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champaignchris

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Everything posted by champaignchris

  1. champaignchris
    The Dodgers and Giants moved due to stadium issues more than "being run out town" by the Yankees' popularity. New York didn't want to finance two new stadiums. L.A. and S.F. were happy to step in, and Baseball liked the idea of opening up the west coast with two of its most successful teams. Who rooted for what team depended on where you were in the city. Yankees were (are) in the Bronx. The Dodgers were in Brooklyn. The Giants were in Manhattan. It was much like the North Side/South Side divide in Chicago. In the late 40's and 50's, New York was the absolute epicenter of baseball. From 1949 to 1958, at least one New York team was in every World Series, with the Yankees playing either the Dodgers or Giants six times. That streak would have continued to 1966, if the Giants and Dodgers hadn't moved. After the other two teams moved, the Yankees had five years where they were all alone in New York during which time they arguably had their best stretch in team history (in the midst of going to the W.S. 9 times in 10 years, winning 4 - the Mantle, Maris, Berra, Ford years), and then after the Yankees dipped a bit the Mets had an absolutely horrible start as an expansion franchise. That pretty well cemented New York as mainly a Yankees town with the Mets having their enclave in Queens.
  2. champaignchris
    The same kind that has sex in the crowded bathroom of a football stadium with a stranger while her husband is watching the game.
  3. champaignchris
    Possibly meaningless statistics: NL 8th batter averages per team in 2009: 563 AB, 60 R, 143 H, 11 HR, 62 RBI, .253/.326/.371 NL ph averages per team in 2009: 226 AB, 26 R, 52 H, 5 HR, 30 RBI, .231/.321/.362 NL P averages per team in 2009: 297 AB, 17 R, 41 H, 2 HR, 16 RBI, .138/.179/.175
  4. champaignchris
    I made a promise to myself some time in the mid-90's to never get excited about a Cubs season until they were at least 10 games above .500. That promise has served me well over the years. I remain interested, but not excited until that point. That said, I think some are being overly pessimistic concerning this year's team. I think they'll still have a winning record and an outside chance at a playoff spot.
  5. champaignchris
    The "Z has become a bad pitcher" thing is overstated. Is he putting up numbers like he did from 2003 to 2006? No. He's still never posted an ERA+ under 117 as a full time starter. That's better than mediocre. That's pretty darn good. The early inning meltdown thing isn't particularly common for him either. He failed to pitch 5 innings in three consecutive starts last August. That was the game he was hurt and then the first two games coming off the DL. In his other 25 starts, he made it through at least 5 innings 24 times. In 2008, he pitched at least 5 innings in 21 of his first 22 starts, then pretty clearly got fatigued. Failing to make it to 5 innings in 4 of his last 8 starts, with some of that also due to the fact that the Cubs were so far in the lead at that point, Lou wasn't pushing him to eat innings. In 2007, he made at least 5 innings in 32 of 34 starts. As for only 9 wins last year... He had an 8 start stretch where he only gave up 15 ER in 53 and 1/3 innings (2.53 ERA) and only recorded one win, which is why the win for pitchers is the single most useless statistic in baseball.
  6. champaignchris
    More friendly? Have you spent any appreciable time in Central Illinois? It's not open warfare in the streets, but you can draw a line from about Des Moines to Terra Haute, and a hundred miles on either side of that line is a region of fairly fierce partisanship for one team or the other. My daughter is seven years old and doesn't really watch much baseball, but she knows for every kid in her class whether they come from a Cubs family or a Cards family. George Will has written quite a bit about growing up a Cubs fan in Champaign, Illinois and having to deal with Cardinal fans.
  7. champaignchris
    The only rivalries in baseball even worth mentioning are Cubs-Cardinals, Yankees-Red Sox, and Giants-Dodgers. Braves-Mets might be a distant, distant fourth.
  8. champaignchris
    The big market/small market labels get tossed around by a lot of people without a lot of clarification about what they actually mean when saying it. I see Oakland referred to as a "small market team," when they're in the sixth largest media market in the country. Here's an actual list of the 210 media markets by size.
  9. champaignchris
    Every player I think of that might deserve to be on that list over the players that are there was actually acquired in a trade... Derek Lee: Nope, Hee Seop Choi trade. Jon Leiber: Nope, Brant Brown trade. etc.
  10. champaignchris
    Clark Griffith isn't on the list but Jose Cardenal is? I mean, I know it was a real long time ago when he played, but it seems to me that the first thing you should do before compiling such a list is check into who's been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as a Cub, not to mention the franchise's top 10 lists of such statistics as wins, innings pitched, games started, complete games, and that newfangled Adjusted ERA+. If you're going to put players that were only on the team for three or four years on the list at all, shouldn't Rogers Hornsby be above Bill Madlock?
  11. champaignchris
    I don't think anyone was expecting him to hit 30 HR. I think people were expecting him to have a slugging percentage higher than Bobby Scales and Reed Johnson. I think Bradley got a bit of a raw deal in Chicago. I think the media went into the season with its preconceived story that Bradley would be a problem with the Cubs, and then proceeded to chase that story. Milton then handled it as poorly as anyone possibly could, turning things into a self-fulfilling prophecy. His relatively poor performance isn't why he's no longer a Cub. It's his churlishness. Personally, I didn't think that was a good enough reason to ship him away for a contract even worse than his and a player unlikely to make any significant (positive) contributions to the team. But if the linked article is actually the way he feels, then maybe I'm wrong.
