mul21

Huh? Sorry.... hit a wrong key I just thought you were making fun of Hendry and Dusty, actually.

Huh?

You know if that was Theriot or Cedeno up in that situation he would have had them bunting.

Don't say something you can't take back. I wouldn't want to see Greg's stats in Minute Maid. fwiw, Wrigley has been a better park for hitters than Minute Maid this year: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/stats/parkfactor That makes the Cubs offense that much more pathetic. Or does it make the Cubs pitching that much more pathetic?

At least Houston put out a crappy lineup too. How are they anywhere near the playoffs right now?

Living in St, Louis and watching the Braves pound the Cardinals the last 2 days (at least there is some small enjoyment for me this baseball season), I was thinking that Betemit would be a great guy to get who could be available. Atlanta doesn't have anywhere to put him right now, but he can play 2B, 3B or SS and their bullpen is a shambles. They had a huge lead last night and left Hudson in longer than necessary because of it. I think Williamson plus a prospect might get it done with the price of relief pitching apparently what it is. I'm less enamored with Pena, and Boston gave up a solid starting pitcher to get him. I think the player cost may be more than it's worth.

I just sent a case of Vodka each to Baker and Hendry's offices. Drink up boys. Pity no one thought of this strategy in, oh, April maybe.

http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/cs-060719cubsmaddux,1,5003999.story?coll=cs-home-headlines Maybe you were just being facetious (if so, proceed :)), but I really don't see any opportunity to criticize the Cubs here. I think the point was that management is wasting their time on things that really don't matter much in the grand scheme of things instead of trying to fix this mess they've created. Not that Hendry is necessarily the guy responsible for this, but that the focus is in the wrong place.

Does anyone actually believe that where a player hits in the batting order has a major affect on how they hit? Absolutely. Look at Renteria's numbers in the 2 spot vs. the 6 his last couple of years in STL. Huge difference if I remember correctly. Baseball is so ridiculously mental that is does make a difference, especially if your hitting approach is better tailored to one area of the order or another. Great example would be CPatt.

If this is true and Abreu wouldn't block a trade to the Cubs, even if it meant picking up the option year(s) on his contract, I say do what it takes, cause what Baltimore's offering isn't a whole lot.

St. Louis' pitching seems to go in some pretty awful spurts. The Padres didn't hold the Braves down in the first three games of the stretch either. Yeah that's true, but I also remember the same Cardinals staff giving up something like 20 and 14 runs in back-to-back games against the Sox a few weeks ago. Currently 13-1........Braves winning in the bottom of the sixth.....Marquis gave up 12 runs in his outing, but I'm not sure how many were earned. All of them. :shock: LaRussa must really have confidence in his bullpen. Nah, they just got rocked and had to pitch 5 innings out of the pen last night.

The 2005 Cubs were 9th in BA, 20th in runs scored. Their OBP was 20th. The 2006 Cubs are 17th in BA, 30th in runs scored. Their OBP is 29th. Where were they in OPS relative to runs scored? Bottom line is, I think OBP as a whole is the important thing here. Whether it comes from a guy hitting .340 and having a .380 OBP or hitting .270 and having a .380 OBP. If you don't look at it as a whole, you're not getting the entire picture. Now, there aren't a ton of guys who can hit .340, so you're going to need some patience to get to the desired OBP.

Seconded....Is that a word?

Incorrect. He has been good for 2 wins above what would be expected of a replacement player, and WARP takes defense into account. This team is horrible, and has been for the last 2 years, therefore, this argument is invalid. Walker is not a quality all around second basemen and his position on the field requires more defense than he's capable of providing. In 2003, he batted .283 for Boston in the regular season and .349 in the playoffs (.313 in the ALDS and .370 in the ALCS) yet they let him leave in favor of Pokey Reese because Walker ended that year as the worst 2B in the ML at turning the DP. While Reese wasn't the best available player he was more versatile (played both SS and 2B) and more defensively sound than Walker. This proves that even an offense-oriented team, like Boston, realized that they were better off having a more defensive player at 2B than someone like Todd Walker. They didn't need a guy like Walker and if the Cubs are going to improve they need to find someone at 2B who will field accurately and consistently (you can hide someone who's defensively challenged at 1B or LF but not 2B). As I mentioned earlier, he's actually more of a liability now that the team has cut the infield grass. See, I think that because Boston is an offense oriented team, they were ABLE to sacrifice offense at 2nd for defense because they had other pieces in place to make up for the offensive deficiency there. The Cubs are so bad on offense right now that they can't afford to make that kind of a sacrifice. The need is determined by what surrounds the player (i.e. the argument that Murton is a perfectly acceptable guy for LF as long as there is a bopper in RF and/or CF).

Why in the "bleeeeeeeeeeeep" does this idiot insist on playing guys who don't have along term future with the Cubs. Play Murton already you moron.

