Sammy Sofa

"Very funny."

Who sucks more, this ump or Carl?

It's funny how on GRB they're bemoaning having to come to Wrigley and playing the Cubs because the Cubs have so much on the line....meanwhile a bunch of us here are worrying about playing a desperate Cardinals team for the final series. ALL FEAR, ALL THE TIME.

And yet another bizarre thing that's bit the Cubs this season: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-silliest-thing-about-kyle-schwarber/ High Leverage, 2018 Player wRC+ Kyle Schwarber -62 Alcides Escobar -3 Chris Davis 9 Mallex Smith 10 James McCann 11 Brian Dozier 13 Addison Russell 15 Kendrys Morales 15 Adam Engel 17 Gorkys Hernandez 26 wRC+ By Leverage, 2018 Player Low/Med High Difference Kyle Schwarber 137 -62 -199 Mallex Smith 129 10 -119 Kendrys Morales 119 15 -103 Joey Wendle 128 28 -100 Javier Baez 143 53 -90 Cody Bellinger 130 46 -84 Willson Contreras 109 26 -83 Nick Markakis 125 42 -83 Brian Dozier 95 13 -82 Brandon Belt 115 40 -75 High Leverage, 2002-2018 Player Season wRC+ Kyle Schwarber 2018 -62 Ryan Zimmerman 2016 -54 Neifi Perez 2002 -35 Royce Clayton 2003 -26 Casey Kotchman 2012 -24 Mark Ellis 2011 -24 Chris Young 2009 -20 Justin Smoak 2012 -20 Pedro Florimon 2013 -20 Kurt Suzuki 2011 -17 wRC+ By Leverage, 2002-2018 Player Season Low/Med High Difference Kyle Schwarber 2018 137 -62 -199 Jim Thome 2008 135 -5 -140 David Wright 2013 171 33 -138 Ryan Zimmerman 2016 81 -54 -135 Hideki Matsui 2007 136 3 -133 Jose Cruz 2003 119 -14 -132 Craig Biggio 2004 116 -15 -131 Mike Moustakas 2015 136 8 -128 Jason Varitek 2004 137 15 -121 Richard Hidalgo 2003 156 35 -121 TL; DR version: baseball is dumb and the worst.

Bryant and Rizzo are fine if there were other dudes playing the roles of Normal Bryant and Rizzo on the team. Rizzo's got, like, a .780 OPS and Bryant's is around .750, which, again, great if there was someone other than Baez hitting for ANY power, and if there wasn't a drunken shitbird farting out different awful lineups each night. As per usual with the 2018 Cubs, getting killed by no power.

Which Cubs DON'T have horsefeathers stat lines in September? Baez...Zobrist...and that's probably it.

60 fewer dongs this year than last

It's simplistic, but I keep coming back to how all of this anxiety is erased if they had just hit more dongs. Yeah, that sounds like "no horsefeathers, Sherlock"-common sense, but it's not even THAT many more dongs, especially given that it's a team that, on paper, should have been clobbering them. They are, STILL, linger at horsefeathering 22nd in dongs in all of baseball. If they had hit, say, 25 more, certainly not unreasonable given the roster, they'd still just be tied for 13th....but then you think back to how they've had SO many games where they've been shutout or only scored 1 run, and it's easy to suddenly see them with 3-5 more wins than they do right now. Their team BA and OBP is still in the top 3...if they had just managed a slugging % better than 14th, they would have easily run away with it. I think it really is as basic as, "they don't hit enough home runs." It's so weird. Or maybe not; maybe most of that is being without Bryant as a power hitter (or at all)....though I gotta think Russell and Contreras seriously helped kill that, too.

And trading Baez was hugely influenced by me being into the nonsense about Russell going to be awesome because he was still so young. What a dope I was.

The hell I don't. (Well, OK; you got me with Contreras. Baez I would have traded in a heartbeat for Yelich. Though I would have also traded Baez for Verlander, too, so there's that)

Records to tie Cubs / Brewers / Cardinals 4-1 / 4-0 3-2 / 3-1 2-3 / 2-2 1-4 / 1-3 0-5 / 0-4 / 4-0 Well, I don't miss them anymore.

that wouldn't be crushing enough, they'll win just enough games to not win the division anyway, in real talk, if they win tonight and the pirates lose, we're like, totally ok.

https://deadspin.com/this-is-probably-how-the-cubs-ended-up-with-porn-in-an-1829312053

The hell it didn't.

Respectfully disagree, given the relatively uncharted territory-nature of his success. That's not saying he's likely to fall off of a cliff, but I'd be pretty surprised if he was a 4-4.5+ WAR player on a regular basis, if even just or how his style of play has a good chance of landing him on the DL and/or declining sooner rather than later.

Everyone knows how well Zobrist has done this season. He's also going to be 38 next year. At the very least his playing time is likely to decrease. Hell, there was also plenty of talk of trying to move him after this season in anticipation of just getting some more money off of the books BECAUSE of how well he had been doing this year, and that's pretty much out the window now.

He had to do that this year to keep this team competitive w/o Bryant. He will not do that next year, but Bryant and Harper will make up for it. "..had to do"? It just seems like his style of play. He's always been a bit of a magic-show infielder and is being watched for that far more this year I think. Dude, he's not being valued more simply because more people are paying attention to him.

I'll take the hit if Liam doesn't want to go.

This feels like a HUGE unspoken thing; how many people actually think Baez: Baseball Freakshow is a realistically sustainable scenario? Outside of the general miracle of him being who is, it's double miraculous he's been able to stay healthy given how banged up his style of play must leave him. People seem super casual about him taking over at SS and that being set for the forseeable future, when that doesn't seem like a sure thing at all. It's crazy the Cubs went from, "LULZ, what are we going to do with all of these baller middle infielders?!?" to, "holy horsefeathers; our MI is the bizarre baseball monster that is Javier Baez and the corpse of Ben Zobrist sometimes," in, what, less than 3 years?

This is a good thread and is the kind of reporting that will net this young go-getter the first of many Pulitzers.

Or they just can’t hit offspeed pitches. Which is what was happening in 2016 and then they tore off a couple games with a ton of runs. It all comes down to tonight. We also need Yelich to be intentionally walked a lot. Maybe it's a matter of the greater good.

Some combo made out of pretty much anyone they would have wanted outside of Bryant. I firmly believe they didn't really try and probably didn't offer anyone worth a damn besides Schwarber. I will indeed harp on this FOREVER.

Maybe this needs to happen. Maybe the bizarre wrongness of a truly dominant Cubs team unsettled something in the fabric of reality, and the ripple of chaos energy is what tipped things in favor of Trump winning. Maybe if the Cubs go back to their hilariously inept ways starting off with an epic collapse, then things can start healing.