddenly things look even worse. Three of the six games featured no walks at all. Worse still, the Cubs aren't even putting the ball in play, striking out 56 times in the seven games. That's a strikeout every four at-bats, nearly one per inning.

Who's to blame? It's not any one player, but I'd say the bulk of the fault lies squarely with the table-setters, Soriano and Theriot. In the six road games, Derrek Lee is hitting .368 (7-for-19) with a .400 OBP. Do you know how many RBI he has? One. And it was a solo home run. The problem is that Soriano and Theriot, at the top of the order, have gone a combined 4-for-45 in the past six games (.089), and neither has walked once. Soriano has struck out nine times in 21 at-bats.

Still, nobody's hitting. In the same six games, here's how everyone else is doing: Fukudome .125 (though he's also taken four walks and a hit-by-pitch for a .333 OBP), Bradley .158, Soto .188, Fontenot .235, Miles .100, Scales .100 (though his OBP is .357 because of three walks and an HBP), Hoffpauir .143 (with seven strikeouts in 14 at-bats). In a six-game span, only one guy has more than four hits (Lee with seven), only two guys have reached base more than five times (Lee 8 and Fukudome 7), and only two guys (Scales and Fukudome) have taken more than one walk. Meanwhile, four guys have struck out at least five times (Soriano 9, Hoffpauir 7, Fukudome 6, Soto 5). It's ugly.

What now? The Cubs are severely limited as far as possible changes they can make to the team - I don't know that there's anyone like a Jim Edmonds last year who could possibly be brought in. People are talking about Jake Fox, who's tearing up the PCL - but it's still the PCL. Fox is apparently a guy who either homers or strikes out, and we've already got Soriano and Hoffpauir, plus Fox can't really play anywhere but first base with anything resembling acceptable defense. As far as outside help, who's there? And perhaps more to the point, who can be replaced? The outfield makes too much to be movable. The only real open space on the infield is second base, perhaps the shallowest position in the game from a hitting perspective. You're not going to fill that spot with anything better than what's already there. And the Cubs' options for trades are limited anyway given how thin the farm system is.

Of course, we should remember that a seven-game losing streak - while it sucks - is hardly cause to start talking about blowing up the team or anything. Lee's bat was cold for weeks without creating significant problems because the rest of the team was hitting better; it seems likely that a team full of professional hitters will be able to turn it around. Still, how much longer can we wait for them to do so? Even the 2007 Cubs never lost more than six in a row. We're not quite at the 2006 Cubs "7-22 in May" point... but even the 2006 Cubs topped out at eight straight losses. Should the Cubs somehow be swept at home by the Pirates - an unlikely occurrence, but at this point I'm ruling nothing out - that would be ten straight losses, the most since the 1997 Cubs lost fourteen straight to start the season (en route to a 68-94 finish). If that happens, I'm going to buy a Bears cap and devote the rest of my summer to miniature golf.

This may not be the year

2009-05-10T10:50:00.003-05:00

I know it's technically still early, and the Brewers beat up on the Cubs in the first two series last year only for the Cubs to flatten them down the stretch (except in games where they had already clinched), but my God - did you ever think you'd see a Brewers/Cubs game where the Cubs' bullpen was so much worse? Let's take a look at the bullpen so far:

Angel Guzman: Perversely, he's been the best of the bunch, with the lowest ERA (4.11) and best strikeout-to-walk ratio (2.67). He's also thrown the most innings (15.1), so at least the guy who's throwing the best is getting the most work. With all due respect, though, when Angel Guzman is your best reliever that probably isn't saying much about your pen.

Carlos Marmol: His injury probably hasn't helped, although he seems to be on the way up - in his last three appearances he hasn't walked anyone, and his ERA is somewhat artificially high thanks to a four-run, 0.1 IP appearance on April 29 in a game that the Cubs were already losing 4-0. Still, his ERA is 4.50, he's already blown two saves, and his K/BB ratio is just 1.42 after being around 2.75 the last two years. At least his numbers aren't too bad aside from his leap in walk rate, which is inflated thanks to four walks in that Arizona game. He'll probably be fine.

Kevin Gregg: Gregg actually seems to have settled down after a rough start, as he's up to five saves and has still blown just the one at Milwaukee on April 10. His ERA has receded to 4.40, and his K/BB in his last six appearances is 6/1. Still, for the year he's allowing 15 W+H/9. That number will probably improve significantly if his current form keeps up, at least.

Aaron Heilman: Here's where things start to get bad. At 15 IP, Heilman has been the second most active member of the bullpen, but he seems to be going in the wrong direction. In his first eleven appearances this year, Heilman allowed just one earned run; after a scoreless inning and a third on April 26, his ERA stood at 0.82. Today it's 5.40 after just five additional outings. Most of the damage was done on April 30, when he entered a tie game with the Marlins in the top of the tenth and proceeded to get charged with six runs, five earned, without recording a single out. However, he hasn't been much better since then; after two scoreless appearances against Florida and Houston, he's been abused by Milwaukee, allowing The Incredibly Annoying Ryan Braun's game-winning eighth-inning home run on Friday (in a spot that should have been Marmol's, except I guess Lou is trying not to use him every damn day like he did in the early-going last year) and walking three after coming on in relief of the incompetent Chad Fox (about whom more anon) on Saturday. At least, I guess, if you take away the Marlins game he hasn't been that bad - his ERA is only 2.40 if you pull out those five runs.

Neal Cotts: I know Cotts is a lefty, and those are hard to come by, but I don't know what it's going to take to get him run out of town. Luis Vizcaino didn't give up a single run as a Cub and was released; Cotts seems to be allergic to outs. In 14 appearances he's recorded just 20 outs while allowing 18 baserunners (9 hits, 8 walks and a hit batsman). He's actually only given up runs in four of his fourteen appearances, but because he has a tendency to pitch 0.1 innings, his ERA is 6.75. One of the reasons why he hasn't given up that many runs, though, is because he has a lot of outings that look like this:

April 10 @ MIL: brought on to face PH Craig Counsell. Hits him with a pitch; gets yanked. Marmol finishes the inning.

April 11 @ MIL: brought on to face Prince Fielder. Walks him; gets yanked. Heilman finishes the inning.

April 18 vs. STL: brought on to start the 7th. Walks the first two batters he faces; gets yanked. Marmol finishes the inning.

April 21 vs. CIN: brought on to start the 8th. Strikes out the first batter, then allows a single and a walk; gets yanked. Marmol finishes the inning.

It goes on. In fact, only four times this year has Cotts recorded as many as three outs; on the same number of occasions he hasn't recorded any. Don't the Cubs have anyone left-handed at Iowa or even Tennessee? I don't see how they could be any less effective.

David Patton: Speaking of less effective - it's David Patton, everyone! The Rule V draftee was a fun story making the team after never pitching above A ball, but I think it's time to admit that he looked good in the spring because he was pitching in late-inning situations against total nobodies. If I'm a manager, I think I have a few spring games where I throw a few relievers to start the game; if that's what you're basing the team on, you need to know which of these guys can actually face down real big-league hitters. I guess considering Patton spent the last two seasons as a middling high-A reliever, he hasn't been as bad as one might have feared, and his ERA is certainly made worse by his 1.2-inning, five-ER outing on April 25 when he gave up the grand slam to Pujols - but if you take that away it's still over 5.00. Aside from Cotts, he has the worst WHIP of anyone who's pitched more than four innings - really, across the board his stats are second only to Cotts' in their awfulness among the regular relievers. Is it really worth not having to offer him back to Colorado, or is there just no one else in the pipeline? (What about Jose Ascanio, who's been destroying the PCL so far? Albeit he's done so as a starter, and maybe he's being saved for that role.)

Jeff Samardzija: Samardzija is already back down at Iowa, but he wasn't given much of a chance - just five appearances and 3.1 IP. He didn't have a very good start, coming into a game vs. the Reds on April 23 and giving up four hits and two runs in one inning, but since then he'd gotten two Ks in mop-up duty on April 27, another two Ks on April 29 (although between those he gave up a three-run double, all the runs getting charged to Marmol), and gotten out of a bases-loaded spot with a short flyball on May 1. Then on May 5 against the Giants he turned in this string: HBP (to load the bases), two-run double, RBI single, popout, walk. Only one of the three runs was credited to him, but apparently Lou had seen enough and Samardzija was bounced back to Iowa. While he certainly wasn't super-effective in his brief time up, it's worth remembering that Samardzija gave up runs in two of his first three appearances last year, and then went the entire month of August without allowing another one.

Chad Fox: The real reason not to send Samardzija back down is that it resulted in Chad Fox being called up. I would rather Jake Fox come up. To pitch. Here's what Fox has done since returning to the big club:

May 7 @ HOU: enters the game in the bottom of the ninth with the Cubs up 8-2. Jason Michaels walks, Ivan Rodriguez triples (scoring Michaels), Jeff Keppinger grounds out (scoring Rodriguez), Darin Erstad triples (scoring on a sac fly after Kevin Gregg replaces Fox). Final line: 0.1 IP, 3 ER.

May 9 @ MIL: enters the game in the bottom of the eighth with the Cubs down 9-6. Ryan Braun walks, then Fox throws a wild pitch in the middle of walking Prince Fielder and gets yanked mid at-bat. (Aaron Heilman comes in and finishes walking Fielder, then eventually allows both Braun and Fielder to score. Baseball's bizarre scoring system charges Fox with one run but two earned runs.)

So in two appearances, Fox has two walks and half of a third (he's credited with three in the stats), two hits, and five earned runs... and one out (and that an RBI groundout). His ERA? 135.00. His WHIP? 15.00. He makes Chien-Ming Wang look like Bob Gibson. I've gotta think we've seen about all we're going to see of Chad Fox at this point. Whatever he was doing at Iowa - where he had a 1.64 ERA and 1.00 WHIP, along with a 10/3 K/BB in 11.1 IP - he can't seem to replicate it at the major league level. If you can't even get outs in mop-up duty, you need to be out of here.

EDIT: I didn't actually get to see Saturday's game, and after writing this I found out that Fox got injured on the 2-0 wild pitch he threw and that's why he was "yanked" mid at-bat. Most likely he's thrown not just his last Cubs pitch but his last big-league pitch as well. With that in mind I feel kinda bad for the guy, but really it wasn't working out even if he'd stayed uninjured. Jose Ascanio is coming up instead, so hopefully that goes better.

So that's the bullpen so far. I guess the top end really isn't all that bad, but the bottom has just been awful. Last year the bullpen was a relative strength, but it's just looked bad way too often so far. Maybe this is just the result of a few really bad outings, but I don't know.

Add in all the injuries - especially with Ramirez set to miss at least a month and Zambrano on the 15-day DL - and the Cubs will be lucky to hold on until everyone gets healthy, if indeed everyone ever does get healthy at the same time. The worst part with all this is that 2009 was probably the best chance; this team is only getting older, and if guys can't stay healthy now, what chance do they stand in two years when Soto is basically the only guy under 30?

What's the problem?

2009-05-05T20:21:00.002-05:00

For some reason, people made a big deal about the Cubs' lineup today. Here it was:

1. Gathright, CF
2. Miles, SS
3. Fukudome, RF
4. Lee, 1B
5. Hoffpauir, LF
6. Fontenot, 3B
7. Scales, 2B
8. Hill, C

On ESPN 1000 they referred to this lineup as "the Iowa Cubs." I'm really not sure why. Aside from Scales - called up (probably just for a couple days) to fill Zambrano's roster spot - the seven remaining starting position players featured three regular starters (Fukudome, Lee and Fontenot), two guys who have been getting regular playing time in the absences of Bradley and Ramirez, and the backup catcher, Hill, in a day game after a night game. Only Gathright's presence in the leadoff spot really stands out as particularly weird.

If Lincecum weren't the opposing pitcher, would anyone have noticed? It sort of looked like the Cubs were punting the game, but you do have to consider that they are in the middle of 20 games in 20 days, and it makes sense to give the regulars some rest in a day game following a night game. The fact that it was Lincecum really doesn't change that much regarding the decision. If anything it does make it a slightly easier decision; since you already want to give your regulars a rest, there's no reason not to do it in a game that is already going to be pretty difficult to win.

I'm much more concerned with the fact that Samardzija appears to be Croatian for "Farnsworth" than with anything else that happened in this game.

Cubs 7, Cardinals 5 (11 innings)

2009-04-18T19:07:00.004-05:00

I know what I said about recapping series, but fuck it - it's not every day I get to sit and watch a Cubs game at all, let alone one won with a walk-off homer in extras.

I had been out and got in front of a TV in the top of the 7th just after Cotts walked two guys on eight pitches and was yanked for Marmol. (Jesus Christ, by the way. Are the Cubs ever going to have a lefty specialist who actually gets lefties out when called upon? Looking through their history, they basically haven't had a consistently good lefty reliever since Randy Myers, and since he was the closer that doesn't exactly count.) Marmol did a great job cleaning up the mess in the 7th, but somehow fell apart in the 8th against a significantly less dangerous part of the order, blowing the save, and requiring Kevin Gregg's services an inning early.

I have to say I liked what Lou did here, whether it was intentional or not. At this point, Marmol is clearly your best bullpen pitcher and Gregg - for all his early tribulations - is pretty clearly #2. Bill James' concept of the "bullpen ace" recommends using your best guy in whatever situation deems it necessary rather than saving him to "close" a game that may never get to that point if you don't put the best guy in now, and Lou worked that well, bringing in Marmol an inning earlier than he clearly would have liked to put out Cotts' fire, and then bringing in Gregg to put out Marmol's. I was more shocked that Gregg not only proceeded to go two innings (I guess his knee was okay because it was warmer today?), but to look pretty darn good doing it, striking out the first two men he faced in the 8th and mowing down the 2-3-4 in the top of the 9th.

Aside from the obvious, there was no more exciting play in the game than Soriano's assist to double Duncan off second to end the top of the 10th - he really whipped that thing out of his glove, although it wasn't exactly great baserunning on Duncan's part. But that one roused me as much as anything before the homer. And actually, the bullpen did a pretty decent job after Marmol - neither Gregg, nor Heilman, nor Guzman gave up a hit. I think we'd all like to see some more of that.

As for A-Ram... well, what can you say? He did it again.

The Cubs certainly haven't lacked for drama this season, have they? So far their seven wins include three in which they scored the winning run in their last at-bats (they also have two losses in which the opposing team did the same). Maybe this is part of a plan to make sure they don't fall apart in the playoffs again - play a game with playoff-like intensity every goddamn day, just to get acclimated to it. Come October, it'll be just like any other game! Or maybe everyone playing and watching will be dead of stress-induced heart attacks. Man, this team.

FU-KU-DO-ME

2009-04-18T13:06:00.003-05:00

At the risk of "talking during the no-hitter," as it were, remember how crazy we went for Kosuke Fukudome in the first months of the '08 season? Especially right at the start when he came flying out of the gate. Fukudome's stats through the first ten games of 2008:

.333/.447/.487, .934 OPS, 3 2B, 1 HR, 6 RBI, 8/7 BB/K

(And that's bearing in mind that in games 9 and 10 he went a combined o-for-8.)

Of course, we all know what happened next. Over the course of the year, Fukudome's numbers kept dropping; in the second half he went just .217/.314/.326, and in the final two months he hit under .200, getting so bad that he only started 9 games in September.

Coming into this season I said the following:

"[W]hat to expect out of Fukudome is entirely unclear; watching him bat in the second half of last year was pretty depressing given how great he looked the first couple of months. Like most Cubs fans, I still desperately want the guy to hit, and at least he can take a walk now and again (leading the team last year with 81), but the days of thinking he could pop 20 homers out of Wrigley and go for a .400 OBP like last year's PECOTA projected are long gone. (For the record, this year's PECOTA pegs Kosuke at .386, which still seems awfully optimistic. But hey, Hideki Matsui improved in his second year in America.)"

Well, Fukudome may yet turn out to just be a first-half player. There aren't too many of those in the majors that I'm aware of - Alex Rodriguez, despite his reputation, has virtually identical career numbers before and after the break, and while Dave Winfield (once pejoratively described as "Mr. May" by George Steinbrenner) does have better career first half stats, they're nothing along the lines of Fukudome's 2008 dropoff. But the guy has only been in the majors for one year. While a quick check of my copy of BP '09 reveals that the Japanese season is not shorter than the US version - Fukudome had 578 PAs in 2006, compared to 590 with the Cubs last year - it's clearly less strenuous. Every game is indoors in nearly identical stadia, the degree of travel is significantly less (Japan quite obviously has nothing like flying to the West Coast and back within a week), and of course the level of competition isn't exactly identical.

My speculation has been that Fukudome's initial success had to do with him not being a known quantity - you see guys come up and rake all the time because pitchers don't necessarily know how to pitch them yet. Eventually the league caught up with Fukudome, and he had trouble making adjustments, instead overdramatizing his infamous bailout swing and turning into a corkscrew as a result. Come the offseason, it was up to Fukudome to make his own adjustments or risk becoming one of MLB's most expensive pine jockeys.

Well, it's early. But given that pitchers supposedly know how to pitch Fukudome now, maybe he's actually figured it out? Sure, he could just be a first-half guy, but on the other hand, maybe he'll be more adjusted to the rigors of MLB this year and be able to maintain his form. He probably won't do what he's doing in the first ten games all season - small sample sizes and all that. But given the bang with which he exploded onto the scene last year, would you believe his first ten games this year aren't just better, but significantly better?

.371/.477/.771, 1.249 OPS, 5 2B, 3 HR, 9 RBI, 8/6 BB/K

Yeah, he won't do that all year. A .771 slugging percentage would be the seventh-greatest year of all time, trailing only three seasons of Bonds and three seasons of Ruth. More likely than not he won't even turn in a .300/.400/.500, and he probably isn't going to hit 48 home runs and knock in 144. Ten days of stats really doesn't tell you much of anything, all told. (Milton Bradley probably won't hit .056 all year, either.)

But with that said, I think - I hope - that his start to this year being even faster than his start to last year says something about the steps forward he's taken as a player. Because if he falls off the table again, Jim Edmonds and Mark DeRosa won't be there with surprising seasons to pick up the slack, and even if Bradley can stay healthy he'll probably only give you what we were hoping from Kosuke in '08 in the first place. This team needs a .300/.400/.450-like line from Kosuke, with 15-20 homers and maybe 70-80 driven in. Only time will tell if he truly has the ability or if he just really loves hitting in April.

Walk the (first base) line

2009-04-13T20:27:00.003-05:00

In today's home opener, which the Cubs won 4-0 - more on that after the series concludes - the Cubs drew nine walks from Rockies pitching (six from starter Ubaldo Jimenez) and also took a hit by pitch (Reed Johnson, natch). This made ten free passes for the Cubs, just hours after receiving twelve (ten walks and two HBPs) from the Brewers in an 8-5 win. All told, the Cubs reached base 17 times against the Brewers and 19 times against the Rockies while failing to reach double digits in hits in either game. Recording nine or more walks and nine or fewer hits in consecutive games has only been accomplished 41 times since 1954 by any team; the last and only other Cubs team in that span to do it was the 1974 edition, which won at the Mets 5-4 on 9/15/74 in a game in which they had eight hits but eleven walks (plus an HBP), then won at the Phillies 4-2 two days later, a game in which they walked nine times but had just four hits.

Only once before in Cubs (post-1954) history had they recorded consecutive games with at least 17 times on base but single-digit hits. In 1980, the Cubs visited the Giants in August. On August 1, they had 8 hits, 8 walks, and a hit batsman, and won 5-3. The next day they had 9 hits and 9 walks but lost 8-5, with Dick Tidrow blowing a 5-4 lead by allowing four runs in the bottom of the 7th. Of course, those Cubs lost 98 games, so let's not read too much into this stat either way.

One more walk by the Cubs in today's game would have admitted them to an even more exclusive club of just nine teams (since 1954) with consecutive games featuring double-digit bases on balls but single-digit hits. (Somewhat amazingly, of the nine teams, just two won both games while three lost both.) Last team to do it: the 2002 Phillies, who lost a game 5-3 despite 10 walks and 8 hits (0-for-7 with RISP will do that to you), then won the next day 10-8 with the same walk and hit totals. (This time they went 3-for-14 with RISP, but more crucially, Expos starter Bartolo Colon walked five men in one inning - one intentionally - including three in a row to start the inning and then later one with the bases loaded to give the Phillies three runs in the inning - on one hit.)

Series recap: Cubs at Brewers, April 10-12, 2009

2009-04-12T23:32:00.002-05:00

Just win series.

That is the goal. But did we need to get this nerve-wracking this early in the year? Look, I'm ultimately not worried about the Brewers - their lineup is basically the same as last year's but their pitching, as far as I can tell, is significantly worse. But I'd still rather not give games to them in April or any other time.

April 10: Brewers 4, Cubs 3
Saw: None (at work), but was on phone and IM with my dad (who was watching) for most of game and was following on Gamecast

Blech. I may have overreacted a little; at first I thought this loss was more brutal than any of last year's, ignoring all the times Wood gave up three runs in the bottom of the ninth to blow a two-run lead. But it certainly wasn't pleasant. Milton Bradley's first Cub hit being a home run? Nice. Harden striking out ten Brewers in six innings and looking like his exhibition game at Yankee Stadium was, well, just that? Nicer. Koyie Hill homering to give the Cubs the lead in the sixth? Nicest. The Cubs bullpen? Least nice. Some of this I blame Lou for - it shouldn't have taken three pitchers to get out of the seventh and three more to get out of the eighth. Using two lefty specialists against the Brewers seemed particularly unnecessary - the Brewers hit righties so poorly they need Craig Counsell in there to break up their lineup. Really, you had to bring in Cotts just to face Craig Counsell? (And then he hits him and you've burned a pitcher.) Possibly not the best use of resources. And then Gregg adds a horrible ninth to his two appearances in the Astros series in which he got one shaky save and then was on the mound at the time of the ten-inning loss's completion. Good start to the closer tenure there.

April 11: Cubs 6, Brewers 5
Saw: Very little. We were in Culver's and the game was on TV in the background for Milwaukee's two runs in the seventh, but I missed everything else.

Not Z's best outing although it was a "quality start." I did manage to see the walk-happy bullpen show up again in the seventh - given how bad the Brewers' team OBP was last year, I don't know how you walk the bases loaded, even if it is Braun and Fielder and clearly you're terrified to pitch to them. And why even bring in Cotts when he's just going to walk a guy? Heilman sure looked good after giving up the go-ahead runs, though, huh? Reminds me of that game against the Rockies in 2007 when Howry gave up the go-ahead home run and then (after nearly being attacked Randy Myers-style) immediately settled down and worked quickly out of the inning. Soriano - well, what can you say? I just hope he keeps sockin' 'em out.

April 12: Cubs 8, Brewers 5
Saw: Bottom first, top second, bottom sixth through end of game

We went for dinner in the middle of the game, so I missed the ridiculous fourth inning, featuring five walks and a hit by pitch, and four runs scoring despite just one hit. Talk about being handed a game, although if not for Reed Johnson's heroics in the bottom of the fifth - which I didn't see live but which were replayed multiple times later in the game - it would have been handed right back. Truly, "P Fielder hit sacrifice fly to right," as the play-by-play on ESPN.com lists it, doesn't exactly do the encounter justice. Johnson may never be mistaken for an in-their-prime Ken Griffey Jr. or Andruw Jones, but he has made some epic catches for the Cubs since being signed just before the start of '08. Anyway, the Brewers issued 10 walks to the Cubs all told, six by Suppan, the starter, in just 3.2 innings. Just for good measure, they hit two more guys, for a total of twelve free passes. Total Cub hits in the game: five. Now that is called handing over a game. Man. But how about that team OBP for the Cubs!

Bad news: gee, Milton Bradley got injured. On the bright side, Kosuke is hitting .409, and if Bradley hadn't left the game, Johnson doesn't make that catch on Fielder. (I guess Fukudome might have, but hey. It worked out for now.) How about that middle of the Cubs order, huh? Lee hitting .080 and Bradley hitting .059? Heck of a start. (Although Lee did have 2 RBI with a sac fly and bases-loaded walk.)

As for Gregg... the less said, the better. He only looks worse in comparison with Marmol when Marmol blows away the side in the 8th and then Gregg seems like he's going to roll only to give up a two-out homer to make it 8-5, followed by a double and a walk before managing to strike out Fielder as the tying run. Frankly, I'm not sad to see Marmol remain in a setup role - people complain about the firmness of the closer's role when the team's best reliever - say, K-Rod in New York - is locked into "ninth inning with a lead" scenarios and only rarely pitches in any others, rather than being able to throw him into any late-game spot, including in the 7th or 8th, where a big out is needed. Keeping Marmol out of the designated closer spot allows him to do things like he did on Friday, coming into the game in the 7th with two on and one out (he's certainly the guy you want to see there because he gives up so few hits and even so few balls in play). You certainly wouldn't want to see Gregg in that spot, which is what would happen much more frequently were Marmol locked into the ninth. Really, while Gregg's ninth inning struggles have made the early part of the year a lot more heart-stopping than it really ought to be, it's better he's there - because the closer virtually always comes in with no one on base, it's an easier job and better suited for someone who isn't a shutdown reliever with a huge strikeout total and extremely low WHIP the way the Marmot is. It's understandable that Marmol wants the "closer" title - those guys make more money. (As it is, Gregg makes $4.2 million while Marmol makes $575,000.) But if Marmol keeps doing what he's doing, I foresee a nice payday for him down the line whether he gets the "closer" mantle or not. And if I were the Cubs, I'd tell him that (a) we still consider him the likeliest future closer but (b) honestly, we're using him right now in the way we feel gives him the most value. People love saves, but no one is going to miss a reliever who strikes out 114 guys in 87.1 innings.

Home opener! Bring on the Rockies.

Series recap: Cubs at Astros, April 6-8, 2009

2009-04-08T20:14:00.004-05:00

Here's something I'm going to try this year - a recap following each series. We'll see how this goes since I don't always get a chance to watch the games and really, what are you getting out of a recap by someone who didn't see the game that you're not getting from anywhere else? Anyway.

April 6: Cubs 4, Astros 2
Saw: 9th inning (plus heard 8th on WGN)

Didn't see much of this one; I was still at work when it started and didn't get to a TV until the ninth inning. The bottom of the inning was plenty nerve-wracking, but hey, I saw the win. The box score shows Zambrano pitched fairly well in earning his first-ever Opening Day win (although he actually pitched better last year in a no-decision, statistically), and you have to like Soriano starting the year with a home run considering the notoriously slow power start to his Cubs career (not hitting his first home run until May 1, 2007) and his awful start last year (hitting below .200 as late as May 9).

April 7: Astros 3, Cubs 2 (10)
Saw: Inning three through end of game

Wandy Rodriguez isn't exactly Sandy Koufax, but he pitches well at home - in 2008, his ERA there was just 2.99. The Cubs struggled against him in this one, managing just four hits (though they also drew three walks); Soriano struck out three times and was so happy to see LaTroy Hawkins in the 8th that he hit a moon shot off him that nearly left the stadium entirely, tying the game at 2. Dempster pitched all right, getting a quality start, but the bullpen was up and down. Guzman looked pretty good, but Heilman, Cotts and Gregg all had one issue or another. When the first two reached against Cotts in the 10th, it was pretty clearly over. Gregg, as I predicted, has underwhelmed so far. On the other hand, Wood underwhelmed to start last year (having a horrid outing on Opening Day), so we should probably reserve judgment for now.

April 8: Cubs 11, Astros 6
Saw: Bottom third through bottom fifth, and the last two outs

By the time I got home, it was already 8-2. The home run that made it 8-4 was a typical Lilly home run, the hanger at about 85 (if even) that I feel like I could hit out half the time. Russ Ortiz didn't throw a single pitch above the knees, I think, which of course meant he racked up a big run of strikeouts while the Astros started to chip at the 8-0 lead the Cubs had built off Brian Moehler. The Cubs finally picked up on "he's not actually throwing strikes" in the fifth, loading the bases on three walks and chasing Ortiz. Ramirez then doubled off the scoreboard to score two more (actually bouncing a tile out of the hand-operated scoreboard). Fontenot ended the inning, but with the lead back to 10-4, I decided to watch my DVR'ed Lost episode. I got back just in time to see the last couple outs. Not the most impressive game for Cubs pitching - five homers? I ask you - but hey, a win is a win, and 11 runs is pretty nice. Also, Fukudome was 4-for-5 with a walk and a home run. Is this his early season form again, or might he actually be back on the ball this year? Well, ask again in a couple months.

First opening-season series win since 2003 at the Mets (when the two winning pitchers were Wood and Prior). Heck, I'll take it.

Here Comes Your 2009th Nervous Breakdown

2009-04-05T23:01:00.002-05:00

Baseball season is finally back. The 2008 Cubs have faded in the rearview mirror, and it's time to see if the new iteration can improve on their result. Let's do a position-by-position look at the '09 Cubs compared to the 97-win squad of '08.

First Base
'08: Derrek Lee (.291/.361/.462, 20 HR, 90 RBI)
'09: Derrek Lee

Lee returns for his sixth season starting at first base for the Cubs, and with the exception of his lost 2006, they've all been at least pretty good. But 2005 looks more and more like a fluke year, and whether or not the wrist injury is responsible for his loss of power, the fact remains that Lee cannot be considered a 30-homer threat until/unless he actually does it again. It's not clear that Lee belongs in the 3-hole at this point of his career, but it seems like he's going to end up there. (Oddly, run simulators seem to suggest that it's beneficial not to put your best hitter in the third slot. So maybe this will work fine.)

Second Base
'08: Mark DeRosa (.285/.376/.481, 21 HR, 87 RBI)
'09: Mike Fontenot

That's right - last year the Cubs got more production from their second baseman than their first baseman. You could certainly argue that the Cubs sold high on DeRosa - he's even older than Lee and only just had his career year? - but it's hard to argue that they couldn't use numbers like that from the middle infield, and his all-purpose utility ways were certainly handy last year. With the potentially fragile Milton Bradley manning right field, maybe it wouldn't have been so bad to keep DeRosa. Fontenot hit in his PAs last year, putting up even higher slashes than DeRo did, and the fact that he's a lefty clearly helped, but a dropoff in production from this position seems inevitable.

Shortstop
'08: Ryan Theriot (.307/.387/.359, 73/58 BB/K, 22/13 SB/CS)
'09: Ryan Theriot

Riot's 2007 28/4 SB/CS ratio clearly made him think he could steal bases; last year took the wind out of those sails. If Theriot can maintain a .300 average and an OBP in the high .300s, that would probably be adequate, especially if he's asked to bat 8th instead of 2nd as he often was last year. Most fielding metrics find him below average at short, and he has less than no power, so he'd better get on base.

Third Base
'08: Aramis Ramirez (.289/.380/.518, 27 HR, 111 RBI)
'09: Aramis Ramirez

Ramirez's 2008 was a little weird - on the one hand, he marked a career high in walks and OBP, but on the other, his slugging was its lowest in five full seasons with the Cubs. Assuming health, 25-30 homers and 100 RBI or more seem likely, especially hitting in the fifth spot, a prime RBI position if Lee and Bradley get on base like they're supposed to. Overall, Rami has been one of the most consistent Cubs of the last few years, and he'll need to maintain that production for this team to win.

Left Field
'08: Alfonso Soriano (.280/.344/.532, 29 HR, 75 RBI)
'09: Alfonso Soriano

As always, the key to Soriano will be his health. Last year he smacked 29 homers despite playing in just 109 games, which equals 43 over a full season. Another broken hand seems unlikely (knock on wood), but we could certainly see more of the nagging injuries that limited him to 135 games in 2007, especially since he's only getting older (and really, who knows if he's only 33?). Anything less than 30 home runs out of Soriano this year is probably a bad sign.

Center Field
'08: Jim Edmonds (.256/.369/.568, 19 HR and 49 RBI in 298 PAs) and Reed Johnson (.303/.358/.420, 6 HR and 50 RBI in 374 PAs)
'09: Reed Johnson and Kosuke Fukudome

The relatively unexpected power surge that Edmonds delivered to this position isn't likely to repeat, since neither Johnson nor Fukudome is a high-power guy. For that matter, what to expect out of Fukudome is entirely unclear; watching him bat in the second half of last year was pretty depressing given how great he looked the first couple of months. Like most Cubs fans, I still desperately want the guy to hit, and at least he can take a walk now and again (leading the team last year with 81), but the days of thinking he could pop 20 homers out of Wrigley and go for a .400 OBP like last year's PECOTA projected are long gone. (For the record, this year's PECOTA pegs Kosuke at .386, which still seems awfully optimistic. But hey, Hideki Matsui improved in his second year in America.)

