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If you're not going to celebrate a little bit when they win, why go to the game in the first place? Plus you have fans going to Wrigley for their first/second game all the time. It's a little bit of harmless fun that has nothing to do with how they may feel about the overall season. Celebrate what? The 2nd pick in next year's draft? Maybe they need a new song...it always reminds me of the 13 game losing streak in 1985, which I think was the reason it was made. Anyone know what they do at other mlb stadiums? Celebrate the win that many spent $100 or more to watch along with the time it took to transport in for the game (some from hours away), and then sat in the moderately hot sun for 3 hours to watch. It would be rather depressing to put all that time/effort/money into it and then not have some fun. If you live in Chicago and have been to quite a few more exciting Cubs games then it might not be that fun to watch this team, but if you fit that criteria you're probably not at many of these games anyway.

If you're not going to celebrate a little bit when they win, why go to the game in the first place? Plus you have fans going to Wrigley for their first/second game all the time. It's a little bit of harmless fun that has nothing to do with how they may feel about the overall season.

All of next year's guaranteed changes. Technically, the arbitration awards aren't guaranteed, but even the Cubs aren't dumb enough to non-tender Garza and Soto. I won't guarantee I'm reading it right, but it appears that the $72 mil covers Soriano, Z, Dempster, Byrd, Marmol, Marshall, $2 mil to Silva and Aramis' buyout. That leaves Garza, Soto, Baker, Hill, Wells and DeWitt as Arb-eligible and six pre-arb guys. They appear to have seven guys either becoming FA or have some sort of option year in Aramis, Kosuke, Pena, Wood, Grabow, Samardzija and Johnson. So what will it take to bump up the arb and pre-arb guys? Would $10 mil total do it? I honestly don't know what a good guess would be. If $10 mil is enough, that leaves roughly $52 mil to spend, if they leave payroll the same. With seven spots to fill, at least 2-3 would be in-house options, 2-3 would be cheaper FA options and the rest big-name FA. Assuming nothing else happens (ie. no one is traded) it leaves this- FA - possible replacement (spot on 25 man, not necessarily spot on the field) Kosuke - B Jackson Aramis - FA? Pena - Pujols/Fielder? Wood - In-house/FA/re-sign Grabow - In-house/FA Samardzija - In-house/FA Johson - In-house A couple of those will be filled in house, just not sure by who, a couple more could be. I'd say the two most likely to be filled by bigger names is Aramis and Pena. So, the question is, given who is coming back, plus the money available, who can they get that will turn this around next year? Does Wells and Cashner recover enough to fix the starting staff? Will (as an example) Fielder/Reyes provide enough of a bump to the offense? Maybe Aramis/Kosuke get re-signed to cheaper contracts. As always, this can all change as we get through the trade deadline and the waiver deadline in Aug. The arb and pre-arb players made 14.479 million this year. Estimating arbitration awards is hard, but I would be surprised if that didn't go up by at least 5-6 million next year if the Cubs don't non-tender/trade anyone. So there's probably more in the range of 40-43 million to spend, and that doesn't include Aramis's 2 million dollar buyout if the Cubs choose not to re-sign him (or Pena's 5 million depending on if the Cubs are counting that for the 2012 payroll).

Explain how Wilson/Aramis/Prince will cost more than $60 million. Something like Wilson getting $15 million a year, Aramis being brought back for the team option and Prince inexplicably getting $30 million a year? That 60 million number doesn't count people like Garza, Soto, Baker, or Wells. The Cubs don't actually have 60 million to throw around.

Id be more comfortable with Dempster as a 3rd starter. The problem is, who is out there good enough to be better than Demp? Wilson maybe, but the likelihood is that Dempster will be our second best starting pitcher going into next season. And if his horrid start were really a fluke, that'd be fine. CJ Wilson seems to be the best guy available, unless of course anyone out there thinks we have a shot at CC. Problem is, if we do go after CJ and Fielder, it could become a very expensive endeavor, and they may need to consider moving Z or Soriano for partial salary relief. All depends on what the Ricketts are willing to spend. If the money coming off the books can be re-spent if necessary then they could easily afford both without dumping anyone. I wouldn't say easily-are you keeping Ramirez in that scenario? I don't see how you can afford all 3 unless the payroll is increased.

