UMFan83

So you hope the season is over within the first two weeks? And people get on my case.... He's kidding though. I don't think Kyle really hopes the Cubs start out 0-14.

my opinion about the cubs is pretty much immaterial. there's no reason to rush a 20 year old who doesn't walk and has no power to replace a guy who is adequate. wait 2 months and don't burn an arbitration year on a guy who will be getting rushed and may not even be as good as the guy currently playing shortstop. if this was mark prior or jason heyward then sure, call him up. but he's not nearly that good calling him up now may well harm his future development. Fine maybe Castro isn't the answer right now, but I don't think the Cubs can afford to have Theriot manning one of the most important defensive positions all year, and then on offense give us a .700 OPS.

I see your point, but you weren't getting Soriano offering a contract for 4-5 years. I think Soriano will still have numbers worthy of starting, but worthy of starting on a bad team as the worst outfielder. Hendry betted that the Cubs would win it all in 80 or 09 and the contract wouldn't matter because the fans would be on cloud 9. Just didn't happen. How could he make that sort of bet with the downside of the risk being a horrible player for 3-4 seasons? Remember they signed him coming off an under 70 win season and had a ton of holes. Signing Soriano alone wasn't putting the team over the top. It was obvious to everyone in baseball that Soriano, while a good player, was not a franchise player. Never was and never will be. People on this board were not thrilled with the signing before they even know how many years he got. So not only did they sign Soriano to a ridiculous annual salary, but they signed him to that salary until he was 38 years old. Hendry did it to make a splash and save his job. We rip on Hendry all the time for dumb moves, but Hendry had to know at the time what he was getting with Soriano, and that was a complimentary player, not a superstar. If we didn't have a GM trying to save his job, Soriano is not a Chicago Cub. I thought Soriano was a superstar before he got here. He was putting up arguably superstar numbers. I thought he was going to put the Cubs over the top cause the 70 win team played a lot worse than they really were. The Cubs haven't won a WS in 103 years. Dusty overused the pitchers cause he wanted to bring a WS to Chicago. He had to gamble. So did Jim. Neither gamble worked. You thought he was putting up superstar numbers before coming here? He had one season with a +.900 OPS in his career, the year before he came here when it was just .910. He was such a butcher at 2B that he was randomly thrown into LF before the 2006 season because that's where he was going to hurt the team the least there. He did two things very well, which was hit for power and stealing bases. At age 30, you can't sign someone expecting them to steal a lot of bases over the years. He was not at all a superstar, he was a very good player with significant holes to his game.

well, we gave him 11 innings, time to pull the plug. No we gave him 3 seasons and 11 innings. I'm not guaranteeing that Castro is better from day 1 or anything, but for a team that seems to have a weak offense, you need someone with more range at SS. Also, Theriot's high average, no power hitting abilities were somewhat OK when the offense lead the league in OBP and runs scored, but in an offense with potentially 3-4 black holes in it (or possibly only 1 or 2) we need to start considering other options if there is a better one out there. the cubs aren't good, what's the point of killing an arbitration year and rushing a guy up to the big leagues when he is, at best, a very marginal upgrade from the current shortstop over the next two months? people complain that we rushed ronny cedeno; calling castro up now would be way more silly than anything the cubs did with ronny. Castro won't put us over the top, but giving up on the season on April 7th is a little premature. Especially when you consider that if you are even sniffing the race, the Cubs are probably upgrading in July. I don't care about arb years, since when do the Cubs have difficulty affording/resigning their star players when they leave their arb years. Teams like the Rays do that because they have a strict payroll. With the Cubs, if you can avoid an extra arb year, do it but it shouldn't be written in stone that it has to be that way.

I see your point, but you weren't getting Soriano offering a contract for 4-5 years. I think Soriano will still have numbers worthy of starting, but worthy of starting on a bad team as the worst outfielder. Hendry betted that the Cubs would win it all in 80 or 09 and the contract wouldn't matter because the fans would be on cloud 9. Just didn't happen. How could he make that sort of bet with the downside of the risk being a horrible player for 3-4 seasons? Remember they signed him coming off an under 70 win season and had a ton of holes. Signing Soriano alone wasn't putting the team over the top. It was obvious to everyone in baseball that Soriano, while a good player, was not a franchise player. Never was and never will be. People on this board were not thrilled with the signing before they even know how many years he got. So not only did they sign Soriano to a ridiculous annual salary, but they signed him to that salary until he was 38 years old. Hendry did it to make a splash and save his job. We rip on Hendry all the time for dumb moves, but Hendry had to know at the time what he was getting with Soriano, and that was a complimentary player, not a superstar. If we didn't have a GM trying to save his job, Soriano is not a Chicago Cub.