Right Field
'08: Kosuke Fukudome (.257/.359/.379, 10 HR, 58 RBI, 81/104 BB/K)
'09: Milton Bradley

Since Fukudome turned out not to be the world-beating left-handed right fielder the Cubs wanted after the '07 season, they went after another one in Bradley - and arguably took at least as big of a gamble. For all Fukudome's lack of production post-June, at least he could run out there every day and played above-average defense. Just what Bradley is going to turn in in those departments is really anyone's guess. He had a great season last year, leading the AL in on-base percentage (.436!) and OPS (.999), but he also played just 20 games in the field (and just 126 overall). In fact, just once in his career has he been an everyday outfielder and played more or less a full season - 2004, when his OPS was a mere .786. His career stats are much higher in the AL - not having to field probably helped. And ironically, Bradley is actually a switch-hitter who hits better against lefties while batting RH than against righties while batting LH. Eesh. Still, I would hope the Cubs at least did their research on the injury front, and Bradley tore up the spring, hitting .460/.526/.800 (!!!) in 50 at-bats. Yes, that's just spring, but it's a good start.

Bench
'08: Mike Fontenot, Ronny Cedeno, Henry Blanco, Felix Pie, Daryle Ward, Micah Hoffpauir
'09: Koyie Hill, Aaron Miles, Micah Hoffpauir, Joey Gathright

Not the most intimidating bench. Hoffpauir flashes power in spring and the minors, but he's been mired behind Derrek Lee at first and can't really play anywhere else (to paraphrase Christina Kahrl at Baseball Prospectus, he plays the outfield corners in the sense that he's happy to run out there if you give him a glove), which means he's likely relegated to pinch-hit duties for most of the year, especially if Lee plays 155 games again. Miles is clearly a downgrade from DeRosa from a hitting standpoint, but he can also play anywhere; expect him to log a lot of games in right and left if Soriano and Bradley have years anywhere similar to last from an injury standpoint. A team with DeRosa hitting 21 homers could survive such outages; Miles' career high is 6, accomplished at Coors Field in 2004. On the bright side, he hit .317 last year for St. Louis and can switch-hit. Hill should be a similar non-factor on offense to Blanco, though he had a monster spring; the real loss in Hank White's departure is his veteran presence and defense, though Soto should have the latter covered anyway. As for Gathright, it's unclear why he was considered an upgrade over Felix Pie, who at least had the redeeming quality of still having potential. Gathright basically looks like a Juan Pierre clone on paper, although possibly even less talented, and we all remember how that turned out. I suppose if Pie wasn't going to play regularly anyway then it's probably a wash as to who sat on the bench between him and Gathright, but it struck me as an odd move even at the time.

Starting Pitching
'08: Carlos Zambrano (14-6, 3.91), Ryan Dempster (17-6, 2.96), Ted Lilly (17-9, 4.09), Jason Marquis (11-9, 4.53), Rich Harden (5-1, 1.77)
'09: Carlos Zambrano, Ryan Dempster, Ted Lilly, Rich Harden, Sean Marshall

Zambrano lowered both his walks (which had been soaring) and strikeouts last year by largely pitching to contact, which unfortunately led to some ugly games, especially late in the year. It's also been speculated for some time that Zambrano has had lingering arm issues that would eventually blow up completely. He seems healthy this spring, but let's see how he looks in Houston. Dempster seems ripe for a regression, so let's just hope he doesn't fall back to the pack too much. Lilly probably will be what he will be - 15 wins, era around 4, bunch of home runs allowed - while Harden is something of an enigma even if he can stay healthy. Marshall should be an upgrade over Marquis, but just how much of an upgrade remains to be seen.

Relief Pitching
'08: Carlos Marmol, Bob Howry, Michael Wuertz, Neal Cotts, Sean Marshall, Jon Lieber, Jeff Samardzija, Kevin Hart, Chad Gaudin, Scott Eyre
'09: Carlos Marmol, Aaron Heilman, Neal Cotts, Angel Guzman, David Patton, Luis Vizcaino

Marmol's mediocre spring leaves him stuck in the 8th-inning role for now, which apparently disappointed him, hopefully not so much that he'll struggle. Heilman had a great spring; so did Patton, strangely, seeing as he's never pitched above Class A before. The rest of the pen is just "who had the least awful spring" - Cotts, Vizcaino and Guzman all had ERAs over 5, but had the good fortune not to pitch quite as badly as Chad Gaudin (released after signing a $2 million contract to avoid arbitration), Kevin Hart or Jeff Samardzija (both of whom had options and so headed back to Iowa). I imagine the hook will be quick if the middle relief struggles, though - with a couple years at most left in the win-the-World-Series window, the Cubs can't afford to turn into the Mets. Relief pitching was mostly a strength last year; it needs to be again.

Closer
'08: Kerry Wood (5-4, 3.26 ERA, 34 SV, 6 BS)
'09: Kevin Gregg

The sabermetric community frowned on the Gregg trade (he was acquired for Jose Ceda, a flamethrowing prospect who some said was a better pitcher than Gregg right now), but so far it seems all right - in the spring, Gregg made 11 appearances and didn't yield a single earned run. Of course, it's the spring - how often do the best players come up late in games? It's more likely that Gregg fattened his line on guys who will be in AA tomorrow if they aren't already. He'll probably be an adequate closer - 30 saves, 3.50 ERA - but this was probably a step down. Of course, if Gregg struggles, at least Marmol's there to step in.

All told, I'm definitely not without my worries for this year's team. Last year's team really seemed like it should have won it all - 97 regular season wins, career years from Dempster and DeRosa, a killer one-two punch at the end of games reminiscent of Rivera-to-Wetteland on the '96 Yankees. This year's team probably won't win 97 games, doesn't have that same one-two punch unless Gregg proves us all wrong, and looking at the roster I just don't see how anyone is likely to outperform last year's counterpart at their position significantly, unless it's Bradley. After all the talk of not repeating last year's embarrassing NLDS departure, did this team really even improve, in the final analysis?

It seems like the Cubs are primed to make the playoffs again. Milwaukee has taken two steps backwards, St. Louis hasn't really upgraded after overachieving last year (although a healthy Chris Carpenter would make a big difference for them), the Reds still seem too young to me, and Pittsburgh and Houston have been predicted by everyone to be awful. I still hate being the favorite, though. We've reached a point in the last decade where it's suddenly become a disappointment if the Cubs don't make the playoffs - or don't make the LCS or World Series - rather than a pleasant surprise when they do. And while no one wants to go through life rooting for a team that can only be counted on to make "pleasant surprise" playoff appearances, I'm not sure I'm a fan of being in the position of just coasting through the summer waiting for the playoffs to start. Which is ironic since I hate watching the Cubs lose, and any team that wins most of its games comfortably is clearly going to be a playoff lock.

I don't know. Much like last year, I'm looking forward to the season, but I'm also dreading it. Does that make sense?

Last of '98

2008-11-14T14:19:00.002-06:00

The 1998 Cubs were not the first team of my lifetime to make the playoffs. They were, however, the first to make it when I was really old enough to be fully engaged. And what a year that was. The Cubs were certainly not a great team, but there was Sammy Sosa battling McGwire for the right to Maris' record, and a dramatic wild card chase and playoff, and the wunderkind Kid K, Kerry Wood, tying the strikeout record and delivering one of the most dominant pitching performances of all time on May 6, his fifth career start.

Wood never really lived up to his promise. Oft-injured, he had just two full seasons in Chicago, 2002 and 2003, and since the latter - the best of his career - his record is 18-20, with 34 saves (all in 2008). In 2006, he was paid $12 million to make four starts, earning more than $600,000 per inning pitched; all told, Baseball-Reference lists him earning almost $49 million for a career in which he has won 77 games, more than $636,000 per victory.

But with that said, Wood was a good soldier. Perhaps feeling that he owed the Cubs for his well-paid and under-performed 2004-2006, he came back in 2007 on a cheap, one-year deal, reinventing himself as a reliever. He came back with another lower-paid, one-year deal in 2008 and took over as the team's closer, allowing both Ryan Dempster to move into the rotation as he wanted and Carlos Marmol to stay in the more favorable 8th-inning role. In the process, he became the first Cub to play on four playoff teams since Stan Hack.

Sadly, the Cubs have announced that Wood will not be back in 2009, or at least that he will almost certainly not be be back assuming that someone else will be willing to sign him to a multi-year deal. It seems that Wood is looking for a three- or four-year commitment as a closer, surely for at least 6-7 million dollars a year, and the Cubs are not in a position to offer it to him. (Chalk one up for the slumping economy.) After trading prize prospect Jose Ceda for Marlins closer Kevin Gregg, the message is clear - we're moving on.

The rational side of me understands this perfectly, of course. Even in 2008, Wood could be unreliable - he was out with a blister for most of July and could struggle with his command at times. Of course, the latter is true of most pitchers, and at his best Wood was typically unhittable. His best moment of the year came when he froze Prince Fielder with a breaking ball to get a game-ending strikeout on September 16, but even this came after giving up three hits and a run. To ask the Cubs to pay anything like 3/25 or 4/35 or whatever, when reasonably effective closers are a dime a dozen and few of them have anything resembling Wood's injury history, and with the team's ownership status still unresolved and the economy in shambles - yeah, that's probably too much.

But the fan in me is upset. In part because Wood is the last connection to the seminal Cubs team of my childhood, and the only current Cub besides Zambrano to break camp with the team in '03. In part because even in the age of free agency, I think we're still conditioned to believe that players who come up with our team are going to stay with them forever, especially if they're good; surely we wouldn't let them go. Seeing Sammy Sosa leave the Cubs - yes, he didn't come up with them, but he spent the vast, vast majority of his career with the Cubs - was tough, and that was in spite of what the situation with him had turned into and in spite of the fact that he was aging in dog years. Seeing Wood leave, though, is significantly worse; he doesn't leave on bad terms like Sosa, he isn't sneaking out to grab a ring in his twilight years like Grace, and he isn't making a shameless money grab in spite of inspiring no confidence like Prior. He's a very good pitcher who, while only in a relief role, is about as effective as he's ever been. He's just turned himself into a luxury the Cubs clearly don't feel they can afford, at least when you combine the money he can command with his injury history. It's reached the point where the Cubs feel that if they're going to spend that kind of money, they need a guy who is more likely to be on the field day in and day out than not. And having that be the reason, while perfectly understandable, is tough to absorb.

The other reason is that there is a pretty good chance that Wood will sign with an NL team and the Cubs will have to see him. Heck, he could sign in the division - Milwaukee and St. Louis could both use a closer. And the thought of Kerry Wood, the longest-tenured Cub at the close of the '08 season, jogging in from the bullpen in Cardinals red, makes me sick to my stomach. It's not just that I don't want Wood going to the Cardinals - I don't want to have to root against him. You thought seeing Jim Edmonds in blue was weird? Wood on the Cardinals or Brewers would be 100 times worse. For my own sanity, I really hope he goes to the AL.

Anything's possible if you just make shit up

2008-10-27T23:21:00.002-05:00

Say you're Phil Rogers and you need some grist for the rumor mill to fill out your "Whispers" column. Hey, how about saying something totally unsourced about the Jake Peavy "deal"?

The Cubs are on the list of teams for which Jake Peavy will waive his no-trade clause. This doesn't look like a fit, but don't be surprised if Jim Hendry tries to put together a package that would include a swap of first basemen, Derrek Lee and Adrian Gonzalez, who is supposedly untouchable.

Uh, what? Let's break down this nonsense.

Okay, the first sentence is true; the Cubs are on that list. Doesn't really mean much.

The second sentence starts with "This doesn't look like a fit." True enough. It seems doubtful that the Cubs have the prospects to beat out teams like Atlanta.

Then: "Don't be surprised if Jim Hendry tries to put together a package." Yup, that's fine. I mean, I want him to try.

Then we head to Crazy Town: "...that includes a swap of first baseman, Derrek Lee and Adrian Gonzalez, who is supposedly untouchable."

Whaaaaaat? Phil, did you forget to take your non-crazy pills this morning? Think about this for a second. The Cubs don't have the prospects to put together a deal... so they're going to juice it up by asking the Padres to trade their untouchable first baseman for the Cubs' first baseman? I can just imagine how this conversation would go:

Kevin Towers: Hello?
Jim Hendry: Hey, Kevin, Jim Hendry here.
Towers: Hi, Jim, how are you?
Hendry: Oh, fine, thanks. Listen, since you guys have Jake Peavy on the market and he's willing to come to us, I wanted to pitch a trade to you.
Towers: Shoot.
Hendry: All right, Felix Pie, Kevin Hart and Jeff Samardzija. And we'll eat some of Samardzija's contract.
Towers: I don't know, Jim. I really need some guys who are major-league ready right now. Pie hasn't exactly done much for your team, and Hart and Samardzija haven't proven they can start in the bigs. I've got the Braves ready to offer me either Jair Jurrjens or Charlie Morton as a centerpiece of a deal.
Hendry: Well, I could send you Jason Marquis...
Towers: Ha ha! You old jokester.
Hendry: Um, yes. I'm a jokester. Anyway, I thought you might find that a little light, so I'm willing to sweeten the pot.
Towers: Go for it.
Hendry: What would you say to the triumphant return of Derrek Lee to San Diego?
Towers: Well, we've already got a first baseman, Jim, and he's younger and more powerful than Lee.
Hendry: Here's how you resolve that problem - you trade him to us in return! So, what do you say?
[faint clicking sound]
Hendry: Kevin?
[dial tone]

Does Phil Rogers honestly believe that the Padres would trade the Cubs arguably their pitcher and best hitter for a grab bag of prospects and Derrek Lee? Just for fun, here's how Adrian Gonzalez stacks up with Derrek Lee:

Lee, 2008: .291/.361/.462, 41 2B, 20 HR, 90 RBI; age for bulk of 2009 season: 33
Gonzalez, 2008: .279/.361/.510, 32 2B, 36 HR, 119 RBI; age for bulk of 2009 season: 27

So Gonzalez is six years younger than Lee, has more power despite playing in Petco (on the road he hit .308/.368/.578), and makes $3 million in 2009 to Lee's $13 million. Who wouldn't do that???

I don't believe for a second that Phil Rogers even had a source on this. I think he just made it up. Either that or it was some tossed-off thing that the source wasn't being serious about.

Randy Bush: So that about wraps up the interview, I guess, Phil. Anything else you wanted to ask me?
Phil Rogers: Yeah, any chance that Jake Peavy deal happens?
Bush: Heh, well, we'd all like it to, Phil. In fact, we'd love to be able to get Adrian Gonzalez from them too!
Rogers: Really? Wow. What about Derrek Lee?
Bush: I suppose we'd have to ship him out there, then.
Rogers: Wow, I can't wait to break this story!
Bush: Phil, I was clearly kidding.
Rogers: Can't hear you! On a deadline!

Pet Peavy

2008-10-18T14:32:00.002-05:00

Good news, everyone! Jake Peavy is probably going to be traded by the Padres any day now, and he's listed five teams he'd be willing to accept a trade to. Those five? The Braves, the Dodgers, the Cardinals, the Astros, and your Chicago Cubs.

Now the bad news: there is no way the Cubs can put together a package capable of getting Peavy.

Consider what the Cubs gave up for Rich Harden: essentially, it was the prospect pu-pu platter. Two guys in Murton and Patterson who had proven themselves as great AAA players but average major leaguers; an A-ball catcher (Josh Donaldson) who was highly rated but struggling (though he's improved substantially since joining the A's system); and a young pitcher (Sean Gallagher) whose ceiling is considered by most to be "third starter." And if Harden didn't have a history of injury, it doesn't seem likely that would have been enough to get the job done.

But that deal exposed the barrenness of the Cubs' farm system. What top prospects do we have to swing a deal for a Cy Young winner in his prime? The Padres are said to want a center fielder, and surely they'll want either a very good young starter or maybe two good-to-decent ones. From the Cubs' standpoint, the obvious name for the first part is Felix Pie, but does anyone really think that's getting the job done? He still seems to be considered a decent prospect, but he doesn't seem to have the "future star" tag on him that he used to. Is he really still thought of highly enough to be the centerpiece of such a deal?

And what pitchers do the Cubs have to give up? Once upon a time, that was the strength of the farm system, but many of the callups of the early 2000s flamed out. Now, who's left? Samardzija? Hart? Even if a package of Pie, Samardzija and Hart could get it done for Peavy in a vacuum, what are the odds that that's the best offer?

I hope Peavy goes to Atlanta, because I sure don't want to see him in the division, and fuck the Dodgers. But even though he'd be willing to waive his no-trade to come to the Cubs, I just don't think we've got the pieces necessary to do it.

AC 00 63 100

2008-10-05T15:06:00.002-05:00

There's not much more to say about the baseball itself. For the second year in a row, the opposing team got all the breaks, and the Cubs compounded their own misery by looking like a wreck on offense. The team that scored 855 runs in 161 games in the regular season scored six in three in the playoffs; the team that was second in the league in ERA allowed almost seven runs per.

During Game One, I was angry. During Game Two, which I didn't get to watching until it was already 5-0, I was pretty much just numb. During Game Three, which I attempted to watch from the beginning but gave up on watching consistently once the Cubs went behind, I was angry again. But I already feel numb to the whole thing the day after, although I was in Borders today and saw a raft of Cubs-related merchandise, including caps reading "1908-2008: Team of Destiny" and various magazine covers, and it just felt like a punch to the gut.

What upsets me isn't so much how badly they played, although that's certainly appalling. It's how quickly the whole thing was over, after 161 games that started on March 31, ran throughout the spring and summer and ended with the Cubs running away with a second straight Central Division title and 97 wins, the most since 1945. I threw myself into the team as much as I could this year, going to a road game for the first time in more than a decade, listening to day games on internet radio at work, keeping a printout of the schedule in my cubicle, on which I would write "W" and "L" as appropriate. I'm not going to claim I was the most rabid fan there was - I only went to three games, and just one of those was at Wrigley - but given my other commitments I think I did pretty well, trying to make time to watch the games whenever I could or at least following them online. And I loved this team. Every night someone else was the hero; Soto or DeRosa or Fukudome or Lee or Ramirez or Soriano or Edmonds or Johnson or Theriot or Marmol or Wood or Zambrano or Dempster or Harden or Lilly or even Marquis. Yeah, they had a few bad stretches, but what team doesn't? This was the team that was supposed to have the talent to go all the way.

And then it was just over. We barely even had time to soak up the playoff excitement of DeRosa's home run in Game One when Dempster self-destructed, and the Cubs never led in the series again, rarely even looking competitive. The best post-HR moment was scoring two runs and looking briefly competent against Takashi Saito in the bottom of the ninth in Game Two; of course, the score was already 10-1 when the "rally" started. The Cubs, best team in the National League and arguably the best team in baseball, were the first team to be officially eliminated from the playoffs, falling to the mighty 84-win Dodgers. Even Milwaukee, overmatched by the Phillies and unable to get a win out of CC Sabathia in their Game Two, was able to take a game before falling. The NL Central, which had a claim to having the three best teams in the NL as late as August, winds up with no teams in the NLCS.

Every Opening Day with the Cubs is like a first date with that year's team. And this year's first date, with Fukudome's tying home run in the bottom of the ninth, was pretty special, even if the Cubs didn't end up winning. As the season went on, every Cubs fan was drawn into the relationship as far as they could go. Ask just about any Cubs fan, certainly any Cubs fan under the age of 40, and they'd tell you this was the best team of their lifetime. This team was doing things no team in decades had done. It was the 100-year anniversary. This was the team that was going to go all the way. And then, before we knew it, we'd been dumped, sitting heartbroken in front of the television, wondering how six wonderful months could have evaporated into disaster so quickly. Just as with a particularly devastating breakup, it's enough to make you tell yourself that you're going to swear off baseball forever - all it does is break your heart, and you can't take it anymore.

But just as with that next person we can't stop thinking about, we're all going to be back eventually. It may not be next Opening Day, but every one of us is going to allow ourselves to love the Cubs again as long as they give us a reason to do so. The bulk of this team isn't going anywhere - aside from Jim Edmonds, not one of the key players from this year's team will be older than 34 next year. And consider this - aside from Mark DeRosa (and, you might possibly argue, Theriot), not one of the Cubs' position players had what you would call a career year. Five guys hit 20 home runs, but no one hit 30, even though at least four guys on the team probably have that capability. And while Dempster might have had his career year on the mound, just about everyone else on the pitching staff can be better. And who knows what Hendry might do to reshape the roster a bit in the offseason, maybe trying to bring in another frontline starter or a little relief help, or another outfield bat. This team will be back. It may not win 97 games again, but it's going to contend. And when you consider how long it's been since the Cubs even contended in three straight years, that in itself is a small victory.

It hurts now. I know it does. But you haven't heard the last of the Cubs just yet. And if we've waited decades to get to this point, and survived the agonies and indignities of 1969, and 1984, and 2003, always coming back eventually, always believing that one day things finally would go our way... well, there's a reason they call it "eternal optimism." We're Cubs fans. Giving up hope just isn't an option.

Wait till next year.

Bulletin from a parallel universe in which things are awesome.

2008-10-03T10:19:00.002-05:00

Rich Harden throws eight innings of two-hit ball, striking out 13 Dodgers, and the Cubs get to Hiroki Kuroda in the fifth, taking Game Three of the series by a 4-1 score. The next day, a short-rested Derek Lowe struggles with his command, and the Cubs win 6-3; Manny Ramirez hits two solo homers off Ted Lilly, but separates his shoulder diving for a ball in the sixth inning. The series returns to Chicago for Game Five and Chad Billingsley holds the Cubs again, but this time Ryan Dempster is almost equal to the task (it helps that the Dodgers are forced to play Juan Pierre in left), and the Cubs enter the bottom of the ninth trailing 1-0. Takashi Saito walks Derrek Lee to start the inning, and his first pitch to Aramis Ramirez is ripped deep into the night for a walk-off home run, sending the Cubs into the NLCS, where the Phillies await.

Game 2: There are no words

2008-10-02T23:14:00.004-05:00

I really don't even have the energy for this one. How do you give up 17 runs in two games to the Dodgers? (Well, seven walks in one game and four errors in the other, but even so.) The offensive part doesn't necessarily surprise me - though it sucks - but to have the pitching and defense be so lousy (though Zambrano was better than you'd think looking at the score)...

Honestly, yesterday I was really angry. Today I'm just numb. It's like it's happening to someone else's team.

Game 1: Dempster Diving

2008-10-01T20:48:00.002-05:00

Honestly, is there any way that could have gone worse? I suppose Aramis could have blown out his knee rounding first on his double, but that's about it. Here, in no particular order, are the five worst things about this game, and then I'm not talking about it anymore.

1. There goes the home field advantage.
We heard that the Dodgers were better than they had been when the Cubs last played them, but consoled ourselves with two facts: (1) the Cubs are still better and (2) the Dodgers were lousy on the road all year, so having the home field should be enough of an edge. Well, now what? The Cubs have to win at least one in Los Angeles to have any hope. It's not like that's an impossible task, but so much for not having to do it.

2. Can we trust any of the starting pitchers?
Whether Dempster was anxious or what, it doesn't matter - he blew it big-time, utterly failing to vindicate Piniella's faith in him. Let's say the series does come back to a fifth game at Wrigley - are you feeling that confident seeing Dempster stride out there again?

3. In Carlos we trust.
Yeah, Mr. 7.28 ERA Since August 1 now has to win Game Two to save the Cubs' season. (At the very least, the Cubs have to win, but Zambrano simply can't pitch poorly.)

4. Hi there, 2007 NLDS offense.
Only twice in the game did the Cubs put more than one runner on base in an inning. Once was DeRosa's two-run homer in the second, and the other was when DeRosa and Theriot had consecutive two-out singles in the fourth. Everyone else who got on - and the Cubs had a man on base in every single inning - just died there, most annoyingly Ramirez's leadoff double in the sixth.

5. Derek Lowe.
I hate you, I hate your stupid face, and I hate that the umpires call your stupid pitches at the ankles a foot off the plate for strikes.

My dad wanted to spin this by saying that "you have to overcome some adversity to break a curse," pointing to the '04 Red Sox. Of course, the Red Sox won their first-round series 3-0. Also, the '05 White Sox overcame adversity to the tune of losing one game the entire postseason. Whatever. It comes down to this: the Cubs win tomorrow, or the Cubs lose this series. Here we go.

The 11 Best Games of 2008

2008-09-30T22:10:00.004-05:00

I did this last year, and okay, it wasn't exactly a harbinger of good things for the playoffs. But with 11 games left to win, here are the 11 best Cubs games of the 2008 regular season, this time with video! Let's hope that by the time October's over, they're games #12-22 of the 2008 season.

11. "Atta boy, Jimmy!" (June 12)
Hosting the Braves and Tim Hudson, the Cubs struggled to get much offense going all day behind Carlos Zambrano. Trailing 2-1 entering the bottom of the ninth, Jim Edmonds - who was still fairly new as a Cub and trying to win the fans over - smacked a 1-0 offering from Blaine Boyer out to left to tie the game, eliciting this call from Len Kasper, who (on WGN's 60th anniversary) had clearly been saving it all day. Perhaps even more entertaining was the Cubs winning the game in the 11th when they loaded the bases and Reed Johnson took a ball off his shoe to drive in the winning run.

10. Revenge is a dish best served cold (May 11)
Hosting the Diamondbacks for the first time since being eliminated from the playoffs in three straight games the previous October, the Cubs had already won the series with a Sunday game against Randy Johnson looming. But due to the conditions (cold, wet, and with a 24-mph breeze blowing in), both teams scrapped their intended starters, treating the fans to Sean Gallagher against Edgar Gonzalez. Gonzalez got the better of the head-to-head, but the Cubs rallied - down 4-2 in the seventh, they scored two to tie it when Reed Johnson smacked a no-doubt line drive into the teeth of the wind in left center, his first Cubs home run. In the eighth, Daryle Ward blasted a pinch-hit two-run double to right center, and the Cubs swept the D-Backs out of Wrigley with a 6-4 win, an early statement series for the season (at a time when people still thought the D-Backs were good).

9. Ward pinches the Fish (August 15)
Daryle Ward might not have had the kind of 2008 we all hoped for after his stellar 2007, but he could still come through in a big spot. Aside from the above mentioned double to beat Arizona, he also had a dramatic go-ahead three-run homer on the same night that Michael Phelps won his seventh gold in Beijing. (So you can see why Ward got overshadowed.) With the Cubs down 5-3 against Marlins closer Kevin Gregg, Mark DeRosa drew a walk and Reed Johnson singled, leading to Ward's heroics. The Cubs held on to win 6-5 (not without a scare as Wood walked one, hit another and threw a wild pitch), their fifth in a row at the time.

8. "Beating" Sabathia (July 28)
The Brewers had been adrift in the Central, falling as far back as 8.5 games on June 15 - the exact same deficit the Cubs had come back from a year earlier. And the Brewers, like the Cubs, came all the way back by the end of July, tying the division on July 26 and entering a pivotal four-game series in Milwaukee just a game back, having already taken four of six from the Cubs at Wrigley earlier in the year. The Cubs weren't about to yield anything, even against Milwaukee's newly-acquired ace CC Sabathia, who was already 4-0 as a Brewer with three complete games and a shutout. Ted Lilly was pitching well until giving up consecutive homers to J.J. Hardy and Ryan Braun in the sixth, followed by a run-scoring double to Corey Hart that put the Cubs behind 3-2. Sabathia couldn't hold the lead, however, giving up two singles, a double steal and a walk that loaded the bases with one out. Derrek Lee grounded into what looked like an inning-ending double play, but Reed Johnson made a good takeout slide into second and Rickie Weeks fired wide of first, scoring two runs and putting the Cubs back ahead 4-3. Bob Howry blew the lead in the bottom of the inning with a solo home run to Russell Branyan, but the Cubs won it 6-4 in the ninth, Lee atoning for his near-DP with a double to score the go-ahead run. It was the only game the Brewers would lose behind Sabathia (though he ended without a decision) until the Cubs beat him outright on September 16.

7. Really beating Sabathia (September 16)
Speaking of which, here's that game. By this point the Cubs had an eight-game lead in the division, and they entered their final series with Milwaukee at Wrigley with a magic number of six. They lowered it to four after finally handing Sabathia an L to call his own, though it was close. The Cubs led 3-0 after three thanks to a couple of RBI doubles from Lee and Ramirez, but the Brewers closed it to 3-2 in the top of the sixth when Ryan Dempster allowed a mammoth home run to the mammoth Prince Fielder. Sabathia was still around in the seventh when Alfonso Soriano added a much-needed insurance run, taking the big fella deep to left to make it 4-2. Fielder struck again to lead off the eighth, but the Cubs added another run in the bottom of the inning with a Henry Blanco pinch-hit RBI single. This was again needed to survive a set of Kerry Wood adventures in the ninth, which finally ended the game at 5-4 when he struck Fielder out looking on a gutsy breaking pitch.

6. Rallying past the Phillies (August 28)
Opening a big home series against one of the NL contenders, the Cubs trailed 4-1 going into the bottom of the eighth after doing little against Cole Hamels. Although the Phillies' bullpen was strong for much of the year, seeing anyone but Hamels suited the Cubs as they scored five runs in the eighth. Mike Fontenot led off the inning with a pinch-hit homer, and a double, single and walk loaded the bases for Aramis Ramirez, who put the Cubs up 6-4 with a single swing. Wood had to face the big bats in the ninth, but allowed just a single to Jimmy Rollins, ending the game with a Ryan Howard pop-up.

5. Rallying past the Brewers (September 18)
For sheer degree of difficulty, it's tough to top this game (although the Cubs managed it; see #3). The Cubs trailed 6-2 heading into the bottom of the ninth, and proceeded to make two quick outs; at this point, the likelihood of them winning the game was so low that Baseball-Reference actually rounds it down to zero. But Ramirez doubled on the first pitch he saw, Edmonds singled (scoring Ramirez to make it 6-3), and DeRosa singled, bringing up Geovany Soto, who also took a liking to the first pitch he saw and murdered it to left center, enough of a no-doubter that, as you can see on the video, Ryan Braun didn't even move. This sent the game to extras; Marmol and Wood mowed the Brewers down in the 10th and 11th, but in the 12th Wood put himself in a second and third, no out jam before working out of it. In the bottom of the 12th, Derrek Lee came up with two outs and runners at second and third; he'd been 0-for-5, but picked a good time for his first hit, lacing a single up the middle to win the game and drop the Cubs' magic number to two.

4. Mr. Clutch (June 20)
Aramis Ramirez has taken heat over the years for not hustling all the time, but he was pretty good at coming through when it mattered in 2008, and isn't that what's really important? Perhaps the best example was the opening game of interleague against the White Sox; the Cubs trailed 3-1 after doing little off John Danks in six innings, but Octavio Dotel was greeted with consecutive homers from Lee and Ramirez to open the seventh (winning some lucky WGN listener $7,000, no less), tying the game up. There it stayed until the bottom of the ninth, when Ramirez, leading off against Scott Linebrink, hit the second pitch to pretty much dead center. The Cubs had six walk-off wins in 2008, but this was the only one on a home run.

3. Climbing the Rockies Mountain (May 30)
Ted Lilly won 17 games for the Cubs in 2008, but he was also capable of having really bad outings. This was one such; Lilly lasted just three innings, allowing seven runs (though only four were earned). Jon Lieber replaced him and allowed two more; by the time the Cubs came to bat in the fifth, they were already down 9-1 and their chance of winning the game was down to about 1%. It was bad enough that Lou Piniella actually pulled Lee and Soto, putting Blanco and Micah Hoffpauir in their places. This turned out to be a pretty good move. Hoffpauir smacked a double to start the sixth, which was followed by home runs from Kosuke Fukudome and Jim Edmonds, cutting the deficit to 9-4. Still, the Cubs only had a 3% chance of winning entering the seventh inning, which they turned around in a hurry. With one out, Mike Fontenot singled, followed by a Blanco home run to cut the lead to 9-6. After Hoffpauir and Fukudome singled, Edmonds hit a deep double to center, scoring both runners and cutting it to 9-8. The next hitter was Mark DeRosa, who lifted a full-count pitch into the breeze, giving it enough to carry to the seats in left center and sending the remaining fans (of which there were surprisingly many, but then why leave the ballpark early on a late spring afternoon?) into a frenzy. The Cubs still had to hold the slim 10-9 lead, but Marmol struck out the side in the eighth, and Wood got a convenient lineout double play in the ninth before Todd Helton ended it with a flyout to right.

2. The Clinch (September 20)
Only once in the division play era had the Cubs clinched things at home (2003), and the time was right to add a second, especially against the rival Cardinals and on national TV. The Cubs jumped ahead with three runs in the second, as Soriano hit a single that skipped past Brian Barton in left, clearing the bases and allowing Soriano to go all the way to third. The Cubs tacked on two more in the fourth on a Mark DeRosa RBI double and, amusingly, a suicide squeeze from Ted Lilly (he ended up being safe on the play when the Cardinals attempted to get DeRosa at home and failed). Lilly's squeeze, somewhat fittingly, ended up being the difference, as he scuffled in the sixth, giving up a predictable home run to Troy Glaus to cut the lead to 5-4. That was as close as the Cardinals would get, however, as Kerry Wood closed the door once more in the ninth - also fittingly, as he's the only Cub to appear on every playoff team of the wild card era.

