Careless

Oh good, Howry still sucks

I'd be really confused if I was in the stands. Do I boo him? It's briggs, but that was terrible!

Holy cow, is he a terrible singer

Not even close to a swing, Geo

you think Zambrano was lobbying Lou to let him hit for the last 3 innings?

was I the only one worried that Bay was going to have beer dumped on him there?

I wish he would miss more bats though. Oh man Bay just ticked off Soto. What did Bay do? fouled off Soto's mask, knocking it completely off his head

that was not pretty

not sure why soto was chasing that ball

that's an unusual play

Cheap hr, but we'll take it!

Gameday has him at 21 Guess it is. I just figured between a 9-pitch out for Cedeno and a walk to Theriot, it'd be a bit higher. Still good, though Gallagher is running his up a bit too. Soriano and lee were both on first pitches

"damn" yes, "god damn" no

that was absolutely crushed

theriot should have been nailed there The ball almost hit Theriot when he was still 9 feet from the bag

Soriano is on fire

He's locating some nice breaking balls 73-82, haven't noticed any FB speeds (and it's been mostly off-speed) 94 on that last pitch (and I thought that was going out)

field side of the warning track

Control looks good so far I just had to post that

this post-season pretty much has to lead to conspiracy theories

What I'm taking from this is that our lineup and roster are a lot better this year than it has been

The defense behind him, more than anything else. He's only allowed something like 33 hits in 57.1 IP. Yeah, his K rate, BB rate, and HR rate (and HR/FB) are all pretty comparable to his prior Cubs experience. Its just that coming into todays game he has a 203 BABIP, resulting in a 173 average against. Granted he has only allowed a 14.6 LD%, but thats not really a skill and will regerss to the mean. Regardless of what his ERA says, his underlying statistics show that he was and is a league average pitcher. There's still some interesting digressions from his previous Cubs career that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. 1) There is a noticeable difference in his pitch selection. He's throwing more fastballs at the expense of sliders. 2) All three of his pitches are coming in at a consistent 2 MPH below when he was a closer, possibly indicating a change in the way he's pitching. 3) Not only is his LD% lower, his FB% is as well, with the difference all going to his GB%. If he was just getting LD-lucky, I wouldn't imagine the difference would be that pronounced. http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=517&position=P He's nowhere near as good as his ERA, and I don't know if any of this will be meaningful long-term, but it's curious to say the least. RE #1 I'm guessing this has to do with him having to "conserve" his slider. When you are facing batters multiple times as a starter vs once as a reliever, you have to not show all of your pitches the first time around. I'm guessing this is just correlational with moving to the starting role, rather than a causation for his success. If anything, you would assume that a pitcher who does a worse job at randomizing his pitch selection will get hit harder. RE #2 I'm guessing the reduction in speed can be attributed to the fact that he was only pitching one inning at a time before and could go all out and is now pitching multiple innings and needs to conserve himself and/or get tired later into games resulting in a slower average than when he was closing. RE #3 Yes, his GB% has increased, and hes eclipsed the point where GB% becomes moreso due to skill than luck (ie r^2 exceed 0.5) of 150 batters faced. Thats great an all, but on the flip side that further exposes the luck in his BABIP. Fly balls get converted into outs more than any other type of batted ball, and even though he has a really low BABIP, he has a low FB%, meaning that his BABIP should actually be higher than our standard LD%+.120 estimation (because those non-line drives are mostly ground balls (infact 2:1 in comparison with FB), which are turned into hits much more often than FBs). Ok, he's not going to finish the season being top 3 in cy young voting. I don't think anyone thinks he will. I, and I know I wasn't alone in this, was worrying about the guy giving up 85 runs in 150 innings for the season. He'll get worse, but that much worse?

How'd you like to be that bank teller. what, you think he'd be annoyed that someone asked for a thousand pounds of pennies?

Houston is currently the #2 team in the central, 1.5 games behind the Cubs. Berkman is slugging .808. 32 of his 59 hits (essentially 1.5 hits per game and 2/3 of a walk per game) have been for extra bases. So, Houston has been very good (3rd best run differential in the NL), and Berkman has been simply amazing. While I think it's safe to assume that Lance can't keep this up, what do those here who have been paying attention to them think of this Houston team?

Heavily positive, with a smattering of boos, especially when he GIDP and struck out in embarrassing fashion with the bases loaded. Something positive: the plurality of voters on comcastsportsnet's poll think that it was a good signing, he's got a good bat