BigbadB

I know I'm late to the party, but don't forget to bring your XM radio to work tomorrow! :wink:

Ryan Theriot for 3b!

I like Theriot and I also appreciate him. He also has a cool nickname. The blame for him being the regular at SS and batting lead of actually isn't his fault. That blame belongs to Lou and Jim. I'm with Tim on this, except that I would send down Fontenot and keep Theriot as the back up utility guy. Patterson at 2b and DeRosa at SS is exactly what this team needs. And here is the line up I'd run out there: Soriano Fukudome Lee Ramirez Pie Soto Patterson DeRosa

My team is weird. At this point, they have a total of 6 hits on the day, 5 of them are HR's. On the season, 9 hits and 6 of them are HR's. I don't mind the HR's, but hey, how about some singles and doubles instead of outs?

Looked like a hit and run and Aramis was caught in a rock and a hard place.

Haha. The Dodgers are starting Juan Pierre in Matt Kemp's place tonight. Morons!

Juan and I (when we get a chance to breathe) are planning to put together a thread that will contain all the rules in one handy dandy, easy to read format. But, it would certainly help if anyone else wants to help organize all the rules into the thread Juan started, then we can sort them and copy them into one quick reference post that will stickied at the top of the page.

I knew it was a gamble, but it looks like Pedro will be joining RJ on the DL.

Exactly. If Alou doesnt throw a fit and start screaming it doesnt get blown out of proportion nearly as much. I don't have a problem with Alou's reaction. While he can admit he probably wouldn't have caught it, Bartman eliminated any chance of possibly catching it. So, the probability factor went from not likely to catch it to not a chance in hell of catching it. That's got to be pretty frustrating.

Same ole, same ole. My offense sucks and my pitching looks pretty good. The bats are 2-22 and my pitching accounts for about 4/5's of my points. :roll:

I would have rather had a competent CFer who didn't lead the league in outs in 2006.

That's about the most lame excuse in the book. If it's true, then it's further proof that the guy doesn't belong in the bigs. More sarcasm. :wink: Whoops. My apologies. But, I have heard Cubs management use that excuse for him from the tail end of last season. "Theriot wore down late in the season, blah blah blah." No, he didn't wear down. That's just who he is.

The worst GM's in the game are capable of pulling off a miracle deal. Dave Littlefield (yes, the guy who traded Kenny Lofton and Aramis Ramirez for a bag of balls) traded Brian Giles for Jason Bay and Oliver Perez. Just because a guy pulls off a trade that makes the team better than they were before the trade shouldn't be grounds for a lifetime contract. As far as suggestions at SS, the suggestions have been made over and over. Hendry didn't have SS on his radar. That was pretty obvious. Theriot is a light hitting utility middle infielder and nothing more. Yet, Hendry treats him like he's some elite player that shouldn't have to resort to battle for playing time. At a point where you would consider Jose Hernandez an upgrade at SS, one has to come to the realization that Hendry really, really dropped the ball this offseason.

That's about the most lame excuse in the book. If it's true, then it's further proof that the guy doesn't belong in the bigs.

To accurately assess Hendry's tenure as GM, all one really has to do is look at our current situation at SS. And it truly is a situation.

How many sub commishes to we have? Well, when the first subcommish is even less available than the commish, we needed another sub-commish. :D So, what does the other subcommish do on his first day on the job? Take a vacation. :D But hey, I'm back!

I'd be enraged if I was a Cardinal fan. Fresh off a World Series and a brand new ballpark, they've basically scrapped together a pretty worthless team.

Zambrano at SS! Since Murton pretty much sucks in the outfield, maybe it's time for him to get some reps at SS. :D

Game Center is drunk. Everybody appears to have gotten the same stats today that they got yesterday.

