Jim's not so dandy

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.