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To be fair about our patience, Bush hasn't given us much chance to-pretty much all of his pitches have been strikes anyway. There have been a couple called strikes that we could have taken and probably been better off, but that's about it.

Bo is right. Why do you say that? Notre Dame is annually rated the most popular team in the nation. It's not like they have to compete with the Wolverines for fans. Although I despise Michigan and want to see the series continued for rivalry purposes, ND isn't really getting much out of the series other than road money. It gives Notre Dame a usually guaranteed good matchup for their schedule. You know every year there are going to be a couple teams in every conference with 0, 1, or 2 losses so you'll get good games every single year in conference. Because they don't play in a conference, Notre Dame doesn't have many teams that are guaranteed to be good. Look at last year. Notre Dame's only good scheduled opponent was USC. Every other team they played was eh at best. Michigan provides them an opponent that is likely to be in the hunt for a BCS bowl year in and year out. I think they both help each other but as Pedro said, Bo is right. The thing is though, Notre Dame has several series they have taken off thier schedule in order to get a slightly more managable schedule. If we lost Michigan, one of those teams would play us. Tennessee, Florida State, and to a lesser extent Boston College are three teams who ND has basically chosen only to play from time to time because of the strength of their schedule. I do think though that Michigan needs Notre Dame less for only one big reason. Michigan can get into a BCS bowl with a Notre Dame loss meaning very little if they do well in a conference. For Notre Dame, every loss is vitally important as it's all based on where they finish in the BCS standings-and I believe they now have to get top 8 to get considered starting this year, so that will make a loss even harder to take-which means to cushion themselves against a loss, they have to play a tough schedule, which includes Michigan.

How many more posts are on premium? And how is it sorted that certain posts are only on premium? Everytime I read regular the conversation seems smooth with no missing link. It's not that certain posts are only found in premium, it's just that a premium page will hold 20 posts while a regular page will hold 15. That means that threads are smaller in premium (in terms of pages) and certain posts in a thread will be on different pages depending on whether it is being read in premium or regular. I figured that was the case when you said it was on page 11 of premium..it was on page 15 of regular. And of course, no reason to make this post except I'm trying to help the thread to 25! (on 24 now in regular)

While I want no part of Neifi, Jones hasn't been horrible. Stats: AVG .288 | HR 18 | RBI 55 | OBP .321 | SLG .499 Sorry, but those numbers suck for a RFer in my opinion. 55rbis? Jeez that's terrible. Those numbers for Jacque aren't actually that bad so far this year. He's 17th in OBP, 4th in slg, 10th in OPS among right fielders. His RBI totals aren't that terrible-14th right now, and 4 RBI's out of 9th. He has been an average to above average right fielder this season-the trick is if he can keep up these numbers or not.

You really should qualify that better - he's 10th in the NL in OBP among qualified CF's. If he were 10th in the NL, we'd be very happy with his .398 OBP. Unfortunatley for us, ol 43 is 74th in the NL in OBP. That's simply horrific for a lead-off hitter. No he's 10th in the NL in OBP among qualified Leadoff hitters... That still sucks, you know. That puts him in the bottom half of leadoff hitters at 10th out of 16. And 74th overall is terrible. His original post said that for the contract Pierre wants to get rid of him because he is 10th in the NL in OBP-he didn't mean it as a positive stat for him.

it's those darn rookie pitchers that poor dusty has been complaining about. during the 11-4 run... hill, marmol, mateo: 5-1 z, prior, rusch: 3-3 It's really been the entire pitching staff with the exception of Rusch. If you look, all 5 of them have had 1-2 good starts with mostly 1 bad start in there (except for Mateo, who's only had 1 start). In fact though, the pitching staff hasn't been great as a whole during that stretch. They have over a 5 ERA during that 14 game stretch-it's the offense that has scored 5.14 runs a game over the last 14 that has really helped.

Who knows-maybe it was Jones's 14 at bats in August he was talking about :D

Hmmm..Cubs.com has the same sort of quote from Baker, but only has Ramirez, Barrett, and Pierre listed...except that's the one part that's not in quotes, just that Baker pointed out those 3 as being hot..maybe they realized it and took out some of the names.

