Soul

Yes, I think we should all agree not to play the "5.5/gm" card. It's meaningless in this case.

I saw it. My first thought is, what have the Cubs done in the past in such situations? I have not seen a pitcher used this much in PH situations. One way or another, Marquis as a PH must be part of the plan. Otherwise Lou would make sure it never comes to that.

At least we now know the real reason Hendry wanted Marquis so badly. Wonder no more, Cubbie fans! Why was Marquis signed? Secret pinch-hitting WEAPON.

Well, I'm still giving it until mid/end May before making any declarations (not that what I say matters anyway). There are also some areas of the club that have performed above their expectations, such as Lilly/Marquis -- even Rich Hill. So we need some areas to improve, and others to hold their own at the same time. Meanwhile, teams like the BoSox have no trouble beating up on someone 8-6 and declaring everything to be cool, even though Dice-K hasn't been completely dominant and some other areas of the club might not be tearing a new hole in the fabric of the universe. It's still all about winning games, even with some areas of the club not performing.

Obviously St. Louis found it an acceptable situation-they sent him up to the plate 9 times in 2005, and 10 in 2006 as a PH. Probably in blowouts.

To me, seeing Marquis as a pinch hitter is an indication this club is in trouble -- or at least that our roster has some big time problems. Which other team would find this an acceptable situation? Do we really have a $100 million club that can't muster anything more in a critical situation than jason marquis? Come on now. That means we're in trouble. It just does.

Why can't it be? If a pitcher hits well enough, they should be considered part of the bench. If you count this year, then 3 out of the last 4 years Marquis has hit .292, .310, and .273. Also between 2004-2006, he was 6-19 as a pinch hitter with 1 2B and 1 3B. With the Cubs roster right now, putting Marquis up there is just as effective as Izturis, Cedeno, Blanco, or Pie. ...which should tell you exactly how much trouble we're in. Marquis is a .225 lifetime hitter, according to the stats I saw last night on screen. That is true, but that's because he went 7 for 73 in his years with Atlanta. Somebody with St. Louis taught him how to hit. In the past 3 1/2 years, he has been a .262 hitter overall. Still not awesome, but pretty good for a back of the bench guy. For pretty much any team, when you get to your 3rd or 4th best bench option, that's about as much as you can hope for. From what I'm seeing, we might do well to beg that St. Louis coach to come teach our hitters how to hit :wink:

Baseball has a drug testing policy in place. That policy specifically mentions a player must test positive before action is taken. Bonds has not tested positive. However, it's completely clear he took steroids from the documentation which was leaked in Game of Shadows. Bonds himself sued the authors for the facts that were leaked. At least one of the authors is serving jail time for the offense. These were real, sealed court documents leaked to the public. They indicate Bonds' usage. He's not going to be kicked out of baseball because he didn't violate the letter of the MLB rules. That has nothing to do with whether or not he used steroids. There's an important distinction here. Bonds will probably never be called to pay criminally or legally for his actions. But as fans, we should not be forced to like this guy, or accept his home run record, when we know damn well he cheated to get it. That's all I'm saying.

Why can't it be? If a pitcher hits well enough, they should be considered part of the bench. If you count this year, then 3 out of the last 4 years Marquis has hit .292, .310, and .273. Also between 2004-2006, he was 6-19 as a pinch hitter with 1 2B and 1 3B. With the Cubs roster right now, putting Marquis up there is just as effective as Izturis, Cedeno, Blanco, or Pie. ...which should tell you exactly how much trouble we're in. Marquis is a .225 lifetime hitter, according to the stats I saw last night on screen.

This is simply ridiculous, but believe it if you want to. If you think all the documentation they have on Bonds amounts to hearsay, then there's nothing more to say. MLB isn't going after him for a variety of reasons, none of them have anything to do with whether he could be proven in a criminal court of law to have used steroids.

