In today's edition of Obviously Obvious Item of the Day, the Sun-Times has come right out and quantified what everybody familiar with the Cubs' relationship with Chicago's 44th Ward has known all along: Alderman Tom Tunney gets a tremendous amount of financial backing from the good people who own the rooftops across from Wrigley. It is also no secret that …
Matt Garza and Cubs extension talks going well
Ken Rosenthal has said that the Cubs and Matt Garza are discussing an extension and the talks are going very well. It's been awhile since we've taken a look at what kind of contract Garza may be looking at so we'll try to do that today. The league ERA is right at 4 over the last 2+ seasons so I'll …
Even bad teams get hot
A few days ago some were feeling a little optimistic about this team. They'd just taken a couple series against two of the best teams in the league to this point. The games were at Wrigley so winning 4 of 6 is much less impressive than it sounds. The Cubs probably had 50% odds of winning each game. Had they …
Dempster trade to Boston makes sense to Heyman
Jon Heyman is providing some suggestions about how the Red Sox can be fixed. One of them is acquiring a starting pitcher and he names Ryan Dempster. One obvious suggestion could be Ryan Dempster of the Cubs. He has an 0.95 ERA, the lowest ever for a pitcher who has yet to win a game through five starts. He is …
Should managers be allowed to use the sacrifice bunt?
Before you read any further, please take the poll below. I'm curious what the responses are on this site. Tangotiger set up a poll yesterday asking whether people would rather live with the status quo of the sac bunt or do away with it all together. I was quite surprised to see that 65% had voted zero tolerance (stop it …
Cubs Put Marmol on DL, Call Up Casey Coleman
I'm not sure who had it first and I don't care enough to go back and look, but both Carrie Muskat and Paul Sullivan have reported that Carlos Marmol has been placed on the disabled list after injuring his right hamstring last night, with Casey Coleman being called up to replace him on the roster. Muskat is also reporting that …
10 Best Games By A Cubs Player So Far
We're only 31 games into the season, but I was curious for some unkown reason who had the best game of any player on the team. Win Probability Added (WPA) is the perfect stat for this. Below are the top 10 WPA's of the season for the Cubs. 10. Matt Garza, April 29th @ Phillies: The Cubs won 5-1 behind …
Bryan LaHair's Fantastic Start
Some Cubs fans entered the season with relatively high expectations for Bryan LaHair. Others weren't optimistic at all. I was somewhere in between. I was fairly certain LaHair's numbers were so damn good at AAA that it indicated he should probably be about a league average ballplayer at the MLB level. To this point we've all been wrong. MLB's best …
Where We Stand Now: Starting pitching
I already took a look at the team batting numbers, and now we'll look at the bright spot in the Cubs roster: starting pitching. Here's how the seven pitchers who have started games thus far have performed. Player GS IP K/9 BB/9 HR/9 GB% BABIP ERA FIP xFIP Ryan Dempster 4 28.1 9.21 2.86 0.32 41.2% .191 0.95 2.32 2.94 …
Blake DeWitt DFA’d
The Cubs have DFA'd Blake DeWitt and re-caled Travis Wood who will start today against the Dodgers. I don't believe Berselius published a projection for Wood, but Oliver did project him to be worth 2.5 WAR at the time the Cubs traded Sean Marshall for him. Wood has had mixed results so far at Iowa. He has struckout over 9 …