Every year the Cubs struggle the masses come out and say the Cubs should play the kids. It happens every single time. It happens when a veteran is struggling. It’s happened a lot as the 2011 season has progressed. Who exaclty are the kids on the Cubs? Generally speaking, we refer to kids as being younger than 18. Often times …
Why the hell do people care if so and so plays in September?
I’ve seen a lot of comments lately from Cubs fans upset that the Cubs are still playing the veterans (on other sites). Of course they are. What young player has pushed a veteran out of a job? Bryan LaHair isn’t young so let’s stop with that. Yes, I think he’d be as good as Pena, perhaps a bit worse, but …
What are the 2011 Cubs good at?
I wanted to look over various statistics to see what the Cubs were good at. It’s a bad team, but even bad teams excel at something. Right? Batting average is a useless statistic, but I figured if there was one thing the Cubs were good at it would be this. The Cubs .258 team average beats the NL average of …
2012 NL Central Champion Cubs, part 1
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 …
Carlos Marmol and Kerry Wood working on stuff
I’m not sure why it made me laugh, but I saw on cubs.com today that Kerry Wood was working on stuff to regain his form. CHICAGO — Kerry Wood has been a little inconsistent, but Cubs manager Mike Quade said the right-hander is healthy and just needs time. “He’s obviously capable of dominating and pitching a lot more efficiently than …
Bruce Levine’s 5 most likely to be traded, yo
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 …
Mid-Season Good and Bad: Position Players
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. …
The Cubs just aren’t very good
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, …
Random Cubs Notes and Ramblings
The world won’t end today, but by the 5th inning of tonight’s game, you’ll wish it had. The Cubs aren’t just modeling themselves after the Red Sox, they’re four years ahead of the curve. They signed a speedy left fielder with diminishing potential to a gaudy longterm contract long before Theo Epstein made it fashionable. (h/t, of course, to Berselius) …
Cubs Baserunning
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 …