dalgreen

Why do you think Perez will be the starting shortstop next year?

His .281 OBP outside of April is tied for 40th out of 44 SS with 100 PA's. He's bad compared to everyone. You are missing my point. Perez is bad, period. Which ties back to my original point that is why you can't re-sign Nomar. My point also is backup infielders are backup infielders for a reason. We have bad starting outfielders, bad starting pitchers and have had bad top bullpen guys. Key word is starting. This is just redundant. We all know how bad Neifi is and why it's ridiculous to have him or either Cedeno (who may or may not be just as bad) as backups for a guy who seems incapable of playing an injury-free year.

I don't like Perez, but some of you act as if he was brought here to be an everyday player and not a backup infielder. How about at least showing some level of fairness and compare his numbers to other backup infielders. Or maybe we should've just kept Ramon Martinez, eh?

Thanks for the replies. I just don't get it. I got the Comcast game last night via Extra Innings, and the TBS broadcast, but the ESPN broadcast of the game was blacked out in St. Louis. I don't get it. That ,to me, is absolutely ridiculous. Again, I know why ESPN's coverage would be blacked out in Chicago and Atlanta, but why St. Louis? By the way, who were the broadcasters for ESPN last night?

Are some of you under the impression that Giles will only want a one-year deal? I'm not excited at all about him because I think he'd want at least a three-year deal. Giles will be 35 on opening day next year.

I have a question that I'd like your help with. I live in St. Louis, yet the ESPN broadcast of the Braves/Cubs game is being blacked out in favor of ESPNEWS. Why? I have the Extra Innings package and TBS, but I wanted to see who was doing the ESPN game and it's ESPNEWS. I don't get what rule there is that would make St. Louis a blackout market. I understand why Chicago and Atlanta are watching ESPNEWS, but I fail to see why St. Louis is being blacked out. Anyone else outside of Chicago or Atlanta getting blacked out, too? Stupid tv rules!

Which is why I think you bypass Nomar and use the money/trades and pick up at least two studs for the outfield. I'm sick of seeing poor defense and lack of range up the middle. I wish we had a GM that saw the need for two small ball type of guys who have very good gloves who could play 2nd and short. The Cubs don't need small ball types. Bunting will not save this team. Oops. My bad. I keep forgetting my use of "small ball" isn't the same as others use. When I say small ball I mean I would like to have a 2nd and SS who have little power, but great OBP, great gloves and they know they are basically capable of only singles and doubles. These are guys who know the fundamentals and know their roles and won't deviate from them. They can squeeze, hit and run and aren't afraid of getting two strikes on them. I would love to have 1-2 hitters like that. I'm sick of our guys playing the game like it's a slow-pitch softball game where strike one is really strike two. A balanced lineup with power mixed in and we should have a successful offense. Please, just say no to Nomar.

Which is why I think you bypass Nomar and use the money/trades and pick up at least two studs for the outfield. I'm sick of seeing poor defense and lack of range up the middle. I wish we had a GM that saw the need for two small ball type of guys who have very good gloves who could play 2nd and short.

That's the day that I lose a lot of hope, if Neifi is brought back. Can you guys tell me why Neifi would be bad as a true 25th man? Unless you bring back Nomar and know he's likely to have at least one stint on the 15-day disabled list then I could see why you wouldn't want him as a backup. But if that's the case you shouldn't re-sign Nomar. I'm just trying to figure out how many better backup shortstops there are in the majors. Okay, maybe you might want to go with Ronny Cedeno. I just hope everyone realizes this is his first season with good offensive numbers. So if he's your backup and Nomar misses a month or two of the year, is Cedeno going to be an adequate offensive player at shortstop? Cedeno > Perez, that's about as succintly as I can put it. If Nomar goes down for a month or two, I think that Cedeno is a better option than Perez. Also, going back to my previous post, to me it would show an approval of what Neifi has done this year. I don't like that in the least, since Neifi has done more harm than good, although whether he would do that next year may be up for debate due to playing time considerations. Are you sure your bias hasn't altered your objectivity when it comes to Perez? I don't necessarily like the guy, particularly if he's anything other than the 25th man, but he's done more harm than good? I don't understand that. If I showed you his numbers and the numbers of games he'd play, you would've been upset? I feared a .230/.250 and an average glove. I'll give the devil his due, his glove saved a lot of pitchers a higher ERA. I don't have a problem with Cedeno starting but only if we can get two studs somewhere in the outfield to offset whatever offensive dropoff that might occur from Cedeno's bat, if he isn't capable of producing offensively. I still don't see how Perez has done more harm than good, though.

My theory is that they've emphasized pitching at the expense of position players in the 1st round of the draft. in the Hendry era, they've only taken position players in the 1st round 3 times: Patterson (1998), Montanez (2000) and Harvey (2003). An example of the preference is taking Prior instead of Texeira in 2001. A more unfortunate example is using five high draft picks in 2002 on pitchers, including taking Brownlie ahead of Jeff Francouer. Yeah, but a lot of times the baseball draft can be a crapshoot. I still don't know why you can't draft position players even in rounds let's say 4-9 and not still have talent left. Heck, even diamonds in the rough. I still say there's some sort of difference in scouting or in player development between our pitching and position prospects.