well, we gave him 11 innings, time to pull the plug. No we gave him 3 seasons and 11 innings. I'm not guaranteeing that Castro is better from day 1 or anything, but for a team that seems to have a weak offense, you need someone with more range at SS. Also, Theriot's high average, no power hitting abilities were somewhat OK when the offense lead the league in OBP and runs scored, but in an offense with potentially 3-4 black holes in it (or possibly only 1 or 2) we need to start considering other options if there is a better one out there.

No range.

I definitely slept on the Braves this year, they seem to have a fantastic team. Does anyone here think otherwise?

No raaaangeeeee. Not sure if they would have gotten him anyways but still.

Yeah they should stop hitting into double plays like the rest of the teams in the MLB decided to do.

To be fair Soto and Riot did make good contact. I'm not saying right now, I'm just saying in general. Hopefully Soto can heat up but I don't expect a ton from Fontenot and even Theriot.

Very true. Defense is like the new OBP, which doesn't mean the Cubs have to follow it blindly. But the Cubs look like they've payed almost no attention to defense while constructing this team.

I usually get really bored once the Cubs get past Soriano in the lineup. Fontenot, Soto, Pitcher, and Theriot it's impossible to expect almost anything from them.

Just missed that Geo. At least he finally hit a ball somewhat hard.

Damn he looks good tonight. Gonna be a long night me thinks. And it doesn't get easier tomorrow.

Hmmm makes you wonder if he keeps struggling where he's gonna fit on the Nats playoff roster.

I just called CSN Chicago and talked to a nice lady who told me she would contact Comcast to resolve the situation on Channel 285

Yeah that' what I've been getting too. Does anyone know how to watch the game?!?!?!!?!

Yeah I mean it sucks that we have to pay so much but I don't fault them for charging that much if our fans will pay it and pack the place. The price of being popular I guess. The best part about all the tickets basically selling out is that if the team sucks, I can go to a lot of games for dirt cheap. The downside of course is that when they are awesome, it's nearly impossible to get a cheap ticket.

You can't say you actually don't hate it, the pictures are iffy and it looks pretty cool. You can say it's bad, it's okay, or it's good. It looks like crap here, even more crowded than the other angle. The banner is ridiculous, especially the dumb slogan. Why can't say all that? "don't hate it" indicates an overall favorable response towards the photos but not an overwhemling like. "the pictures are iffy" one thing he's not favorable about is the actual pictures used on the banners. This is something that hinders him from truly loving the banners. "it looks pretty cool", overall he thinks that hanging of the banners, including the horizontal banner that goes across the top of the marquee makes the exterior of the park look pretty cool.

Damn 95% of your fans want to face the Hawks? :lol:

I've seen stand alone banners, but not 8 packed in tightly around the marquee. One year saw a game in Cleveland and they had very similar banners all around the outside. It wasn't really packed around the marquee like this though. I think the Twins do something similar (though I haven't seen a game up there in awhile and can't totally remember). Maybe I'm a sucker for advertisement but it does kind of get me excited for baseball -- which I'm sure is the intent. The Twins did do something similar last year when I went there. They actually had a cool feel outside the ballpark before the games. Obviously that has changed now that they play at Target Field

Fine but that still doesn't prove that there is any negative effect to them making the playoffs and getting stomped. You can argue the level of benefit though from minute to fairly beneficial. I would just enjoy knowing that the team accomplished something despite losing last year's leading scorer, starting off the season really poorly, trading 2 key role players to teams your competing for playoff spots with, and dealing with injuries to the 3 best players on the team at the same time for a 5-10 game stretch.

He heard the Cubs were hoping to retire Steve Buchelle's number 24 so he had to switch. In determing the number to switch to, he wanted to honor the legendary Julio Zutela and his slump breaking fruit voodoo.

Yeah, I don't see how it could be worse to make the playoffs and get destroyed. While I think it will be an easy sweep, I would imagine 1 of the games, probably game 3 would be reasonably close. Enough to give people like Taj some valuable experience, or something intangible like that.