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TruffleShuffle

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  1. in philly we had a statue of a roided-up actor near our stadiums.... if we can do that, i'm sure the cubs can put an ernie banks statue up
  2. I'm in a 10-team fantasy league with my pitching doing pretty well, but in some offensive stats my team has sucked: Runs scored: 7th Singles: 9th Doubles: T6th Triples: T4th RBI: 9th SB: 6th K: 9th OPS: 8th Here's the team: C Johnny Estrada (Piazza on DL) 1B Nick Swisher 2B Kelly Johnson 3B Bill Hall SS Hanley Ramirez OF Carlos Lee OF Alfonso Soriano OF Manny Ramirez Util Barry Bonds Bench Paul Konerko Bench Felipe Lopez Now, Lopez was a useful player last year, but this year he has been awful, and hasn't even stolen bases. Manny Ramirez and Paul Konerko have been much, much worse than expected to this point, and Soriano has been disappointing too. Among the free agents are 3B Mike Lowell, OF Josh Willingham, OF Ken Griffey Jr. and OF Gary Matthews Jr. Are any of these guys worth picking up? Do I need to stick it out and hope that Soriano, Manny and Konerko pick it up (Konerko seems like he's warming up)? Or should I try to trade pitching for better hitting?
  3. that's real encouraging. this organization is mind-boggling in its incompetence.
  4. In other words, this organization doesn't understand what the heck they're doing. They shipped out the wrong player. It should had been Eyre, regardless of contract or whatever else is in the way. Zambrano has been pretty bad too so maybe they should DFA or send him to the minors also, right? Eyre has had one bad month, why in the world would they just dump him to keep around a mediocre Cotts who still has options. It makes no sense to throw away a guy that can still be an asset to the team either on the field or via trade at the deadline (when veteran lefties are overvalued) if the alternative (Cotts) is about equal in talent. One bad month??? He had a 9.00 ERA in August last year, and a 7.71 ERA in September. His second-half ERA was 5.49. His overall ERA of 3.38 did a nice job of hiding an unsightly 1.48 WHIP, and this year he's been much worse than bad. His ERA is 7.23 with a WHIP of 2.37, so he's pretty much rendered himself unuseable except in blowouts, until he can prove that he can get hitters out. He's not going to be an asset at the trade deadline unless he actually returns to his 2005 form, which given the second half of last year and then the beginning of this year, is looking rather unlikely. He's worthless.
  5. no we dont. That BS he pulled yesterday,with the wind blowing in, nonetheless, certainly is a cause for concern. yeah, how DARE he insert himself into a bases-loaded situation not of his own making! Was the gopher ball he served up also not of his own making? to a guy with a .601 OPS the past three years against LHP. Yeah, Cotts sucked bad yesterday.
  6. the game log says ronny cedeno was picked off first... this can't be right. He was always such a solid baserunner.
  7. Says the guy with the very large sig. No doubt and what the hell is it? you don't deserve to know
  8. A large part of his walk rate ballooning is the fact that nobody else is behind him. Vlad has been walked 12 times intentionally already, and a few of his other fifteen walks were probably the unintentional intentional walk. you mean teams aren't afraid of Gary Matthews Jr., Casey Kotchmann and Garrett Anderson? That's crazy talk.
  9. He's a Cub. We might as well start stitching his name on the jersey already. oh yeah, no way we draft wieters over a hacker
  10. If he was being moved to starter b/c he was so good in the pen that they wanted to maximize his innings, I'd agree with you. But when you get moved from one job to another b/c your boss thinks you're not very good at your current job, I wouldn't consider it a promotion. Even if you get more customer contact or something, you're still being moved b/c your boss thinks you're costing the company business (or, in this case, games). On the other hand, Dempster wants to start. And I want to have sex with Josie Maran. Sometimes we have to settle for inferior roles than we'd hoped for.
