Rob

Joe Jackson and Pete Rose for sure. If I remember correctly though, Cicotte's numbers don't stand up too well. I know the comps you put up there were mostly considered mistakes.

Do you know the difference between hating a player, and being able to objectively assess his strengths and weaknesses?

I doubt it. If memory serves, Elias determines free agent rankings based on IP, ERA, W, and SV for pitchers. Linebrick has a solid ERA, but not much in the way of the others, being a setup man. Then again, I could be completely wrong about how Elias works out those rankings.

FYI, Inman ranked #3 on the BA prospect list for the Brewers, behind only Gallardo and Braun.

They gave up Inman for Linebrick? :P

I couldn't agree more. Kendall has a past, and the hope was to catch lighting in the bottle. Maybe coming back the central will wake up his bat. I don't see the big deal, its not like Bowen or Hill are any good anyway. I still hold out hope he'll adjust to NL pitching soon and help the club. Soto may be good. He was the only guy who actually stood a chance of doing something good this year. Look I don't know anything about Soto, but why didn't he come up before Hill if he's so good? Why didn't he come up after Barrett was gone and we had Bowen/Hill up? Is it really everyone blocking him? I would think if he's so good, he'd been given a chance. Its not like guys aren't getting chances this year from the minors. Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus ranked Soto the #3 catching prospect in the minors right now (not including new draftees).

Are you seriously using win/loss as a basis to your argument? Hill gets no run support, and win/loss is a terrible stat to judge a pitcher The man thinks Don Kessinger was good. What did you expect?

Your avatar is gonna give me a seizure, man.

Oh noes! I have to choose between hearing Len and Bob, or watching the game in HD.

Mind you, that's a play that Theriot very well might have needed to dive at just to get to. As such, there's no guarantee he would have made an error. Better range gives more chances to make "errors."

Since you're here, I was wondering if you could let us know if Hendry has been in at all on Wily Mo Pena or Bobby Kielty. They seem like the kind of guys Hendry would acquire to help out in right, and I'd heard rumors at least of a deal falling through for Pena going to an unnamed team I thought could have been us. I hadn't heard that such a deal fell through. Hendry and Co. no doubt are looking at both. Alrighty, thanks Bruce!

Since you're here, I was wondering if you could let us know if Hendry has been in at all on Wily Mo Pena or Bobby Kielty. They seem like the kind of guys Hendry would acquire to help out in right, and I'd heard rumors at least of a deal falling through for Pena going to an unnamed team I thought could have been us.

Which is what you should do. So you are confirming that you haven't heard anything about this? I would be absolutely shocked if this actually happened. Trolls start trade rumors on blogs at every trade deadline. Did anyone check whether this was the blogger's first post (or one of them)? It was his first post. It's not a surprise. Thank god we have Bruce here to keep us in check before we get too rumor crazy. To be fair, I am very impressed with the restraint shown by everybody here. I half expected this thing to balloon to 30 pages inside of 4 hours.

I'm in the same boat. I'd love to see it happen, but I wont believe it til Bruce Miles clues us in or the Cubs.com website makes an official announcement.

Yeah, Bruce said right field, and I'm inclined to believe him on that account. At any rate, using somebody with Soriano's skillset outside of CF or RF is about as dumb as it gets... especially when failure to do so relegates a cheap and effective player to AAA duty because he has no position to play.

http://allstar.rotoworld.com/scb/lm/reports/player.asp?sport=BB&Leaguenum=9592&Mode=&X=7670&Y=0 Note: the source is the Chicago Sun Times To me, it couldn't sound any less like Lou had any confidence in Theriot at short in that one... a sort of "my back is to the wall" moment for him. Referring to SS http://www.suntimes.com/sports/baseball/cubs/358886,CST-SPT-cubnt26.article Interestingly enough, Theriot played 86 games at 2B compared to 36 games at SS in 2005 (the year Theriot refers to).

You're saying this like you have. i've heard him say it before. And everybody else has heard him say we'd "try him out" at SS. Which meant he'd try him as a starter Considering his only goal was to replace Izturis, who is one of the singular worst hitters in the league, and average at best defensively. Obviously, Lou knew that Theriot couldn't hit any worse. He was questioning if the offensive boost would be worth the downgrade on defense. Downgrading on average defense = Bad defensively Bad defensively = Not a "natural" SS

You're saying this like you have. i've heard him say it before. And everybody else has heard him say we'd "try him out" at SS.

The unintentional comedy value of this thread has gone through the roof. Calling Cedeno up has already been worth it, and going hitless the rest of the season wouldn't change that for me.

Muskat? :lol: You only have as much credibility as your sources... using wikipedia, Muskat, and the infamous "knowledgable people" isn't really helping you make your point.

Or just disappears completely. Neither will happen i'm not wrong. Being stubborn isn't the same as being right.

Before insulting people you should probably heed your own advice first. Theriot is not a natural SS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Theriot This is what it says at your link. Haha, I'm not getting into this debate, but check the edit history on that wiki page. Someone just changed it to say "a natural at second base". Oh, it was definately me. I was just proving that using wikipedia as a source is about as rookie a mistake as there is.

Before insulting people you should probably heed your own advice first. Theriot is not a natural SS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Theriot This is what it says at your link.

Cedeno hasn't been hitting for as much power recently, I'll grant... but he's still batting .310 in his last 10 games. And why on earth are you using errors to judge a player's defense? I thought the world was past that archaic mode of thought. Why on earth are you using batting average to judge a player's offense? I thought the world was past that archaic mode of thought. :wink: His defense doesn't worry me one bit. Great range don't mean crap when he drops the ball every time he gets to it, and considering the hitter paradise in Iowa's AAA league, I don't agree with this call up one bit. Need I remind you we have a right fielder who lives life day to day. Take a look at his probabilistic model of range page from last year. Even in a year where he made a uncharacteristically high number of errors, he did enough on balls that nobody else would get to to make him right about the definition of average defensively. Theriot isn't even that good. And Sean, I just didn't feel like crunching the numbers myself. I know it's lazy, but so am I. Seems to me like Cedeno is slightly above average ranging to his right yet terrible at ranging to his left(which makes sense cause that's what I remeber), while Theriot is much better at ranging to his left and the difference sems to make Theriot a better SS. Besides how many of Cedeno's errors are 2-base errors, compared to Theriot's minimal errors. Theriot played two games for a total of 17 innings at SS last year. If that's not small sample size, I don't know what is. Besides, anybody who's watching the Cubs can tell that Theriot doesn't have hardly anything in the way of range.

Cedeno hasn't been hitting for as much power recently, I'll grant... but he's still batting .310 in his last 10 games. And why on earth are you using errors to judge a player's defense? I thought the world was past that archaic mode of thought. Why on earth are you using batting average to judge a player's offense? I thought the world was past that archaic mode of thought. :wink: His defense doesn't worry me one bit. Great range don't mean crap when he drops the ball every time he gets to it, and considering the hitter paradise in Iowa's AAA league, I don't agree with this call up one bit. Need I remind you we have a right fielder who lives life day to day. Take a look at his probabilistic model of range page from last year. Even in a year where he made a uncharacteristically high number of errors, he did enough on balls that nobody else would get to to make him right about the definition of average defensively. Theriot isn't even that good. And Sean, I just didn't feel like crunching the numbers myself. I know it's lazy, but so am I.