To expound on what you mentioned here, there really aren't that many lefties to worry about, anyway. Pittsburgh looks like they have 3 in their rotation with Maholm, Duke and Gorzelanny. Cincy has an all right handed rotation. Houston only has Wandy Rodriguez. Milwaukee currently has no lefties. St. Louis won't have a lefty in their rotation until Mulder comes off the DL. That's a total of 4 lefties in our division of potentially 25 starters. Granted, there are more lefties in the other divisions, but the bulk of our games shouldn't affect too much of Pie's playing time.

Is this pure speculation on your part or did you read it somewhere... I brought this up a while ago and was shot down because of DeRosa's suspect range at SS. I'd love it if the Cubs were to give him a shot there, but I haven't heard it discussed anywhere but this board. Buster Olney had a blog up about a few days ago, and in it, he speculates that if the Cubs do eventually complete a Brian Roberts trade, that DeRo wants to compete for the SS job. And if this is true, this Roberts trade is no longer about is Roberts an upgrade over DeRo, but more about Roberts being a significant upgrade of Theriot. So the possibility is real that DeRo could play SS, if Roberts deal is completed. But has DeRosa taken grounders at SS? What would he be like there? To me, DeRosa would probably be a bad choice to play SS if the team in general was average to below average defensively on defense. But, the Cubs can expect to be above average to well above average defensively in RF, CF, LF, 3b, 2b, 1b and C, basically everywhere except SS (assuming Roberts became a Cub). Because of that, I think you could afford the defensive shortcomings of DeRosa at SS, especially when you consider Theriot is playing out of position as well.

Does anyone else think now that we signed Johnson, that Hendry may add Pie to this thing, and pull back some others? No, I don't see it. Also, with Reed Johnson on board, it looks like we won't have to take Jay Payton anymore. If I had to guess, Murton and Cedeno is 2/3 or 1/2 of the package that would end up going to Baltimore.

I might get savaged for saying it, but I could live with that deal if only because Lopez is an upgrade (however slight) at SS over Theriot, IMO. I don't see why the Nats would do it though. They already have Kearns, Milledge, and Dukes. They also have Wily Mo Pena, Ryan Langerhans, Willie Harris and Rob Mackowiak. I would think Washington would want some pitching if they were going to make a deal.

Everyone puts up huge numbers in the PCL. Big deal. Look at PCL stats from 2007, sort by OPS, and count the number of Shortstops ranked above Cedeno. Link No offense, but so what? Did you some of the other names on that list? Joey Gathright kicked butt in the PCL last season. AAA is not a prospect league anymore. Its a dumping ground for AAAA players. Isn't Joey Gathright a bad example? .307 .371 .342/ 88 OPS+ That's a heap better than Juan Pierre who posted .293 .331 .353/ 75 OPS+

Everyone puts up huge numbers in the PCL. Big deal. Look at PCL stats from 2007, sort by OPS, and count the number of Shortstops ranked above Cedeno. Link Go here, and look at what Ronny Cedeno has done against major league pitching: http://www.baseball-reference.com/c/cedenro02.shtml Do you realize how extensive the list is of players who basically flopped in their first season in the majors at the age of 23? Couple that in with less than a season's worth of at bats between AA and AAA before his major league call up, and all we REALLY know about Cedeno is that he just wasn't ready. BJ Upton posted a 56 OPS+ in 2006 in the majors and last year posted a 136 OPS+. That's the equivilent of Felix Pie's '07 season for his '06 numbers and Curtis Granderson's '07 season for his '07' numbers. Granted, Ronny Cedeno isn't BJ Upton. However, if a guy can hit as poorly as Pie did last year and improve so much in his next stint to the extent of matching Curtis Granderson's production, why would you just settle for the guy who is guaranteed to give you very generic numbers and not take a chance on a guy who has the potential to put up much better numbers than that. Besides that, Theriot would likely excel much better as a reserve utility infielder much moreso than a young and still developing Ronny Cedeno. I'd rate Cedeno getting 10-15 at bats a month about as worthless as anything else the Cubs could do with him, which is basically what they did to him last year in the big leagues.