1. Zambra-No (September 14)
It was an up-and-down season for Carlos Zambrano, as it often is. But he found time to throw the first Cubs no-hitter since Milt Pappas in 1972, oddly enough against the Astros at Miller Park, the game having been moved due to Hurricane Ike (or, if you believe Astros fans, due to an anti-Houston conspiracy cooked up by secret Cubs fan Bud Selig). Zambrano needed 110 pitches, striking out 10 (including the last batter of the game) and walking just one (he put a second man on with a hit by pitch). Alfonso Soriano led off the game with a home run, and it was all the offense the Cubs needed; the Astros only sent two balls out of the infield, both caught by Mark DeRosa in right. It was a great moment, and yet another historic punctuation to a season we all hope will end with even bigger things. (And yes, Zambrano followed this up with the worst post-no-hitter start since Bob Forsch in 1978. Let's not dwell on that.)

The playoffs start tomorrow. Recaps/commentary will be here, hopefully for a lot longer than they were last year. Go Cubs go.

Dodge this.

2008-09-28T21:11:00.005-05:00

There won't be a New York team in the playoffs, and I'm feelin' fine. But now that we know the Cubs' opponent, it's time to focus on the Dodgers and see just how these teams match up.

Season Series: Cubs 5, Dodgers 2

The Cubs took all three games at Wrigley Field in late May before splitting four at Chavez Ravine a week later. Just about every game in the series was pretty close, though; the Cubs won the first two games at Wrigley by identical 3-1 scores, then squeezed out a 2-1 win in the finale only by scraping out a run in the ninth and then another in the tenth. In LA, the Cubs blew a 4-0 lead in the first game but got a run in the ninth to win 5-4; the Dodgers then got a complete-game shutout from Hiroki Kuroda, followed by a 7-3 win when Carlos Zambrano fell apart in the bottom of the seventh. The Cubs salvaged a split, winning the fourth game by that familiar 3-1 score behind, somewhat surprisingly, Jason Marquis, who allowed just three hits in 6.1 innings.

Reason not to take the season series results very seriously: Manny Ramirez

The Cubs played all their games against a Dodgers team that was still sending Juan Pierre into left every day (and, for that matter, that was still going with Chin-Lung Hu and his .181 batting average at short). Going into today, Manny Ramirez was putting up this line as a Dodger: .396/.489/.743, with 17 homers and 53 RBI in 53 games. A little better than Juan Pierre and his .327 OBP and .329 slugging.

Position-by-Position

To be honest, it's not entirely clear to me who the starters are at some positions for LA. For example, Rafael Furcal started the year as the starter at short. Then I think he was injured, and most recently the starter had been Angel Berroa - until Furcal started the last three games. Also, Jeff Kent has been on and off at second base. And frankly, how one evaluates the Dodgers changes a lot depending on whether Kent and Furcal are starting, as opposed to Blake DeWitt and Berroa. So I'll have to play the comps a bit by ear, here, based on what they're likely to throw out. Could I wait until Torre announces his roster? Maybe, but I don't feel like it.

Catcher: Geovany Soto vs. Russell Martin

Martin is a very good hitter for a catcher - .279/.384/.395 this year - and he's pretty strong defensively, winning the Gold Glove last year (I know, I know). He's also caught the staff with the lowest ERA in the NL, for whatever that's worth. But Soto has been a more valuable hitter - .285/.364/.504 - and his staff isn't too shabby itself, plus Soto's caught-stealing percentage is slightly higher.
Edge: Cubs, though not by as much as you might think.

First Base: Derrek Lee vs. James Loney

Loney's had an okay year, but hasn't flashed a lot of power for a first baseman - his OPS+ is actually just below average, at 99. His .341 OBP is pretty mediocre as well. Lee, for all the knocks on him, still managed to get to 20 home runs (although most were at home) and had a .363 OBP, which isn't too bad. For all the noise about his double plays, he ended up grounding into 26, but Loney grounded into 25 himself. Add in the fact that Lee is a great defensive first baseman while Loney is average, and the fact that Loney is in his second full season while Lee has a World Series ring, and that should give the Cubs the edge.
Edge: Cubs.

Second Base: Mark DeRosa vs. Jeff Kent/Blake DeWitt

This depends a lot both on DeRosa's health - he's been nursing a strained calf for a few days - and on which player is actually starting for the Dodgers. Kent came off the DL last Saturday, but has only appeared in three games since then and only twice as a second baseman. I'm guessing Kent gets the nod if he's healthy, as DeWitt is just a rookie and hasn't hit all that well (although he's having a strong September), but Kent's OBP for the year is only .327. He murdered the Cubs in his five games against them, though, going 8-for-19 with two home runs. As for DeRosa, assuming he's fully healthy, he's having a career year, setting new career marks in home runs, RBI, runs scored, walks, and OBP and slugging. All this and he's been 11 runs above average on defense, despite being shuttled around between four different positions and appearing in right field more often than at second base in September. For this he's been worth 7.8 WARP1 and is top 30 in the NL in VORP; Kent has been a below average defender and contributed just 2.3 wins to the Dodger cause.
Edge: Cubs if DeRosa is healthy, although even if they're forced to start Mike Fontenot at second, they might still have the edge (Fontenot was worth more wins that either Kent or DeWitt this year).

Shortstop: Ryan Theriot vs. Rafael Furcal/Angel Berroa

It seems like it's Furcal's job now that he's back, and why not - his OBP in 36 games is .439, compared to Berroa's .305 in 83 games. Furcal has also been the superior defender historically in spite of his occasional tendency to air-mail throws to first. As for Theriot, he's never going to be mistaken for Alex Rodriguez at the plate, what with his one home run this year, but he's been pretty good at finding a way on base in big spots, whether by slapping a single or drawing a walk, and he does walk more than he strikes out, which is certainly a nice feature. All told he's been worth about five wins to the Cubs; all the guys who have played short for the Dodgers combined add up to just slightly more, although a full season of Furcal, presumably, would have been worth more than that (I would project, but his slashes are so high in his short period of time that it's going to be inflated past what he likely would actually have contributed). At any rate, a fully healthy Furcal - if that's what he is - is probably a better player than Theriot.
Edge: Dodgers if Furcal is 100%, Cubs if he's not (and especially if he isn't playing at all).

Third Base: Aramis Ramirez vs. Casey Blake

Blake has hit 10 home runs since coming over from Cleveland, but his OBP is .313. Ramirez, meanwhile, might be the best hitter on the Cubs. The two are probably about a wash on defense, so you have to give the edge to Ramirez's offense.
Edge: Cubs.

Left Field: Alfonso Soriano vs. Manny Ramirez

Soriano, somewhat quietly, is really the engine that drives the Cubs. When he's out, you can tell; just look at the Cubs' record without him this year. He added 5.8 wins in just 108 games played; over a full season he might have added nearly 9, a pretty robust number. But Ramirez has added a mind-boggling 5.3 wins to the Dodgers in 53 games since coming over! He gives that lineup an entirely new dimension, and he's also got a ton of playoff experience.
Edge: Dodgers.

Center Field: Jim Edmonds/Reed Johnson vs. Matt Kemp

I was surprised to see Baseball Prospectus credit Kemp with 6.1 WARP1, since his OBP is only .340 and he's listed as an average fielder. I was even more surprised to then find out that combined, Edmonds and Johnson have only added 6.6 wins to the Cubs. Consider, however, that Kemp has played in almost every game for the Dodgers, while Edmonds and Johnson combined have about 25 fewer at-bats than Kemp does alone. Given the Cubs' ability to platoon, and the postseason experience Edmonds brings, I think you have to favor the Cubs here.
Edge: Cubs.

Right Field: Kosuke Fukudome vs. Andre Ethier

There's no guarantee Fukudome will even be starting, of course; if his bat stays silent, Piniella might try to play DeRosa out there (though that would depend on his injury) or even Hoffpauir (although that's a lot of defense to give up in a playoff environment). Either way, you probably have to give the offensive edge to LA; Ethier is hitting .302/.373/.507 this year, but .447/.547/.671 in September, possibly thanks to hitting in front of Ramirez, and seeing better pitches as a result, for most of the month. The Cubs have the advantage on defense, but for the moment you have to give the Dodgers the nod thanks to Ethier's hot bat.
Edge: Dodgers.

Starting Pitching: Ryan Dempster, Carlos Zambrano, Rich Harden and Ted Lilly vs. Derek Lowe, Chad Billingsley, Hiroki Kuroda and Greg Maddux

Dempster finished third in the NL in VORP, the highest among this group; next was Billingsley at seventh. Lowe was tenth, and while you have to go all the way to 23rd to hit the next Cub, Zambrano, Lilly and Harden are bunched up at 23, 24 and 28, just ahead of Kuroda at 30 and well ahead of Maddux at #80 (most of that accomplished with the Padres, of course). But Maddux might not even start; Joe Torre has suggested Lowe could come back on short rest in Game Four if the situation called for it. At any rate, this will probably be a series for people who love pitching. Certainly it was in the regular season, with both teams scoring less than three runs per game.

The opening game will match Dempster and Lowe. Dempster, famously, was 14-3 at Wrigley this year, while Lowe has been touchable on the road, his BAA rising from .206 at Chavez Ravine all the way to .292. He doesn't walk many, though, and he's a sinker-ball pitcher, both factors that will give the Cubs trouble. Lowe started twice against the Cubs this year, both times matching up with Zambrano; he got a no-decision after seven shutout innings in the Dodgers' 2-1 loss on May 28, but won the 7-3 Dodgers win in LA on June 7, though he allowed three runs in seven innings in that one. Dempster was also 1-0 with a no-decision against LA, though the Cubs won both games; his start at Wrigley was seven innings of one-run ball.

Game Two as scheduled will pit Zambrano against Billingsley. Like Lowe, Billingsley has pitched worse on the road - not surprising for pitchers in a pitcher's park - but not by much, and he's only got a couple bad starts all year. Zambrano, of course, is Zambrano; really, who has any idea what to expect out of him at this point? He might go eight innings and give up three hits, or he might get knocked out in the fourth. His biggest problem is always walks; if he can restrict those and keep himself under emotional control, he could be great. Let's not forget that he turned in a strong start on the road last year in the playoffs after sucking out loud for much of the final two months. The good news is, the Dodgers don't take a ton of walks. The bad news is they pounded 13 hits off him in his June 7 start in LA.

Game Three should match up Harden and Kuroda in Los Angeles, where Kuroda blanked the Cubs on June 6. Like Lowe, Kuroda does not issue a lot of walks (in fact, the Dodgers were second in walks allowed, which partially explains their #1 ERA); he's also pitched better at home, though like Billingsley, the split isn't all that wide. Harden is one of the most unhittable pitchers in baseball; in seven of his 12 starts for the Cubs, he's allowed no more than two hits. Two! The only problems, of course, are (1) in three of those starts, he's only gone five innings and (2) he's also got four starts with at least four walks. The piece de resistance was on September 18, when he threw 115 pitches in five innings against the Brewers, walking six and striking out seven. (I believe he also hit the bull mascot twice.) His ERA with the Cubs is 1.77, but that's only so useful if he's forcing you to call the bullpen after five innings. Hopefully he can turn in seven of similar quality in what will likely be yet another pitchers' duel. Harden has been slightly worse on the road this year, but since he's a flyball pitcher when the ball actually gets in play, starting him away from Wrigley Field probably isn't a bad thing.

Ted Lilly may be the hottest pitcher the Cubs have; he's gone 16-5 since a 1-4 start, and lowered his ERA to 4.09 after it was over 5.00 as late as June 10. He's pitched particularly well on the road of late, with his last two road starts both seeing him take no-hitters into the seventh inning (and both times at Miller Park). For the season, he's 10-4, 3.77 on the road next to 7-5, 4.50 at home, so throwing him out there on the road in a pitcher's park can't be a bad thing. Of course, he might not make a start in this series depending on how things go. As for who he would face, it's either Lowe on short rest or Maddux, who has been mediocre as a Dodger.

Edge: It's pretty even, which isn't surprising when you have the top two teams in ERA going at it. But because of the home field advantage and the way the pitching lines up with that, I'd probably give a very slight edge to the Cubs, pretty much no more edge than the home field allows for. Obviously a lot of this depends on which Zambrano shows up. A top-of-his-game Zambrano, following a good outing by Dempster, gives the Cubs a good chance of being up 2-0 when heading out west. If Zambrano drops a bomb, that pretty well changes the complexion of the series.

Middle Relief: Carlos Marmol, Jeff Samardzija and the rest vs. Joe Beimel, Jonathan Broxton, Cory Wade, Chan Ho Park and the rest

The Dodgers have more middle relievers in which I'd be willing to have confidence; the Cubs are pretty much down to two, and frankly I'm not sure I trust Samardzija all that far right now. The Cubs catch a break in that Hong-Chih Kuo, possibly the Dodgers' best reliever, won't be available, but they've got several guys with sub-3.00 ERAs. I don't even know who Piniella wants to take besides the above two since everyone else has been so lousy; I expect Howry will show up on the roster, and at least one of Marshall and Cotts. Kevin Hart has also pitched fairly well since being called back up on September 1. I've gotta think Marmol is the best of this bunch, and in fact he's fifth in baseball in WXRL, a reliever's win expectation over replacement (lineup-adjusted), adding more than five wins to the Cubs, a lot for a guy who pitches under 100 innings. But you go through six Dodgers on the list before you get to another Cub who isn't Wood, and that's Marshall at #125 in baseball. On volume, the Dodgers are better, and more equipped to handle the early departure of a starter.
Edge: Dodgers.

Closer: Kerry Wood vs. Takashi Saito

Saito was out for two months and has only had one save chance since coming back, but I'm assuming he'll be the closer in the playoffs. Edge to Wood mostly on the freshness count; Saito's stats are comparable to Wood's, with a better ERA, but the Cubs have also handed him a blown save and a loss this year in the two times he came on in either a save situation or a tie.
Slight edge: Cubs.

Put it all together: The Cubs are going to be the favorites, and they should be, but this isn't going to be a cakewalk. In the playoffs, you need good starting pitching, timely hitting, and a bit of luck. Last year the Cubs had none of that. If they want to avoid another, even more serious disappointment, things have to begin with the starters and roll from there; that's how the Red Sox and White Sox broke their droughts (the latter in particular). This should be obvious, of course, but that's what I'll be looking forward to seeing starting Wednesday. This team is the best team in the NL and it should be representing the league in the World Series if it plays up to its potential. Whether or not that happens... that's why they play the games.

Change of plans

2008-09-26T22:01:00.003-05:00

The Cubs officially announced their playoff rotation today. Fortunately, this year the Cubs have four starters and won't have to do anything like pull Zambrano a little early in Game One to save him for Game Four. Of course, they also won't have to do that this year because Zambrano isn't starting Game One. Your planned rotation:

Game One (Wednesday): Ryan Dempster
Game Two (Thursday): Carlos Zambrano
Game Three (Saturday): Rich Harden
Game Four (Sunday): Ted Lilly
Game Five (Tuesday): Ryan Dempster

I think this works out pretty well. For one thing, it's obvious that Dempster has been the Cubs' best pitcher all season, so why not reward him? He's also got a 14-3 home record, lest we forget, so having him possibly start two games, both at home, seems like it would work out pretty well. Better still, you're starting your two ground-ball pitchers at home and your two fly-ball pitchers on the road, and "the road" is looking more and more like it's going to be pitcher's park Chavez Ravine.

I think it's time to revisit the playoff roster debate:

Starters: Dempster, Zambrano, Harden, Lilly
Relievers: Wood, Marmol, Marquis, Marshall, Howry, Samardzija, Cotts

I'm not totally sure about Marquis. Remember last year during the season-ending series in Cincinnati, when he was put in as a reliever, got shelled, and then afterwards said that he really only feels comfortable when he's starting? He's been good down the stretch this year, in defiance of his usual form, but he's right - his value is as a fifth starter who can usually give you six innings and maybe only allow three or four runs. But he often allows all those runs in one inning. I guess he could be the long-relief backup plan should anything happen with Zambrano or Harden (or, for that matter, the occasionally homer-happy Lilly), but man - if we see Marquis trotting in to save the Cubs' season in Game Three or Four, I don't think I'm going to be feeling very good. As for the rest of them, I don't really like the last three, but where else do you go? You need that second lefty in Cotts, and Howry and Samardzija, while they haven't necessarily been great, have probably been the two most effective relievers outside of the Wood-Marmol team in the last month. The only other possibility is Kevin Hart; Gaudin pitched himself out of consideration last night, and Wells and Lieber are hurt.

Eleven pitchers allows for 14 position players, which is nice. I think the debate here is about the same as the last time I talked about it:

Catchers (2): Soto, Blanco
Infielders (6): Lee, DeRosa, Theriot, Ramirez, Fontenot, Cedeno
Outfielders (4): Soriano, Edmonds, Johnson, Fukudome
Bench (2): Ward, Hoffpauir

I've been on board with taking Pie over Hoffpauir, but I was thinking about this just now and changed my mind for a couple reasons, and Hoffpauir's recent 5-for-5, two-homer night doesn't even have much to do with it.

Reason #1: Carrying three center fielders is crazy.
I mean, if you're not going to carry three catchers, there's no reason to carry three center fielders, and you've already got the Edmonds/Johnson team platooning at that spot. And let's not forget that in an absolute pinch you can switch DeRo into right (since you are carrying three guys who can play second base) and move Fukudome into center. Pie may be a better center field defender than any of them, but is it by so much that you have to have him on the team?

Reason #2: Bringing Pie over Hoffpauir basically says, "We're valuing late-inning defense and pinch-running over pinch-hitting."
If you bring Pie, he's probably your absolute last pinch-hit choice off the bench, unless you're trying to create a lefty-righty matchup. But Hoffpauir also creates that matchup, and he's a much better shot to get a hit, it seems to me. Pie can pinch-run, but so could Cedeno, Fontenot, or Marquis if it came to that. And as for late-inning center-field defense, you can replace Edmonds with Johnson if you're so worried. Johnson himself probably doesn't even need replacing.

So yeah, Ward and Hoffpauir are basically the same guy - slow-footed lefties who can play first and, if you're really desperate, an outfield corner, but who in the playoffs will only really be used for pinch-hitting anyway. And if someone gets injured, you are allowed to replace that player for the series with someone not on the 25-man (this rule only started in 2007, apparently), so it's not like you absolutely have to plan for all contingencies at the start of the series.

So... the Dodgers, probably? Unless we beat the Brewers the next two days, which isn't impossible. (Even then, the Mets would have to win their next two, and I don't know about that.) The Dodgers don't have lefty power, which is nice, but I do worry a little about their pitching, as I've said.

Strike a match

2008-09-23T22:12:00.003-05:00

The playoffs are locked up. Home field advantage is locked up. Now, there's only two questions: can the Cubs really get to the World Series, and who are they going to have to beat to do it?

First things first: of course the Cubs can get to the World Series. They've been the best team in the NL all year and have the record to prove it. If they don't have the best top-to-bottom pitching, they're darn close, and they have the highest-scoring offense. Anything can happen in short playoff series, but it's inarguable that the Cubs can win the pennant.

But will they? To answer that, we have to look at the other NL playoff teams (or potential playoff teams) and ask ourselves how they match up with the Cubs, and what the Cubs have to do to win.

Possible Opponent #1: Mets
At the moment, this looks like the most likely option for the Division Series. After beating the Cubs tonight, the Mets have a one-game lead in the wild card over the Brewers with five games to play. Of course, the Mets have two more against the Cubs (and won't get to start Johan Santana in those games) while the Brewers are playing Pittsburgh, their personal bitches for 2008. So check back on Thursday night, because it's entirely possible the Mets won't be the wild card leaders anymore.

Pros for the Cubs: For a team that's scored 781 runs, the Mets seem to have a tendency the last couple seasons to lock up in the clutch. The Cubs shut them down at Wrigley earlier this year, although that was so long ago at this point that it's virtually meaningless. The Mets' pitching is also highly suspect once you get beyond Johan Santana, especially in the bullpen, which lacks a real closer with Billy Wagner injured and is even thinner beyond that.

Cons for the Cubs: Even ahead of the Phillies, the Mets might be the scariest offensive team in the playoffs (if they make it), with David Wright, Jose Reyes, and a suddenly alive Carlos Delgado, among others. There's also the little matter of Johan Santana, who could pitch twice in a five-game series, leaving little margin for error if the Cubs struggle to hit him as they did tonight after the first three innings.

Possible Opponent #2: Phillies
It should probably be noted that the Mets are only 1.5 back of the Phillies in the NL East right now, meaning it's not yet impossible that the Cubs could see Philadelphia in the first round. Still, an NLCS matchup seems more likely if anything.

Pros for the Cubs: Last year the Phillies were the second-hottest team in baseball going into the playoffs, and they got skunked in three straight. Of course, the team doing the skunking was the hottest team in baseball. But the Phillies are still not blessed with a ton of playoff experience - really, the bulk of their major players have just that one series to point to. The Cubs have a good deal more than that. The Phillies' starting pitching is also a bit thin beyond their top two, and while they have a lot of power, they're not really great at getting on base, often more important in the playoffs than the ability to hit home runs.

Cons for the Cubs: The Phillies went 4-3 against the Cubs this year but it could easily have been 7-0, as the Cubs only won their one game in Philly thanks to a phantom home run call and needed late comebacks against the Phillies' bullpen just to split the four-game set at Wrigley in August. Hamels and Myers are good pitchers, but the Cubs have made them look like Koufax and Drysdale, with Hamels allowing one run and six hits in fourteen innings vs. the Cubs this year and Myers is 2-0 with a 3.00 ERA in two starts. That could easily present problems in a short series if the Cubs can't do a better job of solving them. The Phillies' power and speed are also both liable to be problems. This is probably the one team in the NL I absolutely don't want to see, certainly not in the Division Series.

Possible Opponent #3: Dodgers
If the wild card is won by the Brewers, the Cubs won't play the wild card team; instead, they'll play the division winner with the worst record, which is going to be the team out of the West. Right now that's LA - they should lead by three games by the end of the night with just five to play, an awfully difficult lead to blow, especially when they don't play second-place Arizona.

Pros for the Cubs: The Cubs went 5-2 against the Dodgers this year, sweeping them at Wrigley Field. And aside from one bad Carlos Zambrano start, they mostly kept the Dodgers from scoring, allowing less than two runs per game in the other six contests. The Dodgers have also been pretty bad on the road this year, and of course the Cubs would have home-field.

Cons for the Cubs: The Cubs also didn't hit Dodger pitching all that well, scoring a total of 19 runs in the seven games. They were shut out by Hiroki Kuroda at Chavez Ravine, and twice needed to get into the bullpen to win, including the May 28 game at Wrigley where it was 1-0 Dodgers in the bottom of the ninth before the Cubs managed to tie the game on a sac fly and win in ten innings. Also, we can't count on the Dodgers to be a lousy offensive team anymore, given the improvement in their numbers since the addition of Manny Ramirez.

Possible Opponent #4: Diamondbacks
The chances of this look pretty slim right now, thank God.

Pros for the Cubs: The Diamondbacks stink. They're 79-78 right now!

Cons for the Cubs: Anybody who tells you they want to face Webb, Haren and Johnson to start a five-game set is crazy. It could be over before it even begins, just like last year. And just for good measure, give them Cub killer Adam Dunn. You don't know how glad I am this isn't happening.

Possible Opponent #5: Brewers
This could only happen in the NLCS, and they need to catch the Mets for the wild card to do it. But they're only a game out, hardly insurmountable with five to play.

Pros for the Cubs: The Cubs know the Brewers very well. They also seem to own them at Miller Park, making the possible 3-4-5 middle section of the NLCS not as daunting as it might be in another city. In addition, the Brewers have pretty much stunk on ice in the last month, and Sabathia seems to be wearing down, something that won't be helped by all the pitching he'll be doing on three days' rest in the next week.

Cons for the Cubs: For some reason, the Brewers seem to play almost as well at Wrigley as the Cubs do at Miller. Also, the Brewers might be able to get on a roll if they win a first-round series; not that the Cubs wouldn't be on a roll also, but with Fielder and Braun, that could certainly be dangerous. You wouldn't want to end up in a slugfest with that team. Still, I'd rather face the Brewers than the Phillies here, given the option.

So, who would you rather face? I'll take whatever I can get, of course, but I'm inclined to prefer Mets/Brewers, although that combo is really unlikely to happen since at this point it looks like an either/or as to which one gets in. So let's say Dodgers/Brewers. The Dodgers are better than they were, but they aren't great.

Magic number: zero

2008-09-21T00:44:00.002-05:00

Today I got a new cable box for my HDTV, which unfortunately I didn't get working until the fourth inning of the game, but I still got to see the winning runs (gotta love that the eventual winning run was a well-executed suicide squeeze by Lilly) and, of course, Marmol and Wood closing the door in the eighth and ninth. (The Glaus home run was depressing and utterly predictable - like with most of the home runs Lilly gives up, you could see it coming a mile away - but fortunately it ended up not mattering.)

With the division wrapped up, there are now a few things to concentrate on. In order:

1) Wrapping up the best record in the league (I believe the magic number for this is 3)
2) Being able to set the rotation for the playoffs
3) Determining the playoff roster

#1, while not set in stone, seems like all but a foregone conclusion. The Cubs have eight games left, meaning a simple 3-5 record in that span would be enough to clinch the league's best record, and that's if the Phillies don't lose another game, which they almost certainly will.

#2 has some bearing on #1, of course, but I'm not sure that the rotation is going to need much setting. Looking at the current lineup of probables, here's how the next eight games would be started: Dempster, Marquis, Harden, Zambrano, Lilly, Dempster, Marquis, Harden. The last game happens on Sunday, September 28, and the first game of the NLDS is three days, on Wednesday, October 1. If you assume Zambrano starts that one, that means he'll have had fully six days of rest before it, and I'm going to guess he won't be throwing a ton of pitches against the Mets this Wednesday. Assuming Dempster starts Game Two, he'll have had five days of rest, and if Lilly is your Game Three guy, he gets the nod on a full eight days off. Then, if needed, Harden goes on six days' rest (and probably after a kid-gloves outing on the final day of the regular season, if he even goes then; given how well he's pitched on long rest I might give Marshall a start in that spot to save Harden up) and Zambrano comes back for Game Five. And if they do make the NLCS, I'm frankly fine with pretty much any order. Obviously it'd be nice if you could get there in four games or less, enabling Zambrano and Dempster to pitch four of a possible seven games in the NLCS. But there's no reason to get greedy.

#3: I'm assuming the postseason roster is going to consist of 11 pitchers and 14 position players, at least for the first round (if you're not carrying five starters, there's no reason to carry 12 pitchers). Here's my vote:

Starters: Zambrano, Dempster, Lilly, Harden

Marquis has been surprisingly competent in the second half this year, effectively reversing his usual trend. He's got a 3.38 ERA in September (albeit in just 18.2 innings), and in his last eight starts, dating to August 1, he hasn't given up more than 4 runs (and then just twice) and has four quality starts in the group. But with all that said, there's really no need to have five starters for the Division Series. Maybe you could bring him back for the NLCS, if the Cubs get that far.

Relievers: Wood, Marmol, Cotts, Howry, Samardzija, Marshall, (Gaudin, Lieber or Wells)

The first six are pretty obvious. Wood and Marmol are the best the Cubs have, and Samardzija has tailed off a bit, but he's still a better option than the other available ones. Cotts and Marshall are your lefties (and of course Marshall can throw long innings in an absolute pinch), and Howry... well, he's a veteran. And actually, aside from a real stinkbomb four-run, no-out appearance on September 2 at Houston, he hasn't given up a run since August 22 and has allowed just six hits in eight other innings in that time. Okay, only eight innings, but he hasn't looked this good since May. As for the last slot, I'm not sure at the moment about the injury status of Gaudin and Lieber right now. I'd take Gaudin if all were healthy. If Gaudin and Lieber are both question marks, Randy Wells has looked pretty good in a couple outings so maybe you go that direction. Wuertz is about the only other option but I think it's fair to say Piniella isn't exactly crazy about him (and he gave up three of the runs in that ridiculous 14-9 win over the Reds).

Catchers: Soto, Blanco

Duh.

Infield: Lee, DeRosa, Theriot, Ramirez, Fontenot, Cedeno, Ward

No hard choices here.

Outfield: Soriano, Edmonds, Johnson, Fukudome, (Hoffpauir or Pie)

The only real question here is whether you value Hoffpauir's bat or Pie's value as a pinch-runner and defensive replacement. The latter might be more important in the playoffs (and Pie has shown the ability to get a hit on occasion anyway, and he's also left-handed), so I might go with Pie here, especially since Hoffpauir's defensive value is pretty much nil.

Looking at that lineup, it's almost funny how there's no real difficult decision to be made. You'll probably live with any of the back-end relief pitchers, and Hoffpauir vs. Pie is probably a tossup as far as how much value either will give you, albeit maybe in different ways. If Marquis isn't on the roster, you may prefer Pie to pinch-run for Ward in close spots, of which there will assuredly be some.

There's still some baseball to be played, of course, but we can't avoid it now: the Cubs are in the playoffs.

Carlosing it

2008-08-26T22:24:00.002-05:00

Where have I been lately? Well, things were steaming along, I didn't have much to add and little complain about, so I just let it go. But as much as I hate to complain after a win, tonight's game seems to deserve some addressing.

What in the hell is wrong with Carlos Zambrano? Is it just arm angle? Mental? Fatigue? A combination?

After coming off the DL, Zambrano appeared to have found his form. Here were his first six starts after returning, not including his solid two innings in the All-Star Game:

July 4 @ STL: 6 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 5 K
July 9 vs. CIN: 8 IP, 1 H, 1 R, 0 BB, 5 K
July 19 @ HOU: 6.1 IP, 6 H, 4 R, 6 BB, 3 K
July 24 vs. FLA: 7 IP, 6 H, 2 R, 0 BB, 6 K
July 29 @ MIL: 8 IP, 5 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 9 K
August 3 vs. PIT: 5 IP, 3 H, 2 R, 1 BB, 2 K

Pretty strong there, except for the game in Houston right after the break. But that's five out of six strong starts; the July 4, 9 and 29 games, in particular, are probably the three best games he threw all year.

Then came his last few starts:

August 9 vs. STL: 4.1 IP, 10 H, 9 R, 1 BB, 3 K
August 15 @ FLA: 6 IP, 4 H, 5 R, 5 BB, 6 K
August 21 vs. CIN: 7 IP, 6 H, 1 R, 4 BB, 4 K
August 26 @ PIT: 4.1 IP, 8 H, 6 R, 4 BB, 3 K

After all this, his ERA is only 3.53, but this is still a disturbing trend. That's awful control the last three starts, and he just doesn't seem to be missing many bats. Okay, it's only four starts, and actually he's only 1-1 through them, but... recently on ESPN.com, Jayson Stark did a chat that debated which team had the best potential playoff rotation (i.e. top four starters), and he picked the Cubs. But if Zambrano - the theoretical ace of the staff - can't be relied upon not to walk four guys and give up 5-6 runs or worse, that puts a pretty big hole in the rotation.

It may be that I'm overreacting. Z was up and down last year too, putting together five straight starts in August/September where he allowed 31 runs in 28.2 innings (and bookended those five starts with two starts in which he gave up a combined 12 walks in 11 innings, although he allowed just two runs combined in those two games, somehow). He also proceeded to go 4-1 in his last five starts, giving up no runs in the last two, and then had a nice start in the playoffs. So really, who the hell knows? But with that said, he's making what, 18 million a year? You need to be better than the third-best guy on a staff for that kind of cash.

Well, anyway. That's nine straight series wins, the first time the Cubs have done that since 1907, which is ridiculous. It's also their first time at 32 games over .500 since September 15, 1984 and, before that, September 2, 1969; if they win tomorrow, it'll be their first time at 33 games over .500 since they finished the 1945 season at 42 over. I refuse to assume a championship or even a pennant, but with stats like that... if this isn't the year, what the hell is it going to take?

Brew Ha Ha

2008-07-31T22:25:00.002-05:00

Hey, remember how confident the Brewers were a week ago?

The Brewers have downplayed the much-hyped July series after initially calling it a dress rehearsal and a test for September and the playoffs.

"This is not a death sentence by any means," Yost said. "If this was September, it would be different. We have plenty of time to recover from this and get back on track."

I mean, obviously he's not wrong. It's not even August yet; at this time last year the Cubs still trailed by a game (tying for first for the first time all season on August 1). But given how people were starting to talk about the Brewers being the hottest team in the NL (which I guess they technically have been, record-wise) and how the Cubs were so bad on the road and were in real danger of losing the division lead...

Well, who's laughing now??? Not only did the Cubs win four straight on the road, they dropped the Brewers from one back to five back at a stroke, returning to a position the Cubs hadn't occupied since July 12. The starting pitching continued to be awesome and the hitting finally came around, with the Cubs scoring 31 runs in the four games - nearly 8 per - and allowing just 11. The Cubs now have a +130 run differential, and the Brewers' is down to just +10.

It may not make or break the season, but it certainly was a statement series. First of all, it proved the Cubs can win on the road (although of course the Cubs do have a lot of historical success at Miller Park), it proved they can score runs again, it more or less proved their starting pitching is better than the Brewers' top to bottom, and more importantly it didn't just keep the Cubs in first, but it pushed their advantage well out. It's certainly a lot better than splitting the series and still being up just a game, or losing three of four and leaving Milwaukee in second place.

