MWV

I think he'd make it through waivers. What team wants to pay $2 million for a guy who can't consistently retire AAA hitters? Edit: I forgot about the return of John Grabow as well. The bullpen as of today: Marmol Wood Marshall Silva (assuming Cashner wins a rotation spot) Samardzija Grabow That leaves one open spot for Guzman/Coleman/Maine/Dolis/Caridad/etc. With almost half of our bullpen spots presently occupied by onerous contracts, I'd be even less surprised to see Samardzija exposed to waivers if he struggles.

Yeah, I did.

With Ramirez' contract expiring at the close of the 2011 season, how do the Cubs fill 3B? The FA list is not pretty (from MLB trade rumors): Jose Bautista (31) Wilson Betemit (30) Casey Blake (38) - $6MM club option with a $1.25MM buyout Jorge Cantu (30) Eric Chavez (34) Craig Counsell (41) Joe Crede (34) Mark DeRosa (37) Greg Dobbs (33) Edwin Encarnacion (29) - $3.5MM club option Pedro Feliz (37) Jerry Hairston Jr. (36) Wes Helms (36) Omar Infante (30) Felipe Lopez (32) Jose Lopez (28) Melvin Mora (40) Nick Punto (34) Aramis Ramirez (34) Miguel Tejada (38) Omar Vizquel (45) While I would prefer the Cubs not tender a lengthy extension to Aramis, he may be the most appealing option of the bunch. If he could be had for 1-2 years, that might be the best option. No immediate heir to 3B springs to mind from within in the Cubs system (barring an improbably outstanding 2011 campaign from Vitters). Thoughts? Trade possibilities?

Over the course of Pujols' career to date, the Cards have paid $979,500/WAR. Perhaps they've simply grown accustomed to free lunch.

Per Rotoworld: No, it doesn't make sense. The deadline was introduced by Pujols. It grants him leverage. If the Cards' truly have adopted the "strategy" of quietly biding their time, confident in the notion that Pujols' harbors some unseen but abiding terror vis-à-vis playing elsewhere for more money, they have been drinking their own kool-aid.

...And then there were 3: Robert Cook, a Packer fan and member of the "Never Miss a Superbowl" club has been hospitalized and will not travel to Dallas. The remaining members, including 49ers superfan and All-World [expletive] contender Larry Jacobson, are expected to be in attendance.

Maybe this is a courtesy contract so he can retire as a cardinal?

Or just take money from the scouting/draft budget. I would imagine/hope that the cost of repairs would be covered by insurance.

I perused his organizational rankings the other day (http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/insider/news/story?page=2011MLBOrgRanks) and was a little surprised to see the Cubs as low as #20, although I suppose much of our top tier talent has been recently traded/promoted to the majors. Other NL central teams: CIN-8 STL-14 PIT-21 HOU-27 MIL-30 He seems to like the Cards more than others I've read. In particular, he has Shelby Miller as his #9 overall prospect (and #2 overall pitching prospect, above Kyle Drabek, Jeremy Hellickson and Aroldis Chapman). I realize Miller is very talented, but that seems rather high praise for a 20 year old who has never pitched above A ball.

Bored/procrastinating: 20 MLB teams have played 47 162 game seasons. Over those 940 individual seasons, teams averaged 81 wins. Assuming a normal distribution produces a standard deviation of 11 wins (not a terrible assumption in this case, ~70% of teams fall within 1 stdev), leaving about 95% of those seasons at or above the 60 win mark referred to above. Doing the same for 2010 payroll numbers (a dicier proposition statistically speaking, but what the hell) produces $91.0 million \pm $38.3 million. These figures produce relative efficiency measures as follows: $ = ((avg. payroll)-(team payroll)/(38.3 million) wins =((team wins)-(avg. wins))/(11) Adding the two together produces a measure of payroll allocation and wins (not a simple $/wins metric, but a relative scale): TEAM Effic. $/1E6 Wins SDP 2.21 37.8 90 TB 1.86 71.9 96 TEX 1.75 55.3 90 CIN 1.40 72.4 91 TOR 1.10 62.7 85 ATL 1.08 84.4 91 OAK 1.03 51.7 81 MIN 1.01 97.6 94 FLA 0.83 55.6 80 SFG 0.82 97.8 92 STL 0.39 93.5 86 COL 0.36 84.2 83 CHW 0.19 108.3 88 PHI 0.12 141.9 97 MIL -0.10 81.1 77 LAD -0.19 94.9 80 CLE -0.31 61.2 69 WSN -0.32 61.4 69 ANA -0.46 105.0 80 HOU -0.49 92.4 76 ARI -0.66 60.7 65 PIT -0.72 34.9 57 KCR -0.78 72.3 67 DET -0.83 122.9 81 BAL -1.12 81.6 66 BOS -1.15 162.7 89 NYM -1.27 132.7 79 NYY -1.74 206.3 95 CHC -2.00 146.9 75 SEA -2.01 98.4 61 Cubs are 29th, but that shouldn't shock anyone. Pittsburgh is 22, which seems a little more reasonable to me. A team that achieves little else except its own continued existence at minimal cost can only be considered efficient in a purely biological sense of the word. Anyway, I really didn't put a ton of thought into this, and I'm not a statistician. I welcome the criticisms of those that are.

