snoodmonger

I like it. Can you imagine all of the "Aramis doesn't hustle" crowd dealing with Andruw? Talk about exploding heads... I know. The thing is that Jones is so fluid that it looks like he isn't hustling when he is, IMO. Did you see his catch last night? I did indeed. I would be incredibly happy with Jones in CF at Wrigley. It was an idea that I brought up a month or so ago with my dad and he flipped. His first argument was, exactly, "that guy has no hustle at all! He doesn't even try unless he hits one of the park!" Some people... If you get Andruw and keep ARam (and assumin we do nothing else to improve the everyday team, which is unlikely, IMO), you have a lineup that potentially looks something like this: Murt Izturis Lee A. Jones ARam Barrett J. Jones Cedeno Not great, but not horrendous, especially in our League. If you then bolster the starting staff with Schmidt and another, B-level starter, that's not a bad team, and likely good enough to at least win the WC. Exactly. ITS NOT THAT BAD Take that team, add a manager who actually cares about winning and losing. LOSES SLEEP over it and takes pleasure in playing consistent, solid baseball, and add (for comparison purposes) average pitching, and you cannot tell me that lineup couldn't be competitive. we that bad? Is detroit that good? Are the Reds that much better? The Phillies? The Dodgers? THE PADRES???? Sure, this lineup isn't perfect by any stretch and I have not claimed it is, but it is better than a 60-70 win team. If this team performed up to expectations under a coach who had a clue and played with FIRE EVERY DAY it could be competing for the WC and/or the division. I see what you're saying, and I understand that, realistically, maybe that should be our 2007 goal, but I have a philosophical problem with assembling a team that should "compete for the wild card." The wild card shouldn't enter a GM's mind in the off-season. He should be thinking, "Can this team win a WS?" And while anything's possible, chances are a team built to scrap for a wild card and maybe a division isn't going to be a championship caliber team. The mindset of the Cubs needs to be the same as the mindset of Boston, NY, StL, the mets...build a team that can win in the post-season.

6'4", 250lbs...and 19-years-old? That's a big kid. Does he have weight control issues? That's roughly Zambrano sized. It's not so much his size, it's his size and age that struck me as surprising. If it's not a problem, great. I was just surprised he's so big at such a young age.

Maybe Zisk would chisel him down...if he had him. The problem is success= promotion, and particularly at the ML level, there's no desire or effort to chisel down (which, for the record, is an irritating term). And outside of Joshua, I don't know if anyone in the org makes any attempt to do it.

6'4", 250lbs...and 19-years-old? That's a big kid. Does he have weight control issues?

IF Ramirez leaves, then I think you consider blowing it up. If he stays, like Gooney says, we're a creative, competent GM away from fielding a good team.

I've seen a few in favor of moving Jacque to CF, and I just don't see how that's viable. Maybe the stats will prove me wrong, but it seems like he's played a pretty bad RF this year. If so, how will he succeed in CF?

I just watched the trailer. Depressing.

At this point, Hendry might look even dumber if he decided to fire Dusty now. He should have done at/around the all-star break. Waiting till there are 30 games left shines a big spotlight on his incompetence. Not saying it isn't the right thing to do; just saying, PR-wise, waiting till now would be pretty inexplicable.

What impact player can be had for the middling prospects in our system? You could get something with the pitching we have. I would think a package of Hill, Pawelek, Veal could net you a pretty good player.

Exactly. With 10 more wins we MIGHT be in the wild card race. Who cares? A good GM aims higher than that.

Just building this team through FA and the minors probably won't net a WS team (although a few of the lineups shown could be competitive in the NL). What people aren't factoring in are trades. We could (theoretically) add a nice piece or two through trades in addition to FA/minors. That's probably the only way we could really turn this around.

If it did, then it should be measurable through the production with and without Lee. And just because someone hasn't derived the mathematical formula for it (the psycholofical effects), doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Luck can't be measured either, but it's alluded to, in explaining why someone's stats vary significantly from normalized stats, like BABIP. The point is, if the psychological effect of losing Lee was an overall negative, it would show up in the production of those players that were affected. So it would be measurable. The players on this team are relatively close to what should have been expected of them. You can't really point at any one player and say he's doing much worse than he should have, and then blame that on Lee. So if the players aren't doing any worse, you can't justify the claim that the loss of Lee caused them to play worse due to the psychological blow. The problem is, we've played so many young guys, it's impossible to say what we should have expected from them versus what we received. I know we had preseason projections for guys like Murton and Cedeno, and those are probably decent baselines to start from, but we still can't say for sure how much they've deviated from thier career norms (at MLB level) because they don't have career norms. Same goes for the pitchers, too.