More importantly, this should shut up Brewers fans for a while. And more importantly, this is hopefully the start of a new trend towards more offense again. As long as the starting pitching keeps up, 5-6 runs a game should be more than enough in most games. And coming up, it's nine games at home, with the first six against cellar dwellers Pittsburgh and Houston. (Of course, watch them somehow lose one of those series now that I'm getting all excited again.)

August is really the time to extend the lead in the division. Here are the August series:

August 1-3: vs. Pirates
August 4-6: vs. Astros
August 8-10: vs. Cardinals
August 12-14: at Braves
August 15-17: at Marlins
August 19-21: vs. Reds
August 22-24: vs. Nationals
August 25-27: at Pirates
August 28-31: vs. Phillies

There's really no excuse for losing any of those series, is there? The divisional series should all be wins, there's no excuse for the Nationals series not to be a sweep, the Braves have given up and are banged up, the Marlins still aren't that good and if we had had any offense last week we'd have swept them, and while the Phillies worry me a little, in a home series we ought to at least be able to split. So that's 28 games in August. I say nothing less than 18-10 is acceptable, and ideally even better. This is the month to push that lead in the division out closer to double digits. Let's see them do it.

Fire Bob Howry

2008-07-25T16:36:00.002-05:00

Remember how, in 2007, Scott Eyre was struggling like crazy early in the year, and Piniella's response was to stop using him except in absolute mop-up situations? Well, what's his excuse for continuing to run Bob Howry out there in key game situations? He's got a 5.22 ERA for the year, and here's what his last eight appearances look like:

July 8 vs. Reds: Howry enters with a 7-1 lead in the ninth. He gives up a single, a deep out to left, another single, an RBI double and an RBI groundout before striking out Jay Bruce to end the game.
July 11 vs. Giants: Howry enters a scoreless tie in the eighth. He retires the 8-9-1 hitters in order and ends up getting the win when Aramis Ramirez hits a homer in the bottom of the inning.
July 12 vs. Giants: After Kevin Hart struggles to start the eighth, giving up two runs, Neal Cotts gets one out. Howry then enters the 7-2 game with a man on first. He retires Rich Aurilia on a sac bunt, then gets Randy Winn to fly out to end the inning. (Carlos Marmol subsequently pours gasoline on himself in the ninth.)
July 18 at Astros: Howry comes into the game with the score tied 1-1 and two outs in the bottom of the eighth. He retires Carlos Lee on a groundout. After the Cubs fail to score, Howry is brought back out for the ninth. He gives up a ground-rule double to Miguel Tejada, then allows another double to Hunter Pence on the very first pitch. Tejada scores and the Cubs lose 2-1.
July 21 at Diamondbacks: Howry enters in the 8th with the Cubs down 1-0. He walks light-hitting catcher Chris Snyder to start the inning, then gives up two deep fly balls to center which fortunately both go for outs. Then Stephen Drew hits a 1-1 pitch for a triple to put Arizona up 2-0, which is how it finished.
July 23 at Diamondbacks: Howry enters in the 8th with a cushy 10-3 lead. He gives up a single to Conor Jackson, then strikes out Mark Reynolds (who hasn't). Chris Young doubles. Tony Clark lines out. Howry then gives up a home run to Snyder on a 3-2 pitch to cut the lead to 10-6. Alex Romero strikes out to end the threat.
July 24 vs. Marlins: Despite throwing 33 pitches the previous night in Arizona, Howry enters in the 8th with the bases loaded, no one out, and the Cubs clinging to a 6-2 lead. He gets Cody Ross to fly out on the first pitch, then throws eight pitches to Luis Gonzalez before Gonzo hits the last one like a rocket to right center. Mark DeRosa bails Howry out with a diving catch, although the runner at third tags and scores. Howry is pulled for Carlos Marmol, who ends the inning with a strikeout of Josh Willingham.
July 25 vs. Marlins: Howry pitches for the third day in a row, entering in the top of the ninth with the game tied at 2. He immediately allows what turns out to be the game-losing solo home run to pinch-hitter Jeremy Hermida. The next four guys all hit the ball fairly hard off of him, but only Hanley Ramirez's double doesn't find a glove, so he escapes allowing just one run.

Basically, he's been awful recently. Not a single one of those outings is impressive. Either he's giving up runs, or allowing bullets that are fortunately caught. In the rare cases where he's cruised, it's only because he faced the bottom of the order or was gifted an out via the sac bunt.

But here's what kills me. Lou brought him into the game on Wednesday when the Cubs had a 10-3 lead. Seven runs! When a guy comes into a game with that kind of cushion, that makes me think that he isn't exactly trusted by the manager. Why use your top-level guys in blowout situations? It's not like Howry desperately needed to get some work in - he'd pitched two days earlier. The fact that he was being brought into the game in that spot suggests that Lou considered Howry's results in his last two outings - both of which saw him give up a run, once losing the game - and thought he should get some mop-up work just to see what was going on.

With that in mind, did the three-run homer he gave up to Snyder not make it clear that he's not cut out for high-leverage situations right now? Why was he right back out there with the bases loaded and nobody out the next night? (I know the answer here is: probably not a better option available. But that's pretty sad, isn't it?) More importantly, why was he out there today in a 2-2 game with everyone else in the bullpen available? The only possible answer is that Piniella still trusts Howry more than he trusts Cotts or Eyre or Gaudin or Marshall. And if that's the case, that's a really big problem.

The Cubs' starting pitching has probably been the best in baseball over the last 2-3 weeks. Since July 1, only three times in 20 games has the Cubs' starter gone fewer than six innings, and in no game has the starter allowed more than four runs; of the 20 games, the Cubs' starters have delivered fifteen quality starts (6 innings or more, three runs or less), and while that's kind of a bullshit stat, it at least gives you some idea of the kind of starting pitching that's been delivered. But the bullpen has been appalling. In the same 20 games, the bullpen has given up at least two runs eight times. They blew the win for the starter three times in that span (although only one of those turned into a loss for the Cubs, mercifully). Offense has probably been a bigger problem - the Cubs are averaging 4.3 runs a game in that span, with a 2-8 record in the games where they've scored three runs or fewer and an 8-2 record in the games where they've scored four or more. In other words, if they could score 4+ runs a little more consistently, the whole issue might evaporate. But while the team is going through a little bit of an offensive drag, it can't afford to have one entire sector of its pitching staff crushing the team the way it's doing right now.

But how do you fix this? Jeff Samardzija, who pitched two innings today, is one possible answer, although it's hard to believe he won't go right back to Iowa when Wood comes off the DL, if only because there's no other obvious candidate for demotion since Howry is too old for that. (Cotts, I guess maybe, but that leaves the Cubs with only one lefty out of the pen.) The trade deadline is still six days away, but reliable bullpen pitching is such a rare commodity that the guys out there for trade are either much more expensive than they should be or just not that good in the first place. (Remember, most guys are in the bullpen because they're not good enough to be starters. Sometimes that works out - Marmol - but a lot of times you're just left with a guy who's only good enough to get three outs one out of every three appearances. Right now Howry is that guy.)

Now, no one really has great bullpen pitching, it seems. Milwaukee's has been notoriously lousy for most of this year and St. Louis's hasn't been any good recently either. So it's not like that's going to make the difference, so long as the offense comes back around a bit. But until that happens consistently, having a bullpen that can't hold a one-run lead 40% of the time it's called upon risks being really devastating to this team, especially with the Brewers now just a half-game back (and potentially tying for the division lead by the end of the night). My dad's been freaking out about the offense the last ten days or so, but I think this team has too much talent there not to return to form pretty soon; it's the bullpen, which has been somewhat shaky all year and even worse than that lately, where I'm directing a nervous look.

The kind of game that will drive you crazy

2008-07-21T23:03:00.003-05:00

There's nothing worse than losing a game you clearly should have won out of nothing other than sheer bad luck. The Cubs started their series at Arizona with one such. Randy Johnson, 12-0 with a sub-2.00 career ERA against the Cubs entering the game, was hardly the Randy Johnson of old. He was hit hard and often, facing 24 batters and striking out just four - he allowed fifteen fly balls, tied for a career high he had only given up twice before in his career (once earlier this year against the Twins, and once in 1992 against the Yankees). But all fifteen found gloves, with at least half of them doing so within ten feet or so of the fence.

Truly it was a night for horrible luck. The Cubs' two hits were both singles - a Jim Edmonds shot up the middle, and a Reed Johnson swinging bunt to third base. The Diamondbacks also only managed two hits - and Harden struck out ten Diamondbacks, giving them fewer chances to even put the ball in play. But their two hits were a solo home run (of course by the #8 hitter, who had zero previous major league homers) and a triple in the eighth (which of course followed a walk and so allowed Arizona to tack on an insurance run, not that they needed it).

Harden is now 0-1 as a Cub when he should be 2-0. He's the first Cub ever, or at least since 1900, to strike out ten men in each of his first two games as a Cub. He's pitched great. And he's 0-1.

If there's anything that will convince you that the universe doesn't really want the Cubs to win this year, it's games like this one. Absolutely unreal. Of course, maybe you could argue that it's one last test, but honestly, haven't we suffered enough?

Achilles tendency

2008-07-21T10:03:00.001-05:00

By this point, everyone knows about the Cubs' road issues. And while they obviously could hit better in road games, to some degree they've just been really, really unlucky.

Consider the following. The Cubs have now played 16 series each at home and on the road. In the 16 home series, they're 13-3. In the 16 road series, they're 4-9-3. All is not totally lost, however; the Cubs started by going 1-6-1 in road series; they're 3-3-2 since, even after the series loss to Houston. What's more, the Cubs have still outscored their opponents on the road, 210 runs to 206.

The Cubs are 15-15 in one-run games this year. 16 of those games were on the road; the Cubs are 6-10 in those games, while going 9-5 in one-run home games. Some of that is just bad luck and minor park advantage when the Cubs are on the road. More importantly, that's fully a third of the Cubs' 49 road games that were decided by a single run. That 6-10 record could even out in the second half - if the Cubs are playing a lot of close ones on the road, it's likely that they'll win some of them at some point. (What's more, in 12 more road games, the game was decided by just two runs - the Cubs are 3-9 in those games. This, too, is likely to move closer to even as long as the Cubs are really a good team.)

The Cubs also have a nasty tendency for outscoring a team yet losing the series. This has happened at home and on the road, but of course it's happened much more on the road, since the Cubs only have three home series losses. At Washington from April 25-27, the Cubs outscored the Nationals 10-7 but lost two of three. In their very next series, at home against Milwaukee, the Cubs outscored the Brewers 29-19 - thanks to a 19-5 thumping in the middle game - but lost two of three. In their next series after that, they outscored the Cardinals 15-13 in St. Louis, but lost two of three. For the season, the Cubs have six series in which they outscored the opposition but still lost two of the three games, including this past series at Houston; five of those series have come on the road. This is the sort of thing that probably can't hold up over a full season, although you never know.

So what's the problem? The obvious answer is consistency. It's not that the Cubs can't score runs on the road or that their pitchers are suddenly much worse, since the Cubs have outscored the opposition for the year - by a slim margin, to be sure, but it's a positive margin and thus not indicative of a road record that's seven games under .500. Saying that the Cubs need to be more consistent on the road is more than a bit trite, to be sure, but it really seems like the answer. The Cubs have allowed just five more runs on the road in the same number of games; they're not exactly getting pounded. Really, it seems like a few more runs ought to do it. The only question now is can the Cubs, with probably the toughest part of the schedule coming up and with some players possibly in danger of wearing down a bit over the long season, actually find more runs on the road?

I guess we'll see.

All-Star Lame

2008-07-17T14:24:00.002-05:00

I don't have a terrible amount to say about the All-Star Game at this point, aside from the fact that staying up until almost one in the morning just to watch your team is at least less disappointing when the outfield of "your team" is made up of three players you hate. Anyway, a few lingering thoughts:

1. The Cubs acquitted themselves well.
With eight Cubs named to the roster in one form or another and six seeing time, two as starters, they had a lot to live up to. Fortunately, they mostly did. Soto and Fukudome didn't do much at the plate, but Soto caught a good few innings (the two steals off him were much more the pitcher's fault). Zambrano was awesome (can he please get through two innings in 20 pitches more often in real games?), Dempster was awesome (striking out the side!), and Marmol was awesome. Dempster and Marmol both pitched in the bottom of innings that could have ended the game, so I was immensely relieved that both pitched well, although I'd have taken just about anything that didn't end with a Cubs pitcher giving up the game-winning run. (The 2001 All-Star Game, when Jon Lieber gave up back-to-back home runs in the sixth to put the game pretty much away, still makes me cringe.)

2. "This time it counts" is still stupid.
As has been pointed out in various places by now, there is no good excuse for claiming that the game needs to count, especially when it's clearly not being managed that way. The lineup that the National League had on the field at the end of the game was kind of pathetic - there's no reason that any All-Star Game that "counts" should be giving three at-bats to Cristian Guzman. What would be wrong with going back to just alternating home-field, which is how it used to be done?

I mean, this is how All-Star Games are played. The best players (mostly) start the game, and then the lesser All-Stars off the bench come in to get a little playing time and finish it out. This is fine when the game doesn't count, or if it's a blowout, but in a tight game where the outcome has any kind of resonance, that kind of thing just doesn't fly. Bringing in Cristian Guzman to pinch-run for Aramis Ramirez was a calculated "let's play for one run" risk on Clint Hurdle's part, but then why did he make no effort to get Guzman into scoring position, choosing to let Corey Hart swing away? Having a man on first and no outs leads to a run more often than having a man on second with one out, but having a man on second with one out leads to a run more often than having a man on first with one out, and Corey Hart's not a bad player but his OBP is only .327 this year. At the very least, it would have been nice if Hurdle had considered that the game might go to extra innings, at which point Ramirez would be a more valuable asset at the plate than Guzman, who may have a lot of hits but only gets on base 34% of the time. Ramirez's OPS+ is 133; Guzman's is 102.

Basically, when you've got Lance Berkman and Albert Pujols on your team, it's pretty weak to finish the game with Adrian Gonzalez at first base. When you've got Chipper Jones, Aramis Ramirez and David Wright on your team, letting Cristian Guzman get three at-bats at third base is unacceptable (to be fair, Wright was DHing, but still). In VORP terms, the NL starting lineup was almost 90 runs better than the AL starting lineup, in spite of the fact that it had the least-valuable player on the field in it (Fukudome, just 11.9, sad to say). By the time the 15th rolled around, the AL now had the more valuable lineup on the field, aided in part by the fact that the most valuable guy in the AL, Ian Kinsler, was coming off their bench. In fact, Kinsler and Grady Sizemore, two of the three most valuable players in the American League, both got five at-bats for the AL. The most valuable guy by VORP left for the NL in extras was Dan Uggla; look how that turned out.

I know it would be kind of ridiculous to make, say, Pujols play a full game while other guys are being rotated out just because he's the best player in the NL. And there's something to be said for trying to strike early, I guess, or for not holding chips on your bench for an inning you might not play. But it just seems like the current format is likely to lead to games like this - close affairs that end up being decided by guys who are barely legitimate All-Stars. Just look at some of the last few out-making batters for the NL in recent games:

2008: Nate McLouth, Russell Martin, Miguel Tejada, Uggla, Gonzalez, Guzman
McLouth has been valuable this season, but he could easily turn out to be a first-half wonder. Martin is a good catcher but Brian McCann, with the highest VORP of any catcher in baseball, probably should have made it into the game first. Tejada and Guzman were both sympathy All-Stars (i.e. the only selections from their crappy teams and not deserving on merit, although Tejada played well so fair play to him). Uggla was more deserving of being there than his performance indicated. Gonzalez has had a good year, but he was also a sympathy All-Star as the only Padre. Should the All-Star Game be decided by guys whose teams aren't coming anywhere near the World Series without buying a ticket?

2007: Orlando Hudson, Freddy Sanchez, Brian McCann, Matt Holliday, Aaron Rowand
Rowand was actually the third-most valuable OF in the NL in 2007, but that says more about how generally weak center field was - Juan Pierre was in the top ten in center, for crying out loud. And of course Rowand managed to make outs in both the 8th and 9th of the 2007 game with the NL attempting to rally, the latter time, famously, with Albert Pujols languishing on the bench. Hudson and Sanchez are both okay middle infield bats but probably shouldn't be deciding a game of this magnitude. Holliday actually deserved his spot. McCann, fittingly, was in the midst of what has been the worst offensive season of his career so far.

2006: David Eckstein, Holliday, Sanchez, Ryan Howard, Carlos Lee
This one actually wasn't so bad, but the mere presence of David Eckstein - the twelfth-most valuable NL shortstop in 2006 - negates everyone else's contributions to baseball.

2005: Luis Castillo, Paul Lo Duca, Carlos Lee, Morgan Ensberg
Ensberg is basically a one-season wonder; this was that one season. Still, he was brought in at first base to replace Derrek Lee, not at his position of third base, which was occupied by token Red, the extremely mediocre Felipe Lopez (though Lopez actually got on base).

2004: Johnny Estrada, Moises Alou, Mark Loretta, Todd Helton, Jack Wilson, Jim Thome
Not as bad as it looks by the names, perhaps; Loretta was actually the top NL second baseman in VORP in 2004 and Wilson was second at SS, and someone has to play those positions. Still, not exactly Murderer's Row.

2003: Preston Wilson, Richie Sexson, Aaron Boone, Rafael Furcal, Castillo, Lo Duca
It's kind of interesting to see which guys manage to be scrubby bench All-Stars year after year, isn't it? Anyway, this is the one that really killed me - you've got a team with Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols on it, with Gary Sheffield, Todd Helton and Jim Edmonds, and Mike Lowell has doubled in his last plate appearance. And the guy you're summoning off the bench to pinch-hit for Lowell - the second-most valuable third baseman and 14th most valuable hitter in the NL in 2003 - is Aaron Boone. (This game remains epically ridiculous for the fact that Eric Gagne - who allowed 11 earned runs in all of 2003's real games and had an ERA+ of 335 [!!!!] - allowed three earned runs in the bottom of the eighth. I was ready to get all het up about the fact that Gagne was pitching the 8th and not the 9th until I looked it up and saw that John Smoltz - who allowed only eight earned runs in 2003 for an ERA+ of 383 [?!?!] - would presumably have been the go-to guy in the ninth. You're off the hook this time, Dusty.)

Some of this is just due to the NL talent deficit in recent years. But this year I really think the NL had a better team and yet they lost, in large part because that better team was fairly frontloaded and so didn't get a chance to play in the most meaningful part of the game. And again, okay, you can't really ask Pujols to play 15 innings in an exhibition game. But that's exactly the point. It's an exhibition game. You wouldn't see the Red Sox pulling Manny Ramirez in the sixth inning of a game to make sure they could get Brandon Moss into the game; they'd leave Ramirez out there because they wanted to win. And while the talent dropoff between Ramirez and Moss is obviously much larger than between Pujols and Gonzalez, for example, the point remains. You can't make the game count and still expect managers to get everyone in like it's Little League.

Am I a little bitter because the Cubs can't possibly have home field advantage in the World Series now? Maybe a little. But then they have to get there first, something of which I'm hardly completely confident, and anyway this means that when the Cubs sweep - which if the 2004 and 2005 schneid-breaking titles are anything to go by, they're destined to do - they'll win it at Wrigley. Anyway.

3. I'm looking forward to the second half.
Now that the exhibition that isn't is out of the way and we're ready for more real baseball, I'm hoping the Cubs can keep doing what they've been doing - which is to say, best record in baseball, best average, OBP and SLG in the league (and best OBP in baseball), pretty good pitching and timely hitting. With Soriano coming back soon and Harden hopefully staying healthy, this could be a really great second half, even with the schedule getting a bit tougher. Here's hoping for a few more road wins.

Proof or GTFO

2008-07-09T11:33:00.003-05:00

Show me a feel-good sports story and I'll show you someone lurking three steps behind, itching to ruin it. Rick Ankiel's incredible rebirth as a 30-homer outfielder in 2007 was followed quickly by reports that he had taken HGH several years before, while still a pitcher; Dara Torres' fifth Olympic games, at age 41, is greeted with extreme skepticism in spite of the fact that she willingly signed up for the most rigorous course of drug testing the IOC has to offer. And now we have Baseball Prospectus, a site I otherwise enjoy, promulgating the rumor that the Cubs are somehow cheating their way to the best record in the National League.

A few weeks ago, John Perrotto mentioned - in an oddly casual way - that there were some grumblings around baseball that the Cubs were stealing signs at Wrigley via the manual scoreboard in center field. Presumably there were two reasons for this: (1) the Cubs were playing extremely well at home and (2) the Cubs have a manual scoreboard in center field, facilitating the alleged theft. (Goat Riders of the Apocalypse made fun of the idea a few weeks ago, around the same time when I first read Perrotto's column. It's noteworthy that when I Googled "2008 Cubs stealing signs," most of the hits were Cubs blogs or message boards laughing about it, and no one actually accusing the Cubs of doing it. There was one top ten hit saying "Cards accuse Cubs of stealing signs," but it dated to 2002.)

At 34-10, the Cubs do indeed have baseball's best home record, and they combine that with a not-exactly-gaudy 20-26 road mark. But as noted before in this space, this isn't exactly all that unusual this year. Milwaukee (29-14/21-26), Boston (33-10/21-29), Tampa Bay (36-14/19-20), the White Sox (32-13/20-24) and Minnesota (32-18/18-22) all have comparable discrepancies, and that's just among teams with 50 wins or more. Are all these teams cheating at home? Surely the Cubs' mark isn't such an outlier that they're the only ones worthy of speculation. (Why not Boston, even worse on the road than the Cubs and basically exactly as good at home?)

There is, of course, the team hitting - the Cubs go .311/.391/.502 at home and .257/.331/.395 on the road. That's 54 points of average and 60 of OBP. But their home BABIP is also 41 points higher (.347 to .306); add in the home runs that the Cubs hit at Wrigley that might just be long flies elsewhere (the Cubs as a team average a home run per 27.4 PAs at Wrigley, and just one every 46.9 PAs away from it), and that accounts for much of the difference in average and OBP - a few more homers and plain ol' good luck.

Furthermore, again, this is not a problem unique to the Cubs, even if they are on the extreme end. The White Sox lose 99 points of OPS on the road; Milwaukee's road OBP is .317 (though their home OBP is a mere .332); Boston's road OBP drops 33 points from their home. The .500 Orioles hit 30 points better at Camden Yards. The Braves, baseball's ugliest road team, give up 38 points of BA and 40 points of OBP when they leave Turner Field.

(Fact: the Cubs' road OBP of .331, supposedly so lousy and proof that they're cheating at home, is seven points higher than the season OBP of Milwaukee, a supposedly dangerous offensive team. It's .003 behind the season OBP of Philadelphia, the #2 run-scoring team in the NL.)

But apparently it's not even just hitting where the Cubs are supposedly cheating. Out of nowhere - Perrotto's article is the only other place I can recall seeing a reference to the idea prior to Googling it for this post - Christina Kahrl dropped this little nugget into her analysis of the Harden trade:

If you really want to depress yourself, A's fans, sign up for the suggestion that the Cubs are cheating in their home park, and look at Gallager's [sic] road performance, where opposing hitters have pasted him at a .271/.341/.472 clip.

Uh, what? Even if you sign up for the idea that the Cubs hitters are getting the signs, how would Cubs pitchers be able to cheat at home in a way undetectable by umpires or opposing teams? (Even if something like overwatering the infield were being done - which I don't think I would even classify as cheating - doesn't that help the opposing team just as much?)

In addition, such an accusation isn't even borne out by the statistics. People have pointed to Ryan Dempster's record, but that owes mostly to his hitters' road woes; if you remove the aberrational 8-run disaster against the White Sox on June 27 from his road record, Dempster's road ERA is 2.55 - his home ERA is 2.58. His road WHIP is higher... by about one hit (or walk) every nine innings. His 0-3 road form owes as much to bad luck as anything - there were at least three games where he pitched well enough to win, only to see the bullpen blow the lead (most recently in his last start, July 2 in San Francisco, where he turned a 5-2 lead over to Marmol only for Carlos to serve a meatball to Ray Durham), and another game where he allowed five unearned runs thanks to errors by Fontenot and DeRosa.

Examining the rest of the rotation, Ted Lilly has actually pitched better, or at least more effectively, on the road (4.07 road ERA to a 4.92 home ERA) thanks to his home-run allowing tendencies, although he does have more strikeouts at home. Marquis' road ERA is nearly three runs lower than his home ERA. (Maybe he and Dempster should platoon.) Zambrano's ERA is a bit worse on the road but the sample size is such that the difference is negligible. Gallagher pitched worse on the road, but on the other hand he's a 22-year-old kid. Maybe the Cubs get a slightly more favorable strike zone at home, but a lot of teams with loud fans probably do, and anyway it hasn't made much difference to how many runs they give up. (Besides, that isn't the Cubs cheating, it's the umpires either cheating or just being inept and easily swayed by a raucous crowd.)

The Cubs as a staff give up .44 more runs per game on the road, but how tenuous is that figure? Well, it drops to .31 more runs per game if you take out Dempster's 2.1-inning, 8 ER debacle. Pull out the 9-0 abomination at Cincinnati on May 7 (when Lieber gave up 4 HR in one inning) and it's down to .18, which it seems to me is barely anything. How much of the "proof" for the claims of cheating at home is based on a little home BABIP luck from the hitters and two bad road starts out of 46?

In other words, I've had enough of this. Either give me some proof, or some statistics that can legitimately support the idea, or please, please, shut the hell up. Cubs fans have waited too long to have a season like this tainted by hearsay and conjecture, as the gleeful rumormongers grasp at any straws in sight. Isn't it bad enough that every single Cubs postseason appearance is going to be accompanied by video of Steve Bartman, a goat, a black cat, and every other terrible thing from the last 99 years on an infinite loop? Do you really have to try this hard to ruin the season for us before we even hit the All-Star break?

Harden fast

2008-07-08T19:55:00.004-05:00

Well, that was quick. How quick did the Cubs pull the trigger on Rich Harden? Quick enough that the last two blog entries posted by Buster Olney are titled "Don't expect Cubs to answer CC trade" and, immediately thereafter, "Harden deal happened quickly."

Harden remains a big injury risk, as I noted yesterday. Given Billy Beane's usual shrewdness and how quickly he moved to deal Harden even though the A's are hardly out of the AL West race, I'm frankly a little worried - and then there's this, from Olney's post:

Harden returned from the disabled list on May 11, and in his first nine starts, he pitched as he usually does, dominating hitters, striking out 42 batters in 32 1/3 innings in June, compiling a 1.67 ERA for the month. Some scouts who saw his July 1 start reported that his velocity was down, and he lasted five innings. On July 6, Harden had five erratic innings, walking four and requiring a 95 pitches to get through five innings.

Who's excited???? I really hope Hendry checked out the injury reports before pulling the trigger.

Harden and Chad Gaudin, a reliever, came over for Matt Murton, Eric Patterson, Sean Gallagher and Josh Donaldson. The good news here is that there's not a ton of loss in that trade. Murton is a good little hitter, but it's unlikely that he's ever going to turn into an All-Star, and he can only play left, a position the Cubs have covered until 2014. Patterson has his assets but never really caught on with Piniella, it seemed; Donaldson is one of the top two or three prospects in the Cubs' system, but he plays catcher, a position that, God willing, the Cubs have set for the next decade or so. The big loss is Gallagher; at 22, his best years are surely ahead of him, and he was certainly showing flashes of serious talent in his time with the big club this year. At the same time, he wasn't going to be in the rotation for the rest of the year anyway, and the Cubs weren't in a position to let him pitch his way into improvement as a starter. From the Cubs standpoint, they really gave up very little they couldn't afford to part with. The loss of Gallagher potentially makes the Cubs a worse team in 2010 (Harden is a free agent after the '09 season), but the addition of Harden potentially makes them World Series champions in 2008, and that can't be overlooked.

Still, his health situation scares the shit out of me. How/if (bite your tongue!) he pitches the rest of the year will probably determine whether or not fate really wants the Cubs to win this season.

Reaction time?

2008-07-07T17:17:00.002-05:00

On Sunday, as the trade of C.C. Sabathia to Milwaukee was becoming official, Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus included this quote from someone in baseball in his article:

“The Cubs will react quickly to any deals in their division.”

Now, I don't know how true that is. But it seems reasonable to assume, doesn't it? Milwaukee made the Sabathia trade because they figure this is their year to try and contend - Sheets is likely gone next season and Fielder may not be around much longer either - but the thing is, the Cubs had already earmarked 2008 as "the year" to go for it, and their relatively hot first half, even with the recent stumble, has only encouraged things further. The Brewers, however, seem to be rebounding after a slow start, and while their bullpen is still extremely questionable, Sabathia certainly plugs one of their holes and potentially gives them one of the best 1-2 punches in baseball, one that could be particularly dangerous in any playoff series.

So Milwaukee has punched first. The question is, does Jim Hendry have a counterpunch in him? As good as the Cubs have been, they've been unable to shake St. Louis and Milwaukee so far, which isn't exactly an encouraging trend - while I hesitate to be too negative, one does have to wonder if the Cubs are actually going to win 96-97 games as they're ticketed to do based on current win percentages. And while the Cubs do have sizable statistical advantages over Milwaukee right now, their edge in pitching is actually fairly slim and could be largely erased by Sabathia and their edge in hitting has a lot to do with Milwaukee's slow start - and despite the fact that Milwaukee started slow, they now sit just 3.5 games back (possibly 3 after they host the Rockies tonight). The chance to take a 2005-White-Sox-like lead (10 games as early as June 22, 15 games on August 1), insurmountable even with late-season doldrums, has probably come and gone, and while the advantage the Central currently has over the rest of the NL likely means that the wild card will come from within, you'd hate to have to rely on that, especially since it would remove home-field in the playoffs.

I'm certainly not conceding the division to Milwaukee (though many Milwaukee fans certainly seem happy to assume a division title); that would be ridiculous before Sabathia even throws a pitch - and maybe after, since he only affects a game once every five days - and I think the Cubs are still more talented top to bottom. But the Brewers just got a lot scarier in the rear-view mirror, especially given that we finish the season with six games against Milwaukee in the final two weeks, including a season-ending series at Miller Park (where, of course, the Brewers are 28-13, the second-best mark in the NL behind the Cubs).

Anyway. The general assumption is that the Cubs are looking to add another starting pitcher, and presumably a #3 starter or better. Here's a list of the names being kicked around:

Rich Harden
Pros: 5-1 record, 92 Ks in 77 IP, 2.34 ERA (some of that due to a home park that strongly favors pitchers, but his road ERA of 3.38 is still quite respectable), frequently said to have ace stuff. Reports have Hendry working this angle quite hard at the moment.
Cons: When he's said to have ace stuff, it's usually followed by "...if he could stay healthy." Threw just 72.1 innings combined in 2006 and 2007; has a pretty substantial injury history. In spite of this, Billy Beane is said to want a comparable package to what he got from Arizona for Dan Haren last winter - which was fully six prospects, including two guys who are currently starters for Oakland and a blue-chipper they think of as their CF of the future. The Cubs probably don't have the pieces to put together that kind of haul, but then if Beane wants six players for a guy who still needs to prove he can pitch a full season, I'd run as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

Randy Wolf
Pros: Once upon a time, Randy Wolf was a pretty decent third starter. In 2002, he threw more than 210 innings, had an ERA+ of 121, and as many strikeouts as hits allowed. He's still capable of putting up pretty good ERA numbers, provided you play in Petco Park.
Cons: If you don't play in Petco Park, Wolf is a fourth starter at best, and the Cubs need someone elite, not someone who isn't even league average. Wolf's road ERA this year is 6.66, which should be a dead giveaway. He'd probably be cheap, but why give away anything for him when you could get the exact same results, or significantly better, by continuing to start Sean Marshall or even Sean Gallagher? This would be another Steve Trachsel deal, if you ask me.

A.J. Burnett
Pros: Apparently, Burnett would welcome a trade to the Cubs, and when he's on he can be very good, putting up an ERA+ of 115 or better in four of his six full seasons in the pros. He also strikes out nearly a batter an inning, a valuable asset on a Cubs staff that increasingly finds itself pitching to contact.
Cons: This year, his ERA+ is 82. He may not be fully healthy (like Harden, there's some injury history there). There's also some risk that he would be a rental player if good, but a liability if bad (he can opt out of his contract at the end of the year, but presumably wouldn't do so if he sucked, leaving the Cubs on the hook for two more years at $12 million per), but then again if you're the Cubs and trying desperately to win in '08, it might be worth the risk.

Erik Bedard
Pros: Has ace-like stuff. Last year in Baltimore, went 13-5 with a 3.16 ERA (146 ERA+) and 221 Ks in 182 innings.
Cons: Attitude seems questionable. Might be injured at the moment. Hardly setting the world on fire this year, though who knows how much of that is mental, due to Seattle's struggles. Mariners might not be willing to give him up for anything but a big package, given how much their previous regime spent to bring him in.

