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Doesn't matter. He's not even close to the best kicker in the NFL now and never should have been close to the highest paid. Whether that lasts a week or a season is inconsequential. It's irresponsible cap management and bad business. For a team that talks about prioritizing contracts and paying their own, it's absurd that they reward a mediocre kicker who skipped voluntary workouts with an inflated contract while they have meaningful players in need of deals. He most certainly is close to the best kicker in the NFL. Maybe our coverage unit is just that good but his kickoffs haven't really hurt us and his FG kicking has been excellent. Among the best in the league over the last two years. http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/teamst.php http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/teamst2006.php Where Gould is involved, our kicking game has been pretty much undeniably excellent over the last two seasons. FO measures FG efficiency/effectiveness based on the percentage of attempts that are successful from that distance and adjusted for field and weather conditions. If you want to argue about Gould's contract in terms of an opportunity cost with respect to other needs, that's fine. Saying he's mediocre simply isn't valid. Personally I think the whole "highest paid in the leauge" angle is being overblown in light of an ever increasing salary cap and the fact that he's pretty damn good. Yup, he was helped by a little bit of down year in kicking overall last year. Taking a quick look at the numbers, it looks like he finished 3rd in field goal effectiveness both years.

He was only among the most accurate in 2006, and the only reason his percentage is high is because he never even attempts long ones. He's a high percentage kicker on chip shots and extra points. That's dime a dozen stuff right there. Gould doesn't kick a lot of chip shots (35 yards and less). He's way down the list in the 30 yards or less categories. He's 24 out of 28 the last 2 years on kicks between 40 and 49 yards (12 out of 14 each year). That's the most attempts in the entire league from that distance. Gould connected at a 85.7% rate from that distance each of those years, while league average was only 74.2 in 2007 (I didn't take time to calculate league average for 2006). And you should be happy he doesn't kick a lot from 50+. Those kicks are really bad bets, and shouldn't be used for anything but buzzer beating situations or any situation where you absolutely need a field goal to win or tie.

Definitely Kaz Matsui. He was going to get a 3 year deal at the position the Cubs have the most players at, and he's worse relative to average than Marquis is at his position. His contract is also higher relative to other second baseman, while Marquis's contract is below average for a starting pitcher. Neifi was just designed to be a backup and was a good defender at the hardest position on the field to cover. Womack, Wilson, and Podsednik were just supposed to be fill-ins. Burnitz signed a 1 year deal at average salary, and was around an average right fielder. Jones had a better history of production than Matsui and Marquis, and honestly the Cubs probably got the 12 million dollars in production they paid for him. Edmonds would be tops if he had a contract that the Cubs couldn't get rid of quickly, but since he does, the risk becomes a lot less. Rusch was actually a somewhat defensible move that went horribly wrong (the re-signing). It still likely was bad, but the chance of success was better than some of the other players on this list. Baker was bad, but it wasn't immediately obvious to most people, so that makes it less dumb then some of the other names on this list.

I have to think Marquis will get 1 more start after this one at the very least. If they had wanted to bring Hill up this week, they wouldn't be starting Gallagher on Friday. Marshall isn't fully ready quite yet from stretching out. Lieber just got demoted, so Lou isn't likely to throw him in there in place of Marquis. So I think Marquis will start today and Sunday. If Gallagher and Hill pitch well and Marquis pitches poorly, he might be gone. If Marquis pitches ok, and Gallagher pitches ok, I think Gallagher will be the one taken out when Hill comes back.

I'm confused as to how his OBP is .500 even though he has 3 PA's. One was the home run, what were the other 2? I know sac bunts go against your OBP, but the 3rd at-bat must have been something that didn't hurt or help his OBP. I'm sure it's something very simple that I'm missing. Sac bunts do not count against your OBP, but sacrifice flies do. So Johnson has had 1 sac bunt, 1 sac fly, and a home run against Estes.