Pathetic, again. This woman is a terrible excuse for a journalist, writer, or whatever she's calling herself. The only two possibilities are black magic or bad luck? There's no way that somebody is doing something wrong? Prior has arm issues, but she only focuses on the oblique? The only way you can tell a coach is doing something wrong is if the players say so. This woman is maddeningly dim. As an insider with the team (writing for the team as opposed to an entity charged with covering the team objectively) we can't expect much, but seriously, what's the point of even having these things. She also focused on O'Malley, who is probably the last guy anyone was thinking about when they've wondered if Rothschild is doing something wrong.

If it did, then it should be measurable through the production with and without Lee. The statistical measurement would have to be a Lee-specific, wouldn't it? Because not every player brings an equal component of confidence to his team. (VORL? Value over replacement Lee?) And it would have to measure Lee's teammates, too. Because not every group reacts the same to a key loss. For example, a team of young guys might take it harder. A team with an obvious co-leader might react better.

Well nothing does tell this story. We're all trying to predict what would have happened if a certain event wouldn't have transpired. What in life has definite answers like that? Stats can give you a solid foundation for your opinion. The rest is guesswork. When did I say stats did otherwise? My argument is that people take those stats and then effectively stop thinking. VORP says four wins, so that's that. Four wins it is. It's silly. VORP doesn't measure a player's total effect on the field. I know intangible is a naughty word here, but there are aspects to player and team perfromance that aren't measurable. I don't think many people have said "VORP says four wins, so that's that." I think it's quite offensive, and typically insulting of people who follow stats, for you to say that people "stop thinking". Most have looked at several different measurements and came up with the conclusion that whatever number it was, it was probably less than 10-15. It's not a case of people looking at a stat and saying "that's that". Well you're easily offended then. Because that's the danger for relying too much on stats, IMO. People stop thinking and just trot out numbers, ignoring the immeasurable parts of sports. On the flipside, there's perhaps greater danger in ignoring stats--not thinking at all. And that, I suppose, is an even worse alternative.

Well nothing does tell this story. We're all trying to predict what would have happened if a certain event wouldn't have transpired. What in life has definite answers like that? Stats can give you a solid foundation for your opinion. The rest is guesswork. When did I say stats did otherwise? My argument is that people take those stats and then effectively stop thinking. VORP says four wins, so that's that. Four wins it is. It's silly. VORP doesn't measure a player's total effect on the field. I know intangible is a naughty word here, but there are aspects to player and team perfromance that aren't measurable.

This is one of those moments where stats really don't tell the story, IMO. Would Lee have accounted for 15 more wins? Of course not. But I doubt it would have only been three wins, too. Anyone who's ever played sports knows psychologically, you play differently when your best player goes down. At the beginning, there might even be an upwards spike in intensity, but overall, a lot of teams play with less hope and less confidence. Is that measurable? No. But do confidence and hope, for lack of a better word, play a role in sports performance? Without a doubt. That's why there's such a big sports psychology industry. Because thinking you can win is a key part of winning. Unfortunately, because it's not measurable, many people will discount it or, at least, say its lack of measurability makes it pointless to discuss. But I think it's foolish to ignore the psychological impact losing the team's best player--both defensively AND offensively--can have.[/i]

Probably playing BINGO and accusing the RNs at his nursing home of stealing his cuff links.

Speaking of which, I'm really surprised he's (Nevin) still on the Cubs. Hard to believe some team in the race wouldn't take a flier on a guy who's shown he's capable of bumping into a few HRs here and there.

