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The Cubs are pretty close to middle of the pack in this. Attendance is down across MLB this year. Also last year the Cubs attendance didn't drop as much as MLB as a whole did so they have a higher number to shoot towards. This year is comparable to 2004/2005/2006 attendance, higher than 2003, and lower than 2007/2008/2009. But there is also no doubt that the quality of the team has hurt attendance.

So would I, but aside from DeRosa, when has Hendry sold high on a player? Jose Ceda and Kevin Hart probably qualify. Sean Gallagher would as well. I guess it could be argued he sold reasonably high on Choi and Bobby Hill, too. What about Clement? Clement was let go in free agency by the Cubs. That's probably a little bit of a different category in which a few notable names would appear.

So would I, but aside from DeRosa, when has Hendry sold high on a player? Jose Ceda and Kevin Hart probably qualify. Sean Gallagher would as well.

did the ref say that it was a foul on bocanegra? it would be like a ref calling a holding penalty on a game-winning touchdown and refusing to name what kind of call it was until he got an opportunity to watch the film. That's what the official word was, it's not from the ref's mouth. I don't know why he didn't tell the players on the field, my first instinct is that the language barrier was the big reason. That in itself is not a terribly uncommon situation. I'm surprised that none of the TV coverage has commented on that. They've all speculated that maybe the ref called it on Edu. I haven't heard anybody even today (and they broke the play down on both the morning and afternoon coverage) say that the official called it on Bocanegra.

They need at least a draw. A win makes things much less complicated, gives them a chance to win the group, and it would definitely be a disappointment if the US doesn't win.

It's against another left-hander so unless Lou changes his mind from earlier in the week Soto is starting.

Great point. And I don't understand why people would assume that the power he's shown in the limited sample size of his time in the bigs would just carry over to a full season. If that's the case, then is his appallingly high strikeout ratio going to stretch out as well? His relatively limited defense is going to carry out over the whole season? LH pitchers having their way with him completely and totally? Why are some people acting like the power is the only thing that'll stick around? Well, the power would have to stick around and he'd need to have to keep hitting at these ridiculous levels all season to offset the liabilities he displays as a player. That's why his success as a starter is such a long shot despite what he's shown this season. That's why in a sane world it makes much more sense for him to be starting in the minors since he's yet to show down there that he can be a viable option as a starting OF. Production in a limited role as a part time player up here for a couple months doesn't just suddenly prove he's a good option to be starting over the Cubs current starters, especially when they're trying to shop one of them for a trade. I don't think people are assuming his power is going to translate exactly. He's on a 40 home run pace over a full season and I haven't seen anybody expect numbers anywhere close to that. And I would be quite happy if his defense he's shown so far translates over a full season. He's been very solid so far. And of course he wouldn't have to hit nearly this well to be a fine option as a starter even if his defense was subpar (at least 100 points of OPS less and probably closer to 150 points would be fine). Of course, the strikeout rate is a huge concern. He seems to be a little lucky in the BABIP department. His HR per FB percentage is also really high but the fact that his home runs so far have been hit a long way balances that out. And the small sample size rules all. I agree that it's still too early to give him a spot. But he definitely is a good candidate at this point to be a full season 15-20 home run guy with potential up to 30 or so. His minor league numbers suggest he's a 15 home run player. The elbow injury affecting some of his power numbers in the minors, his 14 homers in 1/2 a season at Tenessee last year after rehabbing from that injury, his muscle gain, his 7 homers in 1/6 of a season this year, and the fact that he hits home runs that would be gone in most every park in the majors all suggest he could be more than that.

Huh? Most of the contracts are all off the books after 2012. You just have to sign the right FA to go along with whoever the farm system produces. Yeah, current contracts won't hold us back from being able to compete again by 2012-2013. Most are off the books by after the 2011 season and we'll have two FA classes to supplement what our farm system can't fill. The key will be making good decisions leading up to the 2012-2013 seasons. I don't know why people pretend that the contracts that run through 2012 are no big deal. The Cubs have a tremendous amount of money guaranteed in future years, much more than most teams. And those contracts absolutely do affect beyond 2012, because they affect what they can do right now, and right now is when you need to be positioning yourself for the future. You can't just wait up November 1, 2012 and say, okay, we can fix all this now. Every contract handed out affects future payroll flexibility. The Cubs have a higher budget than most teams. It's not a shock that they have more future money committed as well. Boston has 75 million committed for 2012. The Yankees have 107 million. The Mets have almost 61. The Phillies have 87. The Cubs are at 62.5 which includes the buyouts to both Ramirez and Silva. BTW, for 2011 the Cubs are at 103.5. Boston is at 100.5. The Yankees are at 144.6. The Mets are at 108.8. The Phillies are at 134.7. So the Cubs don't have an extreme amount of money committed in future years compared to the teams who are directly above and below in payroll. That's mostly because the Cubs had a pretty quiet offseason only committing 10 extra million or so to 2011 and 8.5 to 2012. They'll have plenty of flexibility to make moves as early as this offseason and definitely by the offseason after 2011.