That's the day that I lose a lot of hope, if Neifi is brought back. Can you guys tell me why Neifi would be bad as a true 25th man? Unless you bring back Nomar and know he's likely to have at least one stint on the 15-day disabled list then I could see why you wouldn't want him as a backup. But if that's the case you shouldn't re-sign Nomar. I'm just trying to figure out how many better backup shortstops there are in the majors. Okay, maybe you might want to go with Ronny Cedeno. I just hope everyone realizes this is his first season with good offensive numbers. So if he's your backup and Nomar misses a month or two of the year, is Cedeno going to be an adequate offensive player at shortstop? One year of good numbers (in his rookie year) is better than zero years of good numbers for Neifi. He had one good month this season. Other than that, he's done more harm than good. I'd love to see Nomar back for another year. Don't overpay though. I am not about ready to defend Perez. But I will say this, if you told me on April 1st that he'd have the numbers he has right now in the number of games he's played, I'd take them. Personally, I thought he'd be a .230 hitter with a .250 OBP. But I don't want him to backup if Nomar is re-signed because I already expect Nomar to miss many, many games next year. That's why you have to go with a very capable backup shortstop. Or better yet, not re-sign Nomar.

And Houston's collapse against the Brewers, which was as bad as our losing to the Reds the last week of the season last year.

That's the day that I lose a lot of hope, if Neifi is brought back. Can you guys tell me why Neifi would be bad as a true 25th man? Unless you bring back Nomar and know he's likely to have at least one stint on the 15-day disabled list then I could see why you wouldn't want him as a backup. But if that's the case you shouldn't re-sign Nomar. I'm just trying to figure out how many better backup shortstops there are in the majors. Okay, maybe you might want to go with Ronny Cedeno. I just hope everyone realizes this is his first season with good offensive numbers. So if he's your backup and Nomar misses a month or two of the year, is Cedeno going to be an adequate offensive player at shortstop?

I agree with everything you've said. I want to bring up one other possibility, he's just another in the long line of overvalued, overrated, whatever the correct term is, prospects that the Cubs have produced. I hope that's not the case because I'm still a fan of his although I can no longer defend his poor play as I did in the past. I've never understood how he was rated as a 5-tool player. I can see 4-tool, but I never thought he had a great arm. Unless a good arm vs. great arm counts in the tool ranking process.

Better starting pitching? I don't have any numbers, but I don't think the 2003 offense was any better than this year's offense. Good point about the pitching. I believe Prior, Wood and Z were dominating in August and September. We also had a pretty effective bullpen, too. I still don't think you can win by having a bunch of power hitters with hackers. I look at the run the Yankees had and the 13 year run the Braves have had and they all had a nice balanced lineup with power guys and small ball kind of guys. The same goes for St. Louis and Houston who have pretty much dominated the NL Central since the mid '90's.

I don't really believe in that motivation stuff. I believe it's with the players. Remember, we weren't that good until Lofton and Ramirez came to the team. We basically have too many guys that don't know how to play baseball the right way. In addition, you need a lineup with balance. You need to have power guys with small guys who can work the count, get on base, and guys who play good defense. Defensively, Grudz, AGonz, Miller and Lofton are much better than Walker,Perez/Nomar, Barrett, Patterson/Hairston. Perez alone may be the best defensively in the group.

With the lineup you have listed, you have to think seriously about the bench. You can no longer assume Nomar will play 100 games, I'm not sure with Lofton and Giles' age, you can assume them being injury-free, either. One thing I do know, as evidenced during this season, we do need to get better defensively. That's why I can take Walker or Garciaparra but not both next year.