I'm not sure which of that list I want the Cubs to go for, though I can tell you for sure that they'd better stay the hell away from Wolf. As for the other three, I do have to wonder if the Cubs have the players to make a decent package - Josh Vitters, last year's #1 pick, is still extremely raw in the low minors, but of course he's not even 19 yet; Pie's value has dipped significantly; Hill is probably untradeable at this point; and while the Iowa Cubs have played awfully well this year, a lot of their value is tied up in older guys who may or may not be valuable trading chips. (Is Jason Dubois, at 29, suddenly a valuable commodity because he hits a lot of home runs at Iowa? Doubtful.)

So we'll see. I wouldn't mind seeing Hendry stand pat for the moment - let's not forget that this team doesn't have Alfonso Soriano and their history shows they play a lot better relative to .500 with him than without him. Obviously you can't wait too long to make a move, but let's make sure we know what we've got first, and not do anything out of panic.

How do you solve a problem like Marmol?

2008-07-03T09:14:00.002-05:00

It seems like so long ago that Carlos Marmol was baseball's most unhittable pitcher, doesn't it? Now, it appears that three months of overuse have left him gassed and put the Cubs in a tight spot regarding the relief corps. On May 14, Marmol's ERA was 1.04; it was as low as 2.09 as recently as June 15. In his next appearance, four days later at Tampa, Marmol entered the game with a 3-1 lead, then walked two men and hit two more. He was yanked for Scott Eyre, who proceeded to allow a grand slam; despite not allowing a hit, Marmol was dinged for four earned runs, shooting his ERA to 2.93. In his next appearance, two days later against the White Sox, he entered with an 11-5 lead. After walking the leadoff hitter, he got two quick outs - then walked the bases loaded and allowed a run on a wild pitch. Once again he allowed a run despite not even giving up a hit.

The next two games were fairly uneventful - he threw an inning in the first and second games of the Baltimore series, allowing one total hit and walking no one. Then came Saturday. Marmol was brought in to start the seventh with the game tied at five; on an 0-2 pitch, he threw a high fastball to Carlos Quentin, who was able to put just enough on the ball to let it carry into the seats. Following that debacle, Marmol again got three days of rest prior to his appearance against the Giants last night. He came into the game with a 5-2 lead in the seventh and struck out the first two batters... then walked Travis Denker on five pitches, allowed a single to Fred Lewis, and then threw a first-pitch fastball to Ray "I Have Two Home Runs All Year" Durham. The fastball rose right into the zone, and Durham hit it out to right field to tie the game.

Marmol still has a devastating breaking ball, as he showed with the two strikeouts. But he's got a problem now. His command has gotten shakier - and let's not forget that even at his most dominant, his command could be an issue; remember all those at-bats where he'd leap to a 3-0 count, then manage to come back for the strikeout? He can't do that now, because he doesn't have the same fastball. Where it was touching high 90s earlier in the year, it now seems to top out around 93, and he just can't blow guys away with it. The same batters who would have been swinging futilely at a high 98-mph fastball are now jumping on 92-mph fastballs up in the zone and parking them in the seats.

Is Marmol masking some minor injury, or is he just tired? Yesterday on Baseball Prospectus, John Perrotto quoted a scout who said of Marmol, "He looks really tired to me, his arm is dragging, and his stuff isn’t as crisp. He’s a helluva young pitcher but [manager] Lou Piniella has been forced to ride him really hard this season and the wear and tear is showing." Marmol has already thrown 48 innings in 43 appearances after going just 69.1 (in 59 games) all of last year, and for a while he was on pace to throw well over 100 innings as the early-season struggles of guys like Howry made it more difficult for Lou to keep Marmol out of games. (Just ask Joe Torre what it's like to be a veteran manager who only trusts a few of his relievers.) He's also already given up 19 ER, eight more than all of last season - but 12 of those have been since June 1. So what do we do?

1. Give him a break.
Even three days off between games doesn't seem to be helping right now, so maybe Marmol just needs to be shut down for a while so he can rest. The question is, is there any way that a couple weeks of rest is enough? You can't possibly justify putting him on the shelf for longer than that unless he's actually injured, which I don't think is the case, and even while the fastball isn't there, his breaking ball is still good enough to get guys out if he can get a fastball over early in the count. But you can't always rely on that, as we saw last night.

2. Less use of the fastball.
There's always some risk that he'll just start firing fastballs all over the place, whereas the breaking ball is reliable and pretty much unhittable. Of course, if he turns into a one-pitch guy, that breaking ball will probably start to get more hittable as guys see a lot more of it. Still, I've seen at-bats where he's just buckled a guy's knees with three straight breakers right at the bottom of the strike zone, so it wouldn't be impossible.

3. Just use him less.
Lou doesn't seem to have a lot of trust in the bullpen beyond Marmol, but most of them have at least been decent this year. Ascanio looked pretty good in limited action before giving up a homer to Jim Thome on Sunday (but let's not forget that WWE officials were working that game); Cotts has been decent; Howry seems to be getting into form; Wuertz has a low ERA in spite of some command issues; Lieber has been solid pretty much every time he's come in but has appeared somewhat sporadically because of his assigned role as the long man. If all else fails, you could call up Hart (though it looks like he'll probably stick as a starter in the minors for right now and be brought up in that role maybe in 2009) or Pignatiello (who's been good in recent outings at Iowa, though his stats for the year are kind of ugly). And if all else fails, you could trade for a reliever in the next few weeks, although teams always end up overpaying for relievers and I'm not sure if there's a difference-maker out there.

Still, something has to be done, right? I don't think we can just keep doing what we've been doing when Marmol has been a time bomb recently. Thank God for Mike Fontenot.

U.S. Stealular

2008-06-29T22:04:00.002-05:00

To: White Sox
From: MLB
Contents: One gift-wrapped three-game sweep

My dad frequently resorts to the old "it was fixed" angle whenever he's watching any game with shady officiating. My standard response in these situations is that the officiating was merely incompetent, and that no conspiracy is afoot. But you watch a series like the Cubs/White Sox series at US Cellular this weekend and it's really hard to come to a different conclusion. Incompetent officiating is nothing new, but it's rare to see officiating so blatantly one-sided. I watched most of the Saturday game and the first two innings of Sunday night's game, until the point where it was apparent the umpires had no intention of calling the game fairly. And while I obviously have my rooting interest, at no point did I feel like the Cubs were getting a fair shake.

If an umpire has a bad strike zone, that's one thing - if he enforces it the same way for everyone. That certainly didn't happen in Sunday night's game - Buehrle had to throw a pitch either above the shoulders or in the dirt for it to be a ball. Everything else was a strike. Pitches six inches outside and two inches below the knee were routinely strikes, as they had been the previous day for the White Sox relievers. How a team is expected to produce any offense when those kinds of pitches are strikes is beyond me. It wasn't a problem for the White Sox, of course, because the Cubs' strike zone was half the size. Marshall threw a curveball that should have struck Thome out; ESPN even showed the K-Zone replay showing that it was an obvious strike. It was called a ball; on the next pitch, Thome singled. On Saturday, the plate umpire was making his own judgment on check swings, something which is virtually never seen; most of the times he did it, a Cub was at the plate. On Sunday, Crede checked his swing well through the hitting zone; it was called no swing. When Piniella came out to argue, he was tossed by the plate umpire even as his back was turned to said umpire.

The crew was part minor league umpires, so maybe they were just staggeringly incompetent. But they really were just incredibly, bafflingly incompetent. And it's amazing to think that they could be so incompetent just against the Cubs. Maybe it was just home-field bias and not actually a sinister plot to have the White Sox win, but even if that's the case, it exposes a real problem in the way baseball is officiated. And it makes me laugh when I hear people talk about how horrible replay would be, because the "human element" needs to be preserved. You know what? When the "human element" is this fucking terrible, who needs it?

Double your agony

2008-06-27T20:07:00.002-05:00

We're through 80 games. It's not quite half the season, but here's one way to think about it. I realized this season that it was dangerous to get too obsessed with the results of a single game, which has helped to keep me sane while following the Cubs on a daily basis. Think about a football season - there are only 16 games, so a single game might make or break you, but in baseball, where there are ten times as many games, you could consider each ten-game stretch to be "make or break." Individual games, probably not so much.

At least that's what I tell myself on days like today. I looked it up - the last time the Cubs gave up 10 runs or more in back to back games was August 27-28, 2006, a 10-6 loss at St. Louis followed by an 11-6 loss at Pittsburgh. Of course, those Cubs were well on their way to 96 losses, were starting Freddie Bynum at second, and started Les Walrond in the Cardinals game. This Cubs team, meanwhile, should be on its way to 96 wins. Hasn't looked like it the last couple days, though.

I don't know about Marquis, but I've always been a bit worried about Dempster. On Monday night, the guys on ESPN 1000 were talking about Dempster and asking if Cubs fans were sold on him (this was the night after he'd beaten the Sox 7-1 to complete the sweep at Wrigley). I considered calling in and saying that I wasn't because of BABIP, but I figured that wouldn't get me too far on talk radio.

But you look at Dempster's stats and it's clear he's been walking a bit of a tightrope. Going into today's game, his BABIP was .238; league average tends to be around .300. In fact, his BABIP used to be much lower, but in his last two starts before today it was .375 (and I doubt it got any lower today). He was still getting away with it - last Sunday, he allowed ten hits, but just one run, thanks in part to three double plays behind him.

It's kind of been the story of the Cubs' staff as a whole this year, with the possible exception of Lilly, who's still very much a flyball pitcher:

Dempster: 15 starts (before today); games in which the majority of balls put in play against him were not ground balls: 1.
Zambrano: 15 starts; games in which the majority of balls put in play against him were not ground balls: 5.
Marquis: 15 starts; games in which the majority of balls put in play against him were not ground balls: 3.
(For comparison's sake, Lilly: 17 starts; games in which the majority of balls put in play against him were not ground balls: 13.)

This is why Lilly can give up a bunch of home runs - he allows a lot of fly balls. Similarly, if you give up a lot of ground balls and line drives, you can have a bad day and give up a lot of hits. It doesn't help that, because of various injuries, the Cubs' defensive alignment is a little bit of a mess right now. Your starters in the field today: Lee (1B), Fontenot (2B), Cedeno (SS), Ramirez (3B), Patterson (LF), Edmonds (CF), Ward (RF). Not exactly optimal - Ward has so little foot speed that he's usually pulled for a pinch-runner immediately after getting on base when he pinch hits, and Patterson is a second baseman by nature; he botched a ball in left so terribly (it enabled Pierzynski to go to third on a single) that after the game Piniella said that Patterson wouldn't be put in left field any more. (I can't help but wonder if this means he's going back to Iowa; we've already got several players on the roster capable of playing second, including the left-handed Fontenot, meaning speed is the only thing that's going to keep Patterson with the big club.)

The Cubs are third in the NL in defensive efficiency, and the defense has been a huge part of the equation as the pitchers have started pitching more to contact. (Lilly's 8.67 K/9 leads the starters; Dempster's at 7.45, Gallagher 7.36, Zambrano 5.76, and Marquis is at 4.64. Two years ago, Zambrano was at 8.83.) This has reduced walks - Zambrano's on pace for just 72, the lowest since he became a full-time starter - but it can also increase hits if balls are finding their ways through holes. Zambrano has already allowed 105 hits; as a result, even with his walks way down, he's on pace for the second-worst WHIP of his career (since becoming a full-time starter). His BABIP against is .296; you can see where Dempster's .238 might worry me.

In other words, he was probably due to have a day like today, especially when the defense wasn't really backing him up. Listening to the broadcast until things started getting ugly, it sounded like Dempster was getting pretty unlucky - soft singles finding gaps, doubles down the line, a ball right over Fontenot's head that DeRosa, a taller man, might have caught. Then, of course, after Dempster had given up four straight hits (three of which drove in runs) in the third, he started shying away from pitching to contact, and that's when he walked the bases loaded. And then he had to throw shit over the plate, and we ended up with Swisher's grand slam. And that's the ballgame, basically.

So, there are reasons to be concerned - to some degree you might consider today as statistical inevitability catching up to him a bit - but also reasons to feel a little better than we otherwise might; when the optimal defensive alignment is on the field, Dempster's likely to be a more effective pitcher. His normalized runs allowed number is 3.14; independent of defense, it's 3.53. If the defense can stay above average, things should be okay. As long as his arm can hold up, of course.

What I am a little worried about now is the rest of this series, given that the Seans are going. Gallagher needs to give us at least six tomorrow; with Lieber having thrown 3.1 today, he's probably not going to be available until Sunday at the earliest, which leaves the pen with no long man should Gallagher have any struggles like Dempster or Marquis. (And we all know how much better an offensive team at home the Sox are - comparably so to the Cubs, in fact. Gallagher has been pretty good at not allowing runs recently - high of 3 in his last five starts, and he allowed just an unearned run in Tampa on the 19th only to be screwed out of a win by Marmol's blowup. Maybe this won't be so bad. But the Cubs have got to score runs for him. In only two innings today was no one on base, but Lee hit into a double play in the first and another in the third with the bases loaded. Coming when it did - the Cubs were still down just 1-0 - you could argue that the latter swung the momentum of the entire game, although if the Sox still scored 7 runs the next half-inning then it wouldn't have mattered much, probably. But what could have been a couple runs was a rally-killing, inning-ender, and then in the bottom of the inning the Sox put the game out of reach.)

Anyway, this is long enough. But I will say that I'm not concerned yet about these last couple games. However, if you look at the season in groups of ten games, and we're through the first eight, there's probably some reason to be concerned.

First 10: 6-4
Second 10: 8-2
Third 10: 4-6
Fourth 10: 6-4
Fifth 10: 5-5
Sixth 10: 9-1
Seventh 10: 7-3
Eighth 10: 4-6

Worst block since the third ten, back in late April/early May. That trend needs to get reversed, starting tomorrow.

Even better than the road thing

2008-06-23T16:37:00.006-05:00

As pretty much everyone knows because the media won't shut up about it, the Cubs haven't been a great road team this year. In fact, they're 32-8 (!!!) at home, and just 16-20 on the road. I was in a Baseball Prospectus chat today when the issue came up via a Rays fan, after John Perrotto had commented that the Cubs were the team to beat in the NL Central:

jlarsen (DRays Bay): Cubs too strong in the long haul? They're horrible on the road(under .500 possibly) and the Rays completely destroyed Marmol after Lou forgot he had Carlos in the 'pen for a few consecutive days. If Rays fans know anything, it's that Lou is known to make some very questionable moves that point that he was as much the blame for the Rays only topping out at 70 wins when he was manager as the front office was.

John Perrotto: I still think they are the best team in the NL Central, though your points about their weaknesses are well taken.

So, a few things about that:

(1) As pointed out by a Cubs fan later in the chat, it's not quite accurate to say the Rays "completely destroyed" Marmol in last Thursday's game; if anything, they destroyed Eyre, off whom Crawford hit the GS. Marmol destroyed himself via two walks and two hit batsmen.
(2) It's a bit ironic to hear a Rays fan questioning the Cubs' credentials due to their road record. Your Tampa Bay Rays home/road record splits:

Home: 30-13; Road: 14-18

The Rays, in fact, have played more home games than any team in baseball to this point, and are exactly as "horrible" on the road as are the Cubs. Throw in the fact that the Rays have an extremely young starting pitching staff (the oldest of their five primaries is 26, and only two of the five have seasons of more than 170 innings to their credit in their careers) and I'd be a little bit more worried about my team than the Cubs if I'm a Tampa fan.

But whatever. This isn't about the Rays. The point is to look at the Cubs' road "struggles" and ask the question: are they doomed because of this?

Well, let's consider a couple things right off.

1. If the Cubs finish with the best record in the NL, it might not matter.
Even if you assume the Cubs can only win at home - to the tune of the .800 winning percentage they've posted there so far - they would still put up 101 wins if they continue their current home and road winning percentages through the rest of the year. As I mentioned a few posts ago, it's probably not likely that either of these trends will continue, but it's likely that they'll both approach each other. And if the Cubs use that to win 100 games, they'll almost certainly have the best record in the NL, and if they keep winning at home in the postseason, hello World Series. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

2. The Cubs score more runs than they allow on the road.
The Cubs' enormous +112 run differential - by far the best in baseball - has been built on the back of their home record, where they have scored 260 runs in 40 games (6.5 rpg!) while allowing just 151. But their road differential is also positive, with 158 runs scored (4.4 rpg) and 155 allowed. In other words, the Cubs' Pythagorean road record is 18-18, meaning that so far they have been a bit unlucky. And, in fact, if we look at the Cubs' 20 road losses, we find that fully fifteen of them have been by one or two runs. Even the series in Tampa, where the Cubs supposedly looked awful and had the floor mopped with themselves, saw the Cubs lose the first two games by a combined two runs. In fact, as pointed out by Mike D. on Hire Jim Essian:

If you look at their last thirteen losses, they have lost by one run in eight of those games, by two runs twice, and by three runs once. The only two losses in that span by more than three runs are the Tampa disaster and the game two weeks ago when Zambrano blew his top in Chavez Ravine–and even in both of those games, the Cubs had been winning going into their opponent’s half of the 7th inning.

In fact, the Cubs' team ERA is 3.44 at home and 3.92 on the road - half a run worse, of course, but still pretty good.

The obvious point is that the Cubs hit a lot better at home than they do on the road. The somewhat damning slashes:

Home: .311/.388/.506
Road: .254/.330/.383

Ick, right? As it happens, the latter number is mostly dragged down by the particularly poor road play of Kosuke Fukudome and Mark DeRosa - both hitting .214 with sub-.325 OBPs on the road right now - just as the home numbers are somewhat inflated by the exact opposite performances that Fukudome (.372/.479/.547) and DeRosa (.352/.432/.512) have turned in at Wrigley. Given that both are major-league caliber players, I doubt these splits will continue to be quite so heinous all year. DeRosa's career splits show a guy who's a better player at home, but he's pretty much always had a hitter's park as home base, so that's not too surprising. More encouraging are the home/road splits of guys like Lee and Soto, which line up fairly well (Soto's stat lines are almost shockingly similar home vs. away). Ultimately we're not even halfway through the season yet, and it's entirely likely that the numbers will stabilize.

3. Why pick on the Cubs with this data?
Here are all the teams within 6.5 of their division leads with similar home/road issues as the Cubs to this point:

Boston (29-9 home, 18-22 road)
Tampa Bay (30-13 home, 14-18 road)
White Sox (24-11 home, 17-23 road)
Minnesota (25-16 home, 15-20 road)
Detroit (20-16 home, 16-23 road)
Cleveland (20-18 home, 15-23 road)
Florida (22-15 home, 18-20 road)
Mets (20-14 home, 17-23 road)
Atlanta (27-12 home, 11-27 road)
Milwaukee (25-13 home, 16-21 road)
Arizona (24-15 home, 15-22 road)
Dodgers (19-17 home, 16-23 road)

Well, look at that - it's nearly every goddamn team in baseball. In fact, only five teams in baseball have road records above .500, and only three have road records more than a game over - the Phillies (20-17), the Cardinals (21-16), and the Angels (a jaw-dropping 24-12). So far from being "horrible" on the road, to use the parlance of our goofy Rays fan friend, the Cubs are doing pretty much what everyone else is doing - having a slight losing record on the road - with the caveat that they are also destroying the competition at home right now. There's no real reason to think the Cubs will be below .500 on the road all year, but even if they are, there's a decent chance they'd still win in the mid-90s, and it's hard to see that not being good enough for a playoff spot.

Of course, yes, I think the Cubs need to improve on the road, especially with a lot of road games coming up and especially with those games coming against teams the Cubs need to beat (St. Louis and Milwaukee in particular). The ten-game road trip starting Friday - three on the South Side, four in San Francisco, three in St. Louis - will be a good barometer; 5-5 is the worst I hope to see out of that trip. But come on - this team is more talented than any of those three. If they can just scrape out a few more runs here and there, that road record will turn around in a hurry.

Put a Sox in it

2008-06-20T21:03:00.002-05:00

In July 2004 - midway through a season that would culminate in the Red Sox's first world championship in 86 years but was hardly looking promising at the time - Bill Simmons wrote a column where he talked about the positives of living a coast away from the Boston media (later included, with substantial revision, in Now I Can Die in Peace). In particular, he mentions how sports radio and newspaper columnists - whose principal jobs are to boost ratings and circulation by being controversial - tend to contribute to and intensify any negative feelings he might be having about the team.

I mention this because I was reminded of it when thinking about the constant harping on the Cubs/White Sox "rivalry" by the media here. I guess it's a big series in its way, but any series with the Cardinals is more intense, and more important, than two late June series with the Sox, and any real Cubs fan will tell you as much.

Like all lifetime Cubs fans I know, I never hated the Sox. Growing up - away from the Chicago media and before interleague play existed - I would root for the Sox, as a Chicago team. (I even went to a Sox game my freshman year of college, and, more damningly, bought a jersey. It has since been donated to a clothing drive.) Of course my primary interest was in seeing the Cubs win, but something like 2005 would have been an okay consolation prize. There are still fans who feel this way - my dad and Michael Wilbon come to mind, people who grew up in the 50s, 60s, 70s - periods in which the Cubs and Sox were nothing approaching rivals, when fans of both teams tended to root for each other. (Wilbon is from the South Side, for crying out loud.) Of course, they're also people who haven't lived full-time in Chicago for decades.

But living and working in the city in the interleague age, it's impossible to be a fan of both teams. Sox fans seem to uniformly despise the Cubs, and take a perverse amount of glee in seeing the Cubs fail, nearly as much as seeing their own team win. (As reported by Bad Kermit on Hire Jim Essian, Sox fans started a "Cubs lost!" chant at US Cellular - in an extra-inning tie game, with their first-place team at bat. How much more pathetically obsessed can you get?)

Some of this is because the media desperately wants a rivalry. And a lot of it is because White Sox fans desperately want a rivalry. And still more of it is because the team's management (sometimes prodded by the media) won't shut up about it.

For example, before today's Cubs win, Ozzie Guillen (yet again) talked trash about Wrigley Field:

Guillen was on a roll before the game and got in another shot at one of his favorite targets, Wrigley Field. Especially the batting cage under the right field bleachers.

"You go to take batting practice and the rats are bigger than pigs out there. You want to take a look? I think the rats are lifting weights," he said.

"That's the way it is. This is a museum. People like to come to Wrigley Field. I don't say people don't like to come here. I said, 'Ozzie doesn't like to come here.' "

This was in the AP game recap. Why, other than as an attempt to fan the flames? What does it matter to anyone whether a notorious loudmouth prefers his soulless abomination of a home ballpark?

Better still, Kenny Williams had this to say:

"You might as well build a border, a Great Wall of China on Madison, because we are so different. We might as well be in two different cities. The unfortunate thing for me when I look at a lot of this is it's a shame that a certain segment of Chicago refused to enjoy a baseball championship being brought to their city [in 2005]. The only thing I can say is, happy anniversary."

A few points of response:

(1) Fuck you.
(2) Name me one Sox fan who would enjoy a Cubs World Series win (particularly if it was just another reminder that their own team had not won in forever).
(3) Way to yell at Cubs fans for not rooting for the White Sox, then work in a dig at Cubs fans two seconds later, giving us all more reasons not to root for the White Sox.
(4) Seriously, fuck you, you condescending prick.

It's not quite as bad as when Scoop Jackson called us all racists for not rooting for the Sox in 2005, but come on. It's this ridiculous mindset that drives me more crazy than anything else. Sox fans spend all year making fun of Cubs fans, rooting against the Cubs, antagonizing Cubs fans - and then they want us to root for them??? Get out of my face with that bullshit. I know you've all got a massive inferiority complex, and I know you're mad that you can't consistently sell out your stadium even when the team is winning (not including today, the Cubs have drawn more than half a million more fans than the White Sox this year already, in just two more home games), and I know you're upset that the national media makes a bigger deal out of the Cubs (hint: it's because we have fans who don't live in Chicago, and also more fans in Chicago, and also, fans). But maybe if you would just shut up, this whole thing wouldn't be an issue. I have no particular interest in hating the Sox; at this point, I have no interest in really caring about them, period. But it's difficult to ignore when you're constantly making obnoxious spectacles out of yourselves.

So, I think it may be time to go to plan B, just like Kermit did in the post linked above. Plan B: ignore the White Sox. Don't mention them; it's not worth it. White Sox fans would love nothing more to think that Cubs fans are seriously invested in this rivalry, but real Cubs fans aren't. Real Cubs fans want the Cubs to win or, failing that, the Cardinals to lose. The White Sox? Yeah, great, who gives a shit. It's a rivalry stoked by Sox fans and by "Cubs fans" who are really college kids from out of town who adopted the team so they have an excuse to hang out at a ballpark and drink (and then the twenty- and thirtysomethings those kids turn into). These are the same idiots who buy all those stupid unlicensed shirts outside Wrigley. Legitimate Cubs fans hate these people; they make the rest of us look bad.

So I'm done trading fire. Let the White Sox fans make themselves look pathetic and obsessed on their own time. I'm just going to watch the Cubs, and hopefully watch them win a World Series, at which time White Sox fans won't have crap to say, anyway.

(And, oh yeah, nice win today. No place like home, apparently.)

Pressed peanut sweepings

2008-06-20T09:30:00.003-05:00

For the first time this season, two things happened:

(1) Carlos Marmol made an appearance in which he did not retire a batter. (He threw 20 pitches, seven for strikes, walking two and hitting two more. Then Scott Eyre gave up a grand slam, leading to Marmol being charged with four earned runs. Which you can't argue he didn't deserve. His ERA went from 2.09 to 2.93.) This is the first time Marmol has appeared without recording an out since May 27, 2007, when he came in against the Dodgers in the bottom of the 11th at Chavez Ravine with two on and no outs, intentionally walked Rafael Furcal, and then plunked Juan Pierre to end the game. (The run was charged to Angel Guzman.) This may not sound like a long time ago, but consider that it was Marmol's fourth appearance of 2007 after being called up, and just his tenth career major league relief appearance.

(2) The Cubs were swept by an opponent and lost three games against any opposition in a row. The 2007 Cubs already had a four-game losing streak by April 13, and by June 20 had three more three-game skids and a six-game losing streak, including their first three-game sweep of the year, the infamous Florida series at Wrigley Field where the Cubs had a players-only meeting before the series' third game and proceeded to lose 9-0. As it happened, the Cubs were only swept three times last year in series of three games or more; two of them were to the Marlins. (The third was at Houston in early August.)

For a confluence of reasons, I was unable to see any of the game last night. I watched the top of the first on Gamecast before I left work, then turned on WGN when I got into the car to drive over to Subway for a sandwich at 8:45. As if he was just waiting for me, Pat Hughes greeted my arrival to the radio broadcast with a description of the previous half-inning, which was the very one which had seen the Rays score seven runs to take an 8-3 lead, just after the Cubs had broken through to go up 3-1 in the top half. (Scott Eyre, fresh off having his streak of unscored-upon appearances broken, sucked no less hard than did Marmol, allowing the grand slam, then a triple, a run-scoring double, a sac fly, and another double before being pulled.)

When I heard the score, I turned off the radio in disgust, then ripped my Cubs cap - which I have been wearing everywhere this season, usually only taking it off when indoors - off my head and slammed it onto the passenger seat. When I went into Subway, I didn't even put it back on. But after I ate and drove across the street to CVS, I thought for a second and then returned the hat to my head. When you get right down to it, it's a mid-June series against a pretty good team; these Cubs don't get swept much, but it's kind of ridiculous to expect them to never get swept, or to never lose three games in a row. They were playing in an unfamiliar stadium against an unfamiliar team - in 2003, the Cubs took two of three from the then-Devil Rays in their only previous meeting, at Wrigley. (Tampa's manager that year, of course? Lou Piniella.) Those Rays lost 99 games. These Rays might win 90. And frankly, all three games could have gone either way - the Cubs had at least the tying run on base in the ninth inning in both of the first two games, and even though they lost by five runs last night, obviously that doesn't happen if Marmol doesn't have the worst appearance of his relief career. (This one might have been worse, statistically. But not by much. And considering the difference in stakes - look at the list of Cubs pitchers for that game! Do you think it was anything other than Dusty seeing what the farm had, at the end of a lost season? - this one has to be the worst. And just for posterity's sake, the worst appearance of his career, period, was probably this one. 8 walks!)

My basic point here is that I'm not as worried at this point as I might be. It's probably just as well that I didn't watch the game, because I think it's hard to sit through a seven-run inning and not just absolutely flip out. But really, I'm not that concerned. It's one game; it's one series. Every team, even the best ones, has moments like this. The 2001 Seattle Mariners - managed by, of course, Lou Piniella - won 116 games, and even they had a four-game losing streak in September, getting swept at Oakland. They even lost the middle game of that series 11-2. Shit, they even had that famous game where they led the Indians 12-0 after three and 14-2 after five, then allowed three in the seventh, four in the eighth, and five in the ninth to tie the game, and finally lost 15-14 in eleven innings. All five runs in the ninth scored with two outs! Can you imagine, as a Mariners fan, sitting through that game? (Probably similar to Rockies fans earlier this year, I'd imagine, only much, much worse.) And that team won 116 games that year. The A's went 102-60 and finished fourteen games out of first.

Yes, what happened to the Seattle Mariners in 2001 has no bearing on what's happening to the 2008 Chicago Cubs, whether or not the manager is the same. But my point is simply that June 20 is so early in the season. The Cubs have played 73 games; we won't reach the halfway point until next Saturday. And we still lead the NL in BA, OBP, ERA, and run differential. We still have the best record in the division (and the league) by 3.5 games. Ultimately, we still control our own destiny. And even if the series at Tampa is indicative of more than just a blip, there's plenty of time to right the ship. Remember, on June 20 last year we were 32-38 and eight games behind Milwaukee. Which position would you rather be in?

So now it's time for the two most annoying weekends of the year, made even more annoying than usual by the fact that the Sox are also in first place. Can we please just turn around and win all three? (For what it's worth, we haven't lost a home game since May 17, winning 11 straight.) Tell you what - I'll be generous and say I'll be satisfied with just taking two of three.

Premature speculation

2008-06-16T21:53:00.002-05:00

The Cubs have played 70 games (92 to go). At 45-25, they have the best record in baseball; they lead the NL in average, OBP, runs scored, runs allowed and ERA; nearly every starter plus several pitchers have a case for All-Star selection. In the 100th anniversary year of the last time the Cubs won the World Series, an end to the century of misery is starting to look possible. And yet they only have a 3.5-game lead in the division (thanks to the PECOTA-unforeseen success to this point of the Cardinals), one of the smallest in baseball. (The Diamondbacks, who last year used 90 wins to just barely hold on to the NL's deepest division, are just 37-33 and yet lead the West by 5.5 games because the other four teams are well below .500.) As such, there's still plenty of feeling that the Cubs are going to be in the market - no, need to be in the market - to upgrade their team before the July 31 trade deadline.

I always try not to be recklessly optimistic when it comes to the Cubs. But I look at this team right now and I think maybe it's a little soon to start talking about brushing people aside. Maybe in another month things will look different. But let's take a look at this team, and at possible positional upgrades, and you tell me if people aren't moving to the trading block a bit too quickly.

C - Geovany Soto (.288/.374/.527, 11 HR, 42 RBI; 28% CS)
You can't possibly complain about Geovany Soto. When the Cubs went to the NLCS in 2003, their catchers were Damian Miller (76 OPS+) and Paul Bako (67 OPS+). They were fairly strong defensive catchers (combined 36.7% CS), but Soto is so much better offensively that it's clearly a much bigger advantage for the Cubs nowadays. The only question will be if Soto can hold up over a full season, but Henry Blanco is there to spell him, and playing a full season at Iowa and then coming to the Cubs in September last year didn't seem to slow Soto down. Clearly no needs here.

1B - Derrek Lee (.289/.349/.511, 14 HR, 44 RBI)
Lee's been slumping a little recently, but he's Derrek Lee. Solid here. At backup, Micah Hoffpauir's been hitting pretty well in his limited action, and he adds a lefty power bat off the bench in Daryle Ward: Professional Hitter's absence.

2B - Mark DeRosa (.299/.384/.464, 8 HR, 36 RBI, 97 positions played)
At age 33, DeRosa looks primed to have his best season as a professional - he's already closing on his career high in homers (13) and is almost halfway to his career high in RBI (74), plus his current slash averages would be career highs in all three categories. All that and he can play virtually anywhere on the field, save maybe pitcher, catcher and center - and I bet he'd try center if he had to. (He's already played five positions this year, including extended spells in left and at third during injuries to Soriano and Ramirez.) Did the Brian Roberts fiasco in spring training fire him up, or is he just having a career year at the perfect time? (Roberts, for the record, has a .361 OBP at the moment.)

SS - Ryan Theriot (.310/.388/.373, 32 BB/23 K, 1 HR, 18 RBI)
Okay, Theriot could probably field his position better, and he's got no power. His SB% is also way down (to an ugly 13/8, already twice as many times as he was caught last year with half the steals so far). But he's doing a good job of getting on base, and as the usual #2 hitter when the #1 hitter is a power guy, that's pretty much what you look for him to do, hopefully sticking around for the ride when Lee or Ramirez hit one out (or scampering around on a double). I would like to see a few more hits that aren't singles, but overall there's not much to complain about as of yet. There is still the nagging question of whether he can avoid another September fade.