It should be noted that PR wise sending down Colvin anytime soon to get at-bats isn't really possible. It's a tough situation. While I also believe some of Colvin's minor league numbers have been skewed, that still leaves him as a huge question market with plenty of tools and some flashes but not much of a track record. That isn't much to fall back on when giving a lot of PT at the major league level . But the minors isn't an option at the moment and I don't know when it will be an option again unless he does get significant PT and struggles.

Are you talking about Fukudome? A typically productive player? Are you watching the same games I am? 715 OPS in May and dipping to an abomination like 552 OPS this month. This happens EVERY YEAR. He starts off hot (fukudome), and everyones like oh hey he gets on base he's a pretty preductive guy. Fukudome was better in the second half of the year last year than the first half. He could easily end up doing that again this year.

The point isn't whether Theriot should or shouldn't have thrown it to 2nd; the point is that the runner was smart enough to stop as soon as Theriot was on the base path with the ball so he couldn't be tagged. I believe it was Soto who recently botched a similar scoring opportunity recently for the Cubs by just charging like a goon. I think we interpreted Jersey's question differently. I'm thinking he asked if it was a normal double play ball that somebody (which I took to mean one of the Cubs middle infielders because he asked if it was Theriot in the next sentence) made more difficult than it should have been. I agree it was a smart baserunning play by the Athletics that the Cubs couldn't really do anything about and I definitely remember one of the Cubs runners not stopping in time a week or two ago.

im sorry, but when was this? (not being sarcastis, im reading these posts a few hours after the game and cant exactly pinpoint when it happened over even for which team It wasn't the Cubs, unfortunately. I think it was when the A's scored their final run, and it was because the runner they had on first stopped immediately because the Cubs threw to first, so they had to tag that runner to get the 3rd out, which allowed their runner on 3rd to score before the tag was applied. So, like a normal double play situation that somebody made more difficult? Was it Theriot? It was a slow hit ball that Theriot had to charge into the baseline on. I think that if he had thrown to second the batter would have been safe at first.

On gamecast Zambrano was charged with all 4 runs there. That doesn't make sense to me..he should only be charged with 2 at most. Do the errors on 2 different plays cost him? And as soon as I said that, they changed it to 2.

Haha, I love how Lou says "notice how when Wells gets into trouble hes pitching from the stretch". Well Lou, its hard to get into trouble while pitching from the windup when nobody is on base...... He jut means that Wells has pitched much worse with runners on than nobody on. Nobody on: .256/.304/.375 Runners on: .353/.389/.496

That was written on the day of April 15th. Soriano had a 607 OPS and had committed 2 bad errors in the first 8 games. He looked like he was still hurt. Now his OPS is 890. And he has only committed 2 errors since then (errors are obviously not nearly the biggest part of defense but they are Soriano's biggest problem since he has pretty good range and a great arm). Soriano has showed that the injury wasn't the final blow to his career. What about Soriano makes him that much worse than Ibanez and Burrell were when they signed their new deals?

That's it. He's not good enough defensively to play CF full time and doesn't hit with enough power to play one of the corner spots. From what I've seen in both the minors and with the Cubs his arm his strong and accurate and he's a decent route runner, but nothing spectacular. I'm not sure why so many people here are so down on him, I think he might be able to start on a team that gets power else where, but for most teams in the post steroid era he's likely to be a backup. See I think he has plenty of power potential. He has the 2nd and 3rd longest home runs for the Cubs this season and 4 of his 6 home runs have been over 400 feet, so he hasn't hit cheap ones so far. Anybody who hits that many line drives and fly balls who can hit the ball as far as he does should be able to hit for a decent amount of home runs. And the power numbers at Tennessee last year and the greater than average muscle he put on in the offseason would lead credence to his home run numbers being better than earlier in his career. I'm personally concerned about that strikeout rate. It could be a sign that he's adjusting to the league but it could mean there are certain holes that can be exploited in his swing. Coming off the bench a decent amount might mean that he's faced more high strikeout pitchers as well. Colvin's a strange guy. There isn't a single part of his game that hasn't been questioned at some point. Everybody has a different belief about him from poor defense to inability to make contact to poor walk rate to poor power. I don't have high hopes for him being an impact player but he is definitely got me curious about which weaknesses turn out to be more true than others. And he definitely could prove me wrong and put it all together.