I'm genuinely serious, can you give an example of this? I'm not trying to be a jerk, it just seems to me that most people who defend Corey do so when someone has gone overboard in the other direction. Maybe that's the case. I don't want to pull specific examples because I don't want this to turn into a massive flame war. Saying things like "Where are all the Hollandsworth and Burnitz threads if we're going to rag on Corey yet again." "Let's all pile on Corey." "Another one of these threads?" Do any of those statements have anything to do with the topic at hand? Because there aren't Burnitz threads there can't be Corey threads? So we can't say anything negitive about Corey or else it's "Piling on?" If it's just general fatigue over the Corey threads then don't open them. Okay, I understand what you're saying. The problem is since Corey is such a "powder keg" issue as you say, he invokes a lot of strong feelings one way or the other. One person takes it too far, and then that invokes the strong feelings of the opposition. Personally, I'm at a loss to why Corey has struggled as much as he has this year. He was much better last year with his old, yet flawed swing. I don't know how much the change in his swing, or the coaching he's received, or his attitude/willingness to change play a part in his struggles this year, and I think it's pretty ill-informed to claim to know for certain one way or another. Going forward, I don't know if I'd want Patterson starting in '06, or even on the team in a backup role. Like with several players on the team, we need to see how the offseason shakes out a little bit to determine how we need to address different things. I do know that if it came down to Patterson or Pie, I'd give Patterson CF in a heartbeat, for the simple fact that Pie needs more time to develop plate discipline, especially with his missing time this year. So there's my assessment of Corey, ending with a ridiculously unnecessary run-on sentence. I would love for Corey to basically start over. I think the Cubs need to treat him now as if he were just a third or fourth year pro player. I think it would be wrong to automatically assume he'll make the 25-man roster, in fact, it might be a good thing to not even count on him making the 25-man roster to start 2006. I always saw he and JD Drew as similar style players. Patterson just needs to be taught when to use his power and when to use his natural line drive stroke. I really think the Cubs let Patterson get by on his talent alone without teaching him skills or the right way to play the game. I would love for him to play winter-ball. I honestly don't think he has baseball "smarts" right now.

Regardless of the ideas for 2006, I still think it was silly for Hendry to suggest an overhaul isn't needed for this team. By my estimates, I can only see at most eight of the twenty-five players safe for next season.

I really don't like the "bandwagon" (or BandWGN :wink: ) comments alluding that the site selects certain players to be ripped and makes some players untouchable. Where am I saying that Corey shouldn't be ripped? It's one thing to blame a player for struggling, it's another thing to blame Corey for a messed up squeeze play when Prior screwed up the signs. Again, people can point out all they want that a player is struggling. However, some of this stuff against Corey is really grasping at straws, and the squeeze play is one of them. I wasn't including you in the group. But there are several people on here (not the majority) who will excuse poor play by some while choosing to go overboard with their criticism of some bad play by certain players. Unfortunately, some of the stuff against Patterson is nothing more than people grasping at straws, but you could also say the same thing about those who go overboard in their criticism of others, too.

I think there's a chance that one of the two will be back, but I don't think either will get a huge raise. In fact, I might be in the minority, but I never really had a problem with one of them being on the team, it was the ridiculous fact that both of these guys were on the team that ticked me off. But, I agree with you that it's how one spends the money and not necessarily how much you have to spend.

It's not that people do not want to hear that he is playing bad, they want it to be a fair review. It's fair to say that he is struggling, but it's unfair to rip Corey for a botched squeeze attempt when it was Prior that messed up the sign. In all fairness, many people on this board have the same faults as Baker--too loyal to some players and criticizing some players while giving leeway to others who make the same mistakes as those who get criticized. People on here blame Perez, Baker, Macias, Hollandsworth, and the other whipping boys of the day for stuff that's not necessarily their fault, but it's not okay in some instances to do it to other players? I used to be one of Patterson's more ardent supporters/defenders. I can no longer defend him against others who want to criticize him even when it's not warranted.

I would love to know MacPhail's answer to why there's a blatant disparity between pitching and position talent that has been produced. Is it scouting? Is it player development? It's really incredible to have produced few real major league talented position players. It's based on this that I have higher hopes on Murton's future than Dubois' or Pie's future.

And that means he would've pitched well in Houston and tonight in Denver? I'm no real fan of Rusch, but Hill could've done himself a big favor by at least pitching better in his second start than what he did in his first start. And I'm only talking a little bit of improvement. It amazes me how fast some people want to move guys up while forgetting that a lot of our guys just aren't ready or have been overvalued. All I can say is I hope we don't see Pie in a Cub uniform until September 2006. i'm not saying he would have pitched well in houston and colorado, but how could he have done worse than two cub losses? the cubs are behind 5-6 teams in the wild card race...i'd rather have two cub losses w/ rich hill on the mound than two cub losses with glendon rusch on the mound. i'm looking to have a good team next year, not winning 83 games this year. and w/ regard to pie...there's a big difference between a 25 year old dominating AAA and a 19 year old who had half a good season at AA. it's not a stretch to say that hill is ready. I'm a Hill fan. In fact, and you may want to hang me for this, I'm one of the ones in agreement with Hendry that I wouldn't deal him straight up for Dunn. Having said that, Hill's lack of control at the major league level is a problem he seems to not have at AAA. I'd rather have that issue worked on in Iowa instead of every fifth day right now for the Cubs. And, believe me, after the first inning tonight, I was ready to send Rusch to Iowa (exaggeration). But he threw the ball real well after the second inning.

And that means he would've pitched well in Houston and tonight in Denver? I'm no real fan of Rusch, but Hill could've done himself a big favor by at least pitching better in his second start than what he did in his first start. And I'm only talking a little bit of improvement. It amazes me how fast some people want to move guys up while forgetting that a lot of our guys just aren't ready or have been overvalued. All I can say is I hope we don't see Pie in a Cub uniform until September 2006.