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Thankfully Randy Johnson is not quite Randy Johnson anymore. Lee and Ramirez have had 39 official at-bats against Johnson. In those at-bats, they've struck out in 25 of them. Johnson's still a high K guy, but he's much more hittable than he's used to be. And the biggest problem for him now is that he gives up a ton of HR's. I know the Cubs won't do this, but this is one day I'd like to see Edmonds start. He has had decent success against Johnson during his career (of course, neither are the same players anymore). Since I don't really see Cedeno hitting Randy well, I'd be fine with Edmonds in center, Johnson in left, and DeRosa at 2nd.

The Redskins trade for Jason Taylor. I guess if none of your players ever develop to be stars, and you trade all of your draft picks away, you can still afford high priced players even after the first 30 million of them. The Dolphins got what they wanted all along. A second this year and a 6th the year after that. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3497625

If we're going to throw out Soto, we have to throw out Ankiel as well. Personally, I don't think either of them should be thrown out. They both developed quite a bit in a short amount of time, and became much better players than they were expected to be. To be honest IMO, Soto was much more of a surprise than Ankiel overall. Ankiel always had his prodigious power to fall back on, and was just a manner of continuing to slide up that OBP for him to become an impact player. His numbers have continued to slowly slide up as he continues to develop. The surprise came that he was somehow able to move his OBP up as he transitioned to the MLB level. Soto's pluses were defense and walks. His average and power were both low until he suddenly burst out. He really hadn't shown that much development that would even lead you to believe that a sudden breakout was possible. It was a wonderful unexpected surprise. Now, for the Cardinals team, I would say there are more surprises overall. Part of that is simply due to how they operate though. They love to do these little risk pick ups, give them PT, and see what happens. The Cubs have started to do that more, and when you do that enough you're going to have some diamonds come out (for the Cubs, that's the Johnson/Edmonds platoon). The Cardinals have had some hits and misses, but when they hit they stick around for quite a while, so it seems like they hit more than they do. For example, turning it around, do you think the average Cardinals fan is going to think..look at Pagan and Monroe. The Cubs struggle with getting guys off the trash heap. Probably not IMO. They're not going to remember those guys at all, because they don't follow this team everyday. They'll remember guys like Edmonds/Johnson though who help win a game over their team, which gives them the illusion that the Cubs organization is better at getting lucky with talent than what is actually there. The same is true the other way.

It might have been your initial reaction before seeing the replay, so I'm sorry if it was. But I didn't see anything wrong with what Theriot did there. He threw it to the only base he possibly had a play at, and where his teammate was pointing.

Samardizja is starting to get the sinker working along with the strikeouts. The last 4 in play outs have been ground balls. 5 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 8 K's, 67 pitches, 4 GO-3 FO

Samardzija walks the pitcher, but that's all the damage in the 3rd as he strikes out 2 more: 3 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 6 K, 46 pitches, 0 GO-3 FO

Samardzija through 2: 2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 0 BB, 4 K, 0 GO-2 FO

No way you release him. The Cubs have a decent shot at getting a compensation pick at the end of the year for Howry, and that's lost if they release him. A or B? My guess is a B. Which is a good thing. Nobody would sign him and give up their first rounder. But if he's a B, teams will feel free to sign him before the deadline because it's not their pick that's going to the other team. Good point. I wonder if a desperate team with little or no pen would make a gamble on Howry bouncing back? Again as you said, the player would have to be better than a B pick. The only kink is if the Cubs have to offer arb and no one signs him and he accepts the arb. Well, my hope is that the trend continues from the last couple years and somebody signs him early in free agency before the arbitration deadline. The Cubs have absolutely no risk if he's under contract with another team already to offer him arbitration. If he's not, the Cubs will have to gauge the interest of other teams carefully at that deadline, but the worst case scenario (him accepting arbitration) really isn't that horrible.

No way you release him. The Cubs have a decent shot at getting a compensation pick at the end of the year for Howry, and that's lost if they release him. A or B? My guess is a B. Which is a good thing. Nobody would sign him and give up their first rounder. But if he's a B, teams will feel free to sign him before the deadline because it's not their pick that's going to the other team.

No way you release him. The Cubs have a decent shot at getting a compensation pick at the end of the year for Howry, and that's lost if they release him.

Minor nitpick: Edmonds just turned 38 a little less than a month ago. He's not 39. How do you handle the PT if Bradley was acquired?

Howry was still in the game from getting the last out of the 8th inning though. Not much reason to take him out for the 9th in that spot. And it wasn't even known last night that Wood was available. It sounds like they didn't want to use him unless they absolutely had to last night. After him, there are mostly a bunch of interchangable parts down there right now.

