Neyer on the Cubs

[CubColtPacer]

Injured player, and maybe we're in the race. Injured players, particularly to three of our most important players, and you see what happens.

 

Regarding the lack of pitching. I think our OBP sucks and contributes to our poor performance this season. However, better pitching might be able to overcome our bad OBP and kept us in the race (albeit because the NL Central sucks) see Oakland. My stance, going back to my post, is that people conveniently leave out our sucky pitching when trying to pinpoint blame on this poor season. Yes, I put more blame on Prior than Lee (you brought up Lee) because you can't necessarily control physical injuries, but Prior has said on at least a couple of occasions that part of his problem is mental. And that's the reason why I said I don't place the same amount of blame on Lee as I do Prior. Can you imagine how much criticism "whipping boys" like Rusch would've received on here if he stated part of his problem was mental?

 

The Cubs have scored the fewest amount of runs in MLB by a pretty good margin, better pitching would not overcome that.

 

Well, 12 runs behind the next team, but I can understand what you mean-and they were much farther behind the rest of the league just a month ago. Pitching would have made us better this year, but it wouldn't have solved the problem of May when we couldn't score to save our life.

 

We've actually had a very strange season as far as record: Here is our record by month

April-13-10

May-7-22

June-9-18

July-14-12

August-9-6

 

I would not have thought that if we finish the month decently, we'll actually have more winning months then losing. 3 long stretches destroyed us this season.

April 26th-May 14th-3-15

Friday May 19th-Sunday May 29th-1-9

June 13th-July 4th-4-17

 

Record in all other games: 44-27

 

That's a big reason I want Baker to go-if our losing streaks could have been stopped a little sooner each time (and for example, the second losing streak the last series was that Atlanta series where the 2 run sac fly was on Friday and the Ramirez pop fly off his head in the 11th was on Sunday-both games we could have won, and there were places earlier in the game where we could have won those games), we could easily be right in the race. I think part of a manager's job is to make sure that the team does not go down and keeps playing hard during a losing streak, and if you analyze these losing streaks it is obvious the team gave up at times after losing a few games.

[UK1679666180]

Well, 12 runs behind the next team...

 

That's almost 3 games worth of runs, that's a huge difference between the 29th and 30th teams.

 

I don't understand the rest of your post, it's stating the obvious as far as the Cubs being streaky.

[CubColtPacer]

Well, 12 runs behind the next team...

 

That's almost 3 games worth of runs, that's a huge difference between the 29th and 30th teams.

 

I don't understand the rest of your post, it's stating the obvious as far as the Cubs being streaky.

 

True about the 12 runs-I guess I am comparing to a month ago when we were 30-40 runs behind the next to last team.

 

The rest of my post was just that the Cubs haven't been going up and down all season, but that their season was lost in 3 long streches where they just collapsed in big losing streaks. I'm not sure how many teams you'd find over the years who were this far under .500 and who had more winning months then losing months. That can partially be put on the manager as in my last post, but it can also partially be put on pitching. Many times in a long losing streak a team needs a couple of pitchers who will shut down the opponent and stop the losing streak in order to start the momentum the other way-the Cubs only had 1 possible pitcher to be able to do that in May or June, and that hurt. The offense was still the biggest factor in May and June being so atrocious though-in April, July, and August they have been a middle of the pack offensive ballclub in average runs scored. One just has to wonder if a couple of those games the other way that momentum would have made a 6-7 win difference for this team so far, which would still be under .500 but hanging right in there.