He hit .321... Berkman hit .248. :-k That being said, the fact remains that .340 is better than .220.

First Wellemeyer and now Looper? Given the choice, I guess I prefer auditioning myriad awful retreads for the bullpen over handing millions of dollars to mediocre middle relievers. It's not a fun call, though.

Yep. That game was awesome. I attended that game. Corey Patterson hit the game winning HR. I remember thinking how great it was that our young talent was stepping up. Sigh.

In particular, Lee and Ramirez performed abysmally over the first half of last year: 2010 first half #s: NL: .257/.327/.402 Cubs: .254/.321/.398 Lee: .233/.329 /.366 Ramirez: .207/.268/.380 Removing the contribution of Lee and Ramirez (~18% of total PA over that period) and replacing it with their career average numbers yields a team line of .265/.331/.421. Merely average first-halves for Lee and Ramirez may have been enough to bring the offense from below average in every category to above average across the board. The fact that they typically occupied the middle of the lineup didn't help, either. Fortunately, Aramis was his old self in the second half (.276/.321/.526 w/ 15 HR in 246 PA), so that augurs well for 2011. Even a modest rebound from Peña should more than compensate for losing DLee.

Dilfer has been riding Jay constantly this season. I'm really sick of all the armchair psychoanalysis of Cutler. He might not be perfect, but he's easily the best Bears QB of my lifetime. That's all I give a damn about.

[expletive] I hate Bears fans. Unbelievable. See Bears fans?! This is why we can't have nice quarterbacks!

Carl's Stone Cold Lock of the Century of the Week is the Packers. Keep in mind, Carl is 4-12 on the season, and 0-2 in the playoffs. Here's hoping he continues to pick wrong...

I think that makes 4 out of 10 total.

http://www.onionsportsnetwork.com/articles/prince-fielder-explains-complexities-of-salary-arb,18897/ Fat jokes. I'll stop laughing when they stop being funny.

What's the point of posting this other than inciting arguments? One could frankly say the same of this entire thread.

Nope.

http://wiklifield.thecubreporter.com/w/images/4/42/TMFL.jpg Godspeed, Ted Lilly.

My mother always told me, "If someone is an insufferable [expletive] douchebag, they're not your real friend."

In ~80% of the games Soto actually started (98), he was placed in the 7th (40.8%) or 8th (38.8%) position in the batting order. Without looking, I'm going to assume the Cubs were probably the only team in baseball to consistently dump their team leader in OPS+ and wOBA at the bottom of the lineup. Soto's OBP is a bit of a mirage though. He drew 25 walks in the 8-spot and 25 in the 7-spot. I'm willing to bet the majority of those came because they were trying to get to either the pitcher or whatever light hitting middle infielder was batting 8th that day. Same goes for Castro... he drew 17 walks in 32 games batting 8th, while only drawing 10 walks in 72 games batting 2nd. I'm not trying to diminish Soto's On-Base capabilities, he definitely has them, but I think his OBP is a bit inflated due to batting in front of lesser hitters throughout the season His slash stats by batting order over his career are as follows: 4 .375 / .483 / .667 / 1.15 29 PA 5 .233 / .314 / .451 / .765 258 PA 6 .263 / .371 / .414 / .786 361 PA 7 .287 / .370 / .514 / .884 514 PA 8 .272 / .379 / .470 / .849 240 PA While these aren't statistically robust sample sizes, he has demonstrated solid OBP skills just about everywhere he's hit (not that I think you were really debating that). You may be right that hitting in front of the pitcher helped him put up a .393 OBP last season. Still, how many 8 spot hitters posted anywhere near a .393 OBP? The league average was .316, the lowest outside of the 9 spot (.306), so its clear that not all hitters benefit from being in front of the pitcher. Very good hitters do. Unfortunately, their skills are often squandered there. Such is the case with Soto. I'm not arguing that he should hit 3rd, its just very galling to see his talent shunted to the bottom of the order simply because he wears shin guards.

He was arrested for allegedly threatening a woman. The woman in question remains unidentified. He was released on $50,000 bail.