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, …
Soriano’s Contract: Disability Insurance
It makes sense for Major League Baseball teams, when handing out large multiyeared contracts that are “guaranteed,” to have an insurance policy to lessen the loss to the organization should the player suffer a career ending inury or be otherwise physically unable to play for the team. Given Alfonso Soriano’s contract, I thought I’d be interesting to take a look …
It’s never too early to look ahead to next year
A few years ago I wouldn’t have considered writing something about looking ahead. The Cubs had the pieces in place to contend for as long as they were willing to supplement the roster when it was needed. Following the 2009 season the Cubs refused to do that and what they basically agreed to do at that time was a much …
Grades so far: Outfield
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 …
Cubs rWAR and fWAR
Most of you are at least somewhat familiar with WAR and how it works. I’d bet most of you are familiar that Fangraphs publishes their own WAR (fWAR) and Baseball Reference publishes their own. BRef’s WAR is based on Rally Monkey’s formula and it’s been referred to as rWAR for a few years now. There are some key differences between …
Cubs compared to their projections
I wrote this on Friday morning so it’s updated through Thursday’s games. I’m too lazy to update it to include Friday’s blowout loss. This is something I’ll try to update once a month just so we can see where players are at compared to their projections. It’s something SG has done on RLYW a few times over the last couple …
Wittenmyer Lays Foundation For Later Soriano Hate
Alfonso Soriano has had a very nice start to the season, so the fans that call for his head every time he makes a mistake in the field have been quieted a bit. That's about as much as anyone capable of rational, logical thought can expect from Soriano here in the beginning of the "bad part" of his mega-contract. It …
Cubs Player Power Rankings
There are plenty of places you can go to read team power rankings for all of Major League Baseball. I believe most respectable bloggers and journalists are required by the code of moot speculation to incite as many arguments as possible by haphazardly or systematically arranging the teams from best to crappiest. Two things prevent me from doing that: a) …
11 Cubs Sure To Disappoint
I should have written this about ten days ago, but I didn’t so I’m going to do it now. Early season stats mean absolutely nothing to me so there’s no risk of them influencing this list. 10. Blake DeWitt Why he’s here: The Cubs got Blake DeWitt from the Dodgers last summer in return for Ted Lilly. Lilly was a …
Can’t-Lose Thursday: Random Points of Hopefulness
The Cubs can’t lose today. Nary a single Cubbie appendix has ruptured. Starlin Castro hasn’t been put in timeout yet. Alfonso Soriano leads the league in homers. Wrigley Field hasn’t had chunks of itself fly off in several months. Albert Pujols‘ free agent value has tumbled to $299 million. No new Nicolas Cage movies are being released this weekend. It’s …