Time is running out to rectify it unfortunately. Having a bad April is one thing, but we're going beyond that now. We're digging such a deep hole it's becoming more & more far-fetched to imagine climbing out each day. Right now we're 5 games under. We need to at least play .500 baseball for the next month. 5 games under is a nightmare right now. On June 1st, it will put us just on the outside of the playoff hunt (in all likelihood). By the time June arrives, if we're sitting 10 games under .500 it is over. Sure, the '05 Astros --- happens once in a blue moon, and I don't see Roger Clemens riding to our rescue any time soon.

One of the marks of a very, very bad baseball team. True. Very few games this year has the offense, the starting pitching, the defense, and the bullpen all been in sync. But for any team how many games a year does this actually happen? Good teams find ways to win... Good teams overcome it when an area doesn't perform well. Bad teams "need" every area to perform at its best to win. Guess which category the Cubs fall into?

You don't get it to change-it just does. The majority of the time, it will even out for you-and if it doesn't, then you just become an exception to the rule (which would be terrible). There's no real way you can teach hitting in that situation-you just have to put your best people up there and hope for the best. Yeah, but you can't expect DLee and ARam to just come through every time either. I still think it's a problem that guys like Marquis are put up there in critical situations. The lineup is definitely a mess right now. Entire areas of the roster seem to be in complete flux, such as SS and OF.

Possibly, but I like the move because aluminum bats just plain suck. It's not baseball as we know it. The kids hate them too. I don't remember a single kid who wanted to hit with aluminum. Everyone wants to hit with wood. That's what baseball is.

Hendry is responsible for each and every reason why they suck. He's the GM. He puts together the team. You don't diregard the poor record because a couple of the guys he got are doing well. So I guess whichever team wins the world title, no credit should be given to the players or manager, but just to the GM for "putting the team together." Hendry is not totally to blame. Yes, this is a flawed roster, and for that he incurs blame. Lou incurs blame for a few questionable decisions (none of them last night IMO) and the fact that he told Hendry repeatedly to not bring anyone else in. The players get blame for under performing what people like Hendry or everybody else would expect of them. There's too much blame here to put it on one person. There's plenty of blame to go around. But Hendry is ultimately the main problem. The GM is the most important person in an organization. And the Cubs have a really bad one. Soriano's contract is so bad I can see it crippling us in a couple of years. how about we wait to see who the new owner is. as long as their willing to keep spending money, theres no reason it would cripple us. I'm willing to do that, as long as we recognize the new owner is not likely to have quite the deep pockets of the Trib. It might equal out, because even without the resources, the new owner may be willing to spend more of his cash where the Trib seemed to put the Cubs on a budget that was artifical (which was proven this year, when we found out suddenly exactly how much cash the Trib could bring to bear if it wanted to).

For the Cubs though, this hasn't been true a great deal. For example, here are some of the hitters who could have driven in the winning run last night from scoring position-some of them if they could have just hit a sac fly: Soriano Murton Lee Jones DeRosa Cedeno Barrett Marquis The only hitter the Cubs would want up there that didn't get a chance last night was Ramirez-everybody else simply didn't come through. Statistics claim that should even out over the season-so far that hasn't happened. Really? I would think most people feel when Marquis and Cedeno come up in a critical situation it's a letdown waiting to happen. I also feel Murton, DeRosa, and Jones are hitters I would rather not see in RBI situations. They aren't big RBI hitters. Good clubs seem to get guys like ARod, Ortiz, and Pujols up when they really need the dinger. We get Marquis. Does this not concern you?

That #4 pick could be very, very interesting. Trouble is, Angelo has already alluded to the idea that getting a high 1st rounder might cost more in salary than the team is planning on, given they still will need to sign a few high-profile guys soon.

It's because it always seems the wrong hitter is coming up for the situation, and this is what happens to bad teams. BTW, the Cubs are putting out a terrible black hole 7-9 pretty much every day now. It's no wonder we go 7 innings scoring no runs then score 5 in one inning. This is what happens when you don't have a very good offensive team. When all the chips fall your way, you get a bunch of runs. But consistency? No way -- ain't gonna happen.

What's really crippling this team is that it was put together like a 2 year old does a 1,000 piece puzzle.

