Sammy Sofa

He looks like complete horsefeathers lately, I’m worried. I wonder if the little extra wear and tear of playing SS is affecting him a little. His generally 110% at all times-style of play has worried me for a while; as awesome as it is, it's just not sustainable health-wise. I think he could definitely due with some extra time off, by the MI is such an OF-ian botch job now that they're extra fucked if he doesn't play as much.

Also frustrating: Rizzo and (especially) Bryant have been putting up baller lines for the last 2 weeks-ish, and this is the total result we're getting. Baez has been bad, Willson is hopefully snapping out of his funk, and Schwarber's lines are bolstered by a ridiculous slugging % that offsets how terrible his BA and OBP are in that time. They could really use at least one other person to get hot to help out the Big Two.

Come on, man; how long does one season's worth of a Fangraphs defensive rating get to be the sort of thing you can hang a statement like this on?

Guys, Baez might be dying. I just saw that his line over the last month is .204 .228 .398 .626.

The Cubs seem stacked with guys who SHOULD be their version of Player X that they passed on.

Oh, right; I forgot LeMahieu was yet another guy the Cubs could have signed this past offseason. Peachy.

We're not on speaking terms anymore, so I can't.

Agreed. If we can see it, Theo sure as hell be able to see it. We need guys who aren’t gonna be happy just to be in the race. We need guys who are obsessed with winning. I thought that's what Carlos Gonzalez was all about. The only thing he shook up was his postal address. What the horsefeathers happened to him anyway. Dude was pretty much always a Coors fraud. Career .250 .306 .418 .724 road splits.

Well, there you go. [expletive] lucky AL teams.

How much longer is Abreu signed for? I can't imagine it's for more than a year or two, tops, right? If Eloy keeps hitting, I just figured they'd slide him at DH/1B.

Cubs' crack medical staff strikes again!

Man, I was thinking I had just glossed over Chatwood's recent appearances by how little it felt like he had pitched, but I checked and he's only made 3 appearances this month (though, granted, for just shy of 6 innings), and, woof, he stunk it up fierce in 2 of them.

I know I'm pretty horsefeathering biased in this regard, but I can't remember a recent decision by this org that didn't have me wanting to scream at them for being cowards. Even the Kimbrel signing was such a chicken horsefeathers move based on when and how it happened. I would’ve started Adbert but my only thought is that Chatwood has pitched better this year he’s “earned” a start in their eyes, maybe keeps him a little happier/engaged or whatever and maybe the Hendricks injury really is that minor so it is only 1-2 starts so just let Chatwood take it. I don’t like it but get the reasoning to an extent. They also mentioned they might go 6-man next time through the rotation so maybe Adbert gets a start then. I know, I get it, too; it's still boring and lame, though, right? Do something cool, Cubs.

I know I'm pretty horsefeathering biased in this regard, but I can't remember a recent decision by this org that didn't have me wanting to scream at them for being cowards. Even the Kimbrel signing was such a chicken horsefeathers move based on when and how it happened.

The slow, inevitable death of my fandom, I guess. It's been such a big part of basically my whole life, it's not something I can, or even want to just shrug off easily. But more and more it's becoming clear to me that this org brings me more frustration and negative feelings than positive ones, and that shouldn't be the case, especially having seen so many terrible, terrible seasons (in terms of baseball being played). I have been kicking this around in my head, and I think part of it is where the Cubs are in their competitive cycle. Even if I abstract away the off the field stuff, and even if I set aside that the increasing blurnsball-ization of the game isn't my favorite, you're left with what happened last year, an impossibly frustrating march to the end where I can't even remember if I cared to watch the wild card game. And I think that's because at this point, the expectations for the team are, rightly, to win, and to win a lot. That means that my baseline expectation is higher and more likely to end up in frustration when baseball's special brand of day-after-day reality sets in. It almost makes me wonder if having down years or rebuilding periods is a net positive for fandom, because if the expectations aren't to win 95+ games then you can be pleasantly surprised, there's more room for things to go right instead of going wrong. That's really well put, and definitely a part of what's going on with me. I mean, the clear line in the sand for me is everything with Russell. That was something where they had multiple chances to do something that even resembled the right thing, and every single time they actively chose not to. Combine that with how outside of the rumors that MAYBE Kris Bryant's wife wasn't happy with how this was handled, everything seems to indicate that the Russell situation couldn't motivate a single horsefeathering person on the team to say anything that even remotely resembled being truly critical of the FO, or the team, or Russell himself. All of that really just kind of broke something in me, melodramatic as that sounds, in terms of being a Cubs fan. I think I really truly believed that at some point this would have somehow resulted in the Cubs doing anything but where they've ended up with him...and I just can't abide by that. Then you add on the type of relative disappointments you're talking about, the past decisions with guys like Murphy and Chapman, how they willfully went with the flow and went (again, relatively) cheap during the FA debacle that they clearly had been talking up like they were going to be big spenders in. Combine that with all of the garbage with the Ricketts...by the time the Sinclair stuff rolled around, that almost felt sadly predictable. It struck me at how little that surprised me; of course the Cubs, THESE Cubs, would happily do something so shitty. I know the reality is that a lot of this isn't far enough from how this team, and almost all of the others, have pretty much almost always operated, but for some reason this all feels different at this point. I don't like it, and I wish I could go back to enjoying my team like I did, whether they were good or bad.

Now that's some professional savaging.

If I wasn't such a coward there would always be the whole needle-forehead-doorstep option.

Preferably it'll be his first under the field instead.

Is Bote injured? Trying to figure out why Descalso would be starting against a rightie instead.

The slow, inevitable death of my fandom, I guess. It's been such a big part of basically my whole life, it's not something I can, or even want to just shrug off easily. But more and more it's becoming clear to me that this org brings me more frustration and negative feelings than positive ones, and that shouldn't be the case, especially having seen so many terrible, terrible seasons (in terms of baseball being played).

That wall of hashtags is maybe the most egregious thing an ump has done so far this season.

This is such a weird gotcha (and like from Cubswin11). It’s the only gotcha that exists. You can not deny the numbers. You can not deny your destiny. Well, no; I can, sadly, deny the Cubs pretty easily at this point (and it feels more and more like after this season I'm done after 35 years).