goonys evil twin

Brady was taken out of a game late when the outcome was already determined and after he was getting beaten up. Grossman doesn't need to sit and clear his head. He needs to play well and keep playing, or be replaced.

another tangential effect of this and the Lilly deal is it allows the Cubs to trade away some minor league pitching without worrying about the depth chart. A trade or two before April is inevitable. Good point. Nice issue spotting counselor. I've been wondering if Hendry is going to surprise everybody with a trade of Rich Hill at his high point. You might be able to get a serious offensive upgrade if you're willing to part with him in a package. This is when I'd try and overwhelm Florida with all the prospects they want for Cabrera, or you offer to restock the Yankees farm team with just about anybody for ARod. The Cubs aren't going to win many 2-1 games with this staff, they need to rack up the runs. The Cubs are going to have to play a rope a dope game this season, lulling the opponent to sleep with the incredibly boring pitching staff. 3/20 doesn't reak of terrible. Marquis does have a chance to have a good year, and if he does, and some internal options figure things out, he'd make great trade bait next season. Well, here's to Larry working some magic on the guy and getting something out of Marquis.

What do you think moneyball is? It's about getting value out of a player, it's not about getting a specific type of player.

Everybody loves the Jets, and it only grew after the Bears beat them 10-0 in their own building. The media wrote that game up like a Jets win and a Grossman disaster. That's true-the Jets love has been slowly growing throughout the season-if they win a couple more games, it could be in full swing by playoff time. And by the way, I believe Simmons' Colts treatment is mostly about Manning, and a jealousy that some people actually like Manning over Brady. He acts the same way with ARod.

Yeah, but we're talking about Marquis here, so it could be 200 terrible innings. I've said a lot that I don't care about overpaying for good players, the problem is overpaying garbage, which is Hendry's weakness.

Everybody loves the Jets, and it only grew after the Bears beat them 10-0 in their own building. The media wrote that game up like a Jets win and a Grossman disaster.

As unneeded a stress as fretting over anything anybody involved with the team does before they do it. We're fans, we care what happens, a lot of us are going to fret. It's not a matter of choosing not to. If the roster of the Cubs matters to you, you're going to think about the ramifications of any move and interpret them with your own biases. What you are saying sounds very close to what a lot of people say about "He's the GM, I'll trust him to make the right moves and I'll just cheer the team." That is fine for those people who can do it. But it's not really possible for the people who fret as much as you have to in order to get involved in the discussions that take place on this site.

Despite the craziness, this issue should matter to fans. Too many ridiculous deals leads to an unhealthy situation down the road (see the Orioles). Unless we are guaranteed that payroll will continue to rise steadily and be far higher than most teams, we should hope the Cubs avoid the bad deals. A bad highly paid player can do two things to hurt the team: A) He can play poorly and keep getting playing time either because the manager feels he should player the expensive guy or the GM forces the manager to play the guy. B) He could force the team to not be able to improve in other areas by tying up money. You should mind if this is a 3/30m or 1/2.5m type deal.

There would be nothing fantastic about it. It might be enough to win the division (far from a lock), but that's not really much of an accomplishment.

Where do you get the idea that they will only come when he feels like taking them? I'm fine with him getting part-time duty. He'd be the best part-time duty player the Cubs have had in quite a while.

What? Scouts like to find needles in haystacks. GM's have to field a roster of 25 competent major league baseball players, which involves intense negotiations, cost/benefit analysis and other skills a scout does not necessarily have. A scouting background could be nice, but it's no requirement, and a lifetime scout would probably not be a great GM.

If you were to follow the Sports Guys betting ideas long enough, you'd lose a ton of money. It's fine to question Grossman, but you can't then place Dallas over them and use Romo as good support, since he has not played any better, or against any better competition, than the Grossman started out the season. Rex looked so much better in the Meadowlands than Romo looked.

I'm not sure you can say Jocketty is a flat-out moneyball guy, but he sure does seem to know how to get good players at little cost (Spiezio, Carp, Kennedy, etc.), which was the entire idea behind Moneyball. Not to mention Williams used the money earmarked for Ordonez and Lee to get some fairly similar (or better) producers at lesser cost. He might not be a walk-o-phile, but he seems to like to run a fairly efficient operation, and he isn't satisfied with a ho-hum offense that depends on hitting with RISP.

