2012 NL Central Champion Cubs, part 1

In News And Rumors by dmick8942 Comments

As much as I’ve written about the need to rebuild, it’s not going ot happen. The Cubs have some decent players on their roster and some you’d really like to get rid of. Since they’re planning on contending, we have to first figure out which of the current players on the roster are worth keeping around. To do that, we …

Bruce Levine’s 5 most likely to be traded, yo

In News And Rumors by dmick89155 Comments

Happy Breaking Bad Day … bitch! After xoomwaffle posted this link to Levine’s article earlier today I started writing something and then lost interest about a half sentence in. That’s been happening a lot lately. I started writing something yesterday and lost interest about 3 paragraphs in. A few days ago I began writing something where I was comparing Starlin …

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Mid-Season Good and Bad: Position Players

In News And Rumors by aisle42494 Comments

Last year over at Aisle 424, I decided that grading players on a scale of objectivity was ultimately dumb and subjective. But since it’s like a blog law that you have to do something like that at the All-Star break, I developed my Yin and Yang system wherein I say one good thing and one bad thing about every player. …

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Trade Value: Kosuke Fukudome

In News And Rumors by dmick89196 Comments

In Soto’s trade value piece I mentioned how inconsistent he has been in his career, but that’s nothing compared to Fukudome. Below is an image of his AVG/OBP/SLG/wOBA by month in his Cubs career. If you’d rather see the numbers, here they are. Month AVG OBP SLG wOBA 4/1/08 .327 .436 .480 .399 5/1/08 .293 .388 .404 .351 6/1/08 .264 …

What the Cubs may soon look like

In News And Rumors by dmick89212 Comments

The Cubs are 8.5 games out of first place and it’s just the first of June. Their pythagorean record is even worse than their actual 23-30 record. Pythag has them at 22-31. The only team with a worse Pythag than the Cubs is the Houston Astros at 22-33. Minnesota is worse in the AL at 17-36, but no other team …

These Cubs Are Not the 1997 Marlins

In News And Rumors by aisle42481 Comments

Dave Kaplan wrote a post on the CSN Chicago site where he poses the question: Will the Cubs follow Marlins’ blueprint? I clicked on it because I thought maybe, just maybe, he would have some information from speaking with Jim Hendry or Tom Ricketts or anyone within the Cubs organization that would indicate the Cubs were actually considering such a …

The Cubs just aren’t very good

In News And Rumors by dmick89194 Comments

About a quarter of the 2011 season is in the books and the Cubs have performed about as we expected overall. The pitching, particularly the rotation, has been worse than we thought. Part of that can be explained by the injury to Randy Wells who is an above average starting pitcher. The pitchers they’ve used to fill in for Wells, …

Cubs Baserunning

In Unobstructed Views by dmick892 Comments

Baseball Prospectus has their sortable statistics available for 2011 now. The first thing I checked out was the Cubs baserunning numbers since they’ve sucked at baserunning for several years. So far they rank 21st in baseball in EqBRR (Equivalent Baserunning Runs) and are -1.0. They did rank 14th last year, but 28th the year before that. Darwin Barney has been …

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Grades so far: Outfield

In News And Rumors by dmick89176 Comments

I haven’t gotten to this one as quickly as I’d hoped, but here it is. You can read about the article I wrote about the infield if you haven’t already. Alfonso Soriano – It hasn’t been pretty, but Soriano has been a productive hitter to this point in the season. He has a .359 wOBA thanks to his 11 home …

Kosuke Fukudome’s Odd Season So Far

In News And Rumors by dmick8954 Comments

Kosuke Fukudome has been known for his great April starts and then fading away. This year has been a bit different. He’s still hitting fairly well into May, which is because of the new calendar the Cubs presented him with, but something is different. I put together these images of his AVG, OBP and SLG after each of the first …