jersey cubs fan

This is the part I don't get. Yes, the big league team is bad, and that sucks. No one is enjoying this. But this isn't a situation where you can cast blanket condemnation over the entire organization for "not trying". It's a little more nuanced than that. They didn't try last year. That had a carry over effect this season. They tried to improve incrementally this year but they put themselves in a hole by being so bad last year. My biggest problem is with Ricketts, who took way too long to make a change in leadership. You didn't have to wait to amass a supergroup of front office types if all you were going to do was have them build from within. Any competent management group could amass the talent the Cubs have in the system now if there was no mandate to make the major league team competitive. Hell, Hendry's bumbling morons acquired the guy people are drooling over the most. And he had to know they had to replace Hendry when he showed up. I am also not buying the Theo and Jed are only operating under the restrictions placed on them by ownership theory. There is no way this is just on ownership. The CBA as a surprise story does not hold up, since it was all stuff that had been on the table and likely to happen. These guys have talked openly about their collective desires to build a team all from within, and while they did say they didn't think they would ever have a chance to do it, the fact is they do now, and they are taking advantage. It is pretty clear that all the parallel front talk was just talk, and they went into this ready willing and able to focus exclusively on prospects, while treating the major league team as a secondary concern. It is absolutely ridiculous to criticize fans for not being happy with this set-up.

Can't be an actual on field ump though, since these guys would never overrule one another and risk showing up a colleague.

I assume this is only for training camp purposes.

That's not hate for him personally. That's hate for the double-standard. He's a douchey ex-athlete, but if I hated every douchey ex- or current athlete, I wouldn't have time for anything but hate. Certainly not making enough message board posts to meet my daily quota. Seriously though, can you imagine that story happening today? Was it one year after he signed what was then the biggest contract in MLB history? A perennial all star on the HOF fast track with what was a pristine reputation just quitting out of nowhere to spend time with his family, only to divorce his harpy wife and come back a much worse player. That ranks right up there with any interesting baseball story, although baseball players, by rule, are not interesting.

I hate Sandberg fellaters more than Sandberg himself. At least Ryno was a good player for a while.

I love the idea that this is somehow a thing that should have happened years ago. He's got like 6 years of coaching under his belt, there has to be dozens of guys with more "a long time in the making" on their resume than him.

I would think that people that care about a baseball team enough to actually bother posting about it on message boards, and moderate those message boards, would not pretend that front office maneuvering is more meaningful to fans than the major league team winning baseball games.

Which is insanely good for one of the worst teams in the league over the past 4 years.

This is so stupid. This is a major market baseball team with outstanding attendance and excitement levels that skyrocket just when it looks like they might be decent. We're 4 years into this team being abysmal, and the current owners have been here that entire time. 5 years with an average payroll, comping up against teams that can't get fans to show up even when they are good, is ridiculous. Fans aren't fans because they want to see front offices do behind the scenes work. Fans are fans of the major league baseball team, and that major league baseball team can't go four years being awful and expect fans to not get pissed off.

Hah, I meant the handedness of linemen. It's beyond nitpicky. There is so much more to worry about with Long, and everybody on the line.

I agree with you. It is not an issue worth discussing.

I assume that means Sandberg will be the new Phillies manager. Hurray for them.

that's like a tweet specifically designed to get Paul Sullivan to retweet it

WTF are the Texans doing? The Cowboys Jumbotron is already ridiculously large and their new one will dwarf it. When you go to a game at Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium, I guess) you end up watching on the Jumbotron because it is too distracting. It's an amazing piece of technology but it detracts from the game. There is a very strong sense that fans are being drawn away from the stadium to watch games, and teams are desperate to find gimmicks to keep them in attendance.

