goonys evil twin

If you're trading Williams and Walker you probably have to get at least Lugo and Huff. Remember, this is part salary dump by Tampa. I'm not a huge Williams fan, but the guy has value. He's not stud, but he's young affordable and pretty solid. He's as good a pitcher as Lugo is a SS, plus his age and cost make him more valuable. Walker is as good a middle infielder as Lugo as well. And remember, Williams and Rusch are already penciled in with Wood out. Now you've got to find another guy (Hill?) to take Williams' spot, and if/when Wood does come back you are still probably stuck with Rusch in the rotation, and that's not good.

This is the quote: Note, he said this "is how Baker will", and he gleaned them from the stuff Dusty talked about yesterday, leading up to the convention. The "right now Todd is here" talk is just this guy's rendition of the Cubs typical "he's on the team right now" talk they've used with Corey Patterson and Sammy Sosa. Note he included the rather unnecessary point that we've got 10 weeks before the start of spring training, likely this writers's version of how the Cubs make it clear they still have time to get rid of guys they want to get rid of. Todd Walker will not be the Cubs starting 2nd baseman this year. In the unlikely scenario where he is even on the team by April, he'll be nothing more than a platoon player. The Cubs have made themselves clear here. He's gone. They've been giving the same message they've given on countless others who they've decided to use as scapegoats. They get focused on getting rid of specific guys instead of just making the team better, and they get worse each time they do it.

You do realize not a single NL RF with over 400 PA's hit that minimum mark you set, right? Two guys (Giles & Jenkins) hit over .290, five had an OBP over .350, and one guy (Jenkins) had a SLG over .500. While I agree with you wholeheartedly on Jones (he does suck, and will likely continue sucking) the numbers you set as a minimum for RF are a bit lofty. I know you qualified it with the fact that the other positions are weak, but you stated that it should be even higher because of that. I just don't think those numbers are realistic. In essence you are saying our starting RF should have to produce at a level above all other RF's, as a minimum. Edit: If you lower it to 200 PA's, you add 1 guy to AVG, 4 to OBP, and 3 to SLG. Still no one meets the .290/.350/.500 line. You do realize that I wrote "something like". I never said that he had to have a minimum of a .290 AVG, or .350 OBP or a .500 SLG. If the guy hit .285, or .270, he could still be something like that 850 OPS RF, which is not that difficult to find. If a guy slugs .490, but has the other numbers, he's something like what I'd be looking for. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word minimum. But I did try to phrase it in a way that would express my desire for RF. And it was in response to somebody asking what would make us happy with Jones, and the line he listed 285/315/425, is just abysmal for RF. It's not good for an OF position, but clearly not RF.

I read this article this morning and did not come away with the idea that the answers were actually Baker's. It seemed pretty clear to me that it was the writer giving his impression of what the Q&A might look/sound like. Maybe I need to go back and read it, but I'm pretty sure Dusty has never said that Walker is his started 2B this offseason. It would completely go against everything they've said all offseason.

How can you hate that which you do not know?

I think it's been a pretty fair balance between those picking the Panthers or Bears. This really isn't a "no respect" situation.

I'm thinking Carolina will find a way to score a TD, probably to Smith, and they'll get a big turnover, possibly Rex with a bad throw in his own end, maybe leading to a FG. But I also think the Bears O can drive on their own for a TD and a FG, so that right there is a 10-10 game. The game will come down to whether the Bears D can come up big if/when the Bears O screws up, and whether or not they can create a big turnover of their own, possibly scoring. If all goes well, the Bears win 17-13, if the defense can't make a big play, or the Panthers D scores on its own, they could lose 21-10. One thing I'm hoping is that it doesn't come down to Gould trying a 48+ yard field goal with time expiring to win or tie.

The Cubs are always overpriced, because so many fans want to bet on them the year it finally happens.

RF should be at minimum something like .290/.350/.500, and probably higher than that, given the weakness of the rest of the positions. Jacque Jones sucks. He's been bad for quite some time. He could significantly outperform expectations and still hurt this team by underperforming compared to what a RF and middle of the order guy should be doing. It was a bad signing by Hendry, especially the 3 year part. Jones would have to outperform his career averages by a wide margin every year of his deal for me to say Hendry was right. The Cubs were desperate for a bit bat and they settled on mediocrity, once again.