For football? I'd be interested.

I'd be shocked if that was the case. Players are pretty smart about choosing when they dive now which makes the percentage a lot higher. Of course, that's part of the reason I don't want Soriano diving. He doesn't have the instincts out there and probably would make some dives that would make it a very poor percentage play.

Wow that is just a whole bunch of ridiculous unsubstantiated nonsense right there. I can't really substantiate it without going through all the game tape. It's not like it's something I can look through the game log and find examples from. As others have pointed out, 20-30 bases might be overstating it. I thought of a few examples from the last month or so and then tried to extrapolate that over the entire season, assuming that he has committed around the same number of mistakes each month. That might very well be a logical fallacy. I would probably adjust it a little bit down, but knowing an exact number without the game tape is impossible. We do know from fangraphs who have tracked all these things that Ramirez and Soriano have been 2 of the worst 5 baserunners in all of baseball this season though. But thanks to the stats we also know Aramis is the best 3B offensively in the NL this year. So would the elevated risk of him busting his ass out of the box every time (and being older and somewhat injury prone) be justified? I wouldn't think so. Fangraphs has his baserunning take away a full third of his offensive value this year, but I don't think hustling on outs would help that very much as I think he just has deficiencies in that area . But I haven't even seen Ramirez be that bad at not hustling either.

The only time I remember Ramirez ever having a big problem with hustling was 2006 where he got caught about 3 times admiring home balls that didn't go out. He is awfully slow and pretty terrible on the basepaths and that's maybe where he got the reputation as a bad hustler, but I don't think it's deserved.

Wow that is just a whole bunch of ridiculous unsubstantiated nonsense right there. I can't really substantiate it without going through all the game tape. It's not like it's something I can look through the game log and find examples from. As others have pointed out, 20-30 bases might be overstating it. I thought of a few examples from the last month or so and then tried to extrapolate that over the entire season, assuming that he has committed around the same number of mistakes each month. That might very well be a logical fallacy. I would probably adjust it a little bit down, but knowing an exact number without the game tape is impossible. We do know from fangraphs who have tracked all these things that Ramirez and Soriano have been 2 of the worst 5 baserunners in all of baseball this season though.

And that entire promise is probably absolutely wrong. Soriano going balls to the wall on defense would probably be a much worse fielder and would probably get injured immediately. Soriano going balls to the wall on offense really doesn't mean anything. He's a brittle old player who started playing OF in his 30's. He relied on his speed and power as a young man and doesn't have much speed left and only has some of his power left. Effort isn't the issue. Soriano having to suddenly accelerate because he's seen that ball was mishandled or because a runner is trying to take an extra base is much more likely to cause an injury than just running hard for the ball from the beginning. Even the people who want him hustling more don't necessarily want him diving/crashing into walls. The only way that I would buy that his not hustling doesn't hurt the Cubs is if you feel that his not hustling fakes runners into trying to take bases they shouldn't, and then Soriano guns them down. Other than that though, he's probably lost 20-30 bases so far this season on both sides of the ball just from lack of hustle (although I still believe his hustle issues are overstated because the way he runs it sometimes look like he's not running as hard as he actually is-but sometimes he does lollygag).

The question becomes is if that you don't hustle, do your teammates perform worse? If they do, they're not doing their jobs correctly. If they don't, then not hustling doesn't have nearly as big of an impact. Can hustling make a ballplayer better? Absolutely. Is seeing a player not hustling and knowing he could be better if he would just try harder frustrating? Sure. But hustle is just one of the components like hitting, fielding, baserunning. And it's probably not the most important component because you rarely if ever see a guy who is absolutely terrible at hustling in the majors (if a player lightly jogged after most balls for example he would be kicked out of the league very quickly). If you have two players that are close on the other skills, the hustling player will probably be better. But hustling can't make up for much greater skills in batting and fielding for example. And as TT said, when you look at the performance of a player, hustling is already taken into account. A non-hustling player will be worse than what he could be if he was hustling, but they're often still better than players with limited talent who do hustle. The hustling player has already maximized their numbers-you shouldn't give them an extra bonus on top of it.

