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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.

heh heh, Hendry is actually a huge moneyball philosopher! If kc is correct, then by not pursuing overvalued OBP and by instead pursuing undervalued speed, defense, and young pitching, Hendry is being super smart! Whaddya think? Rather than being way behind the game, clever hendry is really way ahead of the game? Beane did say in 2004 in an interview that now that OBP had caught on that he is trying to build his teams around pitching and defense-he then said that he might some day in the future be building teams around teams who like to steal lots of bases, you just never know. So all that is possible-there is just one big flaw. One, we haven't been very good at any of those things this year, we'll see about next year and two-we don't need to always be thinking about efficiency with our payroll, but rather excellence-efficiency should be a big part, but we can take some risks on guys that teams like Oakland cannot.

Plus, I'm not sure what he's talking about as far as Sammy being rated ahead of Ichiro. Sorry about that-those were thier FRAA numbers that season for Ichiro and Sammy. I used that one because FRAA has been used several times to analyze defense here in the past few weeks, and I was trying to be consistent-I should have mentioned what it was though.

Not to be argumentative, but 26 is no spring chicken. You expect a little improvement from 26 to 30, but by the time a player is 26, you usually know what you have. PECOTA projects Izturis will have his best year in 2009, when he is 29 years old: .272/.318/.356. And we can't just ignore his injury history. He had several setbacks before rejoining the Dodgers this year (he was expected back in May), and many baseball people thought the Dodgers should be playing him at 2nd to protect his arm. There's no guarantee that he'll be what he was before the injury, which wasn't worth trading for in the first place. There's just not a whole lot to like about this deal. It's much harder to tell what a player will be like when they have been inujured for half the time they were 25 and 26. His numbers at age 24 were better than his best year at age 29, as you say, and his numbers at age 25 were doing even better until all the injuries which he kept trying to play through. As you say though, we can't ignore his injury history-hence the risk. If he can't come back healthy, then it's a pretty big problem. We don't know if he can though yet, and the last time he was terrible when healthy was at age 23-which is too early to evaluate a ballplayer conclusively.

Or even if it was a month ago....there's just not enough time now either. Yup-I think 85 wins will probably win the wildcard this year, so we'd have to go 38-13 the rest of the way to do that-which is simply not very likely.

We've had better offense than we've had pitching lately-I think they still said that our ERA was over 5 on the homestand on Sunday, but things like Hill pitching instead of Rusch have meant a couple game difference, that's for sure. It's amazing when the offense can do to a ballclub when they have 4 hot players/positions (Ramirez, Barrett, Pierre, Murton/Pagan in LF)

Nobody said we wanted to try to win at the expense of the young players. If we can continue winning like we have been lately though with many of the young players playing, isn't that the best thing? That means the young players will be playing very well, as players like Hill has done for us lately. Besides, it's more likely that skipping the 5th starter will give an extra start to a rookie at the end of the season as it will be to a veteran (when Marshall comes back we will have 3 rookies in the rotation, and so a 60 percent chance that the extra start it frees up will be given to one of Marshall, Marmol, or Hill). The problems with skipping the 5th starter have to do with 2 things-the stress on a player like Zambrano's arm, which I'm not sure about-and giving Mateo regular work instead of sitting him for 2 weeks and than sending him down, and I am one who sincerely hopes he at least puts in a couple appearances if not more in the next week and a half. Basically, I want us to prepare for next year, but if we can continue winning while we do that than that is just a huge bonus for me.

True, but 4 out of the 7 players that were mentionedd mentioned were from their offense, who are a total of 2 runs from being 2nd to last in the major leagues-which would be right next to us. Their pitching has been very good, and that has been the big reason they have won.

The funny thing is, I thought somebody would bring this article up by now, but since they didn't, here it is http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/news/article.jsp?ymd=20060806&content_id=1596007&vkey=news_chc&fext=.jsp&c_id=chc Some interesting tidbits from Murton "It's the approach, it's trusting your hands, not trying to do too much," Murton said Sunday. "You're thinking, '[Hit it] through the middle of the field,' and then reacting and not being afraid to be aggressive. I think when you do that and keep your front side in and use your hands the way you're supposed to, the inside pitches aren't hard to get to. But when you do try to do too much, you start jamming yourself." And another one: "When I'm hitting my best, I'm not thinking about anything," he said. "I'm seeing it and hitting it. I'm not worried about what he's going to throw me, I'm not worried about what the count is or anything. I'm staying aggressive and hitting off the fastball. What does anybody think about those comments from Murton?