What holes are left to be filled? The OBP is still lackluster. RF is still a joke, the middle infield is very questionable, and Hendry appears to want to make it even worse. ***And I forgot to mention that the bench really sucks*** Just because you have players who play those positions doesn't mean holes were filled. It means positions were filled, not holes. The Cubs spent so much time and effort, not to mention money and talent, trying to fill the leadoff roll with a stereotypical leadoff man, that they completely ignored the much bigger problem of RF/5th hitter. Jones is a pathetic option for both slots. He hits like a mediocre CF who should be in the 7 or 8 hole, but he plays a position where you need big offense and ideally a 3, 4 or 5 hitter. He's been mediocre his entire career, and, on the wrong side of 30, he's not going to change for the better. A full year of Williams suddenly makes the pitching better? Right now Rusch is likely in the opening day rotation. That's bad. Jerome is a good 5th starter, and an acceptable 3 or 4 on a team with good offense. He's not spectacular, but he'll win games if you can score runs. Unfortunately this team has a run scoring problem, the same problem they've had for years (they don't take walks, so their OBP is low, so their runs scored is low), which will make it hard for Jerome, Maddux and Rusch to win more than they lose. Prior and Zambrano should be pretty good. But Wood is a huge question mark, thanks in no small part to the ignorance of management when they allowed him to keep pitching in meaningless games long after it was determined he needed surgery. Hendry pretty much did everything I'd fear he'd do, and he likely set this very expensive team up to be very average, once again. If all goes right they'll be above average with a shot to contend. But you don't field a $100m payroll just hoping to contend. You have to build a sure fire contender that would be a surprise if it only won 85 games. And you especially don't settle on this mediocrity that Hendry has put together in his 4th offseason. He's not walking into a strange situation. He built the mess that was 2005, and he's done very little to correct it. In my opinion, he did very little to correct it because he saw very little wrong with the flawed team he put together last year, and mistakenly believes that minor upgrades is all it will take. He made that mistake in 2004, 2005 and is in the process of making it in 2006. There's no excuse for this team not to have already had a 95+ win season, and there should be no excuse for them to fail to reach that level this year. Unfortunately Jim's wheelings and dealings have all but guaranteed this won't be a great team.

We're getting off the topic of the thread so I'll just post this last time here. You're way oversimplifying and overgeneralizing my comments and I honestly don't know why since we agree on alot more than you seem to think. I could just as easily oversimplify what you're saying and claim that we should field an offense of all guys who swing for the fence on every pitch because they're all trying to maximixe their production, No you couldn't, because I never said swinging for the fences was a good thing. You did say that just trying to make contact, bunting, moving guys over and hitting the other way were all good things. I don't believe they are all that important in the grand scheme of things. When teams go out of their way to find guys who do those things, they sacrifice real production, ie, your Chicago Cubs. I think all those things you listed are overrated ideals held up by conventional wisdom as ultra-important simply because they harken back to the overly romanticized good ole days when men was men and real hitters didn't accept walks. Now, I'm not accusing you of having this attitude, I'm just saying that the general acceptance of these "little things" as being so important comes from the very same type of thinking that says AVG/HR/RBI is far more important than AVG/OBP/SLG and that all this new fangled stats stuff is garbage. Having the ability to bunt is great, but doing it more than extremely rarely isn't. Being willing and able to hit behind the runner is fine and dandy, but it's not nearly as important as being able to drive that runner in yourself with a hard hit of your own. Simply making contact is an achievement for the average man, but it carries next to no value in major league baseball unless you make solid contact.

His job is to continually make this team better. I don't think this team is any better than it was going into 2004 or 2005. I don't see any reason to give him credit for "going hard after guys", and I don't give him any credit for getting rid of guys that sucked, who he got in the first place even though they already sucked and he gave a raise to even though they sucked. This is still a deeply flawed team that had several glaring weaknesses that have been around for a few years that management refuses to either admit are weaknesses, or address them properly.

