goonys evil twin

What are we waiting for?! I think we're waiting on Bochy. My guess is that Bochy is Hendry's primary target and Girardi is the fallback option. I think he's waiting on the Yankees/Piniella situation as well as Bochy. Just like everything else, Hendry is reactive to every other team's moves. He never goes out and gets people, he waits for them to come to him. That's simply inaccurate. He certainly missed on Furcal and Beltran. But there are two players I can think of off the top of my head that he went out and got and they performed very well for the Cubs. How is that inaccurate? He waited for just about everybody to become available. Some might say he went hard after Barrett, but it took another GM to act as broker to actually get something done. He had guys like Ramirez and Lee fall in his lap after other teams were cutting costs. He's gone after a couple small time role players, like middle relievers. But those guys don't make teams win. He's had plenty of opportunity to actually go out and make this team different, but he's been timid, cautious and much to willing to accept mediocrity, and hand-me-downs.

So he had Cubs and Dodgers votes, seperately? Anybody who voted for him with the Cubs had nothing to base it on, and were almost definitely influenced by all the talk of him driving in runs with his glove. It's an opinion poll. More in depth, but no more valuable than your typical poll on espn.com.

If the goal is to understand who the generic fan likes, then I guess we can get a better understanding. Anything else? I don't think so.

Are you just going to continue pretending 2005 didn't happen? I'd like to know if this conversation is going to remain pointless.

Hendry was enamored with simply save totals when he went after Alf. Dempster has 57 saves the past two years with a terrible team that didn't give him many opportunities. His ERA is in the 3's, his OPS against is sub 700, his k/9 is about 8.5. He's not a worthless reliever. You can dig up peripherals and make a case that he has value as a middle reliever, but unfortunately he makes closer money, and I very much doubt he could be sold as an elite middle reliever. Non-elite middle relievers aren't worth much. As a closer he's a very hard sell because people who want a proven closer don't want to hear about peripherals. They want save percentage. Save totals trump save % for many people. In fact, I never ever hear anybody ever talk about save % when discussing closers. Just like they don't talk about win/loss for pitchers, they talk about win totals.

I thought you said "Sounds like pessimism has been granted!" What if Towers wants Hill or another pitcher like that for Boche? If Hendry considers that he needs to be relieved of his duties immediately.

Yes they change. Your preconceived notions are influenced by every new bit of information processed. What you felt about ARod going into 2005 was probably not the same as what you felt going into 2006. It seems to me like the most likely outcome is each team's votes will be influenced mostly by their own fans. And depending on how fans feel about a player, that will affect them. I just don't see the point in asking fans to fill out these somewhat vague categories. Derek Jeter is considered by most Yankees fans to be a "great" defensive shortstop. He's considered by most everybody else to be nothing more than average. He's listed as the best defensive player on the Yankees though I looked at it. I just don't see the point. Unless of course the point is just to measure fan bias or something. There's really nothing to analyze. It's not objective data. Take the Izturis data. Are you going to tell me you can get any sort of realistic assessment of his defense. People were told he "drives in runs with his glove" and they were influenced by such hyperbole. You can instruct people all you want to just base it on their eyes and block out all other data, but it's unrealistic. Izturis is rated as the best defensive player on the Cubs, yet he barely logged any innings at all this year. You had 10 ballots for Freddie Bynum, listed as a better LF than Matt Murton, even though most of his time was logged at 2B.

Pierre's arm was so bad that my guess is that Cub fans consider his entire defense deficient based on the poor arm. I'd agree on this, I think too many people were biased by Pierre's awful arm that they downgraded him on everything(quite possibly subconsciously) Personally I had him above average in the fielding categories, but man that arm is weak. I'm inclined to think the same thing about Jacque Jones, whose range I was pretty impressed with. Look at the categories though. Instinct? Pierre sucks at that. First step? I think that goes along with instinct, and is pretty clearly not good. Speed? Yeah, very good. Hands, as in catching the ball? Not sure how to rate that. Release? Again, awful, he doens't position himself well to get off strong throws. And then of course the throwing strength and accuracy are both bad. Out of all that, the only thing he does well is use speed to get places, but he's bad before and after that speed is useful.

