badnews

You know what the 2008 Cubs showed me? We sure can kick the crap out of the Pirates, that's what. I like the "playoffs are a crapshoot, the team is fine" contingent. Six straight games now with basically this same squad and they've been obliterated in the playoffs. So let's keep trying with the same ilk. I agree with Art Vandelay. This was the year to do it. I see this team as being possibly like the 2008 Mariners, you've got a team on paper and suddenly it all falls apart.

Wait, it's a crapshoot that Soriano will continue to flail away at outside breaking balls he has no hope of getting to? I don't like the way this team looks for next year. DeRosa's probably had a career year, I don't know if Edmonds is going to be a .930 OPS guy again, Lee was a .750 OPS hitter most of the year, Fukudome is still here, Zambrano doesn't wholly convince me anymore, Rich Harden's velocity hasn't been what it was since his first couple of starts, just because the Cubs pay Kerry Wood $12 million a year doesn't mean he's going to be a $12 million a year reliever... seriously, I could see the 2009 Cubs being like the 2008 Mariners, high hopes, high salaries, low results. I can just imagine the high impact left handed bat being a 37 year old Raul Ibanez who comes at vast trade expense can't play defense worth anything.

This is not going to be a popular post, but Dempster pisses me off. If you're going to shoot off your fat mouth about how the team is going to win the World Series, then guess what? You don't get to crap out and walk as many as you did, and pitch that piss poorly. It angers me when athletes talk the talk but don't walk the walk. He really let the team down. As for the people blaming the fans, the fans were down on the 2005 White Sox when it looked like they were going to crap away a huge lead to the Indians, and the same for the Red Sox vs. the Yankees in 2004. And guess what? When your "ace" pitcher walks the bases loaded and then coughs up a grand slam, that takes a lot of crowds out of it. As for Soriano, yeah, I said it three months ago - he's useless in the postseason. I find it astonishing someone just can't beat some sense into him about laying off the outside breaking pitch. YOU CAN'T REACH IT. YOU'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO REACH IT IN THE POSTSEASON. It's hard to tell who I'm more disgusted with. Soriano will help kick ass against the Reds and the Pirates but he'll never be much help against good teams. He can hit a mistake and that's it.

Colvin has no chance of making the Top 100. Vitters will make the Top 40. Samardzija and Cashner will be in the 70s. That's all I think will make it.

Oh man, you thought the regimes of Robert Mugabe, Islom Karimov, and Kim Jong Il were bad. But the brutal Prior/Wood junta has oppressed Cubs Nation long enough. We finally ran Mark "Generalissimo" Prior out of the nation and he is now hiding out in San Diego where we are trying to bring him to justice by blaring bad 80s rock music into his compound. This is bad enough, but we are still left to suffer under the tyranny of Kerry "El Capitan" Wood. And what sucks is Todd Walker and Kent Mercker still have not been brought to justice and are thought to be hiding in Argentina.

Of course not. There's a couple things I do find irritating concerning Wilken though. One is that people on here made him seem like the sole mastermind of that 2004 Rays draft. But the reality of it seems to be that draft appears to be much more indicative of the Rays philosophy of drafting philosophy than Wilken's. I mean, people made it seem like we were going to be flush with badass high school arms like McGee and Davis and so on and so forth. Then, after Colvin was drafted, he got all defensive and said Well, people I said I was wrong about drafting Alex Rios, and look at Alex Rios, Colvin is the same story, basically. And basically the Cubs passed up Snider because of his "bad body." It seems to be a continuation of overvaluing guys who may sort of have in a sense "five tools" but none of them are any good or add up to anything on the baseball field. One second after the pick was made you knew it was bad and Snider or even Conger should've been picked. This isn't hindsight, this is what was said one second after the pick was made, when all of a sudden everyone was scrambling to find out who the hell this guy was and how far down BA's Baseball Tracker and Top 200 prospects he was. I wouldn't be surprised if the Colvin pick was his own arrogance, trying to once again turn up a Rios and show that he's outsmarting everyone. But no, I would certainly not inflict bodily harm on him.

They emphasize his breaking pitch much more than his fastball, which makes me wonder if this is a case of the trick slider that leads to gaudy K/9 rates in the minors (Jermaine Van Buren, Josh Sharpless, Steve Andrade) but no major league success. Sharpless had a pretty neat looking slider but once you saw it enough it could be adjusted to.

