goonys evil twin

This Cubs team is horrible. Hendry put it together. The title of this thread is about "getting it". Any use of that phrase on my part is strictly trying to play along with that line. There's not one way to win baseball games, nor is there one way to field a team. But Hendry failed to put together a winner, and he did so with a top 5 payroll. By the end of this season, Jim's 3 years will average to about 85 wins per year, not impressive, not acceptable. Why don't you just get over your hatred for me and have an actual discussion. I don't know why you insist on getting so emotional and personal in this debate. My only concern in this discussion is what the score of the Cubs game is every day, what the record of the team is at the end of the season, and how far they go in the playoffs. I'm really not interested in the personal jabs, insults and other misc. points.

Todd was a seemingly happy Cub before Hutchinson got here. I don't think that makes a big difference, and they would have to get significant value to trade a guy who is that productive and that affordable next season. They have to get more than the scrub pitching prospects they've gotten so far. And since you can't get anybody's good 40 man roster people at this point, there's really no benefit in dealing Walker.

There is a possibility for a logical move, but you'd have to get serious difference makers to justify. Guys like Kotsay just wouldn't cut it.

It wasn't hard to root for Horny on the Red Sox, but it will be impossible to do so with the Yankees.

GMs are supposed to plan for setbacks. Hendry has not. Anybody who thinks Maddux is underperforming expectations just doesn't understand much about history. Maddux was bound to get worse. He wasn't all that good last year. He won 15, so the Barry Rozners of the world said all was well and Maddux will win 15 again. But his peripherals were not impressive, and the likelihood of further decline was rather obvious. Leicester? Leicester isn't any good. He was never very good in the minors. He threw a couple decent innings in thet majors, but that was all. It didn't take a clairvoyant to think control issues would doom him. Same with Welly. Mitre was never great, he could have been an adequate 5th starter, if given the job, but the Cubs foolishly thought they could put a sinkerball pitcher who gets hammered when he overthrows into the bullpen. If the guy is to be any good, he has to be given time to develop as a starter, you can't expect him to come into the rotation and be consistently very good. Relying on Hollandsworth/Dubois, Patterson and Burnitz for your outfield was predictably disastrous. In fact, I did predict it, as did many other fans. It was negligent. Wood was hurt last year, he was hurt this spring, was it really hard to predict he wouldn't be great this year? Remlinger is a joke. I never said Hendry is 100% at fault. The blame is spread. In fact I've defended Hendry is some circles from those who want to defend Dusty by saying Jim's players failed. But that doesn't take away the fact that Hendry has failed. He's got a top 5 payroll and his 3 years can be summed up as mediocre. Mediocrity in sports is failure. The goal is to win, not just field a team that's good enough to compete on most days.

What else do you judge a GM on other than the success of the team he put together? Am I supposed to praise Hendry for putting together a team with a good batting average (ignoring the lack of OBP)? Should I get excited that he managed to once again field a pitching staff that will lead the league in K's? I am very willing, and very able to make a solid argument about how poorly this team was put together, and how Hendry has failed. I've done it for 3 years on this board. The results speak for themselves. The only way to justify defending Hendry's moves is by ignoring results and living in fairy tale land.

It's quite simple really. A pitcher can only pitch. Everybody else fields and hits. A pitcher cannot determine whether the team wins or loses, unless he throws a shutout and hits a homerun. But that's kind of a ridiculous request to make. The GM though actually influences every aspect of the team. He decides who will be pitching, who will be hitting and who will be fielding, not to mention, who will be managing. Hendry has the responsibility for the record because it is his responsibility to create the entire team. The pitcher only has the responsibility of pitching. I find it quite unbelievable that you can't see the difference.

