Andy

Yeah, it was built to try to entice the White Sox and then the Giants at different times.

Lou has made only a couple of bad moves: benching Pie when he started to struggle, forcing the Barrett trade (by most accounts) and a few sketchy in-game decisions. For the most part, he's been much much better than I could've hoped. I really didn't think the Cubs would be this good at this point of the season, so that's all I could've asked for from him.

Is it too much to ask for 17 of 21? O:)

I'm coming to the conclusion Barrett was our biggest problem the past 2 years. Notice our record since Barrett departed and notice the Padres record when Barrett starts. It's not good for the Padres. my goodness, this is driving me nuts here lately. since barrett left the era has been the same. the catchers have obviously hit worse. how in the holy hell do you figure that barrett's mere presence alone was the difference between a team that was five games under .500 and a team that's playing like .700 ball? you have got to be freaking kidding me to even believe for one second such an idiotic notion. i mean, really, the fact that the cubs have improved so much has nothing to do with zambrano having like a 1 era over the last two months or marmol pitching like mariano rivera or soriano hitting like 15 homers in the past six weeks or theriot and fontenot taking turns being impossible outs or rameriz jacking game winning hits left and right or lee having like a .800 babip or bob howry deciding to stop pitching like total crap or ted lilly pitching awesome or kaz matsui bobbling that grounder or angel pagan playing out of his rear. no...it's all because the devil curse of michael barrett has been magically lifted by the swoop of harry potter's wizard wand and presto suddenly the team is better. he was such a terrible influence on the team that if he had been on the team yesterday instead of hitting a 3 run homer derrek lee would have been like, "you know what...i could hit a homer here, but michael barrett has been really mean to me lately, so i'm going to pop out instead." and just tonight, i heard ramirez say that koyie hill brought him a cup of chicken noodle soup when he had a tummy ache, so he felt strong enough to pelt one off the wall (barrett, of course, was known to kick ramirez in the face whenever he got tummy aches). the fact that there has been such a dramatic improvement goes even further to disprove such a stupid idea. i mean, seriously, is he such a destructive force that the day he left the team immediately improved from a .450 team to a .700 team? can you even wrap your head around how completely ridiculous that is? you'd have a better argument if they improved two games. as if the catcher's era crap we had to endure wasn't stupid enough, now we get catcher's winning percentage? This is a Hall of Fame post and should be placed in some sort of easily-accessible area to throw at the correlation/causation crowd whenever it's brought up.

I missed this, but I don't need another stupid bleacher bum moment. This is utterly dumb.

I think he's ok, although I've never seen why he's 'so amazing he doesn't need a color man'. There are probably plenty of commentators who could go without a color man if the network didn't see fit to hire one.

Here's hoping the magic new lefty lineup works again!

yeah, but that begs the question, how does ravech even know to mention marshall? The original reports were Marshall.

Uhh...

So far as I know.

No. Sorry Banedon, but at the time that was a pretty huge error. Still...we did it again. 16 out of 20. I cannot fathom what is happening right now.

Howry in. Let's do this.

Plz be Marmol.

:D Rich deserves this, he's gotten screwed way too many times.

ARAMIS IS THE NL MVP IF HE KEEPS THIS UP I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING 3-2!!!

Let's hope he is anyway. Give Soto regular ABs in Iowa rather than benching him here...

Because everyone in the media is dumb. Kendall has 292 ABs this year and is OPSing .542. His on-base is lower than Jacque Jones's. Did I mention he's on a $13M deal this year? Cubs will be paying less than $4M though. Pirates on the hook for $5.5M which leaves 7.5M. Less than half the year is left so the Cubs are up for around $3.5M. Ten times what Soto would be paid for a whole major league season to do better than Kendall is.

Because everyone in the media is dumb. Kendall has 292 ABs this year and is OPSing .542. His on-base is lower than Jacque Jones's. Did I mention he's on a $13M deal this year?

Because everyone in the media is dumb. Kendall has 292 ABs this year and is OPSing .542. His on-base is lower than Jacque Jones's.

542 OPS this year in 292 ABs. WHY, JIM?

I can't put into words how lame that is. Corey Hart, Ryan Braun, JJ Hardy...I've had about enough of random skinny white dudes killing the ball for Milwaukee.

What's he saying about it? "They said, you have to play other positions than SS and you have to switch-hit because you can't hit RH. Wrong on both counts!"

He should win it this year. I can't imagine anyone's been better.

A. It's hard to tell if you're serious. B. Don't write in green. Green = sarcasm. It's a new thing some people are trying. I'm not in favor. When did this start and where? In some thread in Social. I'm not sure which.

A. It's hard to tell if you're serious. B. Don't write in green. Green = sarcasm. It's a new thing some people are trying. I'm not in favor.