That won't get us very far either if we're running the Les Walronds of the world out there because all our good pitchers are DL'd from over use. What? How do you know that every pitcher that has seen the DL in the Dusty era has a root cause of "overuse"? That's just wild and inaccurate speculation. I recognize you can show pitcher overuse through study, but you have to back it up by showing a direct correlation to overuse and injury. Folks can make a claim that something has to be amiss in the organizational pitching approach (because of the high rate of injuries) and I would agree, but there are numerous other factors too consider. Overuse might account for a small fraction of injuries in the grand sceme of the Dusty era, but I'd argue issues with strength and conditioning and mechanics are more likely and more of concern. Additionally, the organization aggressively seeks high stuff pitchers with power, little control, and raw talent (which often means poor mechanics). Pitchers like this are bound to break-down and when you stock your system with them, what you see is what you get. Overreact much? My point was about Dierker. He's a guy who ignores pitch counts and pitcher abuse, and all I was saying was that, while his offensive philosophy is nice, a good offense won't get us far if our premiere pitchers are ridden to injury (or ineffectiveness--see Zambrano in 2003 postseason). As for Dusty...no, we can't prove that every injury was related to overuse. In fact, clearly some weren't. But it's certainly safe to say it was a factor in our two prize pitchers--Prior and Wood. And yes, Wood's mechanics were a problem from the beginning. All the more reason to be judicious in your use of him. Why pile on a huge workload to a guy who's mechanics render him injury-prone? That goes for all of our arms w/bad meachanics. You say bad mechanics are a bigger factor than overuse. I say the two go hand-in-hand. If a pitcher's mechanics are bad, then one must take care to not overpitch him. And once he learns better mechanics, one must make sure he's not left out so long that he reverts from fatigue. With Prior, it's harder to say what caused his problems, but he did see an increase of 100 ML IP from 2002 to 2003. This is a power pitcher, a K pitcher, so he probably had high pitch counts. That's a dramatic increase. I don't dispute there are other factors with both men, but pitch count and innings played a role. That's why I was among the many happy about Marshall getting that oblique injury--it shut him down for a while. This is another young arm who's seeing a dramatic increase in workload--during a lost season. At best it has no effect on him. At worst.... I'd say it is a mischaracterization to say Dierker ignores pitch counts. He's mindful of them. He has a differing philosophy in regards to the distance a pitcher should be physically able to perform. His writings seem to indicate that if a pitcher is struggling, and this isn't just in the runs scored, he's not going to leave them out there. But he thinks that a pitcher should be conditioned to throw nine innings. I'd reccomend reading his book as it is explained better there than I can do here. Yeah, t be honest, I'm going only off what I remmeber and what little I've read, so it's possible he's not as abad as thought. And TheDude does raise a good point--it's foolish to be a pitch count nazi, as there are certainly many other factors. I'd just rather err on the side of caution.

That won't get us very far either if we're running the Les Walronds of the world out there because all our good pitchers are DL'd from over use. What? How do you know that every pitcher that has seen the DL in the Dusty era has a root cause of "overuse"? That's just wild and inaccurate speculation. I recognize you can show pitcher overuse through study, but you have to back it up by showing a direct correlation to overuse and injury. Folks can make a claim that something has to be amiss in the organizational pitching approach (because of the high rate of injuries) and I would agree, but there are numerous other factors too consider. Overuse might account for a small fraction of injuries in the grand sceme of the Dusty era, but I'd argue issues with strength and conditioning and mechanics are more likely and more of concern. Additionally, the organization aggressively seeks high stuff pitchers with power, little control, and raw talent (which often means poor mechanics). Pitchers like this are bound to break-down and when you stock your system with them, what you see is what you get. Overreact much? My point was about Dierker. He's a guy who ignores pitch counts and pitcher abuse, and all I was saying was that, while his offensive philosophy is nice, a good offense won't get us far if our premiere pitchers are ridden to injury (or ineffectiveness--see Zambrano in 2003 postseason). As for Dusty...no, we can't prove that every injury was related to overuse. In fact, clearly some weren't. But it's certainly safe to say it was a factor in our two prize pitchers--Prior and Wood. And yes, Wood's mechanics were a problem from the beginning. All the more reason to be judicious in your use of him. Why pile on a huge workload to a guy who's mechanics render him injury-prone? That goes for all of our arms w/bad meachanics. You say bad mechanics are a bigger factor than overuse. I say the two go hand-in-hand. If a pitcher's mechanics are bad, then one must take care to not overpitch him. And once he learns better mechanics, one must make sure he's not left out so long that he reverts from fatigue. With Prior, it's harder to say what caused his problems, but he did see an increase of 100 ML IP from 2002 to 2003. This is a power pitcher, a K pitcher, so he probably had high pitch counts. That's a dramatic increase. I don't dispute there are other factors with both men, but pitch count and innings played a role. That's why I was among the many happy about Marshall getting that oblique injury--it shut him down for a while. This is another young arm who's seeing a dramatic increase in workload--during a lost season. At best it has no effect on him. At worst....

That won't get us very far either if we're running the Les Walronds of the world out there because all our good pitchers are DL'd from over use. That's enough to scare me awayt from Dierker.

Having Girardi might give us an inside track on Cabera, too, from that quote I read. Of course, we'd have to wait 15 years till he's a FA, but still.

Why haven't the Royals taken advantage of that? I guess the same way they let Pujols not get picked 12 times. I think he works for the Red Sox, doesn't he? Neyer is a Royals fan, though.

KU: Bill James. That's gotta get some respect around here.