WrigleyField 22

Is he still officialy with the organiztion though? What if he made a crazy comeback and was able to contribute as like an awesome 4th OF. If that happened I wouldn't be so convince that God hates the Cubs.

:( Pretty disappointing. I wouldn't have even minded the batting averag, but I wanted to see that OBP go up. I would have taken that BA is he put up a .310ish OBP to go along with it. Currently the difference there between BA and OBP is about the same it has been. I don't know if theres a stat that looks at something like that with more detail, but looking at it very simply it appears that his OBP is still highly dependant on his AVG.

With Pierre and Podsednik in the same OF, I think you only need 2 OF. Maybe they aren't the best at getting jumps, but they are fast. Just play the deep right center and deep left center and have a permanent cut off guy in shallow center. :D I think people jokingly toyed with this idea after the '03 season with a Pie Patterson OF.

Ibanez would have been an attractive LF last year. This year we need someone who can play RF and make a bigger splash. I do think Ibanez is a good value, but probably not right for this team.

At least the falling debri at Wrigley is falling on old Wrigley so that it just implodes on itself rather than a whole new ballpark.

Well although Hendry has done a good job of trading when he actually makes a trade, I think there has been some criticism that he could have done better if hadn't waited so long. In the Cruz trade for example, not only did we get two guys who haven't made an impact, but at Cruz's peak we could have gotten a Rolen-type player. I don't know if I can blame him. He thought as most of us did, that he could have been a Pedro Martinez, and even if he fell short of those expectations would still be good. Farnsworth and Sosa trades, while not great, are pretty good considering he was in a spot where he 'needed' to get rid of the guys. The other time he had that situation, Hundley it worked out great. Although the Sosa trade wouldn't have been as god if Sammy didnt suck so badly last year. Farnsworth we may have got the worse end of the deal. If nothing else the guys we got from it can be trading chips. Overall I trust him to make good trades. Everything from turning Snachez(or whatever his name is) for Connoly, to turning Harris/Beltran/Jones/etc into Nomar, he does a good job.

Don't the school that used to be the chinks, they're the dragons now Also the Zion-Benton ZeeBee's (fits under WTF) Although my schools mascot can get ripped on, we're the roadrunners. I personally like it. You don't see it too often and if you're gonna be a bird, best not be one that everyone is (cardinals, eagles, whatever)

Pierre's three year daytime splits... .341 .395 .438 .833

Um, sure, other teams were just beating down our door to get their hands on the likes of Roberto Novoa, Todd Wellemeyer, Sergio Mitre and crew. The excitement is/was just palpable!! Sometimes, it might be helpful to take off ones's Cub hat and for once, try and think as if you belonged to any other team. It is endemic to fandom I suppose, but you're not going to trade Wellemeyer and Cliff Bartosh for Bobby Abreu, OK? Or even a warm bucket of spit as far as that goes. "Lack of faith in our homegrown guys?" You better believe it, baby. And no other GM in baseball has any faith in these zeroes, either. Pffft. What if its the difference between giving up 3 guys for Pierre or two? If you only give up two, you still can take that third guy and use him as a throw in tp help deals. Its a valid point, even if not on a large scale. I believe you said in the Pierre thread that getting him sends a message to Furcal that we don't need him. Well this is kinda the same thing, but opposite and on a smaller scale.

Look at the RC numbers for Patterson and Pierre for those two years. Pierre's complete lack of power took away from his advantage in OBP, they were very similar in overall production. I already said that Pierre is probably more likely to return to those numbers, but my point was that Pierre at his best isn't a world-beater, and that he(like Patterson) had a very bad '05. How is that biased for Patterson? Why do we need power from Pierre? We aren't looking to fill a middle of the order type hitter that Corey would project to be at his best. We need a guy to simply get on base for Lee and Aram, plus hopefully a RF that we get. I didn't realize your point was that they both had crappy 2005. It originally seemed like your point was Corey was basically as good as Pierre. Pierre has twice put up .370 OBP in his career. That may not be world beater, but its damn good. Even if he is a little below career average say .340, its better than what Corey is likely to put up.

At the same time, you'd hate to be left without your relievers and not sign those guys. Maybe he could have spread it out a little though. sign one guy trade off a couple, so you aren't terribly vulnerable, then sign another guy.

Well even after googling I couldn't find anything that clearly stated how WARP works, but I will say that I can't see how you can isolate the wins from a single player when its a team sport. I mean this both when you win and lose. For example couldn't Lee have contributed a lot more wins if he had a more capable offense? And wouldn't it have been easier for Pujols to contribute wins with his supporting cast? I'm not saying Pierre is the best option(althouh a good one). But I can't see how Patterson striking out 100 times and getting on base .300 or worse (.330 tops) is better than Pierre getting on base at .350, .320 at his lowest and .370 if he can put another good year together. If you wanna argue some other CF's Michaels, Lofton, I can understand, but I think this is bias talking cuz he happens to be a favorite of yours. Not criticizing you for clinging to a favorite, even if he isnt that good, we all do it.