I've never hated Edmonds, but I don't think he has much left in the tank, so I don't want him near this team. Hopefully he either impresses or bombs out quickly if he comes here though.

of course you could always invest in improving the offense itself, so it doesn't have to settle for so many FG's. This deal sucks. Kickers are like MLB relievers...very volatile. That doesn't make much of a dent in the offensive budget though, and now you've got another potential hole. Gould obviously doesn't deserve to be the highest paid kicker in football. That won't last long though, just like Josh Brown's reign at the top lasted for a month or 2. In 2 years, he may no longer be in the top 5 in contracts. At the same time, the kickoff thing is a big problem. That may be the reason why this turns out to be a poor deal, even with the Bears really needing him for field goals. I'll have to give that one more thought.

I believe very, very strongly on if you feel a kicker is reliable, you should pay him top dollar. The difference between a top kicker and an also ran is only between 2-3 million dollars. If you put that 2.5 million somewhere else, the upgrade you could get at another position is simply not worth the likely downgrade at kicker, because for most positions 2.5 million doesn't buy you very much. As the cap continues to grow over the next 5 years, that 3 million becomes less and less important. Gould has been one of the most accurate kickers in the league the last couple of years, the Bears offense is right in that range where they'll end up using him a good amount. It's a smart investment overall.

I love seeing a line of 1.000/.500/4.000. It's such a crazy line caused by the tiny sample size. I'm not sure if you're going to see the OBP and slugging more apart than that. It's technically possible, but it would definitely be rare.

Credit should go a little bit all around here. Perry...for working with some of the players and getting them to be more patient. Lou..for hiring Perry, and emphasizing OBP from day 1 Hendry..for adding hitters like DeRosa and Fukudome to balance out some of the Soriano's on the squad.

Unless they're trying to blow out Fox's arm once again, they won't pitch him after he threw 45 pitches yesterday. My guess is that he's unavailable until Wednesday or Thursday. Eyre for 1, Wuertz for 1 sounds good though.

PECOTA projects fontenot to be more productive than cedeno offensively. Really? Damn. Are you sure it wasn't actually just Bill Pecota going bonkers? Well, still, it flies in the face of Lou's "playing the hot hand" BS. Outside of like 2 games, Cedeno easily has had the much "hotter hand." Since April 27th: Fontenot: .444/.643/.722 Cedeno: .250/.368/.312 Fontenot has had 24 plate appearances this month, and 9 of those went for walks. Both have been red hot at times, and ice cold at others. Fontenot went 2 for 15 in the middle of April, which really drug down his numbers. Cedeno is 1 for his last 11 right now, with no walks during that stretch. Their overall number of at-bats is also so low that the difference between them so far this season is not all that much. In fact, it's pretty much two singles. It certainly hasn't been enough to say that one has been a lot hotter than the other.

Yep, it's a decent use of the resources he has. It makes me wonder, aside from Marquis and Z, what pitchers do we have with decent speed? The next one would be Marmol. After that, it's a tough question. Dempster maybe? or Wood? They're all pretty terrible at that point, although there's probably one random reliever that's a much better baserunner than we realize.

One thing I've liked the last couple days is Lou using Marquis to pinch-run for Ward. That's a needed thing to do, but there's no real reason why you need to waste a bat just to pinch-run. When you only have 4 bench players to substitute in (Blanco only comes up if the Cubs have run out of players in extra innings), you need to find other ways of doing things so to not run out of players quite as much. Marquis as the pinch-runner is a very good use of his available resources.

The batter/pitcher matchups on both sides look really, really ugly.

That sounds like a pretty bad trade for the Cubs - plus Greene isn't leaving the West Coast, right? It's the opposite, actually. Greene wants to be on the East Coast to be very close to his family.

He did? Yes. He had 4 at-bats, and got hit twice, which as we know is more of a skill of Johnson's than random luck. It's essentially his way of drawing walks. 1 of his other 2 at-bats he was asked to put down a sacrifice bunt, which he did. So he struck out once, got on base twice, and laid down a bunt when asked the other time. His defense wasn't really tested yesterday, so not much to say either way on his defense.