We're 10 games out dude. Gotta keep pushing for that Wild Card. I don't see those mathematics kicking in yet. We're only 10 games out?! Somehow, entering play today, yes. 10 games out of the wildcard-13 1/2 out of the division-shows you how bad the NL has been this season, doesn't it?

just give it up, we are living in a new baseball age, an age where all but a few GM's base their philosophy on more than just anecdotal evidence. i'm not sure why it's so hard to see. there's no use in hiding from it, the truth will set you free. I agree we should use more than anecdotal evidence, but one shouldn't dismiss anecdotal evidence either. I doubt in a situation like this defensively where all the anecdotal evidence points one way, and defensive metrics point the other way that most GM's are going to go with the defensive metrics over the anecdotal evidence. They use the metrics, but that's not the only thing they use. If they did, it would be extremely hard to evaluate any player. Take a player like Orlando Cabrera for example-he went from a 3 one season to a -3 the next season to a 7 in 2005, the very next year. Did he significantly change on defense in those 3 years, and which year was truly indicative of his ability? Anecdotal evidence can tell you that-and by the way, his negative number was the year that the Red Sox traded for him in order to upgrade their defense.

Absolutely. Neifi is a better defender than Izturis. Cesar's 2005 fielding rate: 108 His career fielding rate: 101 http://www.baseballprospectus.com/dt/izturce01.shtml Neifi's 2005 fielding rate: 115 His career fielding rate: 111 http://www.baseballprospectus.com/dt/perezne01.shtml By PMR, Neifi is shown to have been much better in 2005: http://anaheimangelsblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/pmr-redux-shortstops-update-david.html Just because some Dodgers fans (who probably watch as many Cubs games as I watch Dodgers games) think he's the best fielder in baseball doesn't mean it's true. And Dewan's method of rating middle infielders is pretty flawless, by the way. Well, there's an example of it. Cesar was hurt half of 2005, and both his offense and defense suffered from it. There have been multiple places that said his defense suffered from it, and I think Izturis himself might have said that his defense was worse than usual because of the injuries. The defensive metrics have him as better than his career average though! Also, doesn't the numbers for Neifi concern you just a bit? Why would a player who is getting older and was always known for his defense suddenly have a better than average year? That's what I don't understand-his speed has certainly gone down since he was a younger player-so what has dramatically improved? As I mentioned in another thread, BP had Sosa as a 7 in 2004, while Ichiro had a 1 that year. I simply cannot look at those numbers and say that they are right, that Sosa was a much better right fielder than Ichiro that year defensively. It just doesn't add up for me right now-I think they are getting closer with defensive metrics, but there are still many numbers like that one right there that just make you wonder about how reliable it actually is.

John Dewan, author of The Fielding Bible, ranks Izturis #8 on his top ten shortstops list. Neifi's #6. Every other defensive metric I've seen indicates Neifi is a better shortstop. No offense intended, but I trust them more than your eyes. It's not only my eyes-it's the eyes of everyone who has seem him play. It's not just a few people who are saying he's a wonderful defender-I've never seen a Dodger fan say he's not, and there are plenty of informed outsiders who have said through observation that he's a wonderful defender, and maybe the best in the league at the position. Are you saying that all of them are wrong? I'm not inclined to believe necessarily what one person says, or two-but when just about everyone who has ever been around him says it, I'm more inclined to listen to it. When the opinions are somewhat split, I'm more likely to turn to defensive metrics to help settle the debate-but there are too many discrepancies in defensive metrics for me to make that alone overrule the virtually unanimous other evidences of Izturis's defense.

And if we played well outside the divison and not inside, then it would be said that it was Dusty's fault that the team fell flat in the "big games". I'm not absolving Dusty of blame, but the big reason that these splits exist is that the team did not have many division opponents scheduled when Lee went down, and their few weeks playing the NL West coincided with the time when they were playing their worst baseball. They would have lost to anybody during that time-it just happened to be a heavy non-division schedule at that time.