Corey '03 .298 .329 .511 '04 .266 .320 .452 Pierre Career .305 .355 .375 Or are you just judging Pierre on last years stats? Cuz I seem to remember a lot of people saying we can't only use the previous years stats, see Howry, Eyre. So which is it? Or can we just pick and choose what stats we want to use? EDIT- I'm not sure if you specifically said anything against Howry/Eyre, I'm juat using it as an example. Look at offensive metrics like WARP2 at BP, they show that Patterson and Pierre were near equals in '03-'04(note: not last year for either player). Perhaps you could explain WARP to me, because all the site really says is that it counts how many wins the contributed. Exactly how do you figure that out. I think Pierre at the 1 or 2 spot in front of Lee and Aram is gonna win us more games with CPatt there.

Corey '03 .298 .329 .511 '04 .266 .320 .452 Pierre Career .305 .355 .375 Or are you just judging Pierre on last years stats? Cuz I seem to remember a lot of people saying we can't only use the previous years stats, see Howry, Eyre. So which is it? Or can we just pick and choose what stats we want to use? EDIT- I'm not sure if you specifically said anything against Howry/Eyre, I'm juat using it as an example.

If Greenberg was in the trade, wouldn't he have to be named as a PTBNL at this point? Not being on the 40man he is open to the Rule 5 draft, so wouldn't we have to wait till after that to trade him?

I stopped reading this thing around page 13. Was there a report or something leading everyone to belief that we are definately getting Howry? Just reading, it sure seems like everyone is sure its happening.

Would any of you feel any different about signing guys like Howry/Eyre if it meant we were able to package some of out other arms for contributions to say CF?

Yes We do suck at RF. I agree. We do need to upgrade it. Just curious, what did you do to calculate the change in offense/ERA rank? Just a guess? You can crunch numbers to figure out why somebody is more important. But sometimes numbers aren't going to tell the whol story. Especially just select numbers. You could manipulate numbers to make any point you want. Theres gotta be some element of gut when putting a team together. A whole plan of going with your gut would be bad, but so it strictly looking at numbers/formulas/etc

We did have two separate threads on consecutive days about Dunn coming to the Cubs.

I'm not neccessarily saying signing these relievers is a good thing. And I do view an impact RF as a necessity. But if you are gonna take away the importance of each bullpen by spreading his worth over the other 5-6 guys in the pen, you should do the same for RF. hitting is 1/2, one player contributes 1/8 of that 1/2 or 1/16 to the team total. BP on the same type of rating would come out to about 1/36, depending on how much importance you place on the value of defense vs. pitching and starters vs. relievers. Technically a RF also adds to run prevention, but lets be honest we aren't looking for that. If you really wanna add in defense their importance is maybe 1/12. So a guy who contributes 1/12 to the team contributes 3times as much as the guy who contributes 1/36. So their salary should be 3 times as much. 3mil reliever x 3= 9mil RF. Now actually using such a system to actually evaluate how much to give players is ridiculous. I think you would agree. Plus it would be much more complicated. EDIT- kinda unrelated. But it helps the reading if you cut out quotes that occured 5 pages ago. It is usually pretty sufficent to have just the last thing you are quoting shown. It gets pretty annoying to scroll through all that. So for courtesy of poster trying to read, I request that everyone tries to do so. (At another site I visit, they automatically snip quotes. Any chance you could set something like that up Tim?)

Dempster Eyre Howry Williamson Wuertz Rusch Novoa/Wellymeyer if we go w/ 7man pen Certianly has the potential to do well. For all the money we will be putting towards it, it better.

It could also be that we set the market by signing Eyre.

Me too. Although I can really take all kinds of weather conditions. For example I love working outside in the summer and getting a good sweat. However, I hate that I can also sweat by just standing still. And I would much rather have dry heat. Being poor, we dont keep our house that cool either during the summer, and waking up sweaty is the worst. I also love the snow. I used to always put on long socks, shorts, some long sleeves, and good hat and go play basketball during the winter. The only thing that slowed me down was when the ball hit snow outside the driveway and got all wet. Cold weather is soo refreshing. Someone said they couldn't breathe in cold air. I think its the exact opposite. Cold air is refreshing. On the other hand, trying to breathe when it is soo humid is tough. I never got anyone who could wear sleeves during a football game, unless you sucked and never saw the field, yea then keep yourself warm. But if you are out playing football, you shouldn't even notice the cold. You shouldn;t notice any weather condition, but cold seems to be the only one people complain about, but I don't get it. So although I will gladly embrace any weather you throw my way, Cold is much preferred.

My sister is in St. Louis (SLU) :cry: Can't we just concentrate on the Cardinal's stadium, players, and maybe fans? Actually now that I think of it, go ahead and nuke the whole city, just make sure its over the Thanksgiving holiday. That way you get lots of people from out of town in the blast? :? Tell me you don't work at the pentagon. :shock: Sorry, I'm just trying to protect my sister. . . . :(

Trying to use AOL on my one computer I wasn't able to reach the site using Northsidebaseball.com IE on the same computer wasn't working at all, but I was able to go to other sites using AOL I'm on another computer now (IE) using northsidebaseball.com and its working fine.