Thank you. That's been driving me nuts for months. I've gotten to the point that when someone uses than instead of then, I do a double take because it seems wrong.

quote] I'm not taking walks out of OBP. What I am doing is separating OBP into the two primary components: batting average, and walks. HBP and a couple other things figure in, but those things are too rare to truly make a significant difference. Now why does OBP correlate decently with runs? Is it because of the batting average part, or the walks? The stats clearly show that differences in batting average are the primary reason why some teams score more runs then others. An increase in walks do cause an increase in runs generally, but this link is much more fragile then differences in batting average. The evidence clearly shows that if you had to have a team that was in the top 10 team in batting average or the top 10 in walks, you would clearly take the top 10 in batting average. Of course, it would be even better to take one of the top 10 teams in OBP, because it takes the large effect of batting average and adds the small effect of walks. Do walks matter? Yes. However, you want the team with a .360 OBP and a .284 average rather then the same team with a .360 OBP and a .271 average. You are going to get many more runs out of the first team than the second team on average, even though the second team walks many more times on average.OPS has such a direct correlation with runs scored because it gives walks it's place while essentially double counting hits-because a hit both adds to your OBP, and also increases your slugging. So a hit is definitely worth a great deal more than a walk, and the OPS numbers show this. Not necessarily true. If the team hitting .284 is slugging 30 points lower than the team with the .271 avg., they will probably score less runs, so that completely shoots your average argument down, while reinforcing your OPS argument. Bottom line is you want a high OPS, and how you get there is less important than the fact that you get there.

Z missed most of spring training due to Bud Selig's ill-timed WBC competition. It's not like he wasn't pitching. I don't think that had much to do with it at all. He just struggles with his location early in the year. It's happened several times now.

It's pretty easy to understand. Rehab starts in the minors take away starts from the young pitching. Here's what this guy did when we needed him most down the stretch. 2004 Aug. 27th vs. Houston LOSS Sept. 10th vs Florida LOSS Sept.16th vs. CIN WIN Sept. 26th vs NYM LOSS Oct. 1st vs ATL LOSS I noticed you left a couple of good performances out...... Sept. 1 8IP 0R Sept. 21 7IP 3R So, of the starts that actually occurred, not just the ones you looked at, 3 were quality, 3 were average, and 1 was crap. And I won't go into how meaningless a statistic wins are for a pitcher. In those games where Wood was avg. or less, a playoff level team picks up the pitcher and actually scores some runs. They don't have a monumental collapse like the Cubs did. You can't possibly put that much blame on 1 guy going out every 5th day.

Why has he only played 45 games this year?

I agree, that is until the last few paragraphs. Michael Barrett is in no way one of the 5 biggest culprits for this season. I just can't even begin to believe that. He OPS'd .860 in April, near .800 in May, and over 1.000 in June - he's been solid all year. He didn't disappear when Lee went down. Yes, he punched AJP in the face. At that point, the Cubs were already out of it. They had a 5 game losing streak when he was gone for 10 - true. But they lost 6 in a row earlier while he was playing. Not only that, but during the 13 games Barrett was out for his back & the suspension, Blanco played the best offensive baseball of his life. He OPS'd 1.055 in June (over 15 games, 13 of which were during Barrett's absence). What are the chances Barrett plays any better than that 1.055 during those 13 games? I'd say pretty frickin small. So whatever we lost by having Barrett miss 10 games for punching AJP, we gained by Blanco having a career 2 weeks. Finally, I think a different team would use that punch as a rallying point. Barrett was clearly frustrated and got pissed and showed he wasn't giving up on the year. I was hoping the team would rally behind him and run off a string of Ws. Didn't happen, but I'm still ok w/ the punch. Not a great idea, but certainly not one of the reasons behind our team sucking. I had the same thought while reading that. I think a better #5 culprit would be the hitting coaches and their crap approach to teaching plate discipline. Or actually their lack of ability to teach plate discipline.

From the article, maybe somebody should go tell the Cobs this: "Every great player that ever played, just about, played in this stadium," former Tiger Darrell Evans told us on Tiger Stadium's final day. "So you always felt you'd better go out and not embarrass yourself, because you felt like those guys were sitting right next to you, saying, 'You'd better carry on that tradition.'"

Also taken from that article, which is the attitude I wish everyone on this team had: "I have no doubts about this team," he said. "We just didn't have good luck. Sometimes we do our jobs as pitchers and the hitters don't do their jobs, and sometimes the hitters do their jobs and we don't do our jobs. "When the second half starts, everyone will come together and will do their job." Hopefully without the current buffoon of a manager.

I like this a lot and would be ok with doing that. I think you would end up with an order something like this: Murton Barrett Lee Abreu Soriano Ramirez Jones Cedeno I'm definitely in the sign Schmidt over Zito camp. Schidt has done it better for longer and any inconsistencies he's had have been due to injury, which he's done pretty well to avoid over his career.

To those who are questioning why they couldn't see anything right away: The shoulder is the single most difficult joint to diagnose injury and repair. I personally had 3 MRIs from 3 different doctors before someone figured out I had a 90% torn labrum that was in desperate need of repair. It's not all that uncommon to not be able to see soft tissiue injuries in the shoulder unless there is a complete explosion because there is so muc stuff inthere to try to see through. Just my 2 cents.