TruffleShuffle

i'm really not high on gretzky at all. hopefully i'm wrong on that.

i think team morale would be a lot higher if once in a while those lazy [expletive] cheapskates ARAM and soriano would just take the [expletive] team out for a [expletive] ice cream after a win.

vitters has a home run and an unintentional walk :shock: rhoderick and peralta were complete disasters. casey coleman was also bad, though it appears he can hit (2-2 with a triple, hitting .545!) marwin gonzalez is 2-2 with a home run.

It's conceivable. The NL Central isn't very good. plus we've been ravaged by injuries. if you're playing competent back-of-the-rotation starters, there's a few more wins right there, and the cubs look merely lousy instead of one of the worst teams in baseball.

Until this past offseason. And even then, I'm not so sure. which one are you thinking of from the offseason? there are a lot of trades that are really dumb but still a little bit understandable. like vernon wells is still a pretty good player (or at least was; this year he's been terrible) so i can understand why they'd want him, even though it's stupid to take on his entire salary while also trading players like napoli and rivera who had value. or trading a really good prospect like scott kazmir for a decent pitcher like victor zambrano. but what on earth was the motivation to trade for matt morris, immediately making him the highest-paid pirate in team history? the team was badly out of contention (like 20 games under .500 or whatever) when they acquired him, his performance had been declining to the point where he was at best a badly overpaid #4/5 starter, and the pirates really had no hope of contending the next year (final year of his contract) when he was due another $10 million. for their efforts the pirates got a handful of near-7.00 ERA starts before releasing morris, and blew almost $14 million on him. and they got rid of rajai davis, who wasn't a particularly good player, but at least was better than replacement level and could get on base a little bit at a cheap price. i can't think of a more inexplicable trade executed by a major league executive.

the matt morris trade was possibly the dumbest trade i've ever seen an mlb organization pull off.

again, the cubs had nowhere to play hamilton. they already had four OF who were basically locked into the team, so he wouldn't have gotten a fair shot at playing time. i suspect his story would've turned out differently if the cubs had drafted him and used him as a 5th OF/defensive replacement. the guy obviously needed regular playing time after playing very little for four straight years; the cubs just didn't have that to offer.

i'd do it... auction leagues are great.

i liked the quade that put dave kaplan in his place during the cubs convention, not the one that has been mismanaging the cubs throughout the 2011 season.

between 2006 and 2009 - the time that some people were ok with theriot - fangraphs had him as a 2.28 win player during those four years. baseball-reference says he was only a 1.43 win player on average, but then again b-r says that barney is only on a 1.5 win pace this year. so really, even though they've got different profiles because barney is a plus defender and theriot had more on base ability, their pre-arbitration years value appears to be roughly equal.

yeah, the "stand pat" nickname was definitely from toronto: http://www.torontosun.com/sports/columnists/bob_elliott/2010/12/06/16450661.html

what a lousy pitching day. jay jackson sucked, raley sucked, kirk was awful, wallach was bad as usual. and gotta love su-min jung's start: 0.2 ip, 0 h, 1 er, 5 bb, 1 k.

hopefully the home run will get them off his back with the secondary skills stuff.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/nationals-journal/post/stephen-strasburg-throws-a-simulated-game/2011/07/18/gIQAtxydMI_blog.html

yeah wang's control was a little off (3 BB, 2 WP in 4 innings) but have to like his K rate... he'll definitely be seeing full season ball next year as long as he's healthy. 2011 draftee neftali rosario made his debut for the azl cubs and went 2-4 with a double and 2 K's (through 8 innings anyway)

even the people who, at the time, said he's really talented and why don't we take a flier on him, weren't looking at the situation as it pertained to the cubs. they offered him no opportunity for playing time and also had a new manager who they probably didn't feel like saddling with a project who'd almost snorted his way out of baseball. the reds were a great situation for him and it worked out.

The problem is that there may be no room to bump him up with Jones at Peoria, Bour at Daytona, Rebel at Tenn, and LeHair at Iowa. Each of those guys is doing pretty well at their respective levels. also, he's struck out in almost half of his ABs.

where would hamilton have gone? we already had murton, floyd, jones and soriano on the roster. at very best he'd be a 5th outfielder, and we also had pagan/pie around, so the backup CF role was more or less filled (plus i don't think anyone thought hamilton could play CF). the reds had a hole in the OF and were able to give him consistent playing time. the cubs didn't have anything close to that, so he would've just sat around, which (a) is a bad situation for a guy who desperately in need of some ABs, and (b) maybe it's not a great idea to take a guy with an extensive drug history and throw him into a big city where he doesn't really have to do anything.

can't wait to watch this [expletive] for another three years.

if quade is going to keep bungling his pitching decisions and leaving guys in too long then i'd prefer that he just be fired immediately.

i could see doing it if the bases were empty and there were two outs, but he was the leadoff hitter that inning. you don't give away an out with the leadoff hitter so you can overextend your starter to pitch to one more batter who, oh by the way, has much better numbers against RHP than LHP this year. quade is really not qualified for this.

i'm gonna go with "mike quade is a bad manager"

glad to see i'm not the only one driven crazy by WSR's complete lack of effort when it comes to spelling and grammar.

but sometimes those low-bonus college guys turn into sean marshall or jay jackson. granted the cases above were below-slot signings, but you get the point. and i agree with the high-risk high-ceiling approach, though you obviously can't do that with every pick and you do need to mix in some of the lambert/wright/smith-type picks as well. but the thing is about those high-risk picks, you have to hit on some of those, and the cubs haven't been doing that. if you keep ending up with huseby/rundle-style washouts then you've wasted significant resources without any positive results.

i think his was reported much higher at first, and i always end up lumping him in with huseby and rundle. anyway, the point remains that they were all complete busts and if you're going to provide the money to make big later-round picks then your scouting director has to be on the hook for them.