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.

Garciaparra had three incredible years, four above average years only one of which occurred after he turned 30, and then didn't play a whole heck of a bunch beyond that. He may have played in 14 seasons, but he really only played 9 seasons worth of games. If Albert Belle's prime was too brief, Nomar's certainly is.

His well-known reputation for good, wholesome living?

Dumb deal for the Royals but good for us that he's off the market. There are always mid-season trades...

I love Fergie, but I'm reminded of the old saying about lobbing projectiles and breakable edifices.

To ensure uniformity of the name when being reported on would be my guess. So all outlets call it "Twenty-Fourteen", rather than it being called "Two Thousand Fourteen" by some channels. It's to commemorate the uniform numbers of two Cubs greats. Ernie Banks (14) and... uhm... Felix Pie? O.K., maybe not.

This is the last year of his contract, isn't it? EDIT - He's due something like $13M or $14M, I think.

Zito's a mediocre #3 starter making elite #1 starter money. He's way overpaid, but will at least be taking the mound on a consistent basis and if not dominating, at least keeping your team in the game. There's no reason to expect that he can't keep giving you 180 IP and an ERA in the low 4's over the course of the contract. Soriano was awful last year. No question. The previous two years, he was overpaid but a pretty good run generator. There's a pretty decent chance that he has a bounce back year and then goes into more of a gradual decline than a free-fall. Of course, there's also a chance that he never OPS'es over .725 again for the rest of his career, but if I had to guess which of Soriano or Wells was going to do better over the remainder of their contracts, I'd go with Soriano. Wells has ranged from mediocre to awful for the last three years. You're paying him Albert Pujols money to put up Colby Rasmus numbers. Wells was 19th among all qualified CFs in OPS this year, didn't play enough games to qualify the year before that, and was 13th among qualified players in 2007. (In his last three years, Soriano was 14th, 6th, and 2nd in OPS among left fielders.) Wells is locked up for just as long as Soriano, but for about $10M to $15M more over the remainder of the contract.

Again, I don't understand why you let Harden walk if you're going to turn around and pay Sheets $10M for one year. Harden signed for $7.5M for one year with the Rangers. I understand not offering arbitration to Harden if you're not going to spend the money, or if you're going to spend the money on something obviously better or at a different position. However, signing Sheets cheaper than what it would have cost to keep Harden makes perfect sense.

I understand the bitterness. You take Jack Clark's career, or someone like Steve Garvey or Ron Cey, add steroids, and you've got Hall of Fame numbers. You've got a couple more All-Star games. You've got two or three more years of playing, which back then would have been a couple million dollars, maybe. We all know at the very least Canseco was using as of the late 80's. There's no reason why Clark couldn't have started using about the same time, too and prolonged his career a bit. But he didn't. And he feels like a chump.

This is a big part of my problem. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to see something was off when you had 3 guys blow up the single season HR record in the space of four years with numerous other marginal power hitters in the 40's and 50's. But we were are enjoying the crap out of it, and I don't feel the least bit guilty about that. But then you have these sanctimonious douches in the media prattling on about how we were fooled and betrayed by these conniving cheats. After they, the ones who are supposedly paid to explore all sides of the issues, carried on like doe eyed school girls while it was all going on. Seriously, STFU. It reminds me so much of that scene in Casablanca, "I'm shocked, SHOCKED, to find gambling in this establishment!" "Here are your winnings, sir."

Considering Harden - three years younger, actually pitched last year, more of an upside when healthy - only got one year and $7.5m, I have a hard time seeing Sheets getting anywhere close to two years and $6m from anyone. For that kind of money, the Cubs could have just offered Harden arbitration.

The other thing that bothers me about steroids and the Hall of Fame is that the gate-keepers acting as morality police indignant at the usage of steroids are the same people that completely dropped the ball on the steroid problem in the first place... the baseball reporters. If steroids were so damning, why weren't these guys paying more attention back in the 90's? The one guy who said anything back in 1998 - Steve Wilstein - was basically told to "shut up" by the rest of the press. Instead of doing their jobs - investigative reporting - the sports media bought the whole dog and pony show hook, line, and sinker. Now, a significant number of these people who didn't do their jobs back then want to retroactively vilify the guys they let get away with cheating.