3B - Aramis Ramirez (.300/.412/.502, 10 HR, 45 RBI, 40 BB/41 K)
Though Ramirez is only on pace for mid-20s in home runs, he's on pace to blow past his career high in walks (50) and OBP (.373). He's always been a hotter second-half player - his career best month for homers is July, and August for OPS - so while his HR and RBI totals don't project to anywhere near a year like 2006 (38/119), it's worth remembering that in 2006 he had just 14 HR and 43 RBI at the end of June before going on a tear over the final three months. All in all he's probably been the most consistent offensive force on the team since coming over in 2003 from Pittsburgh, even though you can pencil him in for a couple missed weeks most years (it helped his numbers to play 157 games in 2006).

LF - Alfonso Soriano (.283/.332/.547, 15 HR, 40 RBI, 7 SB/1 CS)
Of course, one of the main reasons for discussion of help is Soriano's absence - and perhaps rightly so, since he was (and still is) leading the team in home runs. But as I've pointed out before, the team OBP tends to go up in Soriano's absence, and it's not like there haven't been RBI machines at the #3, #4, and #6 holes in the order. Besides, what's the point of scrambling to fill this void with someone from the outside who'd be rendered useless as soon as Soriano returns?

CF - Jim Edmonds (.309/.342/.515, 2 HR, 14 RBI, 6 2B, just 22 games played as a Cub)
Edmonds took a little while to warm up, but now that he has, he's pretty warm - .375/.409/.625 in June, in fact. So why are we still talking about the need for a "left-handed power bat?" (And more importantly, if that is the need, why is anyone bringing up Scott Podsednik?)

RF - Kosuke Fukudome (.293/.401/.426, 5 HR, 29 RBI, 45 BB/42 K)
Whether or not it's true that Fukudome passed the art of getting on base to the rest of the team by osmosis, he's certainly been successful at it, trailing only Ramirez in OBP and leading the team in walks. With warmer weather coming, I think it's entirely possible for that power number to climb; there's still a chance he approaches 20 HR, I think. And while he's not the prototypical power-hitting corner OF, he might just be the best defensive RF in the National League. Think - well - Ichiro, except that only once has Ichiro recorded an OBP higher than .400, mostly because he doesn't take many walks. Fukudome doesn't steal as many bases, though. Still, his strong fundamentals have been a welcome sight for anyone frustrated by years of Dustyball.

Bench - Ronny Cedeno, Mike Fontenot, Henry Blanco, Micah Hoffpauir, Reed Johnson, Daryle Ward
Johnson has actually seen a lot of starts, hitting .267/.342/.381, though he's come up with a few timely home runs and has been a solid backup-type guy who can make starts in left or center when needed. Hoffpauir and Ward both fill the role of the "slow power-hitting lefty who can fill in at first or, if you're desperate, in an outfield corner," depending on Ward's health (right now, not). Blanco has been hitting pretty well by his standards and had a key HR in the big comeback vs. the Rockies. Cedeno and Fontenot are kind of slightly lesser offensive versions of Theriot, but they can both fill in on the infield (Cedeno pretty much anywhere, Fontenot at second if DeRosa is playing elsewhere). It's not the deepest bench ever, but it has a lot of guys who can get on base - Cedeno and Fontenot have gotten better at working walks, Ward can take a walk, and Johnson practically loves the hit-by-pitch. It's also worth mentioning here that Carlos Zambrano is hitting .362/.362/.511 and may actually be the best-hitting non-regular the Cubs have. (Although he does not know how to take a walk.)

SP - Carlos Zambrano (8-2, 2.98 ERA, 1.30 WHIP, 7 HR, 32 BB/66 K)
SP - Ted Lilly (7-5, 4.76 ERA, 1.33 WHIP, 14 HR, 31 BB/83 K)
SP - Ryan Dempster (8-2, 2.81 ERA, 1.06 WHIP, 8 HR, 35 BB/75 K)
SP - Jason Marquis (5-3, 4.24 ERA, 1.49 WHIP, 6 HR, 30 BB/37 K)
SP - Sean Gallagher (3-3, 4.54 ERA, 1.37 WHIP, 4 HR, 15 BB/36 K)

Some of the numbers could definitely be better - Zambrano's WHIP, for example, is one of the highest of his career (it's better than last year's, but let's not forget that he sorta sucked last year), and it's not even due to walks - he's been pitching more to contact and sometimes it's been causing him to give up a lot of hits. His ERA isn't too bad for it, I guess, and his cultivation of a sinker has dropped his HR allowed. Lilly's ERA is so high because of his awful start to the year, but over the last seven weeks he's been much improved, finally dropping the ERA under 5.00 with six innings of shutout ball against Toronto on Sunday. He's also been striking guys out like crazy, including back-to-back double-digit K games on May 9 and 14. Dempster has been the shocker of the year, not only leading the starters in ERA and (by quite a bit) in WHIP, but having no starts under 5 innings (the only starter of whom that's true), the team's only CG, and just two starts where he allowed as many as four runs (and none where he allowed more) are all pretty impressive stats for a guy who spent the last several years as a reliever. That, of course, is the main concern with him (will he have enough stamina for the whole year, and especially deep [we hope] into October?); that and his BABIP, which at .215 is pretty low and risks a regression to the mean at some point. Marquis was looking to start his second-half shitfest early this year until getting an earful from Piniella on the mound; in his last two starts he's turned in two pretty dominant outings (at least by his standards). My dad always says he thinks Marquis has stuff that's just as good as Brandon Webb and his problem is making the pitches - while that's as true as what would happen if a frog had wings (he wouldn't bump his ass a-hoppin'), maybe Piniella can actually smack some mental makeup into Marquis. Or maybe these two starts were just a blip. As for Gallagher, he hasn't looked too bad for a rookie. He has nearly as many Ks as Marquis in half as many starts, and he's a hard-luck 3-3 as the Cubs have scored three runs or less in four of his seven starts. He still needs to show he can make good enough pitches to last beyond five innings on a start-by-start basis, though.

Aside from the fact that only one of those guys is a lefty, I like this rotation right now. My main concern is that it needs to go deeper into games.

RP - Carlos Marmol (1-1, 3 sv, 2.09 ERA, 0.77 WHIP, 15 BB/63 K, 43.0 IP)
RP - Bob Howry (2-2, 1 sv, 5.08 ERA, 1.46 WHIP, 5 BB/29 K, 33.2 IP)
RP - Michael Wuertz (1-1, 2.73 ERA, 1.32 WHIP, 12 BB/16 K, 29.2 IP)
RP - Jon Lieber (2-3, 3.21 ERA, 1.37 WHIP, 4 BB/18 K, 33.2 IP)
RP - Kerry Wood (3-1, 18 sv, 2.65 ERA, 0.86 WHIP, 8 BB/44 K, 37.2 IP)

Bullpen wear is another possible worry. I'd be less worried about Marmol if Howry and Wuertz could get their crap together; Howry is looking a bit better but Wuertz has been a damn mess recently, like in San Diego on June 2 when he put two guys on with walks, forcing Lou to go to Marmol earlier than he wanted and ultimately helping to cause the home run the next inning that scared the hell out of me. In recent years, Wuertz was like Marmol, a guy who could come in and strike out the side - this year he has just 16 K in 29.2 innings, and his ERA is mostly so low because he'll get pulled and Marmol will strand the inherited runners. Marmol is pitching too many games, in my opinion. Maybe guys like Eyre and Cotts can help take some of the load off, as they've both been decent since returning, but since they're both lefties, they'll probably see a lot more situational use. Aside from the overuse, of course, Marmol's been pretty godlike. As for Lieber, his one spot start was a total fiasco, but he's been pretty good out of the pen. People were ready to run Wood out of town after he blew three of his first seven save chances (along with the Opening Day issues that Fukudome bailed him out of), but since then he's blown just one, and now none since May 24, saving 8 in a row and 14 of 15 chances. Workload might be a concern there as well - after all, he's already thrown more innings than in any year since 2005. But right now he's second in the NL in saves, is striking guys out, and has mostly been unhittable.

So!

What did you notice in that list that the Cubs were really missing? I can think of three things:

*Lefty outfield bat
*Lefty starter
*Another shutdown reliever

Let's look at these one at a time:

Lefty outfield bat: Right now, this is Edmonds, and I see no need for it to be otherwise. But let's say that he cools back off and, come late July, the Cubs are mediocre in center again. The problem with calling for a lefty outfield bat - and preferably one with power - is that there's nowhere to put it but center; Fukudome and Soriano are pretty well entrenched at the corners (we've already seen it's not worth moving Soriano, and while Fukudome probably could play center, Lou has already stated his understandable reluctance to move Fukudome when he might be the best right fielder in the NL). Here's your list of lefty CF power bats who have seen regular playing time this year:

Josh Hamilton, David DeJesus, Nate McLouth, Grady Sizemore, Rick Ankiel.

Well, I'm sure all of those guys will be available. DeJesus, maybe, but then he's not really even a power hitter looking at his career stats - if he gets to 20 this year, which is a small stretch from his current 7, that would vastly outpace his career high of 9. The rest you can just forget. Maybe the Cubs should have held onto Hamilton when they took him in the Rule V draft two years ago, rather than giving him to the Reds for nothing. (Can you imagine this team right now if the center fielder were hitting even close to the way Josh Hamilton is hitting? Now I'm getting mad. Let's just move on.)

Lefty starter: The obvious answer is "C.C. Sabathia," but it's hardly a guarantee that he's going to be traded, and even if he is, he'll probably cost a king's ransom just in prospects - and that's before you sign him to a $20 million-per-year extension. There are less obvious guys out there - Randy Wolf, for example, although it turns out that his 3.83 ERA is exactly league average for a guy whose home starts are in Petco. (Home: 2.45; road: 5.31. Yeesh.) Erik Bedard has been mentioned if the new Mariners GM wants to ship him right back out. But Bedard, for all his apparent talent, has been awful away from Safeco, and his demeanor seems a little frosty, which I'm not sure would fit into this clubhouse so well. (If we got the 2007 Erik Bedard, then it might not matter. But so far it's unclear that he's not something of a one-year wonder.) Among non-lefties, I've heard Paul Byrd's name thrown out, but his ERA is 4.89; Greg Maddux was also mentioned, but do we need to go down that road again? (Also, his ERA away from Petco is a very human 4.75.)

Shutdown reliever: Nobody trades shutdown relievers - or if they do, you always, always overpay. Better off calling Ascanio back up and giving him another shot, or something. Right now I think the bullpen is holding steady enough.

So, yeah. Is there really anyone out there worth bringing in? Is it worth mortgaging the farm system to do so? (I mean, Peter Gammons doesn't even think we have enough to give up to get Sabathia from the Indians, and it's kind of hard to disagree - we'd really have to give up a young, potential impact pitcher in return, I think, and given Rich Hill's age and well-documented struggles I doubt the Indians would buy him in that role. Jose Ceda, maybe, but he's probably too raw to headline a deal. If there's anyone else out there who scouts love enough to front a trade for the reigning AL Cy Young winner, I don't know who he'd be.) I'm not inclined to say so right now. Sabathia and Bedard are the only two I might put on that pedestal - if you're going to make that kind of trade, make it for a potential impact guy, not for Randy Wolf - but if they're even available, it's not clear we've got the goods. And even if we do, both have potential downsides - Bedard has looked awful outside of a pitcher's park in Safeco and seems like a cold fish, and Sabathia doesn't exactly have a sparkling playoff record (although I know it's a very small sample size, and of course you do have to get to the playoffs first). I mean, I wouldn't say no to having Sabathia (or, I suppose, Bedard) on my team in a vacuum, but it's not like there aren't other things to take into consideration.

But for God's sake, if you hear that the Cardinals are trying to deal for Sabathia, throw the kitchen sink in there.

No no no no no

2008-06-15T21:52:00.003-05:00

Last year, with Soriano injured in August, the Cubs put in a waiver claim on Scott Podsednik, only for him to be (mercifully) pulled back. I covered at the time how much I hated this idea.

Well, Podsednik's name is coming up. Again. At least this time it seems more like a rumor (I'm putting the blame on you, Troy E. Renck of the Denver Post):

Renck says the Cubs might have renewed interest if Jim Edmonds doesn't work out. He says the Cubs have a "working list of potential available left-handed bats" as a contingency plan. One other Cubs-Rockies note - Ken Rosenthal says that despite his initial report, the Cubs do not have interest in Brian Fuentes.

Dear God. Edmonds, for the record, is hitting .297/.333/.500 as a Cub, and that's before he went 2-for-4 with a double today. He's also got 14 RBI in 22 games, which is nothing to sneeze at. And, most importantly, he's not Scott Podsednik.

Podsednik's stats this year? .222/.311/.311. He doesn't have a single number that isn't fucking terrible. Seriously, look at this guy's career stats - he sucks. He's so bad it's not even funny. The only thing he can do is steal bases, and he can only do that if he can get on base - and guess what he has been absolutely terrible at doing in four of the last five years? Some of that might be injury-related, but come on. A .299 OBP in 214 at-bats last year? If your entire game is based around getting on base, you are worthless with an OBP like that.

Fortunately it looks like Edmonds has started to hit, and pretty well - in his last twelve starts, he has seven games of two hits or more, and he saved the Cubs' butts in the 1948 game (I had to link to this clip eventually, right?). Hopefully that will keep any dalliances with Podsednik in the rumor stage. I guess maybe if you can get him for free, maybe I wouldn't be furious. But if Hendry trades anything for that guy at any point, I am going to mail him a bag of poop. (Oh, and "The Cubs don't have interest in Brian Fuentes?" Thank fucking God.)

In much more exciting news, the Cubs took two of three from the Blue Jays up in Toronto, with a strong start from Marquis on Saturday (beating Roy Halladay) and a somewhat shaky (five walks) but passable start from Lilly on Sunday. Even Gallagher didn't look that bad on Friday; he just didn't get much run support. Lee finally woke up, going 5-for-8 in the two wins, his first two multi-hit games since May 30. Ramirez hit his first home run since May 26 (10th overall). And the Cubs averaged 5 runs per game against one of the stingiest staffs in baseball. All in all, not a bad start to life without Soriano, but it doesn't get any easier, heading off to Tampa for a series starting Tuesday (and having to squeeze in the Hall of Fame Game on Monday in Cooperstown, although I don't expect the starters will see a lot of time in that game). Right now, though, I sure can't complain.

From here to Augusternity

2008-06-13T10:36:00.003-05:00

(Reallllly stretching for that joke.)

It's June 13. The Cubs are 43-24 - 3.5 up in the Central and as many games over .500 as they've been since they were 88-69 on September 28, 2004 (this was after losing the first of five straight games that cost them the wild card). It's also the most games over .500 the Cubs have been at any point in any June since ending June 1977 at 47-24. (The Cubs finished 1977 81-81. Let's avoid comparisons to that team from here on out.) Not to get all crazy here, but it is entirely possible that this is the best Cubs team of my lifetime on talent, and if they keep winning at their current percentage they would win 104 games, which would make them objectively the best Cubs team since 1935 on percentage and since 1910 on win total.

Of course, there's the little matter of the home/road splits. The Cubs are 29-8 at home (!!!) and 14-16 on the road; if these percentages hold up over the full 162, the Cubs would go 64-17 at Wrigley (!!!!!!) and 38-43 on the road. This would still be good enough for 102 wins. It seems unlikely that the Cubs can go 64-17 at home, but at the same time I wouldn't necessarily bet on them being a sub-.500 road team all year.

The time to stop being a sub-.500 road team is now, because the road is where the Cubs are spending a lot of the next Soriano-less six weeks. Here's the upcoming schedule:

June 13-15: @ Toronto
June 17-19: @ Tampa Bay
June 20-22: vs. White Sox
June 24-26: vs. Baltimore
June 27-29: @ White Sox
June 30-July 3: @ San Francisco
July 4-6: @ St. Louis
July 8-10: vs. Cincinnati
July 11-13: vs. San Francisco
July 18-20: @ Houston
July 21-23: @ Arizona
July 24-27: vs. Florida
July 28-31: @ Milwaukee

That's 42 games and 26 of them are on the road. If current home/road splits hold, the Cubs will be 68-41 at the end of July, but this requires them to go 13-3 in those 16 home games, and as many games as they've won at home, as I said, I'm not sure we can expect that forever. At the same, you would really want to see better than 12-14 on the road as WPs dictate. Look at those 26 games, though - only Houston and the Giants are below .500, and Houston is just one game under and the Giants have been playing better recently. Part of me thinks this is a great chance to show the country what we've got, and part of me is kind of terrified. Look at that interleague schedule! I saw it coming into the season and kind of chuckled. Now it turns out that Toronto has ridiculously awesome starting pitching and Tampa is playoff-caliber, and the White Sox are defying all predictions and looking like they're going to win that division again. I would be perfectly happy to sneak out of that stretch with an 8-7 record. The one good thing is that I think the Cubs might have a decent DH option this year - you could DH Edmonds while putting Hoffpauir in left and Johnson in center (or DeRosa in left, Johnson in center and Cedeno or Fontenot at second), or you could DH Lee and put Hoffpauir at first, or you could DH Ramirez and put DeRosa at third. None of these are that bad of an option. It's not like a few years ago when like John Mabry would DH in interleague games.

I've been talking myself into this in conversations with Drew and my dad, but as long as the pitching keeps up (somewhat quietly, the Cubs are #1 in the NL in ERA, along with their continued first-place status in BA and OBP), I think the Cubs can get along without Soriano. They'll miss the home runs, no question, but his .332 OBP is replaceable - he has the lowest OBP of any of the regular starters, and Cedeno, Fontenot and Hoffpauir all have higher OBPs in their more limited action. And Hoffpauir - who I expect to see either in left or at DH in the Toronto series, especially since the Blue Jays have no left-handed starting pitchers - has a slugging percentage of .579, higher than Soriano's, although granted that's in 19 at-bats and is probably - although not definitely! - going to go down as his sample size increases. At any rate, let's not forget - in the 14 games Soriano missed earlier in the year, the Cubs were 9-5 and scored 7+ runs per game. His slugging is missed, but Soriano out of the lineup almost certainly means an increase in team OBP - and an increase in team OBP usually means more runs, provided it doesn't coincide with a team power outage brought about by the absence of Soriano's one truly indispensable quality.

(Speaking of power outages, what in God's name is Derrek Lee's problem? His on-base percentage has plummeted all the way to .337, just five points north of the Soriano line, for fuck's sake. He's got just one multi-hit game since May 25, and in that same 17-game span he's walked three times and struck out 17. It's getting worrisome. From the start of the season through the end of April, Lee hit .364/.437/.682, with 8 HR and 23 RBI, making him a heavy contributor to the Cubs not really missing Soriano that much. In May he hit .234/.269/.411 with 5 HR and 14 RBI, and so far in June he's hitting .205/.250/.308 with 1 HR and 4 RBI. His post-April BABIP is hovering around .240, which suggests that he's been kind of unlucky, but I think most people who watch this team at all will tell you he has frequently looked lost at the plate in the last six weeks. If we're going to survive the next six weeks with no Soriano, Lee needs to wake the fuck up. It's not even a home/road issue anymore - his home OBP is now .316, compared to .359 on the road. .316! That is scandalously bad.)

Anyway. I would generally doubt that this Cubs team is going to win 104 games, but in the high 90s is really seeming like a distinct possibility as long as they don't fall apart like the '77 team did. The interleague slate should be pretty darn interesting, and then we'll see where things stand.

(Just for comparison's sake, the Cardinals will be playing the Phillies, at Boston, and at Detroit while the Cubs play their schedule. Oh yeah, and six with the Royals. Fuck those guys.)

Not again

2008-06-11T23:33:00.003-05:00

In 1968, speaking of Tony Conigliaro - who was a decent-hitting corner outfielder who missed the second half of an eventual pennant win in 1967 after being hit in the head with a pitch - Red Sox manager Dick Williams said, "We did it without his butt last year, and we'll do it without his butt this year." This is hardly a one-to-one comparison - Alfonso Soriano's primary missed time was about 20 games in August last year, he hit 14 home runs in September after returning, and the team for the year was just 12-16 in games he didn't start. But I kind of feel like this is starting to become a recurring theme with Soriano, where he starts the season slowly, heats up, and then gets injured.

This one wasn't exactly his fault, although aren't players taught to get out of the way of pitches coming at them? Soriano had, I guess, gone too far into the start of his swing, and ended up turning right into the pitch; I suppose we can be thankful it hit him in the hand and not the face. But six weeks is a long time, and with the Cardinals still annoyingly refusing to go away and the Brewers heating up a bit, and with a tougher part of the schedule coming up, this isn't exactly the best time for Soriano to go down (not that there's a good time for your leading home run hitter to go on the shelf - in 1996, the Cubs were at .500 and five games out when Sammy Sosa was hit on August 20 and missed the rest of the year; the Cubs finished ten games under .500 and 12 games out, although even with Sosa that wasn't exactly the most talented Cubs team ever).

The Cubs won 7-2 over the Braves with Ryan Dempster turning in the first Cubs complete game of the year (last year they had two all season, one by Marquis and one by Zambrano in a 1-0 loss), but it was sort of overshadowed. So, where do we go from here?

Option #1: DeRosa in left, Cedeno or Fontenot at second
Or Theriot at second and Cedeno at short, but I don't see Lou doing that. This is pretty much the obvious move, at least at first - tonight DeRosa moved to left and Fontenot came in to play second. DeRosa actually has a higher OPS than Soriano right now thanks to his significantly better OBP, and he'll probably play left at least as well. As for Cedeno or Fontenot, maybe playing every day will get them back into a bit of a groove and they can contribute from the 7 or 8 hole. On the other hand, maybe not.

Option #2: Bring Hoffpauir back up and put him in left
In 11 games, Hoffpauir OPSed 1.029, and he can play left - again, perhaps not tremendously well, but Soriano has kind of been loping around out there himself. The left-center gap is likely to be hideously exposed on a day when Hoffpauir and Edmonds both play, but there's a potential for Hoffpauir to make it up with his bat.

Option #3: Johnson in left, Edmonds in center
The only problem here is, can Johnson really hit enough to be an everyday player? And can Edmonds be an everyday player (i.e. can he hit lefties and will he have the stamina to play every day at 38)?

Option #4: Thunder Matt
Murton's been hitting the ball pretty well at Iowa (.311/.411/.395, although that is one shitty power number) and he was an above-average hitter (.297/.365/.444) as the mostly everyday left fielder in 2006. If the Cubs do want to trade Murton, this could also be a good audition for him.

Option #5: Another minor leaguer
Eric Patterson, who can play left, is hitting .326/.361/.514 at Iowa; outfielder Andres Torres is hitting .313/.415/.490 (although he's currently on the seven-day DL and is a 30-year-old career minor leaguer); and Jason Dubois (he's baaaa-aaack!) has five home runs in just 12 games since rejoining the Cubs' system. Patterson is the obvious callup of those three, of course, although I think I would put the Hoff ahead of any of them.

For the moment I like option #2. The story on cubs.com suggests that the team is going to call up Hoffpauir and another guy - I would guess either Murton or Patterson - and ditch the 13th pitcher (I'm guessing Hart; Cotts would be the only other option, but he's left-handed and hasn't allowed a run yet).

Ugh. I'm not worried yet per se, but with a suddenly really tough-looking interleague slate on the upcoming schedule, this really was not the time.

Hey San Diego, what do you say?

2008-06-03T01:18:00.002-05:00

The first game of the three-game series in San Diego - and of the two games I bought tickets for while we're out here - was a bit rocky at times, but the Cubs got the win. Zambrano looked better at the plate than on the mound - he needed 95 pitches to go five innings and threw just 51 strikes, walking four and striking out two, although after allowing three runs in a very shaky first inning, he settled down enough to hold the Padres to just those three runs over his five innings of work. At the plate he went 3-for-3 with a triple that tied the game in the fourth, as the Cubs scored a run in the second, two in the fourth, one in the fifth, two in the sixth, and another in the seventh to lead 7-3 going into the ninth. Jon Lieber, Neal Cotts, Michael Wuertz and Carlos Marmol had held the Padres scoreless up to that point (although not much thanks to Wuertz, who went just a third of an inning and left after walking two guys in the eighth, leaving Marmol to get the next two outs). Marmol struggled in the ninth, though, eventually giving up a three-run homer to Adrian Gonzalez that landed two rows down from us and one section over. Mercifully, Wood came in to save it, though the final out came on a Michael Barrett fly to deep left that was less than ten feet from tying the game. 7-6, but it was a win.

The ballpark was extremely blue and very loudly pro-Cubs, especially once they took the lead and then seemed in no danger of relinquishing it. In our section alone, nearly the entire front row - we were in the fourth row in the right field boxes, a pretty great view of the action on the field - was Cubs fans, including a guy who kept turning around and waving his arms to mock the Padres fans whenever Jim Edmonds did something good (and he had two RBI doubles), and the couple with a young kid to my left were expatriate Chicagoans. We did have a few very loud Padres fans right behind us, including a guy who rather bizarrely seemed to have signs for every guy on the team (he held up a sign reading "Scott Hairston" when Hairston pinch-hit, and another reading "Mac Attack" for Paul McAnulty, starting in left tonight but usually a reserve [he has just 169 at-bats in four years with the team]) and who chattered pretty much constantly at every Padres hitter and at any Cubs player who did anything negative. (In the first few innings, another guy near him consistently yelled "He's everywhere!" every other time Zambrano threw a ball. Needless to say, Zambrano lasted longer than the opposing starter, Cha-Seung Baek, and managed to get the win, although that should probably tell you something about the win as a stat.)

Don't look now, by the way, but thanks to this eight-game winning streak, the Cubs continue to have the best record in baseball, they've opened up a 3.5-game lead on the Cardinals (tied with Arizona, despite their recent slump, and the Angels for the biggest division lead in baseball) and lead by seven over Milwaukee and Houston. I'm not going crazy about this yet because five of the games in the current win streak have been against Colorado and San Diego, presently two of the worst teams in baseball, and it's not like the Cubs really dominated either of them. (Let's not forget that the series against Colorado featured a game that required the Cubs overcoming a 1% chance of victory in the sixth inning.)

This was my first Cubs road game since July 4, 1997; it was a win, like that one, taking me over .500 all-time (2-1). That's also seven consecutive Cubs wins in games I attend; hopefully this can continue on Wednesday. It would be too annoying if the streak had to end against the last team I saw the Cubs lose to (in May of 2001).

Hope you like pitching!

2008-05-28T23:05:00.003-05:00

Scores in the Cubs' sweep of the Dodgers at Wrigley this week: 3-1, 3-1, 2-1. This is only the second time this season the Cubs went more than two games in a row scoring fewer than four runs in each, but the only other time (a five-game stretch from May 4-9 that went 3, 3, 3, 0, 3 for the Cubs), they were just 2-3 in the span. Even though the bullpen was a bit shaky and had to constantly extract itself from jams, you have to like three games of one-run ball from the staff. Dempster was solid if unspectacular on Monday, Gallagher was great on Tuesday - could he please give us seven innings of four-hit ball on a regular basis? - and Zambrano deserved better than a no-decision tonight, although he threw a lot of pitches (130, to be precise - his most since throwing 136 [!!] in a 2-1 complete game win over the Phillies on May 8, 2005). His command wasn't great, although the strike zone from the home plate umpire also seemed a bit inconsistent.

The reason I like this sweep as much or more than any other series the Cubs have won is it demonstrated an ability to win some close games, and some low-scoring games, and some games where they trailed late. Monday's game the Cubs went up 2-0 in the first and hung on, but on Tuesday they went down 1-0 in the fourth and looked to be doing nothing against Hiroki Kuroda, but in the seventh they scratched out three runs by putting runners at the corners with one away, then getting an error, a single and a double. Then they held on for dear life as Marmol had one of his worst innings of the year, walking two and loading the bases with one out before getting out of it. Is he starting to feel those 33 innings in 53 games?

And then tonight, one of the worst games of the year for eight innings. The Cubs don't usually hit Derek Lowe terribly well - remember his one-hitter in 2005? - and today was not an exception, as he went seven allowing just four hits and just one guy to get past second (and this was Soriano in the first inning). Then Broxton - who helped blow it last night - came on and mowed down Johnson, Hoffpauir and Soriano in the 8th. Fortunately Saito couldn't find the plate in the 9th, although the Cubs should have won it in regulation but only got a sac fly out of a bases-loaded, one-out situation. Fortunately the Dodgers dug up Chan Ho Park recently, and he came on for the tenth, giving up a double to the suddenly very sparingly used Mike Fontenot. Up came Soriano, and as Bob Brenly predicted that they wouldn't pitch to him with first base open, they did in in fact pitch to him, and Soriano watched a tailor-made 2-1 inside fastball go past for a strike... only to flare the 2-2 breaking ball down the left-field line, scoring Fontenot and winning the game.

So, which Cubs team do you like better? The team that scores in bunches but can have inconsistent pitching, or the team capable of winning every game 3-1? Certainly you have to like the ability to win tight games in a playoff-like atmosphere (night game, chilly, good team, crowd pumping), but I would love it if baseball's highest-scoring offense could be a bit more consistent. Would you believe that even at 32-21, the Cubs are three games under their Pythagorean projection? It's because they score a bunch in one game and then much less in the next two, and suddenly they've lost the series despite outscoring their opponents. In fact, the Cubs have only been outscored by the opponent in four series all year (going 0-3-1 in those series), but they've lost five series in which they've outscored the opponent (going 9-5 in those series). In other words, the Cubs are barely above .500 in series wins despite outscoring their opposition by 84 runs this season. The most recent example, of course, was the weekend series in Pittsburgh, started with a 12-3 thumping and ended with two games frittered away and lost in extra innings by a run apiece, meaning the Cubs were +7 run differential for the series but lost a game in the standings. That's gotta stop happening. And if it means winning every game 3-1... that's fine by me.

Hate McLouth

2008-05-17T15:45:00.002-05:00

I am quickly becoming as sick of Nate McLouth as I am of any opposing player - as much as Rickie Weeks, as much as Rick Ankiel, Ryan Ludwick and Skip Schumaker, as much as any one of that coveted group of Players Who Have No Right to Beat You, a group far more annoying than all the Albert Pujols, Carlos Lees and Adam Dunns of the world. McLouth in particular is starting to make me wonder what they put in the ~~Winstrol~~ water over there in Pittsburgh. After his game-winning home run off Carlos Marmol today, McLouth now has 12 home runs in 42 games; this is almost half as many as he hit in his first 284 career games (25). His OPS is over 1.000 this season, for crap's sake. This is a guy who before this year looked like a decent fourth outfielder - acceptable defense, good baserunning (22/1 SB/CS last year), a little pop, but not all that good. Suddenly he's top five in the league in doubles, homers, total bases, runs scored, and RBIs? I don't think so. You know who I'm reminded of? Chris Shelton, who had 11 home runs and an OPS of over 1.000 as late as May 22 in 2006 (his age 26 season, as this is for McLouth). He hit just five home runs the entire rest of the year and ended up with an OPS barely above .800. McLouth may not have a Shelton-level collapse in him, but I don't buy for a second that he's the second coming of Willie Mays out there in center. Anyone can get hot for a couple months.

Speaking of which, Alfonso Soriano. My dad sent me an e-mail on May 2 - during a 5-3 loss to the Cardinals in which Soriano looked absolutely lost in left field before mostly redeeming himself with a game-tying homer in the ninth - with a subject of "Soriano," and a body that simply read, "They need to cut him."

Since the end of that game, Soriano has raised his average by 131 points, the last 30 of which was done by his 5-for-5 showing today. He now has seven home runs in the last six games. And lest you think he's only a homer machine, he has at least two hits in eight of his last nine starts, including 4-for-5 last Saturday and, again, 5-for-5 today. With seven straight starts with at least two hits, Soriano has set a career high (in 2003 with the Yankees, he had two or more hits in six straight); he's 19-for-33 in the seven games (.576), with 43 total bases.

Unfortunately, this has corresponded with a major slowdown period for Derrek Lee, whose average has dropped all the way to .294 after an 0-for-5 showing today, including flying out to end the game with Ryan Theriot on as the tying run. He's not getting on base either, going ten straight games without drawing a walk, his longest single-season streak with no walk (in games where he had at least two at-bats) since 2001, when he had 13 and 15-game streaks with Florida. That year, Lee had an OBP of just .346; since then, his lowest full-season OBP has been .356. At the moment, it's a mere .360; his batting average wasn't lower than .307 at any point in 2007, and excluding his post-wrist-injury 2006 stats and his first four games of this season, he hasn't had a batting average lower than .300 at any time since ending 2004 with a .278 mark. It's not looking so good right now for him.

There's also Zambrano, but I think he'll be okay. Still, in spite of Soriano's heroics, today was not the most enjoyable. Stupid Pirates.

You can't spell Hendry without "Why?"