But what does "his numbers will even out" mean? Here's what bothers me - in 2007 Chicago Cub right fielders hit for a total .795 OPS. Let's say Fukudome finishes the season with a .780 OPS. People will regard that as an "upgrade" because they spin what Fukudome does in whatever positive light they can. I don't even think he's going to finish with a .780 OPS at this point. But it will turn out the Cubs spent $12 million a year to downgrade their offense in right field. Jeromy Burnitz put up a .757 OPS for the Cubs in 2005 for $6 million, 3 years later you could see Fukudome finishing with a .770 OPS (a downgrade from 2007's .795 OPS) and people spinning it as some kind of victory. i'm ok with fukudome finishing with a slightly lower ops if he has a significantly better obp than burnitz/jones and co. by evening out, i mean that his final stats at the end of the year should be similar to where his stats are right now. if he finishes the year with a .380+ OBP, then i think he's been worthwhile. i sure as hell wish he'd hit for power though. but he might need a whole year of mlb pitching to regain his power. To be fair, that doesn't really help the comparison to last year. The Cubs got a .375 combined OBP out of RF last year. As for Fukudome, I just don't think we have any idea what we can expect from him going forward. He could continue to fade, or he could be in his worst slump and start to get out of it and have a better last 2 months. There simply isn't enough information to be able to be somewhat accurate with his projection. So I'm not panicking (panicking is reserved if I knew he was going to keep falling) but I do agree that he should be moved down when Soriano comes back, at least until his slump over the last 16 games is over.

He was pitching on 5 days rest. He pitched on 7-12 for Mesa. I meant Michael Phelps. He was pretty rusty, having last pitched a single inning on July 8th. He really got shelled. Yeah, I edited too late. I realized that right after I posted it, but it took me too long to find the game logs for Phelps. Again, sorry about the confusion.

Edit: Realized you were probably talking about Phelps, who was on 9 days rest entering today's ballgame, instead of Hill, who was on 5. Sorry about that.

The problem with the errors with a guy like Gomez is not as a defensive replacement. You're right, Cedeno's not doing that either. The problem is that he's a liability defensively when he's starting. Considering that he would likely get as many at-bats starting the rest of the year as pinch-hitting, that's a problem. Theriot can't play every game. Plus, if Theriot goes down for the season the day after they made the trade, who plays SS for the next 2 months? It's a good upgrade for being a pinch-hitter (considering that whoever is in that spot the Cubs are going to send up against LH pitching), a downgrade for days he's starting (especially because Theriot needs the day off most against tough right-handers, and Cedeno is better against those than Gomez), and carries a significant risk factor with it. That factors out at best to a lateral move and quite possibly a downgrade overall. So it's a good move for that one specific role. But it doesn't really help overall, and it could possibly hurt quite badly.

Marshall would also be exiting if there were only 11 pitchers. The bullpen would be Wood, Marmol, Howry, Eyre, Gaudin, and Lieber. And honestly, that 12th pitcher is probably needed more than the RH pinch hitter right now. Neither are that important, but the 12th pitcher is hopefully going to lessen your work on your big 3, and plus, they might want Marshall to stay up to long relieve and start every 10 days or so to given Harden an extra day when they don't have an off day. Of course, Lou also needs to use all his guys regularly, which he hasn't shown to be great at.

His at bats did. you could just as easily say that anyone's at-bats cost the NL the game. Maybe, but Uggla did seem to come up in most of the big spots. Look at his at-bats Came up in the 8th: 1 on, 0 outs: struck out Came up in the 10th: runners on 1st and 3rd, 1 out. Great scoring chance. Uggla grounds into a double play, inning over. Came up in the 12th: bases loaded, 1 out. For the 2nd time in extra innings, Uggla doesn't even need a base hit to score a run. He strikes out on 3 pitches. Lead off the 15th with a strikeout. The NL really had 2 chances in extra innings. Uggla had the misfortune of being really bad in some of the "biggest" at-bats in the game. Does it mean he's a choke artist? No. But he was easily the biggest reason the NL lost the game.

Agreed. If it's Blake or somebody else, the Cubs should try to find a right-handed pinch-hitter late in August. Anything before that and you lose somebody on the bench that could be useful. If you do it late in August though, you can get the person playoff eligible, which is really the main key to a deal like this. Now, the fact that you are waiting until the end of August means that you are limited in the people you can pick up through waivers, but a right handed bat whose only qualification need be that he hits left-handed pitching well, regardless of anything else he does, shouldn't be that hard to sneak through waivers. Releasing Ward to pick up a guy like Blake now solves very little, IMO. Blake is not as good of a hitter as Ward, isn't used to coming off the bench, and really is probably at least as bad as DeRosa in the OF due to being rusty (no games out there this year, only 7 last year) and age (34). There are much better ways of filling that need for the playoffs that give you both Ward and a RH pinch hitter to be available off the bench.

Any idea why they chose Daytona over Iowa? The extra day almost certainly helped. He's going to pitch tomorrow for Daytona, but would have had to wait until at least Friday for Iowa. Every extra day is important at this point because he still has a certain number of starts (probably around 4 I would say) where he has to show good control in order to be brought up, and it doesn't honestly really matter if the last 2 of those are with Iowa or the last 4 are. But giving him extra rest at this point does hurt, because it lengthens the timeframe.

This time they are though: http://www.daytonacubs.com/cgi-bin/dist/news.cgi?id=1

Of all the game threads archived on this site (since late June 2005) this game is now the 4th longest of any of them. And it will likely move to 3rd longest by the end of this inning.

Those first two pitches were nasty..and located well. Better than most of what we've seen recently.

Aaron Cook had 7 baserunners reach base in his 2 innings. 3 base hits, 2 walks, and 2 errors that led to batters reaching. And somehow, none of them scored.

Soriano's not supposed to be gone nearly that long. He's only supposed to be out for 1 more week, maybe 2. And if Hill comes back, it will be this year. If he has another major setback that sets him back from the timetable of later this year (probably between mid-August and September 1st), then that's a major red flag to him ever coming back.