  11. He's still been bad. He's allowed 13 baserunners in 7.1 innings, and has only struck out 3. I guess he's done a better job keeping the ball down, but given that he has a neutral GB/FB ratio during his career, I'm chalking that up to luck and/or small sample size.
  12. I'm not a fan of this move because Guzman was pitching fine in the starting rotation, Marshall sucked last year and is coming off a shoulder injury, and his strikeout rate was fairly low in his rehab starts. I'd have preferred that he spend another month in Iowa to work on his arm strength. I wouldn't have minded Rapada for Cotts, though still you'd have the problem of having three lefties in the pen, two of whom can't get righties out, and the other one can't get anyone out. But really, the problem here is Eyre. He's dreadful, but he's a veteran and won't be sent down to the minors, and Hendry would be too embarassed to eat his contract at this point. So he's just wasting a spot on the 25-man roster with zero usefulness to the team.
  13. You definitely don't pay a reliever as much as you paid Eyre when he's been mediocre every year except for one. Howry, at least, has been a good pitcher for most of his career, and was excellent for two straight years before the Cubs signed him. He was still very good last year. I think he's had bad luck with a high BABIP against this year, and I still think he'll have a pretty good season unless last year's unnecessary workload damaged his arm.
  14. I thought the vast majority of his fastballs were above 90 in that game, not around 88. And I don't think he ever threw 96 regularly, though he'd touch 96 sometimes.
  15. Vlad signed when Sosa was still great. Alou is the player that kept the Cubs from going after Vlad. They were paying Moises big money and he was coming off a mediocre year which followed a crap year. That's right -- my memory was off... its still annoying that an impact FA like Vlad hit the market and the Cubs seemed completely uninterested. Alou did have a fantastic '04, but thats still not enough to get over missing out on Vlad. He hit well in '04, but in the period from 1997-2006, his three worst OPS+ seasons came with the Cubs, and two of those were considerably subpar. I'm still bitter about this.
  16. I agree that a high AVG with RISP is luck, but when voting for MVP, I think it has to be taken into consideration. For example, Hanley Ramirez is hitting .420 with the bases empty and .160 with runners on. While it will probably even out over the course of his career, during the first quarter of this season he has been a poor hitter in more important situations, and that's a big reason that he only has 9 RBI. All other things equal, a guy who hit better in the clutch should win the award over a guy who didn't hit as well, even though in the long run, it's just luck that will even out.
  17. Brackman and Scherzer too (Boras clients). Scherzer I can believe (if he doesn't sign with the D'backs) but I wouldn't give Brackman a big league contract. Just seems too raw to me.
  18. how many guys do you think will get (or at least ask for) major league contracts? I'm guessing just Wieters and Price.
  19. even more obnoxious is the fact that he got a very team-friendly contract because of what really was a minor back injury. 5 years, $65M? And we just dumped $136M on a guy who's not nearly as good.
  20. no, clemens could play for any team in baseball.... todd walker is retiring because nobody would give him a job.
  21. I like how everyone and their mother knows what Zambrano is doing wrong (throwing more sidearm, flattening out his pitches) but it hasn't been fixed yet. I'm not sure if Rothschild knows what's wrong and Zambrano hasn't been able to correct it, or if Rothschild is just a moron.
  22. Any very good college pitcher on a top-tier program will have a heavy workload, especially his draft-eligible year. I'm sure guys like Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson did. Price's workload wasn't unreasonable in 2005 or 2006. What's most important is that the Cubs don't let someone like Dusty Baker manage him, where his innings pitched suddenly goes from 166 to 266 in a year.
  23. NL picture is a lot more muddy... this seems like a three-horse race to me, I went with Vlad, but easy arguments could be made for A-Rod and Mags too.
  24. I'm hoping Izturis will be traded at some point, making Theriot the SS with DeRosa as backup SS. It's not like he's going to get many starts, and he's better defensively at 1b than either Floyd or Ward. most GMs aren't as dumb as jim hendry... if izturis isn't starting over a player like ryan theriot, who's really going to want him? let alone pay $4M for him.
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