NEW YORK — Who's your first half Most Valuable Player for the Cubs? Manager Dale Sveum picked relievers Shawn Camp and James Russell. Camp was 2-4 with a 2.86 ERA and one save, while Russell was 2-0 with a 2.43 ERA entering Sunday. Russell had a 2.30 ERA in 101 games since the start of 2011, the second-lowest mark by …
Matt Garza last year and this year
Last season Matt Garza enjoyed a breakout season. His strikeouts increased. His walks decreased. He kept the ball on the ground and therefore in the park a lot more often. He was even so lucky last year that he allowed only 7.7% of his fly balls to leave the yard. While Fangraphs had him with a cool 5.0 WAR, Baseball …
Castro: "I don't have to change"
After some talk about Bobby V's criticism of Castro's focus last year, the Hobbiton Press has some quotes from Castro about the new hitting coach and whether he'll change his approach. "I don't have to change," he said. "The walks and those kinds of things, they're coming. I try to be more patient, but right now, the pitchers are throwing …
Koyie Hill DFA'd, Ian Stewart to DL, Welington Castillo & Luis Valbuena re-called
The Cubs have made a few transactions and one of them might spell the end to his career. Koyie Hill was let go by the Cubs this past offseason and after about a dozen catchers were injured on the team they were forced to bring him back. Now he's gone and he's probably not good enough to continue playing at …
How much is Ryan Dempster's Trade Value?
Ryan Dempster entered the 2012 season in the final year of his contract. He was coming off season in which his ERA had ballooned to 4.80, but his FIP and xFIP were in line with what he'd done as a starter since 2008. His FIP was 3.91 and he had an xFIP of 3.70. The projections had him at a …
An analysis of the Jorge Soler deal: I guess it's worth it after all
Despite all of my grumbling about the rumored pricetag for Jorge Soler, I was ecstatic when the initial reports today said that the Cubs had signed him to a 9/30 contract. Then we discovered that whenever he has enough service time to be elgible for arbitration, he can opt out of the deal and go through the usual arbitration process …
No Love For Jeff Samardzija
I was checking out the stats for most of the Cubs players today (and some other players too). When I was looking at what Jeff Samardzija had done so far this year it wasn't how well he's pitched (at least by FIP standards anyway) that stood out to me, but how no rest of season projection expected a damn thing …
Does Alfonso Soriano have any trade value?
The simple answer to this question is that he does not have any trade value, but simple isn't good enough. That's especially true when you're talking about a player who is still owed $43.5 million through the end of 2014. The Cubs tried hard this offseason to find some team interested in taking him and didn't have much luck. We …
Updated End of Season Projections
Using Baseball Prospectus rest of season PECOTA projections I figured it might be fun to see just how many games the Cubs are expected to lose at this point. Since this is OV and we're Cubs fans we do things in reverse order. We're more focused on the 2013 draft order and which slot the Cubs may be picking from. …
Handling Starlin Castro
The other day in San Francisco Starlin Castro lost track of the number of outs and failed to complete the second half of what may or may not have been a double play. As you'd expect, Dale Sveum was quite unhappy about it. "It's something that's obviously unacceptable at any time," Sveum said. "Whether we could have turned the double …