There's a massive difference in the two players' offense. Are you saying Hill is better at these other things a catcher is supposed to do to the tune of a .300 difference in OPS? And quite frankly, Soto's defense isn't that much worse than Hill's. I'm saying I don't know, and I don't think anyone else does either. Maybe so, but think about this. The only reason people thought Soto had a chance at the majors was because he played excellent defense at catcher. The scouts repeated it over and over again and so did the pitchers he worked with. It's the reason people were clamoring for him to become the backup catcher after 2006 even though he only had a .739 OPS at Iowa and in very limited time in the majors a .471 OPS. Since then, Soto has lost weight (and then gained some, and then lost some more) which should only help his defensive abilities. So this isn't a case of trying to analyze if a good defense catcher can do enough to outweigh the bat of a poor defensive catcher (Blanco/Barrett is a recent example of that). These are likely two strong defensive catchers. I have no idea which one is better defensively so the bat has to be a tiebreaker, and the massive advantage Soto enjoys is a pretty big tiebreaker.

I honestly think the jury is still out on whether Colvin is a good defender or not. The scouts seem to be mixed in the minors between some believing that he had good corner outfield defense and poor center field defense and others who believed he was only a LF. So far, in the very limited data we have in the majors Colvin seems to be leaning towards the former idea with his defense both with the eye test and UZR. I don't think it's a stretch to believe that he's a good defender at either corner outfield position. At the same time, that still has to be confirmed with more chances.

And the other question is does the SEC want to lose its distinction of the best football conference? They lose a lot of credibility by adding 4 mediocre to worse schools to the conference.

Either team can score with walks, hbp, errors, etc. and have two no hitters in a normal 9 inning game. If the Cubs score in the 9th or earlier, Floyd can't get 27 outs. And if he doesn't get 27 outs, he doesn't get an official no hitter.

Besides Hill the Cubs have all left-handers on the bench so there weren't many choices on that front.

Gotta love that the Cubs have chosen Grabow over Russell, who has actually gotten hitters out this year. Atkins will be here about a week, and the its the return of John [expletive] Grabow. God damn this organization is horrible. It's the best long-term decision. Russell has gotten pretty lucky and still has mediocre numbers for the season. Grabow's likely the better pitcher. And you really want to be sure before you release a relief pitcher that has more than a year left on his contract because they bounce around from awful to good again so much and the Cubs could easily get some contract relief by next year.

This is the best way to use a guy like Atkins. He's most likely insurance for a couple of days and then he'll be sent right back down for Grabow.

Lee has had 10.7% of normal at-bats and Ramirez has 8.8%. Lee has had 10.3% of at-bats with RISP and Ramirez has had 10.9%. If I get a change, I'll calculate what the numbers would be without each of them. I definitely would agree that bad lineup construction might have caused some of these issues. Lou's bad lineup and playing time decisions have cost the Cubs in that one and other areas. Of course it should be said that the numbers I used also dowplayed the problems. If you remove the Cubs from the NL numbers and removed the RISP numbers when using the Cubs total as you should, it gets a little worse.

I heard Dan Bernstein on the radio the other day trying to educate fans on advanced baseball statistics, and was using FIP like it was the king of all pitching statistics. Whoever was with him (not Boers) was noticing that Jimenez wasnt among the top 10 pitchers in FIP and calling the stat out based on that. Dan's response was to defend that damn stat to the death and kept talking about how its more important than anything else you can look at because it's independant of fielding. I was just shaking my head. These stats are great, but people have to understand that there is not one single stat that determines the value or worth of an individual player. Definitely agree. And I'm not actually the biggest fan of FIP in particular because it assumes all pitchers control their BABIP equally and I don't agree with that. But it does show that he probably has been unlucky even if there is a scouting reason why his BABIP might be so high (leaving too many pitches over the middle of the plate for example).