Craig, you're confusing me here. In your first reply to my post you tried to give Colvin's major league numbers a bump from the Juan Encarnacion level I had him pegged at, but in doing so you put him squarely in Andre Ethier territory, which defies credibility. Then you basically said "Fleita is 100% full of crap, but he had good things to say about Colvin." I don't understand why you would even mention that. We've all read so much nonsense about scrubs from this guy it is simply ludicrous. You're almost doing your player a disservice by bringing that up. I feel like people are grasping at straws here. If Colvin was a Brewers prospect wouldn't you consider him a joke? Colvin has essentially repeated a level with a, what , .735 OPS, and we're reaching for Andre Ethier at the plate in the majors? I think it's disingenuous. The reality is, guys like Colvin are like the 17th best prospects in other organizations. I'm not sure why we're even having this discussion. Do Phillies fans sit around and try and prop up Greg Golson? Tyler Colvin was 6th in the entire minor leagues in outs made, 2nd at the AA level. This is like the old game of pretending that Justin Berg's groundball rate makes him anything about Scott Munter at the major league level, or worse. Yeah, Scott Munter is good at getting groundballs but he is simply awful at pitching and Berg is the same way, yet someone keeps posting some quote about "Berg having the 2nd best sinker in organized baseball behind Brandon Webb." I mean get out. Most of the positives in this topic seem like nothing more than wishful thinking.

Coffey vs. Pie hahahahahahahaha okay, that's dead, let's move on. I always thought the way Coffey ran from the bullpen to the mound just to get a beatdown from the hitters was kind of silly.

I think there are some bargains out there to be had. Some enterprising team might want to buy low on Juan Cruz on a multiyear deal and make him their closer. Brian Fuentes will probably cost like 35-40% of what K-Rod will.

John Kruk said he thought Schilling should've won the Cy Young Award in 2004. It's kind of funny that Berthuiame plugs Willie Bloomquist every chance he gets because apparently Bloomquist is related to his brother in law or something. But at least he mostly dropped that "Say hello to my little friend" crap.

Who wants to trade a top tier pitcher for a lardass .831 OPS 1st baseman? I don't see a fit for the Brewers getting good value back for Fielder. Look at who needs a 1b and who has a good pitcher to give up. Maybe the fits are there, but I'm not seeing them.

Would you give him 3/$33m?

I think about the best you can hope for is Juan Encarnacion, which isn't too different from Kotsay or Jacque, in the end we're talking about .750ish OPS guys with middling base stealing results.

Plus I think you have to acknowledge that Fontenot's production would not exist if the Cubs had Roberts. The Chicago Cubs are 3rd in OPS from the aggregate 2nd base position in baseball. Behind Philadelphia, and behind Boston. That takes in DeRosa and Fontenot. It seems insane to blow all your resources to improve a position that is 3rd best in the majors. Cubs' 2b are out OPS-ing Texas Rangers 2b.

Can't we use some other statistic that blatantly favors my side of the argument? Brian Roberts has a WARP3 of 9.1, Mark DeRosa has a WARP3 of 9.0. And that's not counting his big night tonight. Can we not touch on the foolishness of squandering resources just to make a 9.0 WARP3 guy a (snort of derision) supersub? Or mock in an Oscar Wildean fashion the idea that the Brian Roberts trade had to be made so we could, quote "Go for it?"

Marquis is not a whole lot different in quality from Jon Garland, yet Marquis is a pariah and Garland will probably get a 4/42 deal this offseason. Go figure.

Roberts probably means no surprise love-love party for Fontenot. And no trade bait for Harden. Plus VORP isn't everything.

An astute point indeed.

C'mon. I as much as acknowledged I'm just venting over an old debate and by doing so forfeited any moral high ground. But still. "Let's give up Sean Gallagher and Ronny Cedeno and Jose Ceda and Jeff Samardzija and Betty Rubble for Roberts, I mean damn, it's been 100 years so why not?"

Don't worry, it's not 9-1 anymore.

Sorry guys, this was a topic that really got my frustration level up during the offseason. So many people argued *so hard* about how Roberts would be this big upgrade over DeRosa, and the part that always annoyed me was, hey, it was okay, because DeRosa could be a "supersub" and get a number of ABs that was never going to happen. It's like as long as you slapped the "supersub" tag on DeRosa it meant he could somehow get 600 ABs from the bench. And people ran complex mathematical models to show how Roberts was going to be enough of an upgrade to justify giving up 5 players. I probably shouldn't have held onto this for so long, but others can attest that it was one of the most acrimonious debates ever on here. And now I feel 5 years old. My side was right, your Brian Roberts-lovin' side was wrong ha ha ha PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT. Another segment of that debate I hated "Uhhhh it's been 100 years since we wons a World Serues dude lets jsut give them whatever tehy want AND GO FOR IT." Long story short that was obnoxious topic where the Roberts people were certain they were right and I just felt being Nelson from The Simpsons. Ha ha!

I just felt like we all needed to touch base on this issue. Also, I put all those euphemistic uses of the phrase "supersub" by the curb for the trashman to take away.

It seems like a lot of dubious minor leaguers, in the process of grasping for straws, get compared to guys like Torii Hunter, Rocco Baldelli, and Carl Crawford.

He sucks. The light from Travis Snider will not reach Tyler Colvin until another thousand years. The End.