Alien11

The St. Louis Cardinals would be a good NL team to contract. In this plan you could effectively keep the DH (although I don't like it) so that way with the 30 games the NL could gain a little more advantage when the World Series comes around. I feel the AL currently has a slight advantage in terms of offense when the playoffs come around. As to your second point, I hate St. Louis with a passion, but I would contract Tony LaRussa first.

Not really, it is possible with interleague sparsed throughout the year.

Many of you know that sometimes the unbalanced tends to favor some teams and not others from year to year depending on which team has more home games against a certain opponent who might or might not be in the division. I mean the Cubs played 4 games at Atlanta instead of 3 and got swept throughly. Well I propose that we keep the 30 teams as they are, more due to the fact that contraction won't happen, and have 3 divisions of 5 teams each. Now the first question is, well you can't have 15 games go on at once under that system, but you can if you set up the schedule in such a way where you have interleague games throughout the season. The plan is simple: Colorado moves to the AL West, the only division I feel teams there have a better advantage since currently there are only 3 teams to hop over and have Houston move to the NL West to preserve the "natural rivalry" it has with Texas. Next have each team play it's "natural rival" 6 times (3 home, 3 away) and 6 times against 4 teams from a opposite league's division which rotate every year, the same as is happening now. If the team has no "natural rival" then it will play 6 games against the 5 teams in the division it is supposed to play that year from the other league. Now that covers 30 games of the season which are interleague and you can space them out over the course of a season. Now onto a teams own division in which it will play the remaining 4 teams 18 times (9H, 9A) thus ensuring that you will have to earn your way into winning the division. So that takes care of an additional 72 games. So what about the last 60 games, well since there are 10 remaining teams outside of a teams' respective division in that respective league then you play 6 games (3H, 3A) against those 10 opponents and you take care of the last 60 games. The benefit of this system is that you can keep the wildcard, have some good interleague games (imagine the Red Sox playing the Cubs 6 times in a season, you get them at Wrigley and Fenway in the same year), and lastly I feel it creates good competition with each team getting a legitemate shot at a playoff spot. My last suggestion would be a salary cap, but we all know that is never happenining anytime soon so I felt this would be a better idea. Besides don't you think it is unfair that the Cubs have to hop over 5 teams just to win a division while others have to go over 4 or in the case of the AL West 3? Anyway, let me know what you think. Thanks!

Since when are the Yankees good? You forgot to bring up the little fact that the Yankees get beat 5 out of 6 quite a bit too. In case you haven't noticed, everyone's been negative recently, and we've won 8 of 9, so we decided to keep being negative. I have officially joined the Cubs Suck BandWGN.

Good point, maybe since Gerut isn't 100% his range is limited. Burnitz is a great fielder, but his range is a little troubling being in center.

To answer that, bloody stupid is too nice for that kind of move. Burnitz should be in right and Gerut in center, I believe he has played some games in there when he was with the Indians. And for goodness sakes why isn't Neifi batting 8th like he should?

How does Burnitz play center? Dusty, you make no sense, not that is a new thing....

Let optimism reign. Nice post.

Someone should actually write him, I assume he has an email adress somewhere. Just curious, but has Bruce been on the boards today at all? Although, I bet one of the posters around here have his e-mail address.

It should be interesting to see what pans out up until game time and after the game. Although if Dunn comes to Cubs tonight he just could walk from one dugout to the other as would Sergio. That would be a funny sight!

True, but it at 25 you can take the chance he can make the adjustments to improve that BA over a long period of time. Also with such a high OBP, it shows he has at least better plate discipline than say, CP.

I'm not going to hold my breath for Williamson coming back this season. As for Nomar, I hope he comes back soon since watching Neifi really makes me grimace the lower his OBP goes.

The O's DFA'd Baldwin a couple of days ago. He already has ERA of 1.61 in 22.1 innings this year. I think if the Cubs want to trade Mitre or give him more time in the minors Baldwin would be a good replacment long reliver. What do you think?