I'm still a little shocked we went into the season with such a mess in the OF, and nothing but total crap @ SS. That's all on Jim. I appreciate how hard he worked, but he left Lou with some irreparable situations and you can see it's starting to frustrate him.

.....which is what usually happens to really bad teams.

he earned his spot in spring training. it's stupid to just give up on the kid after you put him on the 25-man. You mean after almost a whole year now of horrible offensive and average defensive play? Because that's what he's given the team so far. He had a decent April 2006 and nothing else. Wuertz also "earned" himself a demotion to AAA last year in Spring Training and 3 appearances in the regular season (all of 2.2 innings). Was that the right move? Ronny needs to be sent down to AAA to work on his hitting and one good game is not going to change my mind. The problem is that if you send down Cedeno there is no other MIF on the 40 man roster that can replace him. You would wind up with a bench of 3 outfielders, 1 catcher and one infielder. With Floyd, Ward, Murton, Blanco and Theriot there would not be much flexibility in making late game changes. DFA Miller. Bring up Guzman to be the fifth starter. Send Ronny down. Bring up Fontenot. Then you have four MIF (Izturis, DeRosa, Theriot, Fontenot) for two spots. Theriot can play SS also. I'd rather DFA Izturis than send Ronny down. Ronny sucks, but there's nothing else there. This is the worst group of SS-wannabes I've ever seen. I think nothing happens @ SS. We're stuck with crap, and we'll have to live with it all year long barring a trade.

I think the difference between this year's team is that last year's team really was bad enough to lose 96 games. They deserved to lose 96 games. That team, on paper, was horrid. This team really is not that bad on paper, and their luck evens out or even stops being absurdly bad, they'll be better than the 2006 Cubs. Not that bad on paper, true. Many teams perform below expectations for the entire year though. It happens. The other thing is, we could be significantly better than last year and *still* be a bad team.

And more than one season has ended in April. I'll never understand why Cubs fans get so uptight when other Cubs fans start to panic after a horrible start to the season. The Yankees are 1/2 a game out of last place and just lost to those last place Devil Rays. Should we write them off too? Again, we're talking about the Cubs. The Yankees are 2 games under .500, but have a recent history of early struggles still ending up with 90+ win seasons. If the Cubs won 90+ for the past 10 years, I don't think I'd be very concerned about the start. But they are 5 games under .500, playing .368 ball, coming off a season when they played just .407 ball. So your comparison is worthless. And I believe we pretty much tanked the season last April/May, too. We see this most years. It's nothing new.

Our ace is a basket case who still can't meltdown even when he's leading by 3 or more runs. That's not even close to being very good. I know everyone loves heaping on the bullpen right now, but it's not like it's a disaster. The main weakness is our sleepy offense. Some guys are eventually going to break out because of their history (Soriano in a big way, Jacque in a less big way), but Lee's lack of power is worrisome given his injury last year. I know he's got a bunch of double so far, but he hasn't had anything slapped down by the wind moreso than a guy like DeRosa. Maybe this is just the current variation of his old slow starts...I hope so. Even if it is, Zambrano needs to be traded to pump up the offense ASAP before he flakes out even more. Our offense has been just fine though lately-here are the scores from the last 8 games: 12, 3, 6, 3, 1, 6, 9, 4-avg-5.5 runs per game. The offense has been fine-not great, but just fine. The problem is that when the offense is good, the pitching fails-and when the pitching is good, the offense is terrible. It's just a matter of putting it together in the same games. What you've just described is a losing baseball team. Every team in the league that sucks will tell you "we just can't get both going at the same time." We've gone through this many other years, too. It's the same old story. If we don't rectify this by May, then we are finished. We're already in an ever-deepening hole that will be difficult to climb out of. Yes, but most of the teams who would say that aren't in the top half of the league in both pitching and offense like the Cubs are. In pitching perhaps, but the offense looks better than it really is because we blow a team out one day, then lose by 1 run the next 3 days. And our middle relief is horrid outside a couple guys.