Nice win Cubs..come on Z, come back strong tomorrow night.

I just looked..we've used 6 relievers, and they have thrown 10, 6, 8, 5, 10, and right now Dempster has 15 with 2 outs-talk about short outings. Edit: Oops..obviously all of those are pitch counts.

Lol..Baker does deserve some credit for the way the team is playing-but that is just a small bit of the body of evidence, and 85 percent of it is against him.

He's seeing 3.39 pitches per plate appearance, so he's the least patient Cub besides Neifi Perez. Just sayin. Well, that's what I'm saying. I was expecting a very impatient hitter because of his low P/PA. However, he tends to either hit a lot of strikes early in the count-but if he gets past a couple pitches, he tends to work the count very well. For a person with a low P/PA, he seems to have a pretty good command of the strike zone, and uses that as he gets deeper in the count. So he's a very patient hitter, except in the at bats that he's not patient. Even though I think you are being sarcastic, I will answer. He seems to have the old pinch hitter strategy-hit the first fastball you get, and if you don't hit that, then work the count, be patient, and wait for another good pitch. Izturis seems to have this philosophy all the time.

I'm on gameday. What happened? Jones jumped and caught it up against the wall.

He's seeing 3.39 pitches per plate appearance, so he's the least patient Cub besides Neifi Perez. Just sayin. Well, that's what I'm saying. I was expecting a very impatient hitter because of his low P/PA. However, he tends to either hit a lot of strikes early in the count-but if he gets past a couple pitches, he tends to work the count very well. For a person with a low P/PA, he seems to have a pretty good command of the strike zone, and uses that as he gets deeper in the count.

We now have the exact same record as the Indians after their loss tonight-didn't expect that out of them either.

Izturis has been a more patient hitter than I expected him to be. He seems to either hit a strike in play in the first 2-3 pitches or have a pretty deep count, at least so far.

I can tell us one thing for all of us still harboring that tiny bit of hope..right now we are Mets and Pirates fan every night because those are the two teams we don't need to catch..I hope we can add some other teams soon that we can root for :D

Why the long face? A Cub win tonight and a Cardinal loss moves the Cubs to 13 games back. But still 9.5 back in the Wild Card Not a chance. Come on..let us have a fun..all we need is something like a 38-13 record the rest of the way..let us have some harmless hope until then :D

62 pitches for Ohka so far-28 of them were in the 3rd inning.

Yeah, I went through and looked at it month by month, and we were something like 7 over .500 for April, July, and so far in August combined-too bad our May and June were just awful.

That's a good possibility, according to Dusty today. Good to hear! Yes, it certainly is. Thanks Bruce for helping answer some of our nagging questions!

Bruce, is there any plan to play Pagan more in RF against some lefties here in the last two months of the year? I saw he got one or two starts there-I just hope we can see Pagan and Murton playing against most lefties.

I'll take the under on that one..that would be 12 over .500, and there's only 1 team in the NL that is above that right now. I think the Central winner gets above that number, and 1 West team might get there-but I doubt the Reds go 10 games over .500 the last 6 weeks of the season, and I don't think more than 1 West team does either. I think it will be somewhere around 84 or 85, which isn't a huge difference but still a significant one.

The fact that the Cubs source would even say a word about a search for a possible replacement to Dusty should mean good things for those who were worried when Hendry said that he wouldn't be fired this season, fearing he was going to extend him. You don't talk about a potential search if you may extend your manager-at least that's very unlikely. As for Girardi, I certainly don't want to give up a player or players as compensation for him. If he had the out clause, I'd consider him just as much as some other candidates, but if he's going to cost a player while the other candidates wouldn't that would be a major black mark against him.

I think that we need lights more than ever. Coming from a person who has never lived that close to Chicago (3 hours away at best), all day games would be all right when there were 144 games on a year. Now that there are 80-90, the team already feels disconnected at times-and if there were all day games, than even less would be seen and more of the fanbase would slowly trickle away.