2008-05-16T11:37:00.003-05:00

So, this Jim Edmonds thing. I didn't have the negative reaction about Edmonds himself that some people did, but I just don't understand the deal, really.

I mean, it seems to me that the defense of the Edmonds deal goes a little something like this:

"Well, we're talking about a guy who's had a great career defensively and an excellent career offensively. He hasn't looked good to start the year, but he played in Petco, and he's looked a lot better in the last couple weeks. Worst-case scenario, you don't get a ton of center-field production for a few weeks, then just release him. Might as well see if he can do it."

Which, okay, fine. But here's the thing: isn't that pretty similar to the reason why Felix Pie should just be given a shot at the everyday job?

"Well, we're talking about a guy who's great defensively and who has hit well at every level except the majors so far. He hasn't looked good to start the year, but he still only has 240 major league at-bats and is in the process of fixing the holes in his swing, and he's looked a lot better in the last couple weeks. Worst-case scenario, you don't get a ton of production out of the eight-hole for a couple months, or you start to platoon Johnson more again. Might as well genuinely see if Pie can do it."

Well, let's see if I can justify this:

Pie's only 23, so maybe one more year in the minors to fix these holes in the swing won't kill him. At 38 in June, Edmonds is clearly no long-term solution even if he does pull a Gary Gaetti and hit for us. (He singled in his first at-bat yesterday and also hit a ball well to center, though it was caught. On the other hand, in his other two at-bats he grounded into a DP and struck out with the bases loaded. So, not the strongest debut anyone's ever had, anyway.) And with Johnson's batting average and on-base percentage slowly circling the bowl, I guess you could call this a fairly low-risk, calculated maneuver to see if there was any way to wring more production from pretty much the only spot on the field that hasn't hit for the Cubs this season. Edmonds will strike out, but he can also take some walks and he can certainly hit home runs; if he can hit .260-.270 with 15-20 home runs, and play solid enough defense, is that much different from (if not a bit better than) what you'd get out of a Johnson/Pie platoon unless Pie suddenly exploded to his minor league numbers? With that in mind, the main reason to hate this deal is that Edmonds is first and foremost a Cardinal in everyone's minds. I can only speak for me, but I don't really care that much. I care about whether he can still play. I feel bad for Pie, but ultimately, if Edmonds can help us win the World Series, that works for me.

Send 'em diamondback from whence they diamondcame

2008-05-11T17:15:00.003-05:00

If I had to choose between beating the Diamondbacks in the 2007 NLDS and sweeping them in a three-game series at Wrigley in early May 2008, I'd choose the former. But knowing that that already didn't happen, I've gotta say I'm pretty pleased with how this series turned out, especially since I got to watch the entirety of both weekend games and listened to the entirety of Friday's game, which was made even better by the fact that Ron Santo had the day off due to illness. (I don't wish for the guy to get sick, obviously, and yeah, he's a Cubs legend and that's awesome. But he can be really, really grating to listen to on-air. Mike & Mike did something a few weeks ago where they played a clip of Harry Caray spelling someone's name backwards on the air while, in the background, you could hear a pitch being taken, and Greenberg thought it was ridiculous that Caray would just talk right over a pitch like that. But Santo does this all the time, and he'll talk over three or four straight pitches if none are put into play, and he doesn't have the mitigating factor of calling the game on television like Caray did, where the viewer can see for themselves what happened with the pitch. But I digress.)

As obnoxious as their not-really-that-good hitters were in the NLDS last year, and even though they led the majors in runs coming into this series, the place where the Diamondbacks scare me is on the mound. Their top two pitchers are Brandon Webb and Dan Haren. Micah Owings is decent. Their bullpen has an ERA+ of like 150. Chad Qualls, coming into the series, had an 0.93 ERA in 19.1 IP and only just gave up his first ER on May 4. They just called up a guy who had 38 K in 23 IP at AAA this year.

And yet, for the series, the Cubs kind of outpitched the Diamondbacks, certainly in the bullpen. Here are the lines:

Cubs Starters (Lilly, Dempster, Gallagher): 17.1 IP, 11 H, 8 BB, 23 K, 7 ER, 1.10 WHIP, 3.63 ERA.
Diamondbacks Starters (Haren, Scherzer, Gonzalez): 18 IP, 15 H, 5 BB, 14 K, 4 ER, 1.11 WHIP, 2.00 ERA.

The Diamondbacks clearly win on ERA, thanks mostly to Scherzer's 0 ER on Saturday and Gallagher's 4 ER on Sunday in just 4.1 IP (no thanks to Chad Fox walking in two inherited runners with the bases loaded). But Lilly pretty clearly outpitched Haren on Friday (an extremely good sign, along with the fact that the D-Backs did nothing off him beyond Chris Young's first-inning solo homer), and Dempster and Scherzer were basically as good (same 1.00 WHIP and Dempster had one more K). Gonzalez outpitched Gallagher, although they were even for four innings until Gallagher struggled in the fifth (possibly because this was the most innings he'd ever been asked to throw at the big-league level).

Cubs Bullpen (Marmol, Wood, Eyre, Howry, Fox, Wuertz): 9.2 IP, 2 H, 4 BB, 7 K, 0 ER, 0.62 WHIP, 0.00 ERA.
Diamondbacks Bullpen (Cruz, Qualls, Medders, Slaten, Pena): 6 IP, 13 H, 6 BB, 7 K, 11 ER, 3.17 WHIP, 16.50 ERA.

Small sample size alert, of course, but the point is basically that both rotations were good enough to get the game to the bullpens while it was close, at which point the Cubs' hitters pretty much obliterated the Diamondbacks' relievers. I can remember a time not too long ago where if the Cubs were not looking great against a starting pitcher, they'd usually continue that through the relief corps, leading to games where they'd get like combined three-hit. That still happens sometimes, of course, but I have a lot more confidence in this team to come back over the last couple years than I did at any point in my lifetime prior to 2007, especially at Wrigley. In all three games the Cubs trailed at least as late as the fifth inning; on Saturday they hung around while Scherzer was allowing just one unearned run, then exploded for six as soon as he left the game.

Perhaps even more encouragingly, the Cubs bullpen looked just great - and not only that, but efficient. Chad Fox threw 45 pitches in 1.2 IP on Sunday, but aside from that no Cubs reliever threw more than 17 at any point in the series. Wood threw a total of 18 pitches in getting saves on Friday and Sunday; Marmol threw an inning in all three games but threw just 43 total pitches. Wuertz completed an inning with four pitches in Sunday's game.

Better still, the Cubs put an end to their recent struggles and did so against what was the best team in the NL. Okay, you can't say that the Diamondbacks aren't the best team just because the Cubs beat them in three fairly tight games. But the Cubs have more runs scored (in one fewer game played), once again leading the majors in that category; fewer runs allowed; and you have to consider that the Diamondbacks' gaudy 23-15 record is built on a 17-5 record against their own crappy division, the only one in baseball where more than half the teams are below .500 (kind of a cherry-pick, but the fact is the West contains, right now, the worst team in baseball [Padres], a team tied for third-worst [Rockies], and another team that everyone thinks will be the worst in baseball and has scored just 133 runs so far, second-worst in the NL [Giants]). Against everyone else, Arizona is now 6-10. The Cubs have also seized first place back from St. Louis by percentage points and are a half-game behind Arizona and a game behind Florida for best record in the NL. There is little doubt in my mind that the Cubs, as long as they don't have too many more stretches like the 13 games before this current series, will be in contention for best record in the NL all year; right now they're on pace for 96 wins! If the starting pitching continues to be good and the bullpen continues to be great and the hitting continues to be at least timely and at best awesome, well, what can't this team potentially win?

This blog probably looks like it was written by a manic-depressive. But I think the ship's been righted a bit. Four games with the struggling Padres should be interesting, especially since we will have to face Peavy and probably Maddux as well. I think I'll be okay as long as it's no worse than a split, but you really want at least three here, given that right now San Diego is the worst team in baseball (team OBP: .302!!!).

May day

2008-05-07T14:31:00.002-05:00

I've tried not to get too upset about the Cubs' recent form. But remember when they were 15-6 after holding off Colorado? Two games up in the Central? Well, they're now 4-9 since then and three games back, and that's before St. Louis (a team with very little right to play as well as it has so far) plays tonight. They've lost four straight series and haven't won one since that demolition of the Mets on April 21-22, which now seems like it happened three months ago. Frankly, they're doing nothing so much as reminding me of the 2007 Cubs.

That team, of course, hit its nadir at the end of May and the start of June, with a 6-16 stretch beginning on May 10 ending with a series sweep by the Marlins - the third game of which was a 9-0 embarrassment after a players-only meeting - and then losses to the Braves on June 1 and 2 that dropped the Cubs to a season-worst nine games under .500. The June 1 game, of course, featured the infamous Zambrano/Barrett fisticuffs, and Lou intentionally got himself thrown out of the June 2 game (at least, we assume) to draw attention from the players. The Cubs went 17-8 over the next 25 and were back on the path to respectability.

We can only hope that the 2008 Cubs have hit their nadir in Cincinnati on May 7 with, coincidentally, a 9-0 embarrassment in yet another lost rubber game. The Cubs walked six times off Edinson Volquez (and seven total) but managed just four hits (six total), and struck out ten times (eleven total; three each for Reed Johnson and Felix Pie, turning the Cubs' center field "dilemma" into something of a joke). The Cubs also surrendered seven home runs, four by Jon Lieber in the second inning alone, including home runs to noted sluggers Paul Bako (18 career home runs) and Jerry Hairston Jr. (33 career home runs). It's almost comical that Ken Griffey Jr., sitting on 597, did not hit one in the game. Derrek Lee and Kosuke Fukudome continued their recent slumps, each merely squeaking out meaningless singles; Lee's average has dropped from .378 to .324 during the 4-9 stretch, and Fukudome's from .351 to .320. Worse, Fukudome's OBP has dropped 62 points and Lee's SLG has plummeted from .700 to .576. And at the absolute worst, Fukudome swung at either the first or second pitch in six of his 12 at-bats in the Reds series, making one wonder what happened to his already legendary patience at the plate.

It could just be the road - Lee has hit 104 points higher at Wrigley this year and slugged over 300 points more, while Fukudome's home/road splits for BA/OBP/SLG are frankly astonishing: while he hits .448/.543/.638 in Chicago, his road numbers are .217/.304/.317. Unsurprisingly, the recent huge dips in form for Lee and Fukudome line up with playing 11 of 14 away from Wrigley. The upcoming ten-game homestand - including seven games against struggling San Diego and Pittsburgh - will do a lot to test this theory. But if this is true, it's definite reason to be concerned; a Cubs team whose run-scoring prowess is a creation of Wrigley is not going anywhere this season (especially if they can't win enough to get home-field in the NL postseason).

Even when the Cubs haven't necessarily played badly, they've found ways to lose, from giving up a walk-off home run to a career backup catcher who'd never hit one before, to tying the game on a home run in the bottom of the ninth only to lose on another walk-off home run in extras, to watching Kerry Wood come in with a two-run lead and give up three, to the most recent annoyance, Monday's game, in which Ryan Dempster decided to stop walking guys (which was where he'd been getting into trouble all year) and pitch to contact, only to have the defense fail him to the tune of five unearned runs. And then, in the top of the ninth, trailing 5-3, the Cubs loaded the bases with one out, only to have Mike Fontenot get thrown out trying to score from third on a wild pitch, Ryan Theriot walk (would have made it 5-4 if Fontenot had stayed put), and Derrek Lee ground to first (would have made it 5-5). One part of me says that losing games that way isn't so bad because you figure you'll get the breaks sooner or later. The other part of me says that you can't give away games you could, and probably should, have won, and the first part of me knows the second part is right. Especially when you turn around and see games like today's.

Thank God tomorrow is an off day.

Wood you believe... a 57% save percentage?

2008-05-02T10:35:00.003-05:00

I'm not going to discuss the nuts and bolts of yesterday's game because it was, as you might guess, completely infuriating. The only thing I'll say is that the Cubs cost themselves the game by running into two outs in the sixth (including Theriot making the first out at third base, a cardinal sin in baseball) when they were set up for a big inning against a clearly tiring Gallardo. Instead, they only got two runs, and you know the rest.

So, let's talk Kerry Wood briefly. Unsurprisingly, Jay Mariotti - who was bearish on Wood from day one - wrote one of his typically smug, I-told-you-so columns today, and touted Carlos Marmol for the role (also unsurprising, since you can't make a decent closer case for anyone else in the Cubs bullpen right now, even if you wanted to).

Rick Telander paints the Cubs' clubhouse after the loss as a time bomb ready to go off, which perhaps it was. It was certainly a brutal loss, and with two series losses at home to the Brewers in the first month of the season, the Cubs have to feel like they're struggling in the wrong areas. It didn't help that Soriano's return to the lineup was, to put it mildly, a disaster, as he went 0-for-4 and misplayed Gabe Kapler's fly ball in the ninth (it turned into a double and Kapler later scored on Braun's double). It was such a disaster, in fact, that Piniella blew up when questioned about whether he had considered moving Reed Johnson to Soriano's spot in left late in the game rather than replacing Johnson with Pie straight up.

After the casual, World-Series-discussing atmosphere of the first month, this was not what anyone wanted to see. I think the media are a bit quick to jump on Soriano after one game - Telander describes him as looking "stiff, old and clueless" - but given his already poor start to the season from a hitting standpoint, and the fact that at no point while in a Cubs uniform has he belonged in the leadoff spot, but you can't hit him anywhere else because he's going to pout about it, it can't be considered totally surprising that they'd do so. Soriano himself seemed a bit quick to downplay his struggles after the game, saying (as quoted in Telander's article) that he "feel[s] very comfortable" and is "fine." He also defended his practice of swinging at everything - suddenly extremely out of place on the newly patient Cubs - with a blithe "That's my game." In four at-bats yesterday, Soriano saw 11 pitches; he swung at five. That actually doesn't seem as bad as people would have you believe; Ryan Theriot saw 12 pitches in four at-bats and swung at five, but of course he went 3-for-4. I'm not worried about Soriano just yet, but he needs to start getting some hits or keeping him in the leadoff spot is going to be untenable. What does it matter if he hates hitting fifth or sixth when he isn't producing no matter where he is? Might as well give him some time to get used to a new spot. Personally, I get the feeling that Piniella is going to start considering this a lot more strongly; Soriano has certainly paid lip service to playing wherever is best for the team, and before now Lou just hasn't been willing to wait more than a handful of games before deeming any move a failure. Maybe now he'll give it a little more of a chance if Soriano is a sinkhole no matter where he's hitting.

But I'm drifting. Kerry Wood. I don't want to sound like I'm unreasonably defending him here, but while three blown saves in seven chances is kind of miserable (and makes 2008 Eric Gagne look like 2003 Eric Gagne), you sort of have to consider the way he's been used this season. First of all, there's the fact that in 28 games, he's had seven chances. Extrapolate that out for the year and he'd only have 40 save chances for the entire season. That's not a lot. (Dempster only had 31 chances last year, but he missed an entire month.) It doesn't really help that the Cubs have been winning a lot of games by wide margins (of their 17 wins, more than half have been by more than three runs), which means that Wood often either doesn't get into the game or comes into a situation with virtually no pressure. I subscribe to most statistical interpretations of the game, but I always balk when sabermetricians discount mental factors, as I've seen done. I don't get all lyrical and tell you how closers need to be forged in the crucible of Hephaestus to learn the ninth-inning pressure craft, but I do think that there's something to be said for getting used to a situation like that. I know for a fact that if it were me, and I were coming into a game with a one-run lead in the ninth, I would collapse into a withering heap in a way that I would not do in the first inning. As much as we say that the ninth is no more or less important than any other inning, and as statistically true as that is, you still need ice water in your veins to be a closer. You see guys all the time who just. Can't. Do it. Remember when we tried to make Kyle Farnsworth a closer?

I'm not saying that Wood, of all people, can't handle the pressure. What I am saying is that he probably needs a little time to get used to the pressure. When Dempster was handed the job in May 2005, he blew the very first save chance he got. He recovered to save 14 in a row before blowing the next one, and ended the year with 33 saves and just two blown saves. But he was also used regularly. In 2006, in more sporadic duty because the Cubs were awful, Dempster was just 24 of 33. Last year, once again pitching for a Cubs team that was at least decent, he blew just three of 31 chances. Even pitchers who have never been closers before seem to become creatures of habit, and as much as I hate relying on this kind of ephemeral, unquantifiable evidence, it seems like closers need to have that pressure on a consistent basis to be able to deal with it every time out. If they're only getting into tough situations once a week, that might not be good enough.

And so it is that we look at Wood's game logs for this year. His first appearance, obviously, was a dud; coming into a tie game in the top of the ninth on Opening Day, he gave up three runs before being bailed out by Fukudome's homer in the bottom of the inning. But after that he ripped off three saves in three outings over a four-day span from April 3-6, before blowing his first save after two off days on April 9. Since then (and before yesterday) he'd worked just seven times in 21 days, not the most regular work for a closer, and more importantly he'd only worked in two save situations in that entire time, going 1-for-2. Since the Opening Day fiasco, though, he'd given up just two runs (although both came in save situations with one-run leads, leading to his two blown saves); he wasn't giving up runs, or even hits - just five allowed in April, to 11 Ks - but unfortunately he happened to give up his runs in the worst possible spots. This could just be coincidence, or it could be a guy still getting used to the ninth-inning fire and who has rarely gotten a chance to pitch there. Instead, he's coming in with 7-1 leads against the Mets, 9-5 leads against the Reds, trailing 2-0 to the Nationals. In three cases he's been called upon to hold ties or preserve close deficits; he's 2-for-3, with the failure coming (of course) Opening Day.

But closers are judged by what they do in save situations, and so far Wood has not been slamming the door the way you'd want a closer to do. I'd like to see him get more consistent work, and I think that is likely to change; I know it's tempting to treat Wood with kid gloves because of his injury history, but I just don't think you can do that when you want him to be your closer. You need to be able to throw a closer on three straight days; if Wood can't do that, maybe he just shouldn't be closing. Aside from Marmol, he's got the best stuff of anyone in the bullpen; he may be susceptible to the occasional bad inning, something that's easier to hide when you're a starter, but aren't most guys? It's sticking out because he's had two horrible innings so far (and blown two other saves with mediocre innings), but he's still thrown 11 lights-out innings out of 15. Not a good percentage, and it's not like you can create more tight games for him to throw in, but it's likely that there will just be more tight games over the course of the summer, and I really don't see him sucking 25% of the time. Maybe I'm just an optimist.

More importantly, throwing Marmol into the closer's role is a bad idea. I'm sure Wood can handle the job mentally if you just give him more chances at it; Marmol is worth more in his current role, where you can throw him two innings, or 1.2 innings like yesterday. While the ninth obviously sticks out more because it's the last inning, having a guy who can be a shutdown guy in the seventh and eighth is better than trying to pigeonhole that guy into just the ninth. What good is reducing Marmol's workload to one inning if you don't have confidence in guys like Wood to hold leads - how are you going to get to Marmol in the ninth? As ridiculous as it sounds, if you trust Wood less than Marmol, then what you want to be doing is having him throw just one inning, rather than throwing the seventh and eighth wide open by throwing guys out there who can't get outs fast enough. Then you just end up never seeing Marmol, and you don't want to be never seeing a guy who's got 27 Ks to 5 walks in 19 innings this year and hasn't blown a hold or save chance yet in ten combined tries.

Look. I know there's this tendency to freak out. But it's May 2nd and we're 17-11 and a half-game back of a Cardinals team that almost certainly isn't going to be there come September. I don't think it's time to push the panic button because Kerry Wood had one bad inning. Do you? Last year we got our 17th win on May 13 (we already had 18 losses) and then lost 13 of the next 18 games. I really don't see that happening this year. I said on April 20 that I would get a lot more excited if the Cubs went at least 11-8 between April 21 and May 11. So far they've gone 5-5 in the first ten of that stretch, which means they need to win each of the next three series, perhaps a tall order. But they're more talented than St. Louis or Cincinnati, so it's not impossible. May is going to be a big month for this team, with series against every Central team but Milwaukee and every West team but the Giants, and 29 games in 31 days. If they can win 16 of those 29 games (bearing in mind they're starting 0-1 at this point), I'll be happy; anything more than 16 and I'll be thrilled. Let's just see if we can avoid wanting to blow the whole team up because of one inning. Deal?

Hey nineteen, that's 'Retha Franklin

2008-04-30T23:37:00.002-05:00

Needlessly in keeping with the Steely Dan lyric in the post title, the Cubs weren't getting much R-E-S-P-E-C-T from the Brewers following Tuesday night's 10-7 loss, the Cubs' third in four games to Milwaukee this year and particularly disappointing since it was a rare example of the Cubs actually getting to Ben Sheets a bit. But things turned around in a big way tonight, with Geovany Soto blasting two three-run homers and the Cubs scoring five runs or more in three separate innings - including six in the first that turned out to be all they needed - as they absolutely rolled to a 19-5 laugher over the Brewers.

Within a couple minutes of the opening pitch, it became clear to me - and I said this to my dad during the first inning, while the score was still 3-0 at most - that Suppan had absolutely nothing. His fastball was topping out at about 89 and he was nibbling like crazy. It was the kind of pitching performance, in other words, that used to give the Cubs absolute fits, as evidenced by his 8-2 win on April 2 or by his career 3.13 ERA against the Cubs, nearly a run and a half below his career total. But these are the new, patient Cubs, and a night after walking eight times in a loss, the Cubs walked nine times, though just one was off Suppan. The key, though, was getting into hitter's counts, making Suppan throw pitches, and waiting for the right pitch - and then thumping those right pitches, to the tune of 11 hits and 11 runs, eight earned, charged to Suppan in just 3.2 innings. Suppan averaged 3.83 pitches per batter faced, and against the Brewers' four relievers it was even better, as they combined to throw 4.67 pitches per batter. Patience at the plate does, indeed, pay off. As I said to my dad a little later in the game, this team is starting to remind me of those immensely successful late 90s Yankees teams (much though I hate to make the comparison), at least on offense - what made those teams devastating was a combination of patience at the plate (they led the AL in OBP in 1997 and 1998 and were second in 1999), good baserunning, timely power, and the fact that pretty much every spot in the lineup was capable of beating you in some way, usually with an obnoxious, back-breaking hit. It's still early, of course, but the Cubs have now drawn 130 walks in 27 games, nearly five walks a game. Sorry for all the italics, but I think they're merited. Five walks a game??? The 2007 Cubs, by comparison, drew 500 walks all year (15th in the NL), just over three a game, and the 2006 Cubs - as you might guess - drew just 395, dead last in the NL and under two and a half per game. You really almost have to try to walk so few times. The 2002 Cubs were the last Cubs team to finish higher than 14th in the NL in walks, and also the last to draw more than 500 (585, with 103 of those belonging to Sammy Sosa). The 2008 Cubs are on pace to draw 780 walks, the most of any Cubs team in the divisional era (1969-present), with only the 1975 and 2000 squads even coming within 150 of that mark. It's likely the Cubs will tail off this pace, of course; only four teams in the last decade in the NL have drawn 700 walks, and three of those made the playoffs. (The fourth was the 2004 Giants for whom Barry Bonds walked 232 times, 120 intentional. The Giants missed the playoffs, in part because he was the only full-time guy on the team who was really good at getting on base, but they did win 91 games in spite of a pitching staff whose 2-4 starters were Brett Tomko, Kirk Rueter, and Jerome Williams.) The point of all this: walks are good.

Of course it bears mentioning that Ryan Dempster and company were probably pretty thankful for the 19 runs of support, since the four Cubs pitchers threw an average of 4.35 pitchers per batter themselves, with Dempster walking five despite holding an enormous lead in every inning but one. I'll grant that the Brewers have good hitters and you can't consider a 6-0 lead totally safe when you just watched them score ten last night, but falling behind 2-0 and 3-1 on guys probably isn't the way to avoid having to throw them a ton of get-'em-over pitches. Dempster didn't do that, of course, allowing just four hits, but that's because he walked five. Probably not the sort of thing you can sustain over the course of an entire season. The Cubs are on pace to walk 576, about the same as last year's number, which isn't great; the NL leaders in 2007, San Diego, walked only 474.

So, clearly, still a lot of room for improvement. But with this team on pace to have three 30-homer guys (not including Soriano, who we know can hit them in bunches) and four 100-RBI guys, I'm pretty happy to have a pitching staff that, even when clearly not yet in top form in most cases (Zambrano and Marmol excepted), can at least keep us in games. As long as that improves over the summer, and I would hope it would, and as long as the offense doesn't tail off - and you'd think it would only improve in the warmer months as it has in the past - well, we could be in for a pretty good summer. As it is, the Cubs set a franchise record for wins before May 1 with 17, although it does help when you start playing on March 31.

Rocky Mountain low

2008-04-24T23:15:00.002-05:00

Obviously you can't win them all. I'll take a two-game split on the road, and clearly if the Cubs win six of every seven they're going to be juuuuuust fine. But you've gotta be a little disappointed in today's game. Since managing a mere three hits off Cole Hamels and two relievers (just one off Hamels in seven innings) on April 12, the Cubs had banged out at least 8 hits in every game, and in the ten games since, seven games featured double-digit hits (all at least 12) by the Cubs. So I suppose another game like this was probably inevitable. But still. The part that I don't get is, based on his stats so far, Aaron Cook kills lefties. Yet because of all the lefty pitchers waiting in Washington, Piniella gave the lefty platoon guys a start today - and three of the Cubs' four hits off Cook came from Mike Fontenot and Felix Pie. Pie even went 2-for-3! And each had one RBI, of course the only two the Cubs got in the 4-2 loss.

Positives: You have to like Pie going 2-for-3 with an RBI, especially against a guy who notionally kills lefties. Maybe he really is getting it. In addition, Marquis didn't have a great game, but he did chew up seven innings, giving the bullpen a needed rest, and while he allowed eight hits and two walks, he only let in two runs.

Negatives: One day after being the hero, Ramirez was conspicuously absent, going o-for-4 with two Ks. But, it happens. Not a huge negative. The Cubs' non-pitching defense made an error for the first time since the 9-2 loss to the Reds on April 17, and it was a pretty crucial one; rushing to turn a double play, Theriot dropped the ball and no outs were recorded. Theriot said after the game that if he hadn't turned the double play, a run would have scored, so he was rushing; this is true, but the run scored anyway, and the Rockies were able to add a second run as a result of there still only being one out after the play. Of course, Lee, Ramirez and Fukudome couldn't do anything off Fuentes in the ninth, so maybe it didn't really matter. Final negative, however: the Cubs loaded the bases with no outs in the eighth (trailing 2-1 at the time) and were only able to push across a single tying run. Theriot lined into a double play (Fontenot was caught off first), which really is just bad luck, but man, Theriot was kind of the goat of this game, huh?

As I said, can't win 'em all. I'm not broken up about the loss or anything. But it was a pretty winnable game in spite of the offensive struggles, and a couple mistakes gave it away. You hate to lose games that way.

Beat the Mets, beat the Mets

2008-04-22T23:08:00.003-05:00

Step right up and sweep the Mets
Start Cedeno, start Pie
Guaranteed to have a heck of a day

Yeah, I know - it was only two games, and it's still just April, and we didn't face Santana. But that was two big wins over the presumptive NL champions (if you listen to sportswriters), and both times it was good pitching combined with timely hitting. Zambrano was strong on Monday, and while the five-run eighth was a gift from Jose Reyes, the Cubs were still able to exploit it. Lilly was as good as he's been all year on Tuesday, though that's kind of praising with faint damn. He did walk four, and had similar problems to what he'd been having - after cruising through three (and one trip around the Mets' lineup), he labored through the fourth and sixth, loading the bases with one out both times and somewhat miraculously giving up just a single run. Howry and Marmol slammed the door in the seventh and eighth, and while Hart was a bit of an adventure in the ninth, he didn't give up a run and it was 8-1 at that point anyway.

Is there anything to complain about from this two-game set? Outscoring the Mets 15-2? Pie going 3-for-6 in the two games including his home run to put Monday's game away? Cedeno going 3-for-9 with seven RBI and a grand slam? The team taking eight walks on Tuesday? About the only dull spot was Soto's 0-for-4 on Monday, and after coming in as a late pinch-hitter in Tuesday's game he reached in both plate appearances and he's still hitting .317.

Everyone is hitting, in fact, especially if Pie is legitimately finding it. Every Cub with 50 plate appearances who isn't currently on the DL has an OBP of .400 or better. Read that again. Every last one, with the inactive Soriano being the only exception. Seven of the top 23 OBP guys in the NL, with 50 or more PAs, are Cubs.

I mean, look. This probably won't keep up. I doubt seven Cubs regulars will finish the season with OBPs of .400 or better. Frankly, I'd be reasonably shocked if more than two Cubs regulars - specifically Fukudome and Lee - finished the season with OBPs of .400 or better. But you've gotta love it while it's happening.

Am I a little nervous that they might be peaking too early, à la the Brewers last year? Eh, maybe a little, but the Brewers' biggest problem was and continues to be their bullpen, and the Cubs' bullpen is a lot better than Milwaukee's. Like, by several miles. And it's not like I'd rather they got off to a slow start, especially when all the chasing they did clearly seemed to have gassed them by the end of last year. I'd much rather the Cubs be the team with an eight-game lead in June; I've got more confidence in them to hold it, as strange as it sounds to say that. And yes, I know that the Cubs are off to their best 20-game start since 1975, and more importantly I know that that team wasn't very good and eventually finished fifth. I don't think lack of talent is an issue with the current edition. Hell, if Cedeno, Johnson and Pie all keep hitting, surplus of talent is going to be an issue. What does Lou - a noted sucker for the hot hand - do when every last hand is hot?

And here's a thought question: what happens if Soriano comes back and doesn't start hitting within a few days? What if that coincides with the team's hot streak petering out? Surely you can't justify benching Soriano, but could you hit him fifth? Sixth?

(Just for fun, the 20-game starts of the Cubs' playoff teams of my lifetime:
1984: 12-8
1989: 10-10
1998: 12-8
2003: 13-7
2007: 7-13

Man, that last one sticks out like a sore thumb, doesn't it? I think we're all pretty glad they've gotten off to such a hot start this year. Here's to following a 7-1 homestand with a strong road trip.)

Lucky 13s

2008-04-20T21:52:00.003-05:00

The Cubs just scored 13 runs in back to back games. Yeah, they were both against the Pirates, but you have to like the way the offense looked - the team seems more patient at the plate, and right now everyone is hitting. Ramirez went 4-for-5 today to raise his average to .275, and every single other player who has been even close to a regular, with the obvious exception of the injured Soriano, is hitting over .300, and most are OBPing .400. Right now I believe the Cubs have six of the top 21 players in the NL in OBP who have at least 25 at-bats. (Sure, that's not many, but it allows us to account for Reed Johnson's hot start.)

The season is 1/9th over, which sounds like a lot more than it actually is with 144 games to go. The Cubs' start has been pretty strong, but I don't want to get too excited, even if they are alone in first at this moment, and even if the first day of 2007 on which that could have been said was August 17. There are a few reasons not to go crazy just yet:

1. Who have we played?
Answer: kinda nobody, or more accurately, we've racked up the wins against nobody. Of the Cubs' twelve wins, fully half have come against the Pirates, who at the moment have given up more runs than any team in baseball (although clearly we've assisted them in this endeavor). Of the other six, four have come against Cincinnati and Houston, the other two teams expected to be in the "second division" of the NL Central. In six games against the only two likely contenders we've faced, we're 2-4 against Milwaukee and Philadelphia. That's a small sample size, but so is 18 games. Derrek Lee will probably not hit 63 home runs and Ryan Dempster is not going to go 27-0.

2. The bullpen has looked kinda lousy so far.
One of the more problematic "x9" extrapolations is that Carlos Marmol is on pace to throw 111 innings. A quick search reveals that no full-time reliever threw as many as 100 innings last year. Generally speaking, it's just not done. Hart has thrown even more innings than Marmol so far (though by just a single out); they both came up as prospective starters, but the routine is so different, as we all know, that you can't just ask a reliever to throw 120 innings just because he has some starting experience. I imagine that Piniella is aware of this, and it's still early, but given Marmol's value you don't want to see him gassed. Of course it doesn't help that he may be the only lights-out guy we have right now; Howry is having yet another miserable start, Wuertz seems to have completely lost it over the last ten days, Hart can be up and down. Wood has looked good for the most part, but he does have two shaky outings out of nine. Lieber has also been stellar thus far but I hesitate to categorize him as "lights-out" since he's certainly not the kind of guy you bring in to blow away the opposition.

On the other hand, the bullpen ERA as a whole is only 3.48, while the team ERA is 4.00. Which brings us to problem #3:

3. What the fuck is Ted Lilly's problem?
Any pitcher can look bad in a four-start stretch. But 0-3, 9.16 is pretty terrible, and even more so (a) in comparison to the rest of the staff and (b) given Lilly's success last year. As it stands, right now he's responsible for half the Cubs' losses, and with 19 earned runs allowed, he's responsible for 24% of all their earned runs, and 22% of the total, which might be a reasonable percentage if teams didn't have relievers. He's only pitched 11.5% of the innings, of course, which means he's doubling his share of the runs allowed.