  12. champaignchris
    Yes. Coming off the hand, it looks like it's coming straight for your head. The initial reaction is to back off the plate. By the time you realize it's dropping right over the plate, you can only lunge at the ball. Thus the "knee-buckling" curve ball. Now, most hitters who actually make it to the big leagues can pick up that it's going to be a curve from the delivery and release point and adjust. The traditional up and down curve ball is a slow pitch by big league standards and had a looping curve. Kerry's delivery on his curve was well-disguised, was a relatively fast pitch, and had a real tight, whip-like break.
  13. champaignchris
    He threw both. His slurve became famous after the 20k game, but coming into the big leagues it was the straight up-and-down curve that scouts raved about. Yeah. Find a highlight reel of the 20k game. I believe the second and 18th strikeouts are perfect examples. (It's amazing how many of the 20 were just fast balls that he blew by people.)
  14. champaignchris
    I read that quote on Strasburg's slider and immediately thought of Kerry Wood and that unbelievable curve he had when he came up in '98. It's was the old 12 to 6 curve, but it was going about 90 miles an hour. Jaw dropping. I don't know how right-handers even stayed in the box, let alone got up the nerve to swing at it. I hope Strasburg stays healthy and pitches very well against teams other than the Cubs.
  15. champaignchris
    Yeah. I thought he came over with Leon Durham in the Bruce Sutter trade. But I just looked it up on Baseball Reference, and it says he was a rule 5 draft pick from the Cardinals. That's a pretty darn good Rule 5 draft pick!!! 6 year starting catcher, two All Star games, a gold glove, and 122 HRs.
  16. champaignchris
    He's been awful these last two seasons. But up until then, he's generally been a mediocre verging on pretty decent starting pitcher, with a couple real nice years that no one noticed in baseball Hell (the Expos' last two seasons in Montreal).
  17. champaignchris
    It's not just that the NFL was first, it's that the NFL was first by about 15 years.
  18. champaignchris
    Odd to be coming up with this now. Four years ago, there was an 8 year streak where the two came in 1-2 each year. Since then, Toronto came in 2nd in 2006 and TB won the division in 2008. So Boston and NY have been 1-2 in their division 10 of the last 12 years. I don't think that's a reason for re-alignment. Heck, either the Cubs or Cardinals have won the NL Central for 8 years running, likely to be a ninth this year. Should we break them up, too? These things are generational. Go back 15 years ago and Baltimore and Toronto were the big players in the East. Things are much more likely to change than to stay the same. Basically, get back to us in another 10 years. If the trend's continued it might be worth considering.
  19. champaignchris
    Going 11-17 in August, when the team you're chasing goes 20-6, has a tendency to do that.
  20. champaignchris
    30-ish starts, 180-ish innings, generally keeps the team in the game for the first 6 innings. Everything else is gravy.
  21. champaignchris
    2700 hits, 11 Gold Gloves, career numbers that stack up very favorably to Aparicio, O. Smith, and Maranville (all HoFers)... If Ozzie Smith's in the Hall, I think you've got to put Vizquel in there. Now, if you wanna argue that Smith doesn't belong in the Hall either... Well, you might have a point there...
  22. champaignchris
    Why is almost everyone in this thread handing St. Louis the division? They're not quite Albert and the Seven Dwarfs on offense anymore with Matt Holiday, but still have some major holes, especially on the left side of their infield. Their third best offensive player is either a defensive catcher or a second baseman on the wrong side of 34. Franklin had a career year at age 36. He won't repeat that sub-2 ERA. The rest of their pen is solid, but not special. Wainwright and Carpenter are great pitchers with a history of injuries. Carpenter turns 35 in April and Wainwright has yet to prove he can pitch back-to-back 200 inning seasons. After them, they've got Kyle Loshe, Brad Penny - unspectacular innings eaters at this point in their careers - and... ? Mitchell Boggs? If (or perhaps, when) Carpenter or Wainwright go down, they will be in serious trouble. I see more questions on the Cardinals' roster than I do on the Cubs' roster.
  23. champaignchris
    Yeah. Under the Dusty and Lou regimes, the bullpen has generally been right around league average every year, except in 2007 when it was really good. It generally hasn't been the reason we've won or lost. Last year's disappointing season (and we have to remember they only won two fewer games than the division winner in '07) was all about an offense that scored 148 fewer runs than the previous season. That's just an astounding number.
  24. champaignchris
    I wouldn't go so far as "sucks," but they gave up way too many walks last year. Two of the main perpetrators - Heilman and Gregg - are gone, but Marmol and his 65 BB in 74 IP is back. If he can get his walk rate back to what it was in '07 and '08 he'll be fine. But right now, the scouting report on him should be, "Don't swing."
  25. champaignchris
    I'm a bit concerned about the rotation. If Lilly is slow coming back, Wells has a sophomore slump, and we can't find a 5th starter, it could get ugly. But that's a lot of ifs. More likely, we've got a solid starting staff. Hopefully it won't take a quarter of the season to figure out the bullpen roles this year and it doesn't take Marmol half the season to figure out where the strike zone is. I think Byrd and Nady are a step up from Bradley and Johnson. With Soriano rebounding at all the outfield should be improved. Hopefully Ram won't miss half the season again and Soto should rebound back to being at least an above average mlb catcher. We may still have a big black hole at 2nd, but with the improvements at other positions, it shouldn't be as noticeable. Basically, if we get 120 games each of career average performances from Ram, Fonzie, and Nady, 30 starts and career average performances from Z, Lilly, and Dempster, and decent years from Mormol, Wells, and Soto we should be pretty good. First or second in the division and in contention for a playoff spot. Other than the fact that this is the Cubs we're talking about, there's no reason for all these things not to happen.
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