That's a good point. He'd probably end up with the Giants as rotoworld was speculating that he might be too expensive for the Padres. Still, if he was an option is he worth pursuing? I would say no. It was one thing when he was a loud mouth fatty fat fat who got the job done. Recently he's been either mediocre or absent. I'd steer clear.

I agree with the sentiment of your post, but I don't like the "2 months left" train of thought. It seems like every offseason we hear about how much more time Hendry has left, and he never finishes the job. I'd say he only has maybe a month before the real work has to be done. I don't think you can be waiting around to late January to be thinking of making extremely important moves. He hasn't been waiting around though, goons. He's been driving himself into the ground working. I'm not saying he is waiting around. I'm just saying he really doesn't have 2 months left. He's got to make this team better in the next month, or this is pretty much what we'll have.

I agree with the sentiment of your post, but I don't like the "2 months left" train of thought. It seems like every offseason we hear about how much more time Hendry has left, and he never finishes the job. I'd say he only has maybe a month before the real work has to be done. I don't think you can be waiting around to late January to be thinking of making extremely important moves.

What? I'm attacking the style in which Hendry and Hughes go about constructing a baseball team. Stuff like "we did a good job getting guys on base because we had a good average" and all that nonsense. If they posted here, I would right about what a terrible job they did, that's not attacking them, that's attacking their pathetic work as personel decision makers of the Chicago Cubs. Get away with my crap?

You can know everything there is to know about designing, buildind and maintaining an automobile, and still run a car company into the ground.

I'm denigtrating them based on the results. Everybody in baseball is a "good baseball man". There doesn't seem to be much recognition in the community that some of these guys have to be bad at their job, in comparison to others, because this is a competitive win or lose environment. This isn't a case of 3 fast food restaurants competing with 3 distinctly different markets, where everybody can come out winners because the ultimate goal is to make money. They can all make money. And baseball men can all find baseball players. But what counts is wins and losses. And while it's possible to win the Hughes/Hendry way, it's quite difficult. These guys have their fingerprints all over the Cubs, and the Cubs suck. Guys like Hughes and Hendry are good for scouting, they are not good for management decisions. They are good for advicing, then enacting. They know what they know, and they may well it know. But they are terrible and putting the whole thing together and creating a smooth running efficient and effective machine. Not every good soldier is meant to be an officer. Not every good employee is mean to be boss. Not every good writer can become an effective publisher. The Cubs are, by far, the most inefficiently run organization in the league. They still have a chance to succeed, based solely on the economies of scale. The size of their revenues keep them afloat in a market where they would otherwise not be able to compete. The failings are because of the way these men think about the game of baseball.

# of games played in that duration: Huff: 828 Drew: 707 Just sayin. Sure, of course. I'm just answering the question as to how this writer is saying Huff was more productive than Drew the past 5 years. Hitting metrics aren't the only way to measure things. And let's not discredit Huff for staying healthy. There's a difference between being more productive and blowing somebody away. It's not like Huff has been a rock of stability. He's missed time, and he's disappeared even when playing.

I wouldn't go that far.

The team to me, right now, looks a lot like last year's team, plus Soriano. That's an improvement. But it's not much. There's room for health related improvement as well. But I wasn't very optimistic about the 2006 team on opening day (pre Lee injury), and I'm not a whole lot more optimistic about the 2007 team, right now. I believe this team has to figure out a way to field either a great rotation, or great lineup (if not both - and at this price why not?). And they aren't there yet. A completely healthy Miller, Prior and Wood changes that in an instant. But we aren't in a position to even think that's possible. Last year's team was awful. A fully healthy Lee probably doesn't even mean .500, and might have been no better than a 75 win team. I'm really not going to get into win total predictions at this time. But I think this team has to rely on a lot of breaks, both internal (health, guys not reverting/declining) and external (the competition has to be weak) for significant success right now. It's better, but better isn't good enough, not even close. Hendry made his bed. I'm not going to be happy with him improving this team, because he made it bad in the first place. He needs to make this a great team to deserve any sort of credit.

If the Cubs show no interest in Huff as that LH OF bat, then I have to believe Lou doesn't like him and told Hendry so. He wasn't good in Lou's last TB year.

Do you mean a LH 4th OF?

that can't possibly be true. If so I'm not rooting for the Cubs this year. I don't see why it can't possibly be true. The Cubs are throwing money around to undeserving players, and they've done it for a very long time. I hope it's not true, and I assume, for now, that it's not. But it certainly could be.