To be fair to Ted, the Cubs have scored a total of five runs in his three losses, meaning that you could slash his ERA in half and he'd probably still be 0-3. But then you remember this game, in which he was handed a 7-0 lead after three and still couldn't get out of the fourth, and you think that he could just as easily be 0-4.

The particularly frustrating thing about Lilly so far is that he has a tendency to look more or less lights out the first time through an order, only to get hammered when it comes back around. Here's a quick look at his four starts so far:

April 2 vs. MIL: Lilly gives up a first-pitch home run to Rickie Weeks but otherwise cruises through the first three innings, striking out four and allowing just one other man to reach base (and that on an error). But in the fourth he allows two more runs on three straight hits, and he exits in the fifth after hitting Prince Fielder; he throws 77 pitches in 4.2 IP.

April 7 at PIT: I already referenced this one. Though Lilly allowed three hits in the first three innings, no Pirate got past first. Then came the fourth inning, which went like so: flyout, single, walk, walk (bases loaded), popout, run-scoring single plus throwing error that scores a second run, run-scoring single plus throwing error that scores a second run, run-scoring triple, Lilly yanked. To be fair, again, he was killed by his defense here, what with the back-to-back throwing errors from Cedeno and Ramirez, and he left with a chance to win the game which the bullpen subsequently coughed up. But he also threw 80 pitches in less than four innings.

April 12 at PHI: As in his first start, Lilly gave up an early home run (this one scoring two runs, to Pedro Feliz) and was a little shaky in the second, but had few problems in the first, third and fourth. In the fifth, however, he went single, foulout, double, run-scoring wild pitch, two-run homer. Through 4.1 innings, he threw 86 pitches.

April 17 vs. CIN: Lilly looked good by comparison in this game, going a full six innings (and lowering his ERA by more than three-quarters of a run in the process to its current robust 9.16). But he was plagued by the same issues. After an uneventful first three innings, Lilly struck out Ken Griffey Jr. to start the fourth only to load the bases on a single and two walks and then serve up a bases-clearing double to Joey Votto. After making it through the fifth with little issue, he proceeded to give up a two-run homer to Votto in the sixth. This all came after he struck out Votto his first time up, of course.

You could argue that Lilly has caught some bad breaks, and he has, and you could argue that the sample size is small, and it is. But of course baseball isn't all about stats, and it's pretty obvious from watching the games that he just doesn't have his best stuff right now, which is probably why he can get away with things on his first trip through the order but gets knocked around as soon as the hitters see what he's doing and know which adjustments to make. This could be a really long summer if he doesn't figure things out pretty soon. With his next scheduled start against the Mets on Tuesday, I'm not exactly eager to see what's going to happen if he doesn't.

I hate to be a Gloomy Gus on the day the Cubs took over first place in the Central, but let's be real here - the next two games against the Mets are going to tell us a lot. Is it just a coincidence that the current hot streak (52 runs in six games) has come against the Reds and Pirates, or is this something that can actually be sustained against upcoming opponents of better quality? Of the Cubs' next 19 games - one more than they've played so far - thirteen are against the Mets, Cardinals, Brewers, Rockies and current ML-best Diamondbacks (the remaining six, against the Reds and Nationals, had better be 4-2 at worst). If the Cubs can finish that next 19 games - ending three weeks from now on May 11 - at no worse than 11-8, I will get a lot more excited, especially if the offense keeps looking strong and especially if the pitching improves a bit. Ten wins or worse - especially if at least half those wins are against Cincinnati and Washington - and I will raise my eyebrows a little. (Yes, 10-9 would be over .500 and hardly shameful, but I really want to see this team make a statement when faced with so many contenders, especially after going 2-4 in their only two tests thus far.)

Stop being idiots

2008-04-18T23:12:00.002-05:00

By now I assume most of you have heard about Marty Brenneman's anti-Cubs-fan rant during Wednesday's blowout win over the Reds - after an Adam Dunn home run (with the Cubs already ahead by a sizable amount), people in the bleachers threw about 15 baseballs onto the field. Brenneman was, well, not pleased. I won't bother reprinting the remarks since you've probably read them and because they kind of annoy me. Google them if you have to. But I will say that I don't totally disagree with him. The kind of Cubs fans he was talking about? The rest of us hate them too. I had a conversation with a guy at work today who was saying he hates going to games because of all the people who are just there to get drunk, or who show up already drunk, and in general could not care less about the actual baseball game except that it's a convenient excuse for them to be loud and bothersome. You can't escape it when you leave the bleachers, either; I was in the upper deck last time, one row from the roof, and was still sitting next to a guy pouring Captain Morgan into his Coke and asking who was up during every single at-bat.

Real fans of every team hate the bandwagoners, and because of the cachet of Wrigley Field and the amount of college students and other twenty- and thirty-somethings who flock to the biggest city between the coasts, the Cubs have a lot of them. Unfortunately, it's something that the rest of us kind of have to accept. But this kind of goes beyond the pale, don't you think?

I mean, honestly? People find that funny? More importantly, do people think that they're supporting the Cubs' acquisition of Fukudome when they wear something like that? It's like Asians are the last minority that it's still okay to make fun of. Do you think that there is a white person in the world who would be caught dead wearing that shirt if it was a black-face bear with huge lips and the caption "Holy cow, n****r"? I'm going to go ahead and say no. And I love the defense that "an Oriental guy" (nice, by the way) created it - even if true, does that mean that he speaks for how all Asian people would feel about seeing that kind of caricature, or that if one Asian guy thinks it's cool that white people no longer have to worry about it being a stereotype? It's just ridiculous. Anyone who tries to walk into Wrigley wearing that should be tossed out on their ass.

And that's the kind of fans who Marty Brenneman was talking about. And he may have gone a little over-the-top, but you know what? He wasn't really all that wrong.

Who's Sori now?

2008-04-15T21:52:00.003-05:00

I'm pretty sure I'm on record about this somewhere, but I never liked Soriano's little hop when he catches the ball in left, and while this isn't an I-told-you-so, he's apparently pulled a Bill Gramatica on us.

For all I know, as I write this, he could end up being day-to-day. But maybe he misses a couple weeks. We survived last August, but I'd rather this not end up being a pattern with the $136-million man, wouldn't you? This is a guy who played in fewer than 156 games just once prior to coming to Chicago (145 in his first year with Texas); last year he only managed 135. Not a promising start, time-wise. Yeah, he still hit 33 home runs (thanks to clubbing what, 14 in September?), and missing 30 games is probably not a big deal if you produce in October (although he didn't, not that anyone else did), but this guy was signed to be the missing piece. So far there's been an awful lot of time where he's just been... missing.

On the bright side, is there any way this means Matt Murton could get some playing time in left? Surely they have to call up an outfielder if Soriano misses much of any time, right? Can this please happen? At the very least it could be a good audition for a trade, since right now we're kind of burying his value.

In other news, can Michael Wuertz please get his head screwed back on? Five pitches, one for a home run and the next four balls? Brilliant. Wasn't this guy lights-out until this weekend?

Extra, extra

2008-04-09T23:27:00.002-05:00

So after the Cubs held on in 12 innings on Monday, everyone said what a good thing it was that they had an off day on Tuesday, so the spent bullpen could rest. This proceeded to become entirely irrelevant as the Cubs blew leads of 2-0 and 4-2 before finally winning 6-4 in fifteen innings. (Oddly, the Cubs' last 15-inning game was also against Pittsburgh, on May 8 of last year. The last 15-or-more-inning game that the Cubs won was an 18-inning defeat of the Astros on 8/15/06.) At least this time the bullpen was more naturally stretched, as Dempster turned in his second straight strong start, allowing just one hit (and two walks) in seven innings. He deserves to be 2-0, but fate had other plans; by which I mean Carlos Marmol allowing a run in the eighth and then Kerry Wood blowing his first save thanks to a Jason Bay solo homer in the bottom of the ninth. Then Aramis Ramirez, in the midst of apparently waking up with a 3-for-7 day, hit a two-run homer in the top of the 14th... which Kevin Hart, trying to save his own win, coughed back up in the bottom of the inning. It took a two-run single by Felix Pie, of all people, in the 15th to finally win it, although we still had to sweat through a newly called-up Sean Marshall giving up a one-out double in the bottom of the inning before closing the deal for his first career save. Mercifully, the Cubs have another off day on the upcoming Monday, but it would be nice if we could get some deep starts in the next few games.

I didn't get to see much of the game, but I was a little stunned to come back from a late-ish dinner to find that it was still going on. What is it about the Pirates lately?

Any which way you can

2008-04-07T23:19:00.003-05:00

I'll take the win, of course, but thank God there's an off day tomorrow. It must be something about series openers with the Pirates recently - remember that game from last September at Wrigley where it was 7-7 after three innings, and the Cubs eventually won 13-8? That wasn't as bad as this, though. This game took years off my life. You don't start 7-0 against a team that everyone knows isn't very good and expect to watch that lead get frittered away thanks to some embarrassing defensive lapses. It sounded like Pat and Ron had suddenly started calling a Bad News Bears game. Let's get another round of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly going.

The Good: Once again, Kosuke Fukudome. 3-for-5 with two walks, a stolen base, an RBI and a run scored. Also, Soto was 3-for-7 with 2 RBI and threw out Nyjer Morgan in a huge spot in the bottom of the seventh. Lee continues to hit, going 2-for-5 with two walks, and it sounded like he got hosed on that strikeout in the tenth. I also liked seeing another four stolen bases; it's nice finally getting to watch a team with some speed and that knows how to use it. On the pitching side, Lieber came up huge, going three scoreless innings after the five pitchers preceding him (with some help from the non-Lee infielders, of course) coughed up the 7-0 lead, although he did have to work out of a serious jam in the bottom of the ninth (and if Jose Bautista doesn't stupidly bunt down the first base line without the squeeze being on, we're quite possibly not having this conversation).

The Bad: Lilly struggled for the second straight start, although with some better defense behind him in that fourth inning it might not have come to that. Every starter got a hit, but Soriano and Ramirez were both just 1-for-6 and didn't look very good, although bonus points to Ramirez for managing to hit the game-winning sac fly. I'm not sure what was up with Pignatiello not being able to throw a strike - eight pitches, all balls! - but let's hope that doesn't repeat.

The Ugly: Oh, God, that defense. What the hell happened? I know Lee's the only Gold Glover in that infield (not that Gold Gloves mean much, but we know he's good), but did everyone else have to make an error? Hearing Cedeno and Ramirez go back-to-back was just brutal, and DeRosa's bobble to tie the game was equally painful. Maybe on the off day these guys should just be out there taking grounders.

A win is a win, and maybe good teams have to win games like this from time to time. But on the other hand, good teams probably shouldn't be blowing 7-0 leads to the Pirates. And the Cubs still aren't as good as they should be at stringing hits together to manufacture runs. Aside from the big third inning, there was stuff like Ramirez hitting into a DP in the first with men at the corners; Soto's leadoff double getting wasted in the fifth; second and third with no one out in the sixth netting just one run; second and third with one out in the tenth yielding nothing; and Fukudome singling to lead off the ninth and eleventh innings and getting stranded both times. Obviously over the course of a season you're not going to drive in every single guy who gets on base, but if not for the third inning explosion - which, it might be pointed out, was aided by Gorzelanny's difficulty in finding the strike zone - this might have been yet another game in which the Cubs scored 3-4 runs, and if everything else had happened the same, of course, they would have been buried. Thankfully the Pirates were even more eager to lose this game than the Cubs were. That's not always going to be the case.

The streak continues

2008-04-06T23:51:00.002-05:00

With today's game, that makes, by my count, six consecutive Cubs games that I've attended where the Cubs have won. It seems a little odd that that streak runs back to May of 2001, but it does. Weird thing: in the last four games, the Cubs scored a total of ten runs, but they won all four games (three by one run, as you might guess).

I continue to be a bit worried about the offense. They've yet to start really stringing stuff together; of the three runs today, two were solo home runs and the third came when Zambrano grounded into a double play with the bases loaded and no outs. (In other words: they had the bases loaded and no outs in the second inning, and the end result was one run.) On the bright side, this was the first game of the year in which the Cubs actually managed to score first.

Derrek Lee was just four for his first 18, but in the last two games he's looked really good, including going 2-for-3 today with a walk. He powered his game-winning home run to deep left center (if the wind had been blowing out at all, it would have probably ended up on Waveland), and his only out (a fly ball to center) was pretty well-hit. He's slugging .882 right now and yes, it's ridiculously early. But if he has another season even close to 2005 with the pieces he's got around him now... we could be looking at a really special year for the Cubs.

This, of course, presumes that those pieces wake up. Soriano's 357-foot basket job notwithstanding, he still is looking pretty bad at the plate, and while I'm willing to forgive him for this game since he hit a go-ahead home run and helped preserve a scoreless first inning by cutting down the speedy Michael Bourn at home plate, he needs to start hitting a little better than .077 soon. Maybe going to Pittsburgh will be the cure for what ails him - remember, that's where his first HR was last year after going the entire month of April without one. And then he hit 33 despite not playing for most of August. Ramirez was also 2-for-3 with a walk today, so perhaps he's stirring a bit; Fukudome was 0-for-3, but he also walked. I'm not worried about him at all right now. DeRosa also had a pedestrian day but overall he's looked good in the early going. When all these guys are on at once - plus Soto, who was rested in favor of Hank White today - this lineup is going to be really scary, I think. And there will come a point when they're all on at once, I'm sure of it.

Astros 4, Cubs 3

2008-04-04T19:16:00.002-05:00

I don't know - is it time to start worrying about Alfonso Soriano? 1-f0r-17 (.059) is a damn slow start, even for him - last year he hit just .200 in the first eight games, but his average never went lower than that. While I've only heard the games so far - I probably won't get to see the Cubs until I'm actually at Wrigley on Sunday - it doesn't sound like he's looked very good either. For example, in the opener, he struck out twice, grounded out to first, and fouled out to the catcher. In game two, he popped out to first, grounded out to third, and struck out swinging with two men on, when a home run would have tied the game. He finally got a hit in the win - but he also struck out swinging to start the game and grounded out twice. Today, he grounded out two more times. All in all, he's only gotten the ball out of the infield six or seven times. It's not very confidence-inspiring. And yes, I know how early it is. I also know how much we're paying this guy, and while I hate to be the type of fan who grouses about every little player failure because of their salaries, as though they aren't humans prone to going into slumps every now and then... well, all I can say is that when you're making as much as this team is, you need to figure out the problem, and fast. Same goes for you, Derrek Lee (.222). You too, Aramis (.154). A couple solo home runs aren't cure-alls.

Though I will say this - Geovany Soto is hitting .167, but he's had more loud outs than anyone on the team, including at least four balls to the warning track that were kept in by the wind. If it were June, he'd probably have six home runs already and we'd be casting his statue right next to Fukudome's. So I think Soto will be fine. But when Soriano, Lee and Ramirez are the expected big boppers and they're all looking kind of lost... that's worrying.

It's particularly dispiriting because we could be at least 3-1 if the team were hitting at all. Both the opener and today's game were right there for the taking; if your pitching staff is only giving up four runs a game for the season, you're doing pretty well (the low in baseball last year was 4.06 by Boston; the Cubs were third at 4.26, second in the NL to, surprise, San Diego - but when you factor in park effects, the Cubs actually had the best ERA+ in the NL at 115). The 8-run quasi-meltdown against Milwaukee notwithstanding, this team has really pitched extremely well so far. I mean, if that keeps up and the hitting comes around sooner rather than later, we're looking at a potential juggernaut. Milwaukee will hit but I don't think their pitching will hold up for a whole season, although stranger things have happened. But that's the million-dollar question: when is the hitting going to come around? It's an awful lot of talent for this to turn into another 2006 (barring another catastrophic injury), but it could easily turn into another 2001, or 2004. I'd rather not see that happen, especially since you know we'd be looking up at Milwaukee and that will just be annoying as shit.

Sigh. I can't help but wonder if my plan to watch or listen to every Cubs game to the extent possible is biting me in the ass. When I first started the original Diary, back in July 2005, I intended to watch basically every game and write most days; this was derailed in a hurry as, after I started it on July 18 with the Cubs two games over .500 (and 13 games back in the Central, though still in the wild card race), they proceeded to go 7-7 over their next 14 and then suddenly embark on a season-killing eight-game losing streak in mid-August. That'll get you out of the habit fast. You may have noticed that in-season posting on this blog itself has been fairly sporadic. I wanted to change that this year because I'm as into the Cubs as I've ever been in my life, but if they start the season winning like three of their first twelve, I might not make it. Still, I don't think this is another 2005; our leadoff man at the time was Jerry Hairston, for fuck's sake. Things are going to get better. But as long as I'm following every game, it's going to be pretty brutal if they don't start getting better soon.

So, we're cool now?

2008-04-03T22:47:00.002-05:00

Win #1 of the season. Are we all calmed down now? I think we can resume freaking out if the Cubs are like, six games under .500 two weeks from now. Dempster looked strong after the rough first inning, Marmol and Wood were both solid, and I liked the four stolen bases. Talk of the bats being "thawed out," as the AP recap suggested, might be a little premature, however. I mean, seven hits is fewer than in yesterday's game - but it helps when the opposing starter tosses out five walks and a hit batsman. That probably won't happen every game, though of course I like the patience. (Two more walks for Fukudome! This could be the best free agent signing the Cubs have made since Andre Dawson, although let's not get ahead of ourselves.) Nevertheless, no one had more than one hit today and Lee has looked pretty bad with the bat in two of the three games so far (though in the middle one he had a double and homer, so go figure that one out). I'm hoping it's just the early season, the cold weather, and really re-adjusting to major league pitching (let us not forget that the majority of pitchers faced in spring training end up being minor-league castoffs). Perhaps the upcoming games against Houston and Pittsburgh will only help matters.

Memo to Rickie Weeks: If, after a game, you have to take pains to tell the media how you're not a dirty player... well, I don't know. Maybe? Yeah, Soto was kind of in the line but I'm not sure that Weeks couldn't have just zipped around him. I forget where I read it, but someone recently was saying, why is baseball not a contact sport except right at the moment where it really matters? I mean, if Soto is obstructing, call Weeks safe at home, but Gwynn doesn't score unless Weeks knocks Soto over and I'm just not sure that's fair.

Whatever. We won the game. I expect a lot more of these.

Trying not to panic.

2008-04-02T22:33:00.002-05:00

Okay. See, this is why I was uncomfortable with the preseason expectations. Look at what happened! The Cubs are 0-2, not 0-10. It's way, way too early to get concerned. Yes, it's annoying to lose to the Brewers. And yes, neither the bats nor the bullpen have looked great so far. But it's the second game of the season. If 2007 taught us anything, it's not to get too worked up about falling a couple games behind the Brewers, or losing two in a row.

Yeah, 8-2 sucks. But you know what? The impression I got was that balls were falling in for them that weren't falling in for us. That's the sort of thing that evens out over a long season, as it did last year. So I'm not overly concerned yet. I don't like losing, I don't like losing to the Brewers, I don't like listening to them lose on the radio (and frankly it's kind of annoying hearing Santo go "Oh, jeez!" like a little kid every time something bad happens). But it's not like we were gonna go 162-0, right? Even the most optimistic Cubs fan expected between 60 and 70 losses this year. So, here's two of them. Now let's just start putting some numbers into that win column.

It didn't take Lou long to decide that hitting Soriano second wasn't working; he's back to leadoff. The next question is, how long does Theriot have in the second spot? Well, if he keeps going 2-for-4 he can stay there. We'll see.

Brewers 4, Cubs 3 (10 innings)

2008-03-31T19:55:00.002-05:00

This is one of those games where I'm not sure whether to accentuate the positives or dwell on the negatives, especially this early in the season. So let's look at both, and then decide.

The Good: Kosuke Fukudome. Oh my goodness. 3-for-3, plus a walk, plus the game-tying three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth. Also, the only guy to get a hit off Ben Sheets (which doubles as the bad, I think). I'm not saying he's going to bat 1.000 this year, but if he really does put up that .400 OBP that PECOTA projected, well, golly. In my lifetime, the only Cubs to put up a .400 OBP over a full season have been Derrek Lee (2005 and 2007), Sammy Sosa (2000 and 2001), Mark Grace (1989, 1997 and 1998) and Gary Matthews (1984). Pretty select company. Also, he's currently on pace to hit 162 home runs. In addition, Carlos Zambrano looked strong through 6.2, although he has got to start hydrating during games. This whole leaving with cramps thing is getting ridiculous. (Possible alternate explanation: the 49-minute rain delay, although he went several innings after that before having the problem.) Also, Marmol looked to have picked up exactly where he left off in 2007 (not counting Game One of the NLDS).

The Bad: Fukudome was the only guy who could get a hit off Sheets. I know he's a Cub killer - 9-7, 3.87 all-time with 128 K in 144.1 IP, and two double-digit strikeout performances including one last year - but he didn't look very good in spring training. And then today he looked unhittable. I suppose the "good news" is that the Cubs could not hit Sheets at all and still almost won, which gives you more hope for games in which they don't have to face anyone nearly as good. But to win a World Series, you have to beat decent pitchers, generally. Also bad: the non-Marmol segment of the bullpen, as both Wood and Howry struggled to get guys out. Wood nearly lost the game; Howry did. It's just one game and this stuff will happen, but it wasn't a very encouraging start to the year, was it?

The Ugly: How about that top three! Theriot, Soriano and Lee combined to go 1-for-15 (Theriot and Soriano were 0-for-10) with two strikeouts each. Really, aside from Fukudome, the lineup in general was pretty poor. Ramirez was 0-for-3 (though he did walk and score); DeRosa was 0-for-3 (though he had a little bad luck, hitting two long outs to the wall in dead center); Soto was 0-for-2 (though he walked twice); and Pie was 1-for-4 and the one was a barely, since he only got on due to some first-base shenanigans by the ever ironically-named Prince Fielder. He also struck out twice.

Obviously, there's no reason to start worrying just yet. Frankly, it might be kind of heartening to have a game where the hitting was this lousy and still nearly win. But I hope Lou has the kind of patience with Theriot at the top of the order that I would - which is to say, not much. If he's going back to .326 OBP territory, move him. Hit Soriano first and Fukudome second - yes, I know that Soriano's OBP isn't much better, but at least he likes hitting leadoff, and at least you have Fukudome up there to reboot the lineup when Soriano isn't getting on (or hitting solo shots). Still, this is just the first game out of 162. We should probably all try not to overreact.

By the way, in case you were wondering if my complaints about what I anticipated as being the coverage of the whole 1908/2008 thing were overblown, here are the first four paragraphs of the AP's recap of the game:

Kosuke Fukudome did everything he could in his first major league game -- except bring the Chicago Cubs a victory.

Instead, the start of the Cubs' 100th season since winning the World Series ended in familiar fashion. Tony Gwynn hit a sacrifice fly in the 10th inning and the Milwaukee Brewers beat Chicago 4-3 on a wet Monday at Wrigley Field.

Fukudome, the team's main offseason acquisition, went 3-for-3, hitting a tying three-run homer in the ninth off Eric Gagne (1-0).

But it wasn't enough for the Cubs, who haven't even reached the World Series since 1945.

Hey, Associated Press? Fuck you. Seriously.

Here goes nothing

2008-03-30T21:06:00.002-05:00

At the moment, it's raining here in Chicago, and it's slated to do so all day Monday. But if there's a break, tomorrow is when the Cubs are scheduled to begin the defense of their division title and, hopefully, begin a run towards the pennant and beyond. In some ways I'm really looking forward to this season - on paper, it's gotta be at least the most talented Cubs team since 1984 and possibly longer (I'm not including last year, here). Most of the stars are in the relative primes of their careers; the oldest everyday position player is 33 and the oldest starting pitcher is 32. The only obvious flaw right now is the youth up the middle - as fans, I don't think we can really be sure what we're going to get from Soto, Theriot and Pie, although the former and latter at least seem likely to produce on the defensive side and it's hard to see how either could really be any worse offensively than the guys who spent the most time at those positions last year. Theriot needs to hit like he did last July, or like he did in 2006; he can't put up another cumulative .326 OBP as he did for the 2007 season. At least Cedeno provides an alternative, although he's sort of an enigma too at the pro level. Anyway.

Frankly, I'm a little uncomfortable with the prospect of this season. The Cubs go into the year as favorites, and that's not a position they've been in too often. Anything less than a playoff appearance will be a massive failure. What's more, because this is the century year since the last Cubs title, we're going to be hearing about that fact on every last national broadcast. Hey, Red Sox fans, you think you had it bad with the Curse of the Bambino garbage? Just wait. Every single game on Fox or ESPN is going to mention 1908; most will mention the goat and Steve Bartman. Certainly, if the Cubs do make the playoffs, every last playoff game will make some mention of these facts. The only place it's likely to be avoidable is on WGN (and Comcast), which makes me reeeeally glad to live in Chicago right now.

Plus, if the Cubs win the World Series, it'll be "Oh, well, they had to, right? Because it was the 100-year anniversary?" And of course if the Cubs don't win it'll just be same-old, same-old. There's no way for this to be as fun a season as it seems like it should be. And that's just annoying.

But, I'll hope, as I do every year. Here's to still having it as late as October.

Northbound Suarez

2008-03-27T21:51:00.002-05:00

The team is preparing to head north, to the point that stuff is getting put on the trucks and Lou is telling players to find apartments if they haven't already. But things aren't totally set, it seems.

* Fontenot and Cedeno both made the team. While you obviously need infield backups, doesn't this sort of suggest that Lou is looking for a little insurance should Theriot repeat last year's form? Fontenot and Cedeno have both hit in spring training, but not that much (although both have OPSes well over .800, which you'd definitely take from a middle infielder). Theriot does lag behind them in power but he hit .348 in Mesa.

* Murton is apparently going to start the year at Iowa, which almost certainly means he's going to finish it in a completely different major league city. This makes me a little sad. I'm not sure Murton was ever given a totally fair shake with the Cubs, although if you really look at it I guess his OPS+ in 2006 was only 104, which is above average but isn't exactly setting the world on fire. Soriano's OPS+ in 2007, by comparison, was 123. And Murton isn't known as a great fielder (although he was at least serviceable in left). I mean, even though Murton has put up a pretty good OBP in his career, you certainly can't fault the Cubs for going to get Soriano ahead of him, and Murton's best position is left field - and while he can play right, if Kosuke Fukudome really has a .400 OBP this year, I don't think we're going to miss Matty too much. I wish there was a place for the guy, but he plays better when he starts and you really can't justify starting him at this point (except maybe as the DH in games in AL parks - although even then, Daryle Ward probably fills that role better). Oh well.

* The battle for 12th pitcher appears to be coming down to Marshall vs. Pignatiello, because I guess we only need one lefty in the pen. (We only had one regular last year, and that was Eyre, who spent the majority of the year sucking ass.) Marshall went two innings today, giving up one run on one hit (he walked three and didn't strike anyone out). Marshall's another guy I've liked since he came up - I was at Wrigley for his first career home win, a 3-1 decision over the Marlins on April 25, 2006, and he's a lefty who is one day younger than I am. He had a 119 ERA+ last year, which is pretty dang good for a fifth starter, but he was squeezed out of the rotation by Dempster's move into it (and even if he hadn't done that, the Lieber acquisition probably would have pushed Marshall aside as well). This although Dempster is five years older than Marshall and his career high ERA+ as a starter is 120 (and Lieber has never had one as high as 119, not even in 2001 when he was the last Cub to win 20). Right now I'm expecting Marshall to start the year in Iowa; I don't think you can ignore Pignatiello's 0.90 spring ERA. But I'm not sure I wouldn't bring Marshall over Kevin Hart. Doesn't look like that's gonna happen, though.

More stuff to figure out

2008-03-25T22:53:00.002-05:00

The Cubs just keep on giving us things to consider.

* Lee and Soto both hit home runs today in a 7-5 win over the Giants, which was good to see; Hill also put together a decent start, going five innings, allowing 2 ER on five hits and a walk, while striking out six. All three guys had been struggling, so it was good to see them do something for a change.

* New acquisition Reed Johnson started in center to get some at-bats with the team; he went 2-for-5 and scored two runs. If these trends continue... ayyyyyy.

* Michael Wuertz, subject of trade rumors that I think were just planted by Tigers beat writers, since trading him never made sense, had yet another scoreless inning. Spring ERA? 0.00. Carmen Pignatiello finally allowed a run; his spring ERA is 1.00.

* Matt Murton went 1-for-3 with a sac fly RBI; he also preserved a 4-4 tie in the seventh by throwing out Fred Lewis at home plate from left field. Soriano's not the only one with gifts.

* Hoffpauir, Patterson, and Fuld (along with Walrond and McGehee) were officially sent down. The roster on Cubs.com is currently listed at 29: 15 pitchers, two catchers, seven IFs and five OFs. This means four more guys have to get lost between now and opening day. The outfield - Soriano, Pie, Fukudome, Murton and Johnson - seems set, so who else is going?

Well, the current list of seven IFs is Lee, DeRosa, Theriot, Ramirez, Cedeno, Fontenot and Ward. If you have to cut one from that - and I think Lou wants 12 pitchers, so it's likely that someone will get cut - I'd say it's clearly Cedeno vs. Fontenot. Cedeno is probably stronger defensively, while Fontenot is probably stronger offensively and gives the Cubs another lefty bat on the bench. I really don't know what the Cubs should do with Cedeno; unless Theriot absolutely doesn't hit, he's blocked up here, but he tore up the PCL last year to such great effect that it's not clear more time in the minors is going to help him. It's no wonder he was supposed to be part of the now-dormant Brian Roberts deal. But between them I think I'd keep Fontenot for the time being.

As for the pitchers, the 15 left are the five starters (Zambrano, Lilly, Hill, Dempster, Marquis), the closer (Wood), and nine relievers going for what I think will be six spots (Lieber, Marmol, Howry, Marshall, Hart, Pignatiello, Wuertz, Lahey and Eyre). Eyre is apparently injured, so forget him for the time being. That leaves two more. I don't see how Lahey makes it; I assume the only reason he's still hanging in there is, as a Rule V draftee, the Cubs can't option him to the minors. That leaves one, and it's clearly between Hart and Pignatiello, and although Hart was great last year, he hasn't had all that good of a spring, whereas Pignatiello has. Pignatiello is also a lefty, and with Eyre injured the only other lefty in the pen would be Marshall, so he fills a need.

Makes sense to me. Thoughts? Would you send Pignatiello (or Marshall?) down so you could keep Cedeno up, or does 12 pitchers make the most sense right now?

Trees to Lorax: "Shut up"

2008-03-25T13:27:00.002-05:00

If you read Deadspin, you're probably familiar with the various season previews, usually given to fans of a team as a soapbox to say how they feel about the team for the upcoming year. Or, in this case, given to the most famous magazine editor willing to call himself a Cubs fan. Complete idiocy or subtle sabotage by Cardinals fan Will Leitch? You be the judge.

FRAUD MARKER #1
Believes the 1908 World Series was held at Wrigley Field, which was not built until 1914. (At which time it was called Weeghman Park, anyway.)

FRAUD MARKER #2
Believes the Cubs' last title was won over the Pirates, who finished third in the NL (that's right, same league as the Cubs!) in 1908. When I first read this I thought it was a joke, but I don't think I can extend that kind of benefit of the doubt.

FRAUD MARKER #3
Thinking Hideki Matsui played on a Yankees team that won a World Series. His first year in New York was 2003. Not even close. This isn't Cubs-related, but it does tell you something about how much of a baseball fan the guy is. And even if he wasn't sure, it would have taken, what, ten seconds to look that up?

FRAUD MARKER #4
Thinking Sean Marshall is a viable candidate for the rotation, and apparently having no idea that Ryan Dempster was in the mix. Unless this article was written two months ago, what serious Cubs fan has an excuse for having no clue as to what the starting rotation will look like, especially when it was just announced?

FRAUD MARKER #5
Ditto for the whole "Howry/Marmol as two-headed closer" thing. Have you been in a cave since February 1?

FRAUD MARKER #6
Thinking Fukudome is a 40-45 HR threat. I'm hopeful for the guy, but nobody is projecting he's going to have that kind of power. Maybe if you just heard that the Cubs were getting some Japanese guy and read nothing about him, you could make that kind of leap in your mind.

FRAUD MARKER #7
Thinking that Soto was "landed ... this off-season." Uh, did you watch the playoffs last year? When he was our starting fucking catcher?

FRAUD MARKER #8
Thinking that Felix Pie is "finally making his big league debut." I'll cut him some slack here; maybe he just doesn't know what "debut" means. Pie didn't play a ton last year, but he did appear in 87 games, which is more than half a season.

FRAUD MARKER #9
Generally sounding like a shit-eating 22-year-old who just graduated from Notre Dame and is on his third Old Style in the top of the second. All that was missing was his failure to work in some sort of "Cardinals suck, Sox swallow" joke.

God. And see, this is the kind of person that the media allows to be the face of Cubs fans. No wonder everyone pictures us as drunken, overgrown frat boys who are more interested in getting a sunburn than watching a baseball game. Ugh.