It seems you measure Hendry's value differently some others. I don't look at this season and blame Hendry. He assembled a team that should have made the playoffs. Number of wins is a reflection on the manager more than the general manager. I measure Hendry's worth in value of deals. Or maybe you are the one who measures it differently. Wins and losses are the only things that matter. How can you possibly measure the value of a deal, if collectively, all those deals fail to produce more wins? I don't see how a manager can be held accountable for the record, but not the GM. Managers don't win games. They can lose some, and Dusty has lost a few on his own with his silliness. Players win the games, and the GM assembles the players. With a top 5 payroll the past 3 years, Hendry simply has not assembled a good enough team. There is no justification for this team not averaging more than 90 wins per year the past three years. Some say 2003 was overachieving, but there was nothing overly impressive or surprising about 88 wins. It was only the failures of the rivals that allowed 88 wins to be meaningful. 88 was nothing to get giddy over. It was an acceptable progression. But last year's team should have been 92-95 wins easily. Dusty hurt the team's chances, but the team still came up short. And this year there was no justification for the giant step back. This entire organization's focus has been in the wrong spot. Hendry has to take blame, Dusty gets blamed, but he deflects it like he typically does. Hendry has actually stepped up and accepted blame, fans shouldn't feel sorry for him and stop assigning blame to him just because he's the one with the guts to accept it.

No one? Collectively, the team is worse than it was. 88, 89 and now we'll be lucky to see 80 wins. That is not improving the team.

I hate that silly line of reasoning. Tim Krzikstan said something to the effect of "Pujols has to win the MVP this year because he didn't the past couple years." That's as insane as Joe Morgan saying Roger Clemens has pitched better than anybody in baseball but he shouldn't win the Cy because his teammates don't score enough runs for him. It's not a lifetime achievement award. If you want to give it to Pujols you are more than justified in doing so, but don't make up silly stuff like that voters.

I don't get the lack of support for Cedeno. He's younger than Murton and the same age as Patterson, and he's performed extremely well playing a major need position at the highest level.

8/14/05 Recalled RHP Todd Wellemeyer from Triple-A Iowa and optioned LHP John Koronka to Iowa. In the never ending desire to keep the 12 man staff intact, they called up Welly right before the Houston series. He pitching on 8/15 and hasn't thrown first. But they can't operate as a team without that 7th reliever.

But Dusty had enormous input into the makeup of this team, he has since coming here. Hendry leaves a lot to be desired as a GM, but that doesn't give Baker a free pass.

When Nomar was debating going back on the DL, they called up Cedeno in advance in case they made the move. They knew after Saturday that Wood was going down soon, there's no justification not to have an arm ready to fill in.

The Cubs website says surgery will be Wednesday. When they say "shut down tomorrow" does that mean he's active tonight?

What team did Hendry inherit though? The talent is definately not worse than what is was when he took over, even if the results are not the best. If your criteria for a quality GM is that every move has to brilliant and work out - then good luck. There is no reason to think that the team is 2 or 3 quality offseason moves from contention again. I for one won't siphon off frustration from Dusty to Hendry, because I don't think it is justified. Is there any reason to believe Hendry can pull off those deals? I don't think there's any value in judging a GM's worth by saying whether a specific trade or signing was good, bad, or not his fault. The GM's job is to make the team as good as it can be. The Cubs are a $100 million joke of a ballclub. There are many reasons for that, but Jim has to take part of the hit. Hendry inherited a pretty fantastic situation. There were a lot of mediocre veterans, but the young talent was tremendous. Now, I give Jim credit for amassing much of that young talent, but that was his doing as the head of the minor leagues. What I'm critical of is his work as GM. He became GM just as this team was poised for greatness. The payroll kept going up and up in a time when most other team's payrolls were declining (only Boston and NYY kept going up, Atlanta was cutting hard, the Mets were stagnant during an ownership changeover). He was given a top 5 payroll to build a team, and he had loads of young cheap talent with which to work. And the results speak for themselves. 88 and 89 win seasons, followed by disaster. The team hasn't come close to greatness, and they appear very far from reaching that goal. Jim's biggest problem may be that he is far too focused on talent alone, and pays very little attention to production. He loves his former 1st round picks, ROY winners and toolsy athletes, but you can't win with just talent, you need good productive baseball players. Jim has done a terrible job filling this team with good productive baseball players.

True, but I'm not sure we can realistically talk about putting together a lineup as solid as I would want it to be.