He's really not, although most of that is how bad all LF's are. For example, look at the other LF's in the Cubs division. Braun, Gomes, Holliday, Lee, and Tabata. I'd probably take Soriano defensively over Lee, Braun, or Gomes because Soriano has at least one elite part of his defense (arm) while those three just struggle at all parts of their game. Soriano's a below average defensive outfielder, but he's a pretty average defensive LF.

Dempster's been pretty awesome for nearly 3 months now. Those numbers took a pretty big hit today. I hate those sorts of arguments, because all starting pitchers are capable of looking pretty good for long stretches between their bad outings. Looking at it again, Since April: 91 1/3 IP, 89 H, 37 R, 35 ER, 5 HR, 27 BB, 87 K, 3.45 ERA, 8.57 K/9, 2.66 BB/9, 0.49 HR/9 The ERA was the only thing that was incredibly affected by today. The peripherals didn't change much (K rate went a little up, BB rate went a little up, K/BB rate is a little worse now, but HR rate continued to to go down). This was not a disaster outing for peripherals because he didn't give up a HR and he struck out 5 batters in 3 innings.

It's no more foolish to assume payroll will remain the same than to assume it will go down. A big market team isn't going to respond to reduced attendance by slashing payroll, especially after raising ticket prices. If the team retains Ramirez, that leaves two, maybe three holes to fill. And we're probably looking at at least 40MM to fill those 2-3 holes. Retaining Ramirez next year won't handcuff the Cubs in any significant way. Trading him would create a hole even harder to fill than the others. The Cubs won't have that much money. If they retain Aramis, they will have 86.6 million tied up in 7 players. That does leave about 47 million from this year's payroll. But that doesn't take into account arbitration guys. Garza, Soto, and Baker alone I would guess would command at least 15 million combined. So that's 32 million left with 10 players paid for. I have no idea what a guy like Wells would make and DeWitt probably will only get a small raise. For Ramirez and a guy like Pujols to fit into the payroll, they'll have to cut just about everything else. No Samardzija, probably no Wood, no veteran bench or bullpen players. It's a tough decision. Aramis is a great hitter still who is a poor defender at 3B (the defensive metrics are split on him this year but they are pretty clear from the previous few years that he is definitely well below average there, which also correlates with how he looks). He also gives away some of his value on the bases. If he continues on his 2011 pace so far for the rest of the season he'll probably have been worth about his contract this year, which anytime you can say that about a player with a contract that high is a really good thing. But he only has downside risk with no real upside to that contract. I'd probably pick up his option at the end of the season, but if I could get a decent amount of value for him in a trade that would be my preferred option (unless he would take a lesser contract which I doubt he would do until after his 2012 year was done).

I would disagree that center is the least important position on the line because of the responsibility that many centers have before the play even starts, but I have no idea if Kreutz is any good or not anymore. From what I've seen of the many line mixups and bad blitz pickups the Bears have had Kreutz is probably not doing his job well.

I would call Cashner, Flaherty, and Russell solid bets to be league average for their positions. There's a couple others who still have reasonable chances to be that good.

He was an everyday player at the top of the lineup when he sucked. Well, I get the top of the lineup thing. I would agree that's the one big blemish they had with Theriot. Theriot deserved to be an everyday player though. For the 4 years the Cubs played him (from August 2006 to July 2010) BR has him as a 1.3 win player per year and fangraphs has him at a 2.2 win player per year. That's really nice value for a cheap everyday player. Then the Cubs managed to upgrade right as Theriot was starting to become more expensive.

Something like 16 million for the US-England game (which was at like 5 in the morning) but maybe that was ABC. I don't recall. The US-England game last year? It was on ABC at 2:30-4:30 on a Saturday afternoon.

