UMFan83

That's cute. But what mythical entity prevents us from winning the World Series? The Billy Goat curse only prevents us from getting to the World Series. We need to explore this so that when Theo gets us past the NLCS, we are prepared for what awaits us in the World Series.

I was just putting together a random team filled with the players I want to keep from the current Cubs and fill in the rest with soley FAs just for fun, and the Kelly Johnson/Jeff Baker platoon really warmed my heart. Johnson actually hits slightly better against Lefties over his career but whatever, Baker can sub at other positions too as a platoon guy. If we can get an .815 combined OPS at 2B i'd be thrilled.

Hello we should probably trade all our draft picks if Angelo is goin to be the one using them.

I can't believe how good of an offense the Cubs looked on paper. Looking down that lineup on August 1st, here are the OPS's for the regular starting 8 .960 (Ramirez) .930 (Sosa) .910 (Lee) .870 (Alou) .850 (Nomar) .825 (Barrett) .820 (Walker) .750 (Patterson) Compared to this years team: .871 (Ramirez) .819 (Pena) .773 (Castro) .759 (Soriano) .742 (Fukudome) .721 (Soto) .719 (Byrd) .666 (Barney) Different eras no doubt but wow.

nomar coming to the plate in his first AB with the cubs was such an epic moment. then he grounded into a double play on the first pitch, but nobody even cared. didn't he end up having the game winning hit or something on a line drive to left? IIRC, the Cubs had a small..maybe 2-1 lead throughout the majority of thet game, and in the 7th or 8th, they had a rally going and had already scored at least 1 run, when Nomar came up and kept the chains moving with a liner to left to score another run in the inning. Edit: Memory was a little off. Cubs were down 3-2 going into the inning, and had scored 3 runs already in the inning before a Nomar liner to left made it 6-3 Cubs.

I belive a few seasons' worth of the oldest threads got archived during one of the site crashes/rebuilds. Yeah I know. There used to be game thread from the 2003 playoffs here. Crazy stuff. Was just seeing if for some reason the archive.org site happened to archive individual threads that got a lot of traffic at the time but I guess not.

Tried my hardest to find Tree's infamous MS Paint Thread from 2004, but this is the close the internet wayback machine would let me get: http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/795/sumtree.png We need one of these for Theo.

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They don't have Theo anymore. I'd be surprised if anyone left in that front office knew what OBP was much less WAR.

Although Theo clearly has more impact on the current and future Cubs, I was still a bit more excited of Nomar. -Part of it was because it would have more immediate returns with the Cubs being in the thick of a playoff race and seemingly Nomar was the midding piece. -Part of it was because, while their were rumblings that Nomar was available, I don't recall many of us thinking we had much of a shot back then. There was no twitter to give us minute by minute updates and a few artciles casually mentioning the Cubs interest in Nomar, and many of those were speculation because the Cubs had a hole at SS. -Part of it was because there was still a lot of leftover excitement from the previous year's team and people in general felt we were a lot closer. -Part of it was because I was younger and my only major concerns in life were finishing college and having enough money for beer, so sports were a much bigger chuck of what I cared about on a daily basis. When Nomar was announced, I was listening to the radio as the deadline passed and all I was hearing about is the White Sox trading Loaiza for Conterras so I assumed the Cubs didn't do anything. Even if the Cubs did anything, I was thinking it would be for something much lower profile like trading for Orlando Cabrera, who many speculated we'd get in the days leading up to the deadline. So I was at a BBQ when I starting getting calls from my friends in Boston. By the 3rd one I figured something was up, so I called one of them back and the first thing I heard was "YOU BASTAHHDS YOU TOOK AHH NOMAAHHH" and I remember it took me a second or two to comprehend what he just said before it hit me. Great day. As much as we will remember Jim Hendry for being a bumbling baffoon, I will never forget the story of how he threw that trade together. I don't care if Nomar turned out to be on a clear decline and never the same player, I still commend him for making that happen.

I could really see Lucchino making this tough on the Cubs, if only because he wants it known that he's not going to let his employees go easily. Also because its been said he has an adversarial relationship with Theo and would probably want to get as much as he can possibly get for him, even if relative to what people are speculation it isn't a lot.

No NL team is going to want him even as a salary dump. That said, I didn't realize how badly Zito fell off last year after a couple of somewhat decent years. Maybe they would make that trade. They could use bats too even though Soriano isn't really a good hitter, just deceptive because he hits home runs on occasion.

what will you be wearing? Red Toews jersey just like 10,000 others

I have seats tonight on the 2nd row from the glass directly to the left of the Hawks bench. I believe its section 102 row 2. So pumped. The last time I sat on the glass it was at Chicago Stadium and I was like 10, and I remember I couldn't see anything all game because my seat was right where the linesman stood while the puck was in one of the offensive zones. Hopefully today is better

Or anything about spray charts.

If Cherington plugged Soriano into CARMINE, the machine would immediately start shaking violently with smoke coming out of it with a message stating "SYSTEM WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN 5 SECONDS" which upon explosion would probably kill Cherington, and would leave Theo as the prime suspect for his murder due to him designing the system. Are you sure you want to risk that?

We WILL get him on here so he can serenade us with statistical analysis and then one of us will say something creepy and disturbing and he'll ignore it but then a few more will as well and it will creep him out and finally he'll get scared and leave.

For real? I feel like the media is eating this up. They have certainly overshadowed Robin Ventura and cut greatly into Bears discussion time on sports radio, but that may also have to do with their play.

Did anyone post this earlier? Paula Faris is NBC-5 sports girl Not much news but good to see the players are thrilled

In order to win your division I think you need to beat the teams in your division. I have no problem with 18 games a year with the Brewers, Cardinals, Pirates, and Reds. I'd be fine with something like 12 games against division foes and 8 against the other clubs, but I hate only playing 2 series a year against the other 10 teams in your league.

Dude NSFW tags please. Now I have to explain to my coworkers why I have a giant wet spot in the front of my pants.

Cherington has a vested interest in making sure that talks don't hit a snag here because once it's done he's likely the new Red Sox GM. Meanwhile, Bush probably thinks he's canned and might become a disgruntled employee and give them Starlin.

I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure that other interested GMs werent thinking "I should go after Cutler...well no, I'm not even sure who is to blame for him asking out...I'd better stay out of this."

I trust our general manager to correctly decide whether we should go after this player.

clearly the "safari" was a trip spent with Bill James and Mr Beane to discuss how Mr Ricketts could change the world. It worked. Don't get too giddy guys. The guy hasn't done jack [expletive] yet. Let's not grab our collective [expletive] just yet. He hired a highly qualified person with a track record of success that prescribes to advanced statistics to run the baseball opps department. That's all he needed to really do on the baseball side, other then opening up the purse strings. Now its said he is going to be hands off. So yeah, he did a ton. I realize you also might be sarcastic.