I am not concerned with the lack of power. I'd just like to see some decent production. If he's a .285/.375/.450 hitter, he would be a great value. He doesn't need to knock 40 HR to help the team. Yeah, certainly you'd prefer bigger numbers out of your corner OF. But there's no such thing as an ideal lineup. You have to mix and match. Assuming you can get some production out of the other 2 OF spots, you could easily live with less power in LF (if he's getting on base). A .165 IsoP would be quite a jump considering that he hasn't topped .157 at any minor league level. He'll need to hit .300+ and walk more than he has this year to put up a .800+ OPS. Yeah, I knew I was pushing it by putting up those random stats. I can't find his 2005 numbers since BA inexplicably removes a guy completely after a call-up. Regardless, you don't necessarily need a 800+ OPS, depending on what you get from others spots. Hendry's biggest failure this year was not "settling" on Dubois/Hollandsworth in LF, it was settling on those guys in LF when all he had in RF was Burnitz. I would be fine with Murton putting up .285/.365/.430 in LF if most of the rest of the lineup was solid. That's the point in going with some of these young guys, so you can afford to go big elsewhere. There's no point in paying a veteran millions to put up mediocre numbers.

Alfonseca was never top quality. He was crap. Florida was trying to pawn his fat out of shape overpaid butt off on people. His 45 save season was a fluke, and was done without very impressive peripherals. Hendry traded for an injured SS to fill a need. It wouldn't take much thought to think Nomar could possibly still be injured. I haven't seen any proof that Hendry "gets it'. He certainly hasn't done a good job putting together a team, and it could be argued he's done a horrible team, seeing as how the team is now worse than what it was when he took over.

I am not concerned with the lack of power. I'd just like to see some decent production. If he's a .285/.375/.450 hitter, he would be a great value. He doesn't need to knock 40 HR to help the team. Yeah, certainly you'd prefer bigger numbers out of your corner OF. But there's no such thing as an ideal lineup. You have to mix and match. Assuming you can get some production out of the other 2 OF spots, you could easily live with less power in LF (if he's getting on base).

There's really no point in talking those obscure specific situations when thinking about how to structure a team. Yeah, Furcal can steal. Everybody knows that, but how often will you be down by 1 late with Furcal on base? The key is getting on base in the first place, and Furcal isn't particularly good at that job. Instead of worrying about specific instances when somebody like Furcal is preferable to somebody like Walker, you have to think of the players' production as a whole. Furcal would have to provide $8-10m worth of production above and beyond Cedeno to justify signing him, and you would have to find equivalent production from the other positions where that money will not be going to. As things stand now, it appears the Cubs only have two cheap internal options for next season, Cedeno and Murton. They have to fill holes at all 3 OF spots, SS and possibly 2B. If they don't use Cedeno, then that's another spot that has to be filled externally, which is always more costly.

Would you really rather build a team around which veteran is a worse option against righties?

The Cubs won 90 games in 1998, 88 in 2001, 88 in 2003 and 89 in 2004. They'll be lucky to win 80 this year. They've already regressed back to the pre-2003 performances, and they did it by sticking with the theory of relying on "proven veterans" over "untested prospects". Did you read the rest of my post? It's one thing to play "untested prospects", but you need prospects that are any good in the first place. The Cubs don't have all that many that are close enough to Chicago to warrant such a drastic overhaul to get them on the team. They can't go all young, but there are plenty of spots to fit guys like Fontenot (backup 3b/2b), Theriot (utility/ss), Bacon (pr/backup OF), (Kelton backup of/1b/emergency 3b), Murton (starting corner OF or backup OF if they sign some studs), Sing (backup 1b/of), Greenberg (backup of) and not to mention all the possible pitching candidates. There's nothing wrong with going with some guys like that instead of going back to the well again to overspend on crappy veterans. I just have a big problem with equating "giving up" with "going young" it's a bogus line of reasoning.

The Cubs won 90 games in 1998, 88 in 2001, 88 in 2003 and 89 in 2004. They'll be lucky to win 80 this year. They've already regressed back to the pre-2003 performances, and they did it by sticking with the theory of relying on "proven veterans" over "untested prospects".

That's only because Dusty put him in positions where he could succeed against lefties.