squally1313

The dude walks what, 3 guys this inning and he's still getting those types of calls? horsefeathers off blue

Incredibly impressive from Happ there, especially after the bad swing to get to 0-2. Let's go Jason.

Come on kid

I'm mostly on board with this idea but there would be a notable level of increased enjoyment of seeing them win 10 more games this season, lose 10 less games, and go three straight seasons over 95 wins. 95+ win team teams are fun to follow because there is a noticeable difference in how good they are compared with the 86ers. Plus they could get homefield advantage in the NLDS. I get the day to day enjoyment of watching a win vs watching a loss. I'd be a hypocrite to sit here today and say I didn't really care about how many wins they had in the season after getting pretty anxious watching the end of the game last night. But right now we're 84.4% to win the division. If that number were to dip below like...70% (nice), I might start to have some big picture worry, but as of now I have no doubts we'll start the playoffs in more or less the same spot we were last October. The regular season last year incredibly satisfying to watch, a culmination of a lot of dark years and of a very well executed plan. But I realize how rare those types of years are, even for a team as good as the Cubs. We did it last year, and we followed up in the ultimate way in October. Trying to strive for, or expecting, that type of dominance from April-September just seems like you're setting yourself up for disappointment. The team is better than how they've played so far, but how they've played so far is good enough so....whatever.

Rizzo back in the leadoff spot, Sealboy at #2 which will surely piss off a bunch of people here, Baez at short again, Bryant in the outfield again, you can figure out the rest.

Getting to 90 wins means going 51-35 the rest of the year. I wouldn't expect much more than that from this version of the Cubs. As other have said, it's more than enough, and I still like our chances as much as anyone else come October.

I was in a weird spot where I loved the process they were going through of building a perennial winner from the ground up, but I didn't enjoy actually watching them play baseball. I'd sit at work and click around Fangraphs pretty much daily, check the minor league posts religiously, see how all the contracts lined up on Cots, etc....but then I'd get home from work and have absolutely no interest in watching like...Chris Volstad or something. I understood the process, but the byproduct was in no way appealing to me. Part of that was probably just my personality...every sports game I got I always gravitated towards picking the worst team to start a franchise with and seeing how quickly I could turn it around, and so it was cool to watch it happen in real life. But I was also the guy who would simulate months at a time to get to the trade deadline/free agency/etc.

yeah, but that's good. it means the world series didn't make cubs baseball. the season after the blackhawks won their first cup, i found it really hard to be invested. i haven't really felt that way about the cubs at all. It became pretty clear to me over the course of 2016 that the Blackhawks dynasty was pretty much a perfectly timed distraction from the worst Cubs years of my adult life. If you would have asked me in like 2012 if I were a bigger Hawks or Cubs fans, I might have even said the Hawks, even though I'd only been seriously watching them for like 4 years (along with most of the rest of the city). After the 2015 Cubs season, I found it really hard to get invested in the 2015-2016 Hawks game, and our October run last year had me at levels of excitement/anxiety/etc that I never came close to experiencing with the Hawks. This year's Hawks team was the same thing. I still love seeing them live, but the last couple years reminded me what a lifetime of rooting for a team does to you.

We're fine. Also, I had a thought that Davis and happ would be best friends, but then I remembered that Lester and lackey fit right in too. We have a lot of pissed off looking white guys.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/jon-lester-might-be-beating-the-yips/ Pretty good article/interview on Lester's pickoffs. It really is amazing how effective they've become, in a total team effort, in shutting down the running game when he's on the mound.

Interesting timing, given his .849 OPS in June. Granted, it was with a .196 batting average, and only 46 PAs, but still.

11th in bullpen innings going into today. A bit of a concern, but we seem to lean on different guys for stretches and are pretty deep overall, so hopefully no one hits a wall. Flip side of that is Washington, who has 12 less bullpen innings than any other team. Dusty gonna Dusty.

A league minimum Adam Dunn playing average defense up the middle? Sure, seems useful to me.

Seriously impressive.

Per the couple tweets I saw, they said Rizzo was guilty of violating a rule, but no one has ever been suspended or disciplined because of it. Basically he would have been out based on the violation even if he was ruled safe at the plate (which he obviously wasn't). Let's hope San Diego doesn't do anything dumb. Even though he gets hit a ton and has never really had any ill effects, his low hands/wrists are always going to worry me in a situation like that, especially given that he's been carrying the offense for the last week or so.

I don't even know/care if he is starting, I'm guaranteeing a Schwarber bomb on his holy day.

Wait did you mean in the division besides us, which is possibly right, or in the division including us, which is [expletive] insane

Is it totally meatball-y to say that in general baseball players coast along at like 70-80% effort in the regular season, and the Cubs, as world champs, are seeing everyone at 100%? As you can clearly tell, I'm getting to the desperate rationalization point.

There's a good chance someone like Willson is so cocky he doesn't even think about stuff like this, but I feel like this game was huge for his confidence as a catcher going forward. Taking over for someone who had been a personal catcher for the last 2-3 years and having Lester pitch well, but not up to the standards of the last couple years, might have been weighing on Contreras a little bit. Good to see those two go the distance.

2016 Jake here.

This guy throws a ton of incredibly hittable pitches

Definitely missed any sort of discussion about this, but how long have game threads be members only? Was that a playoff thing?

There's one

This has given the Cardinals a 2 1/2-game lead on the Cubs heading into Busch, and on Friday, they face a Triple-A pitcher in Eddie Butler, with Leake, their current ace. This is the first time in the new era of the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry, the world in which Chicago has a World Series championship (it still seems amazing to say that!) and St. Louis is trying to catch up, that the Cardinals have the upper hand. Good reasoning. To be fair, Leake inexplicably is pitching like an ace all of a sudden, or at least has an ERA like one Some team is going to even out that HR/FB rate. Let's have it be us.

Hey guys I think we traded Bryant