Yeah, that woulda been me. Just for curiousity's sake, which one? By the suites, or by the main gate? I wish I would have said hello, but I wasn't sure and my business group was moving rather quickly. The business thing unfortunately prevented me from meeting all the rest of the board people as well.

Well besides Johnson continuing to start against rightys, Id agree. I cant believe Felix didnt get to start the last 2 games, and with Johnson on the mound tomorrow Im sure he will sit then too. Lou is screwing over Felix right now, and its indefensible. I would agree with that. I decided to leave Johnson alone because he did his job yesterday, but I wasn't happy about that when I heard the lineups.

Roast, about 20 minutes after the end of the game, were you either near the suites or by the main gate? I saw somebody that I thought kind of looked like you near the suites, and then when I got near the main gate there was about 15 or 20 crowd control people standing there in a group watching us late stragglers leave the ballpark.

Got back from the game...a few notes: Soriano looks so much better than a week or two ago. He's able to stop his bat on the terrible pitches now for check swings, and he can then actually do something with the hangers. Definitely the biggest positive to come out of the day today. Theriot had an up and down day, but definitely more up than down. 3 times on base, and some absolutely sparkling defense today on balls that any SS would have trouble consistently making. Also one of the two times he wasn't on base, he had a very sharp line drive (from watching the play again on TV, it doesn't do it justice of how quick the ball was on the first baseman). Of course the CS drags it down and is very frustrating, although I do agree with someone that Lee doesn't take strike 2 right down the middle of the plate unless it was said from the bench. Howry looked good today. That's 4 straight innings without an earned run (the only run he gave up in those innings was the St. Louis game when Soriano let those two easy fly balls drop, and Lee also made an error). I think he may have turned a corner. I was the only fan around me who was really upset that Marmol was coming in. I don't understand why Chad Fox is on this team. He can't go multiple innings, he can't go multiple days, and if they refuse to use him in a 5 run game, when will they again? That was the only really upsetting part of the day.

Anybody find it kind of strange that the deal is contingent on a physical? The Marlins trainers are with him every day, and he's been playing. If this really is for 3 years of arbitration and 3 years of free agency, then I don't know what Hanley is thinking. He should have figured out some sort of way to get a 4 year deal. If the extension starts now, then it's a pretty fair deal overall.

That brings up an interesting question. Do you bring Guzman back as a reliever, at least for 2008-2009? He was having serious trouble getting past 85-90 pitches before he got hurt, and he needs to make the team next year. I'd bring him out of the bullpen because that gives him the best shot to establish himself in the major leagues for a while, and then if he's still healthy re-evaluate before 2010. If he can finish his rehab after June 28 (90 days remaining in the season), Gooz preserves his final option year for next season. One part of my brain knew that, and the other part must have wrote the post :D I still believe he should come back as a reliever though. His injury history is long enough that the team is going to be very hesitant to have him starting in the major leagues, and he can actually contribute a lot at the back of the bullpen, especially next year when the Cubs potentially lose a couple people in that bullpen.

That brings up an interesting question. Do you bring Guzman back as a reliever, at least for 2008-2009? He was having serious trouble getting past 85-90 pitches before he got hurt, and he needs to make the team next year. I'd bring him out of the bullpen because that gives him the best shot to establish himself in the major leagues for a while, and then if he's still healthy re-evaluate before 2010.

Specifically, what do you take issue with? You can't be disputing that Snider was seen as far more polished and "major league ready" than Vitters, who was more of a "project" right? I mean, I'm not saying he was a (Braves) Cody Johnson type project, but I remember the Guerrero comps, the raw tag, etc. Just a couple quick snippets from different reports on Vitters: I have seen exactly one scouting report that even gives a hint of Vladimir, with this quote: The scouting reports pretty much agree with each other though. Polished line drive hitter, short pretty swing, bat is very advanced, defense needs work. He's certainly not raw offensively, not at least in the minds of all those who wrote the reports. In fact, many said his bat is still certainly good enough to hit at a corner outfield spot if he cannot stay at third.