I distinctly remember a high school football teammate of mine in 1990 being traumatized because some other student accused him of doing steroids. I recall another football teammate and I doing a presentation on steroids in Speech class as sophomores in about 1988. If high school athletes in small-town Illinois knew about steroids in the late 80's/early 90's, you can sure bet that professional athletes and professional team knew about steroids then as well. If I recall, the first major news stories involving steroids in American team sports (there'd been jokes about the East German "women's" swim team for years) was when Lyle Alzado admitted using shortly before dying of cancer in the early 90's. In the famous Sports Illustrated article, he admitted using steroids as early as 1969. It's widely accepted now that the Steelers teams of the 70's had rampant usage, and there's no real reason to think that it was confined solely to that one franchise. Mark Gastineau was another prominent admitted user from about the same era as Alzado. It was widely and quite vocally suspected at the time (now confirmed) that Tony Mandarich was juicing in college; in fact, one of the things Mandarich attributes to his failure in the NFL to was that he stopped doing steroids due to the drug testing and started taking pain killers to help him through once he got to the NFL. One of the big reasons why the NFL gets a lot more of a pass in the media than MLB on steroids is that the NFL instituted a testing policy for roids in 1989. Baseball didn't institute their policy until 2004. That's 15 years later, if you're counting. We can argue the effectiveness of the individual policies, but you can't deny the NFL at least started paying lip service to the problem way, way, way before baseball even admitted it had a problem. Baseball, after all, didn't even do the anonymous test to determine the extent of steroid usage until the infamous 2003 test.

Larry Walker is a guy who people should look closely at his numbers. He had some real, real good seasons with the bat and was a great fielder. The Colorado factor may work against him. I think it did against Andres Galarraga. I didn't think Galarraga would ever sniff the Hall, but I thought he'd at least get 5% and hang around for a year or two. Walker put up a very similar career to Duke Snyder. Palmeiro would be a shoe-in first ballot, no questions asked without the roids. If you think Frank Thomas is a HoFer, you should think Bagwell is too. Basically the same rate stats, but Bagwell played his entire career as a fielder (a decent one, too) and didn't get to prolong his career as a DH and get the same accumulation stats. I don't see Brown getting much support. He's sort of like Curt Schilling without the reputation for post-season heroics.

Yeah, after reading that article, I'll be rooting for Veal. I can't imagine going through all that at 25 years old. Despite Cedeno's problems, he'd still have been better for us than Miles last year. In fact, the whole sequence of trading Wuertz for nothing, effectively trading Cedeno and Pie for an older, worse, more expensive version of Wuertz (Heilman), and then signing older, worse, more expensive versions of Cedeno and Pie (Miles and Gaithwright) continues to leave me scratching my head. The DeRosa trade and the Bradley signing I can wrap my head around. This other thing... not so much.

Assuming Byrd posts something close to his career averages, he should be a bit better offensively than Bradley was last year, but not radically so. Looking at his defensive numbers (I know, I know...) he appears to be a competent CF, about on the level of Kosuke. This allows Kosuke to go back to right, where he's a very good right fielder. I think we're going into the season hoping that the offense will improve based on the belief that Soriano, Soto, and the 2B black-hole could not possibly be able to have worse years than last year and the belief that Ramirez won't miss half the season again. Bradley wasn't the reason the offense was awful last year, and Byrd won't be the reason the offense succeeds or fails this season. The outfield should be a bit better defensively, though, and team chemistry blah-blah nicey-nice kissy-face whatever.

Unless nobody else could afford to trade for an expensive pitcher in 2010. then they should have just kept him. did they HAVE to dump salary this offseason? either way, i find it hard to believe nobody else was willing to take on that 13 mil for vazquez. The only explanation I can come up with is Atlanta's owner is broke, and the Yanks are the only team that can afford that contract. I've got nothing else. Well, considering his age and career numbers, there's a pretty strong chance he'll have a significantly worse year this year than last. That said, I'd hardly call this "selling high."

Considering that Zambrano is 5 years younger, under contract for four (?) more years, and has put up much better numbers over the course of his career, I'd say so. Although, in reality, the Yankees probably had a basic package they were willing to give up and were looking for the best pitcher they could get for it. Zambrano was closer to the top of their shopping list than Vazquez was. When the Cubs' price was (justifiably) out of their range, they moved down the list.

there is just about a zero percent chance that carlos silva would strike out 6 men per 9 innings. as for the other numbers, he'd have to be better than he's been in at least 4 years, so good luck with that. he's probably going to be awful because he always had mediocre stuff and now has started getting hurt and fat. it will be surprising if he can even perform as a league-average 5th starter, so if that's not going to happen, the best thing will be for him to be horrendous in spring training and get released. Over the last couple years to get a 1.3 WHIP, he would have had to walk negative people. That's awesome!!!

He's telling us we're idiots for being Cubs fans.

The dude's hits/innings pitched over the last two years is 1.38. Not his WHIP, his HIP!!! That's so bad, it's laughable. Dude doesn't miss too many bats. Chronic phantom spring training injury, anyone? Sprained earlobe? Or does anyone expect this guy to actually step onto the mound for the Cubs next year?

Maddux was a better pitcher than Ruth was, so that should go out the window. :D

Possible "new endeavors": Touring with his band Writing about the Red Sox Talking about the Red Sox Watching the Red Sox Writing about his band Starting a blog about the Red Sox Working for the Red Sox Writing about the Red Sox You forgot writing songs for his band about the Red Sox. :D Seriously though, I've always respected Gammons. He might just get me to watch MLB network at some point.

I'll pitch for the Cubs for 1/10th of what they'd pay Looper. I'm probably a better pitcher for the money, too.