Illini Iceman

That's not fair... Zook has more salary to pay his players. i don't get it. Illinois. Pays. Its players. And they still suck. Id like to see your proof and reasoning behind that. He thinks it is still the 80's. Right now he is listening to Men at Work because he thinks it is the hot new band.

So we should expect that you won't get angry when Aaron Miles bobbles a grounder, because players are going to make errors, and we should just get over it, right? Why would he get mad? He's a Brewer's fan. Because Doug Melvin will have traded Ryan Braun to the Cubs in exchange for Miles. But he still isn't upset because GM's are going to make mistakes and he will just get over it.

On Jay Glazer's Saturday night injury update he has Hasselbeck out for sure and said the Seahawks could have 8 starters in total miss the game.

I have been a Bradley supporter from day 1 and he is even starting to wear on me now. He does not play harder than "anybody" on the field. That is an insult to the other guys out there and Lee, Ramirez, Theriot and Fukudome off the top of my head play just as hard or harder. All this "now I know why they haven't won for 100 years" stuff is him trying to act like none of it is his fault. I agree that some of the media were complete pricks and I think wanted him to fail so they could write about how awful he is. Unfortunately that's how a lot of big market media writers operate and he has to learn to deal with it.

Can someone tell Rick Morrissey to shut up? Every day I check the Tribune the front page is him complaining about Cutler. Some TV analysts were annoyed by Cutler's attitude in the press conference after the Bears' 21-15 loss to the Packers. OMG!!! Not TV analysts!! What's next? Sportswriters being annoyed? Release him now!!!

Looks like the Cubs picked the right time to trade Kevin Hart. I think he was about at his peak value. His numbers have been pretty ugly since going to Pittsburgh.

I applaud you for still finding the energy to care about such things at this point in the season.

Im guessing There must be some kind of bad blood between Jax and Tennessee, and they figured that his progression is more important than keeping him down to prove a point. Maybe Ryno found out that J. Jax's favorite all time Cub was Sammy Sosa.

Wow--- With all due respect. you're way off base with your rant here. I totally understand a casual fan having that type of response. I'm much more of casual fan nowadays myself... But, with over 2,000 posts here on northside, you're no casual fan... Fact is Ray's management has already built a winner. Their formula is to continually build through the farm system, practice financial responsibility, be financially aggressive when prospects emerge as players in the majors & leverage other assets( players) into more prospects. Again, complaining about the the Jackson trade is a 20/20 hindsight thing & ignores the financial end of it. Both Jackson & Joyce have a lot of talent, but their production had been so-so going into this season. Jackson busted out this year, his FREE AGENT year- good for him. Joyce is still developing as a YEAR ONE major leaguer--- good business decision that has worked out better for Detroit this year. Now, will Detroit give him a 60 mil contract? ... Trading Kaz was the opposite of "squandering" core players. The trade now puts the Rays in financial position to retain Crawford & extend either Garza or Bartlett... These type of trades will continue for the Rays, & they will be good smart trades.,, Next up will probably be Upton. The Rays have Perez & Jennings ready to take his spot. In 20011, I could see Shields going. The Ray will have prospects like Barnes & Moore ready to take his spot. That's if Hellickson or McGee don't move in on him in 2010.... So forth & so on. Complaining about the Rays being "cheap" for not signing their top two picks this year is just silly... As I'm sure you know, the Rays will now get comp picks next year for not signing those picks- for their draft position, it's not a loss... The one thing the Rays have done well from the beginning is sign their draft picks with a very good track record of signing the right ones- They go over slot on 2-3 guys almost every year. This year they did it with 5 or 6 guys with the money they saved on their fisrt two picks. BTW, Tampa isn't Ray country- Tampa has too much beech envy to embrace anything in Pinellas county-- lol... Really, the whole fan thing is the same as it is with all the pro teams in Tampa Bay. Florida is a transient state-- people from other states move here & bring their allegiances with them. Like with the Bucs & Lightning, winning for awhile will take care of most of that. Building through the farm system is fine but if you don't want to become the Montreal Expos then you need to build through your farm until you have a core that can be competitive and then ride that core for the window of opportunity and start over. You can't continue yearly trading off your top players for prospects or you continue a vicious cycle where you never are quite good enough to win. If you love the Kazmir trade and the mediocre return that's fine (btw - I love how Neyer says they got three talented players when he doesn't even know who the PTBNL is) but how can Rays management then defend the Burrell signing? That seemed to indicate they were going for it now. To reverse course on that because they are 3 games out of the wildcard with a month to go is a bit odd. I guess you are joking with the whole "beech" envy Hillsborough vs Piniellas fan issue. But bottom line is that in this sized market if you are going to try to be successful with just half the bay area it is losing proposition. I don't know if I am a casual fan or not (probably yes for the Rays and no for the Cubs) but like it or not casual fans are what fills the seats on a nightly basis. To all casual fans this looks like a) they are giving up for the season and b) they are going back to the cheap Naimoli days. Both of those will keep some casual fans away and clearly there are not enough hard core fans to fill the building. For me the key is the return. If they could convince me they got high level prospects to make the move then roll the dice and deal with the perceptions. However, as far as I can tell this was no great haul (not even one top 10 Angels prospect) so how much better did they really make themselves? I find it hard to believe that in the offseason they could't get bigger market teams in a bidding war to add a solid 2-3 caliber lefty starter who is only 25.