I don't get the Barney hate. Sure I love to see more OBP, maybe some pop but he's making the league minimum, plays good defense and hits .300 I would love to get more production out of 2B but with so many other glaring issues and aging/high priced turds with this club I'm not going to hate this kid. how many times has he hit .300 during the course of a minor or major league season? hint: the answer is not greater than zero. but what SSR was not "hating" barney. utility infielders have value. people hated theriot and wanted him to go away; nobody is sying that we should get barney off the team and replace him with whoever is lying around. I think many (of the most vocal) people here are overcritical of Barney, especially in his rookie season. However, besides his defense (which is already pretty good) the only way he will really be useful as a starter is to be a good on-base guy. If he can't do that he's probably role player. Who are these most vocal people? The thing I've heard the most is essentially they don't want the Cubs to turn Barney into Theriot 2.0. That is, don't hand the guy a starting job based on a short period of competence and then get yourself committed to overpaying him because he's some scrappy fan favorite. Barney is perfectly fine as a role player, just like Theriot was perfectly fine as a role player. Don't count on him to be a dependable top of the order starter at 2B in the future. Do view him as a useful asset. I don't get the Theriot 2.0 reference. The Cubs handled Theriot almost perfectly. They didn't hand him the starting job to start 2007. They squeezed two good seasons out of him in 2008 and 2009. They made it very clear in his arbitration hearing that they didn't feel he was worth a lot of money. When a better SS came up, they moved him off the position, and then quickly traded him after that. Theriot's a great example of how you handle a player like that.

It's really misleading to talk about how much Soriano was worth the past 2.5 years when he obviously was injured for the majority 2009. That and your numbers aren't true. Fangraphs has him with -.1 WAR in his injured '09, 3.0 WAR in '10, and 0.6 WAR in '11. Even including his injured '09 as relevant, AND for some reason averaging that 0.6 as if it's a full season in the average, you still don't get 1 WAR per year. Maybe you meant to quote someone else but I did not at any point post any thing about Wins Above Replacement. I was only talking about dollar value based upon play. So yes my numbers are true. He quoted Truffle and was disputing his numbers.

Nearly any manager should've been able to win with the Cubs in 2003 and 2004. They had a solid lineup 1-8 and the best rotation 1-5 in baseball. Dusty turned what should've been a budding Cub dynasty with a stacked farm system of pitching into crap in just 3 years. At least Piniella can say he managed the Cubs to be easily the best team in the NL in 2008. I don't know if we can call the 2003-2004 team a budding Cubs dynasty. Maybe by 2004 since Lee, Ramirez, and Barrett had shown up, but that 2003 team was going to need almost all the major offensive pieces replaced very quickly. And the farm system was not nearly as stacked as had been thought. Dusty ruined the young pitching which was a huge blow, but the Cubs were still going to have to make a lot of good moves to become elite going forward.

Trading him or signing him? I never understand the Jacque Jones hate. We signed Jacque Jones and we got Jacque Jones. I think some people thought that when moved from the Metrodome to Wrigley, hed become something other than Jacque Jones, but he remained Jacque Jones. After giving us 2 solid years, Im still baffled as to how he completely fell off a cliff after the trade to Detroit. He started falling off the cliff with the Cubs but they were able to get extra value out of him that year due to him playing CF. I don't quite understand the Jones hate either. The Cubs paid him just about what he was worth. He was a mediocre player on a decently small salary.

can you really make that determination before knowing what Hak-Ju Lee becomes? or if it's best 'moves that seemed good at the time', Hawkins for Jerome Williams and Aardsma warrants consideration i can't wait for the 10 worst moves topic The 10 worst moves from Hendry probably wouldn't be that bad of a list. There are 3-4 really bad ones but the list would quickly fall off after that. The problem has been more about what hasn't been done and what moves haven't been made rather than what moves have been spectacularly wrong.

Samardzija's walk rate has been getting better every single month this year though. If he's a 5.8 BB rate type of guy as he has been cumulatively for the season, that's a problem. If he's a 3.5 to 4.5 type BB guy as he's been since early in the year that's a whole lot better. Of course his strikeout rate has been dropping as well, but not nearly as badly.