Why is strategy in quotes? I don't see how you can possibly deny that there is additional strategy involved in managing an NL lineup. You don't have to enjoy it, but it shouldn't be hard to understand why someone else might prefer the less cookie-cutter flow of NL games where teams are forced to make trade-offs between pitching and hitting. It's called strategy just so olde timey folk and managers can justify their hard on for history and their job, respectively. It's not meaningful strategy. It's like switching lanes on a highway during bumper to bumper traffic. You look like you're doing something, but you aren't.

There was one play, a TD run, where the announcers praised Long while Mills had the much more impressive and important block. Long basically let a guy who was moving sideways take himself out of the play, while Garza made the initial block and Mills stood up a LB in the hole and drove him into the endzone. Long did show a ton of upside in that game though.

they have a lot more than 6 prospects in the system that could end up becoming great. the system is a lot deeper than that. how much would you like to bet that less than 6 of the cubs prospects end up being great? But they could man, and really, what is baseball than a game of what could happen?

Another series or two isn't going to make much of a difference, and it does open him up to injury. This is going to last into the regular season, there is no way around it.

Fair or not, this is true. I follow a lot of the sports radio guys on twitter, and it's funny. Bernstein last night was laughing at the overreactions to a preseason game last night, but then goes on to criticize Cutler for the one int, despite a 98.3 rating. Mully has already called Cutler "Jeff George" this morning on the radio. I know I'm a Cutler apologist, and he wasn't perfect last night, but for a guy in his umpteenth offense, I was happy with what I saw last night. He needs to obviously find some other guys besides Marshall to throw too, but it's hard to know if that's on Cutler, or if it's on the WR's for not getting seperation. I'm thinking it's probably time to put more of that on Cutler at this point...but still hard to tell. The pick was frustrating, and that was all on Jay..no doubt. But he's gonna throw his share of picks. As long as they're in areas of the field that don't hurt too much, I think we just have to accept that. The amount of obsession over that pick is astonishing. He's an INT prone QB in the preseason with a hodgepodge line and WR group in his 5th new offense with the team, again, in preseason. QBs throw picks. Picks often look bad. It was like his 5th drive ever under this system, in preseason.

ESZM

But he will be a BASEBALL LIFER by then.

i like those guys a lot, but don't you have to sort of just think this franchise is in serious trouble? there's just no way all of the top guys pan out, and even from the top four, aren't you realistically doing well if you get a very good (though non-star) player and a couple acceptable starters out of that group? I've said something similar before, but to expand a bit, the near term Cubs will rise or fall with Castro, Rizzo, Samardzija, Baez, and maybe Bryant/Soler. If they aren't getting star level production from several of those guys, then their chances of being a great team go way down. How that colors your opinion of the Front Office is a bit of a different question. Personally, I think that if Castro and Samardzija aren't ending up more than complementary guys, that truly underscores the atrocious level of talent in the organization when Theo and Jed took over. They can also take at least some responsibility for player development, because that's what we were relying on them to fix along with better talent selection, but in terms of the whole picture, Castro and Samardzija flat-lining puts a cherry on top of Hendry's crap sundae more than indicts them for relying on those players while adding pieces around them. Those two guys who were actually good and getting better suddenly falling off the cliff would have to put at least as much blame on the development side than on the talent side. The talent was there. That much is obvious.

Yeah, it's pretty difficult to be a living former baseball executive who is actually shunned from all of baseball. There is going to be a certain segment that wouldn't hire him out of fear that he'd be taking their job eventually. And a few organizations that probably scoff at his resume. But I'd bet at least a dozen would be all over trying to hire him.

http://thestacks.deadspin.com/the-time-a-baseball-player-sent-a-rat-to-a-female-sport-1148830047 Soooo, Dave Kingman was a douchebag mama's boy who hated women.

Because it's expensive and destroys your entire Sunday. My friend had 7 tickets to Jets games at the meadowlands. He trimmed that to 4 in the new stadium but gave them up 2 years ago. Partially because of cost (you can't get rid of preseason tix), partially because the stadium and tailgate now sucks, and partially because of having kids. But it is only 8 days a year. "destroying your Sunday" doesn't really hold up at all.