Whether or not a guy should do something is meaningless. What they should do is maximize their production. Those "little things" fail most of the time as well. But if a guy is a .290/.320/.410 hitter who bunts a lot and keeps the ks down, he'll get a lot of undo praise, while a guy who is .275/.380/.500 with a lot of ks and no sac bunts will get undo criticism, under your scenario. For most guys, it will negatively affect their game if they purposefully try and ground to the right side, or simpley make contract, on a regular basis. If a .290/.390/.550 hitter with 120 Ks decides he's not going to strike out as much, and he's going to hit it to the right side more often and he's going to just look for contact, it would be easily for him to turn into a .280/.330/.425 hitter with 45 Ks. A lot of guys who manage to simply "make contact" do it by swinging meakly at just about anything the pitcher throws, so, while he doesn't strike out, he does ground out or pop out far too often. And since he's swinging weaker more often, he's not hitting those doubles and homers that are so important. All that stuff sounds great, but it rarely leads to anything meaningful (most big sacrifice teams are really bad offenses that have no other choice - which are typically led by old school managers who refuse to acknowledge new schools of thought). I'd love for all of my hitters to have fantastic bat control and bunting skills. But what I'd love even more is for all my hitters to have above average production or greater for their position and for my team to be a great hitting team in the avg/obp/slg sense of hitting. If it's either or, I'm taking production every time. If it's a combination of the two, I'm leaning heavily on production. If all things are equal, or close to equal, I'll take the guy with the superior "little things", but that is usually not a choice you have the option of taking.

As baseball fans we have to stay cognizant of the fact that nobody does whatever it takes in every situation. Failure is part of the game, and an acceptable part of the game. What matters is the rate at which failure, and therefore success, occurs, and that is measure via stats. And when you have enough of the good stats, your team will win enough games. One guy with ungodly numbers teamed with a bunch of shmoes doesn't work. An entire team of guys with favorable numbers in comparison to their counterparts on other teams will have success.

I agree. And I think it goes to show you that 88/89 wins should not be the goal of a top payroll team like the Cubs. A string of 88/89 win seasons does not equal success, it equates to above averageness. They need 95 win seasons. They need to be in position to withstand strong competition, and compete with the best of the best.

This could be true. Maybe that is Wasserstrom's job, to find the obscure stats that make a guy look good. He was a PR guy before moving into the data department, or whatever the heck it is. But I also think he looks at a guy's stats when thinking about signing him, but does so in a very subjective and not very meaningful manner. For instance, I think when looking for a guy to fill RF, he had his scouts draw up reports for every available veteran RF (except Giles since he was obviously unavailable), then he looked at a list and said, "You know, Jones hit .300 in 2002 and 2003, he's had over 80 RBI a few times, the scouts like his swing, he can catch the ball and run a little, I can afford him. He's my guy." Hendry looks at stats with a glass full, not half full or empty, kind of attitude. If a veteran has done something good in the past, then he's capable of repeating that now, so he's signable. He completely ignores trends, refuses to believe that guys peak around 26/27/28, and never looks past the most basic numbers.

If Andy cared about winning, Hendry and Baker would be gone. But the Trib has very little justification for firing Andy yet. He has done what they hired him to do, which was turn the Cubs from a joke into a team that people took seriously, while staying profitable. For all my complaints about his regime, I will acknowledge that Andy's direction as led the team to at least be in the discussion of potential winners. This team is in position to be in the race for several years. My problem is with Andy's decision that "contending within the division" would be the goal, as opposed to fielding the best team they possibly can. If Andy gives big extensions to Jim and Dusty, but the team collapses, then I could see the Trib thinking about cuts, because attendance and ratings will fall, and they will be on the hook for millions to guys they probably want to get rid of. But these people aren't baseball savants, they don't spend the amount of time and effort a lot of others do dissecting every aspect of the team. Upper management types don't micromanage in successful companies. They aren't going to say "Jacque Jones is a terrible option for RF, therefore I'm going to get rid of everybody". They trust their baseball people to get the job done, and their baseball people think the team is going in the right direction. It's the baseball people who have screwed up this team for so long.

goony, how can you say that? pittsburgh fumbled FOUR times. guess how many times we recovered the ball? zero. i was literally screaming at the television at this point, jumping up and down. I was mostly talking about INTs. But those 4 fumbles that were not recovered also shows that this wasn't a case of the Bears getting pushed around because of weather, rather that the Bears didn't capitalize on their chances (whether that was a tackle at the line or a fumble not recovered) and lost due to the things they are susceptible to in every game, regardless of weather.