he's not allowed to play catch with his daughter? He was caught playing a pickup game which was reported days ago. Since he was caught, he is now saying he was just playing catch with his daughter. Again, the Dusty excuse. Hide behind the kids. So lame. I hear there are some guys at the cubs.com message board that are really interested in discussing this issue in more depth. You may want to check it out.

Yay, trade one of your starters for prospects in the middle of a pennant race. Baseball fever, catch it! I also live in "Ray country" and the reason it really isn't Ray country is because fans in general have no faith in management's commitment to build a winner. Be awful long enough and accumulate the high draft picks and every so often a window will open where you can be competitive like they are now. Don't squander the window by trading core players before the window closes for more prospects (and not even elite ones at that). Fine, trade Edwin Jackson if he is year from free agency if you can get some good value for him, but Matt Joyce? Combine that with being too cheap to sign your first or second round draft picks and it is really not the recipe to compete with Boston and the Yankees. According to Rob Neyer, their playoff chances went from 10% to 8% by replacing Kazmir with Wade Davis. If you can only lose 2% and gain 3 talented young players, youd be a fool not to make this deal. Its a good move by the Rays, and also a good move by Anaheim. Meh - there is only a month left so you could make the argument that any contender trading one player from their team is not going to reduce their chances by much. Maybe Wade Davis will be OK but he has never pitched at the big league level so it is far from a sure thing.

Yay, trade one of your starters for prospects in the middle of a pennant race. Baseball fever, catch it! I also live in "Ray country" and the reason it really isn't Ray country is because fans in general have no faith in management's commitment to build a winner. Be awful long enough and accumulate the high draft picks and every so often a window will open where you can be competitive like they are now. Don't squander the window by trading core players before the window closes for more prospects (and not even elite ones at that). Fine, trade Edwin Jackson if he is year from free agency if you can get some good value for him, but Matt Joyce? Combine that with being too cheap to sign your first or second round draft picks and it is really not the recipe to compete with Boston and the Yankees.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-angels-raystrade&prov=ap&type=lgns Joe Madden always sounds excited about everyone. The PTBL could be the Vladimir Guerrero's grandmother and he would say she has great genes and will bring a lot of leadership to the clubhouse. He has to privately be pretty down about this. Trading away one of their top starters when they are only a few games out of wild card contention? Boston is adding guys left and right and the Rays are giving away one of their front line starters for prospects? If they hadn't signed Pat Burrell they wouldn't have had to lose this salary. People complain about Bradley with the Cubs, but Burrell has been even worse. Having to deal two young lefty starters like Edwin Jackson and Scott Kazmir and getting the return they have is pretty disappointing.

The problem has been a feast or famine offense with famine being more the rule than the exception. When they score a reasonable amount of runs their pitching wins them games. However, there seem to be too many stretches where they get 3 or less runs per game and it is asking a lot for the pitching to consistently win those. The recent Padre game where Gregg blew the save is an example. You can blame the bullpen for not closing it out but when you only score 1 run you put yourself in a position to lose. Last night Wells holds a pretty good Dodgers offense to 2 runs and the Cubs only get 1. You just can't put together good winning streaks with the offense sputtering like it has.

