jjgman21

have it frozen on Tivo right now. he's out. Well unfortunately for the umps, they don't have 10 minutes to analyze the play on Tivo before making the call. doesn't absolve them of their responsibility to see something other than what happened on the field. call could have gone either way, but bottom line is he got it wrong.

I guess games where he gives us 5+ decent innings is a helluva lot better than the Marquis we saw against Tex, Atl, and Fla. Dear Rob Bowen: never call for Jason Marquis to throw the higher than high fastball. Thank You.

have it frozen on Tivo right now. he's out.

damn. nice stop. c'mon Marquis.

According to Ron, after that first inning, he's done better about keeping the ball down and hitting the corners. Control is still a little suspect, as is the strike zone, but overall not too bad so far. I don't think that does his outting thus far justice. I think there's been six baserunners, and maybe one hard hit ball all game.

he looks awesome. slider is just spinning, but all he needs is the sinker tonight.

not a strike, and you're right Rob, he's not giving Marquis that entire half of the plate.

pitch was about six inches away from his body, he dropped his right arm and had it bounce off his elbow. definitely checked. but definitely looked like a Biggio/Vina.

that's nonsense. how is there any attempt to get out of the way of that.

Maroth 2 hitting the Mets through 5.

not a strike

bid for five denied. Cubs have been unlucky this game, but so far so good. definitely one of those games where they need to keep scoring and working deep pitch counts. que first pitch beeeeeaaaaatch.

stop throwing spinning slider now please. sinker after sinker Marquis.

he sucks, but that was a bad hop.

four scratch baserunners. how frustrating.

Did you forget about Soriano? yes. sort of. I was speaking to the rotation of outfielders, but obviously didn't state that clearly.

Pagan quietly becoming our best offensive outfielder. I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Pagan. woohoo.

common DeRo. split that gap.

hits the barrier. luck not with us so far tonight boys.

what was with that second pitch to Helton? not a good sign that first pitch to Soriano.

that's ok, just look at the pitching the Brewers face in their series.... DOH!!! no Oswalt, no Samson. they get Wandy, Woody, and Jennings who hasn't gotten anyone out besides the White Sox since he came off the DL. 2 out 3 by the Cubs this series probably drops them back one more in the standings. but that's ok, because we get our shot at the Brewers after that and have Hill and Marshall going. DOH!!! Brewers have team line of .280/.344/.477/.821 vs. lefties this year. the next five games could very well be the nail in this season's coffin.

as long as I get Jason Dubois's AAA career for dessert. not even close to being a good comparison I know, Cust took 6 years in AAA before he dominated it like Dubois did in his first year. look, Cust has had a great minor league career and an incredible start to this year. I have no idea why he was never given a better shot (other than spending most of his career in NL systems and lacking the abilities to catch and throw the ball). all I am saying is it's lame to declare him the second coming, then the thread making such declarations comes to an abrupt end when he goes into a month long skid, only to be revived when he has a bit of a hot streak. not only that, but using a tiny sample size to declare the month long skid an aberration, especially when as recently as 2004 around the age when a player should be entering his prime, he had a whopping 791 OPS at AAA, followed by a year of 840 OPS. walk rate, fantastic. great year last year at AAA, absolutely. enough evidence to declare him out of his slump and a full year 1.000 OPS player, hardly.

as long as I get Jason Dubois's AAA career for dessert.

hilarious. if that was a slump, then there's a chance Jacque breaks out of it any day. Cust goes 7/52, 2 2B, 8/24 bb/k ratio for a month and noone talks about him. he lights up the NLs worst pitching staff, then gets a couple dingers over the following week, and he's back to hero status. He went through a slump, and did fine. You can cut up the best offensive season of the last fifty years (quite possibly ever) and find a stretch of 50 PAs where he hit .162. Looking for streaks in a gamelog is a dangerous thing. I could also look at last year and marvel at the April Chris Shelton had. If I were a Tiger fan, I might even have declared his slump over on May 23, or on June 18, or on July 8, but I would have been wrong. if I don't look for streaks in gamelogs, where exactly would I look for them? and I'm pretty sure you are wrong about the best years claim you make. while I'm sure there were a few such streaks in a few such years, I'm sure it is far from the norm. just picking a random one, I see Mike Schmidt had no such streak in 1981 despite having a month off in the middle of the season. you think we could find one of the top 50 seasons in the past 50 yeasrs where the player went nearly a calendar month without a dinger? it's also real tidy characterizing this as "50 PAs." if he could catch and throw the baseball, or not have horrific slumps?, maybe he gets more than 50 PAs (actually it was 60 btw, but shhhh, that makes the slump look even worse) in three weeks of baseball games.