Promoting within. When's the last time the Cubs did that ? It makes sense and I think Listach has a good chance to be added as the 1st base coach next season. They promoted Speier from within to the staff. They promoted Hendry to GM from personel guy. They just promoted McDonough. And they've promoted lots of "interim managers" from within.

I agree it's nitpicking 100%. I know he's not a speed player but some of the best baserunners I have ever seen haven't been speed players. They've been faster than Aramis.

That is an odd desire to have for a guy. Especially since it's not a very risky play, for health and baseball reasons. The Cubs already play aggressive ball and it kills them. I'd rather they be less aggressive on the bases, where they simply run into too many outs. There's dumb aggressive and smart aggresive....I'm of the smart variety. Yeah, it's nice to talk about it, but it's much harder to impliment, especially with slow guys. This nit-picking (Aramis doesn't leg out enough triples?) is baffling, and leads nowhere. I don't think much of tangotiger's poll of fans about defense, but somebody in there wrote something that made a lot of sense, about the need to stop focusing on every last negative, and appreciating the good. Aramis is a great 3rd baseman. You will have to work really hard to get a better one, and even harder to get that player as well as signficantly improve the team from what it already is. I understand the romantic notion of every player taking the extra base whenever possible. But it's absurd to expect it, or criticize a player on your team for not doing it, when all you are going to get from a potential replacement is more of the same. It's like complaining about guys who strikeout too much even though they produce. Sure, the ideal player never strikes out, but ideal is unrealistic.

Hendry was enamored with simply save totals when he went after Alf. Dempster has 57 saves the past two years with a terrible team that didn't give him many opportunities. His ERA is in the 3's, his OPS against is sub 700, his k/9 is about 8.5. He's not a worthless reliever.

Hmmmm, highly productive player headed to the HOF or old manager with a checkered past? How could a team possibly consider making a decision like that based on whether or not they could convince Lou Piniela to manage them.

I don't know. The overall feeling of calming down after the initial blowup might make it less likely. One thing I think you have to do is pounce on Yankee hysteria early.

Perhaps you should spend more time looking at the results. Start with ARod, and see how he did in 2005 and 2006. Then, go to Andruw Jones and Torii Hunter. After you've spent 10-20 minutes looking at the results, please post your informed opinion. Is it not an opinion poll? Hasn't it been shown time and time again that fan's opinions are heavily influenced by preconceived notions*? * and bias

Big head

I don't understand the point of this thing. It seems to me to just be a poll of preconceived notions.

That is an odd desire to have for a guy. Especially since it's a very risky play, for health and baseball reasons. The Cubs already play aggressive ball and it kills them. I'd rather they be less aggressive on the bases, where they simply run into too many outs.

How is first base our most important position? Remember, Ramirez has outproduced Lee in 2 of the 3 years they have been teammates. DLee might retake that lead next season, but you never know.

Maybe a contender that doesn't have Mariano Rivera closing? Todd freaking Jones is a playoff closer. If he can do it, Dempster can.

3/21 is no where close to fair. It's a horrible contract. He's a below average producer that would be getting paid significantly more than the average player. That's called inefficient use of resources, and exactly why Hendry hasn't built a consistent winner.

I don't see the Cubs trading Lee. Talk of a Sammy trade was different, because there was lots of negative talk about Sammy, and he was approaching free agency. In this case, Derrek is signed through 2010, has a no-trade clause, and more importantly, "nobody doesn't like Derrek Lee." From a baseball standpoint it could be a smart thing, I just don't see how they pull it off, without getting ugly. You'd have to convince him to accept a deal, and the Cubs way of doing that is apparantly to bad mouth a guy, and/or suck until the guy wants out.

16-0 without a SB would be remembered much more bitterly than 15-1 with a SB. 16-0 without a SB would not be all that special.

He's on the roster but he might pitch one or two games toward the end of the season as ST approaches. No need to worry. Big stars come and go as they please in these leagues. The need to worry is based on the idea that Zambrano would probably want to pitch/participate more than most stars.

There is a lot of doubt that he'd want to go to the west coast, and be that much further from Miami. Chicago is about the same distance as NY.