Thankfully Carol Slezak is not running the Cubs. I am sure she has even more bad ideas in addition to this one. And they probably mostly have to do with getting more gritty players who play baseball the right way.

I am saying that maybe because of your familiarity with the Cubs prospects you are assigning more value to them then most MLB teams would. I have no idea what the Cubs were thinking wasting their time and roster space on a guy like Patton who at best projects to be a set up guy. But just because Hendry did it doesn't mean that a lot of other teams are going to be looking to follow that model and draft similar guys out of the Cubs system to stick at the end of their bullpen for a year. As for organizational ratings, it clealy is more an art than a science since it based on rather arbitrary rankings. However, if a team has a bunch a minor leaguers above and beyond their 40 man roster that other teams would covet enough to put on their active MLB rosters then that seems to me to indicate an organization with a pretty deep farm system.

So as of last year the Cubs had supposedly one of the worst farm systems in baseball but now they are in jeopardy of a lot of their players getting picked in the rule 5 draft? Seems to me that people here may be way overestimating the amount of value other teams will put on these mid level prospects. It's not that people expect 6 guys to get taken, just that there are a lot of guys who have a chance at being drafted. Veal got drafted this past year and the system was in much worse shape than it is now. I could see them losing another guy this year, but his exactly quote was:

So as of last year the Cubs had supposedly one of the worst farm systems in baseball but now they are in jeopardy of a lot of their players getting picked in the rule 5 draft? Seems to me that people here may be way overestimating the amount of value other teams will put on these mid level prospects.

Pie looks like he only has had one really good month which was June and in that month he only had 15 AB's so it doesn't seem that counting that as a whole month is completely fair since that is more like a week for a player getting regular playing time. He is at .245 / .305 / .377 right now which is slightly worse than Reed Johnson. Johnson also had a bad April so if you throw out Pie's April and Johnson's April my guess is that it would not change things much. Honestly 151 AB's for the season does not seem to be enough to judge him on one way or the other, though if anyone is making the argument that the 51 AB's in April taught him something that caused his numbers to increase by June I would be a bit dubious of that. It could be that the Orioles were just more careful in picking spots for him to play against pitchers they felt he matched up well against. But as mentioned above it was only 15 AB's so no matter what it does not seem to be enough to really be sure it means anything. The only way to know what he can do is for someone to give him regular playing time and if he was going to get that anywhere you would think it would have been with the Orioles so if they aren't going to do it there is a good chance he will never get a full shot. My guess is that he floats around as a good defensive player and speed guy to have off the bench and the .245 / .305 / .377 line is what teams will get more times than not.

Based on the front page link I guess Nick Struck signed: His Hawaii coach sounds thrilled about it. http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090818/SPORTS0206/908180329/-1/RSS03?source=rss_sports

That the White Sox PR staff arbitrarily labeled it "The Catch" does not necessarily mean that anyone of value actually calls it as such. The White Sox also consider Hawk Harrelson a broadcaster; the fallacy to that should be obvious. There are traditions, and there are white sox traditions, no? Here in Tampa, Rays fans are walking around with T-Shirts that say "The Catch" and have a picture of Crawford's all-star game grab from this year.

Didn't Boston offer Manny Ramirez? If the Cubs wanted Ramirez they could have just claimed him off irrevocable waivers and had him for no players in return. They just didn't want to pay him. Neither did any other team. Oops.

The return of Glenallen Hill. If one could place bets as to when the scoreboard will be hit for the first time by a homerun, this game will be as good as any. Not really.

Understood. Maybe I am not giving White enough respect or giving too much to Rollins, but personally when I hear a Rollins comparison for Castro it strikes me as exciting while the White comparison for Vitters seems to be kind of meh. I also found the Jody Davis / Ryne Sandberg comparisons for LeMaheiu interesting. Maybe you were just getting bored at that point and wanted to do something different but those two seem like very unsimilar players.

You think that Castro is "likely" to be as good as Jimmy Rollins? Don't know much about him but if that is true then I would think he would be the best prospect in the organization. That projection certainly seems better than your "likely" estimates of Rondell White for Vitters and Kyle Farnsworth for Cashner.