The problem is he does look at statistics, but they are the wrong ones. He lumps all stat heads together when he dismisses numbers the way he does, whether it's somebody who has studied the game and numbers, put forth a solid unbiased analysis of the data or a guy who says "he only hit .250 with 60 RBI last year, he stinks."

Saying guys are "potential 100 RBI guys" makes it sound like driving in an RBI is some sort of skill he's working on. Anybody who doesn't suck that hits 4th or 5th for a full season on a decent team should be able to flirt with 100 RBI. It's not any sort of accomplishment to drive in 90 from the 5 hole if you're playing all, or the vast majority of the season. Jones could have a bad year and still drive in 80+ from the 5 hole, and hurt the team due to their relative underperformance against the league.

I don't have a problem with players predicting what they are going to do in the season. I want the guy to be confident in his ability. And he's at a press conference introducing him to the local media, and the fans. It's inevitable that the discussion of what his numbers will look like will come up. I do have a problem with a GM who says stuff like "he's going to give us a .300, 25 HR, 90 RBI season. First off, that insinuates that you base your offseason moves on what kind of AVG/HR/RBI line the guy will give you and exposes your potential ignorance of the more telling numbers. And secondly, it usually never comes true, and therefore acts as a sort of built in excuse for when the team loses. What happens if that players hits .260/18/76, and the team fails? Well, you can talk about how you and your scouts were expecting more out of player X and he failed to live up to expectations, when in fact, your expectations were out of whack. You have to build teams expecting average numbers out of your guys, not career highs.

Let me also add that I like Rusch. Goony and I have argued about Rusch plenty of times. I don't like what he's making and I don't like that he's blocking the prospects. Of course, some of those prospects are gone now, so Rusch is more needed now anyway. But, I am more in agreement these day with Goony that this probably wasn't one of the better moves this offseason. My apologies if I'm mis-speaking (sp?) on Goony's behalf. Whether or not some other team was dumb enough to pay Tomko what he got has no bearing on how the Cubs should have treated the Rusch situation. The bottom line is he's not good. He might give you 2 very good starts a year, with 5-8 decent ones. The rest of the time he sucks. An inconsistent unrproven kid with upside could easily give you that for the minimum. Rusch would be valuable to a team with no AAA or AA pitchers capable of throwing a few games. His role is much better suited for a guy you can stash in AAA half the year, as opposed to a guy with a guaranteed contract and full-time roster spot. He's exactly not what this team needed in the pitching staff. They have lots of questionable arms who may or may not be any good. What they needed was a good arm, and he doesn't have it. But his salary makes it more difficult to afford one.

Do they refuse to believe Lee is the real or that Lee is going to repeat his 2005 numbers? I think he's the real deal, whatever that means, but I don't think he's going to repeat 2005. And I believe he and Aramis will be neck and neck for best production in 2006.

The funny thing is that Hendry and other Jones supporters seem to think that people who don't like the signing are basing it entirely off of his 2005 season, when in fact, most are looking at his entire career to theorize why he's such a bad option for the Cubs.

If he hits behind Lee and Ramirez, he would have to be completely incompetent not to get 80 RBI. 80-90 RBI don't tell you a darn thing. Too bad all the conventional wisdom types can't see that. His RBI total depends on where he bats and what his teammates do. 90 RBI out of the 5 spot would have put you 19th in all of baseball, 80 would have been 28th. An above average lineup has to be getting 95 RBI there, and a good one is going to be over 100. For the record, Jones has only 2 seasons with an RBI total over 80. I'm guessing if Dusty plays him every day, or close to every day, he'll luck into 80 with Lee and Ramirez in front of him. But that's hardly an accomplishment.