Lefty

Cedeno's job hanging by a thread.

What do you think the Reds can get for Arroyo now?

Wow, Dunn is brutal defensively.

Less of a problem if a buyer buys the whole company and then sells the Cubs to help finance the purchase. They would need a lot more financing than the measley 500 million or so the Cubs would bring in. Like I have said the Cubs are a very small part of the Trib. The Trib has a current market cap of approx. 8.5 billion dollars and is trading near a 52 week low, add in a premium to get an offer accepted and you are looking at a price tag of over 10 billion that is if the stock price wouldn't go up on speculation that the company is for sale, which it is not. Using the 52 week high of the stock price and you are looking at a price tag of of closer to 15 billion. A financial buyer will borrow 80% of the purchase price. With deductible interest there won't be taxes for awhile. Albertson's was in an auction which was public knowledge. The bid was about 25% above it's low. There is so much money available in Private Equity, behemoths like FOX and Viacom out there, this looks to me like it will happen in some form.

Less of a problem if a buyer buys the whole company and then sells the Cubs to help finance the purchase.

As the first person to post this, Thread Life 2/1/06-2/16/06 (currently on page 18), I want to correct an assumption that many of you are making. It is not a question of whether the current Tribune Company wants to sell the Cubs. It may very well be out of management's hands. If a financial buyer and a strategic buyer pool their resources, they will end up divying up the Trib's assets without input from the current management. I.e., there will be no "Tribune" as we now know it that will decide whether or not to sell the Cubs. At the current stock price, if the credit markets can stay healthy through the summer I would say that this becomes a probabilty. A Cubs pennant wouldn't hurt either .

Agreed. We tend to judge GMs each individual off-season. But Hendry should lose mega-points for putting himself in this position. And committing himself to Jones for three years will compound this mistake. And yet, I think the Cubs will win the division. Ain't baseball grand? I'm not sure what you are saying lefty. Are you saying that Hendry has had two off seasons and one full season to replace Sosa with someone better than Burnitz/Jones and hasn't done it? If so, I agree. The proof is in the pudding, obviously. But that right there isn't saying much unless it can be shown that he could have acquired someone clearly better for the right price but chose not to because he thought Burnitz/Jones would be better. Also, how did Hendry "put himself in this position"? I'm just trying to understand what point you are making. I am saying that Hendry should never have put himself in a position where he had to settle for a year of Burnitz and three of Jones. The optimal, I'm not saying necessarily realistic, would have been a trade of Sosa after 2003 for something of value and signing Vlad Guerrero. So I am saying he ought to have been able to do something less than optimal but better than he did.

Who's your brother or husband?

Agreed. We tend to judge GMs each individual off-season. But Hendry should lose mega-points for putting himself in this position. And committing himself to Jones for three years will compound this mistake. And yet, I think the Cubs will win the division. Ain't baseball grand?

. I thought this was the random positive thoughts thread... I wasn't necessarily inviting others' positive thoughts.

Ya' gotta hope. But until he's gone that's all it is with these guys. Furcal contract looking better though.

1. Cardinals are not infallible Had we signed Bigbie and Encarnacion this board would have melted down. Now that the Cards have signed Encarnacion more than one poster on this board has suggested that will make him great. Is that rational? BP's metrics had the Cards about 5.5 games better than the Cubs last year. They have lost some key memebers, added some question marks and a full year of Scott Rolen. We can't compete with that? 2. Cubs a cinch to be better At last year's stats Pierre would be about 20 runs better than Patterson. Last year we had 21 games started by pitchers who were not among our top 6 starters. Those 21 starts had a 6.45 in 113 IPs. While most teams cannot find average starters, we can. If those 113 IPs would be filled with the four guys we have who pitched at the league average last year, Rusch, Williams, Wood and Miller, we'd save another 25 runs. Even if Lee regresses to his 2003 or first five months of 2004 self, this team would still project to about 85 or 86 wins. That assumes Cedeno hits like Perez. That Murton hits like our collective leftfielder of 2005 (@.260, .318, .418). That our bullpen pitches like last year's version. I suspect the surprises will be to the upside. That leads into my final point... 3. Cubs may have already hit bottom Last year was a train wreck and we still won 79 games. In this decade 7 teams have won divisions having won 79 games or fewer the year before (I am counting the 2000 Mariners who were not given a chance to tie for the division because of the Wild Card rules). Including divisional ties, thats 18% of divisional winners (7/39) making that climb. It happens all the time because variable performances are the rule. Last night I saw a panel of three Chicago media guys pick the Cubs for 72, 75 and 78 wins. They don't do any analysis, they just reflect the zeitgeist. "Cubs won 79 games, the headlines are bad, the Sox are World Champs, let's subtract from 79." But they are starting from the low base that was the 2005 season. Like in the stock market, all the bad news is reflected in last year's record. While a 1991 Mets-style collapse is possible it is highly unlikely. The Cubs are much more likely to flirt with 90 wins. And if they get positive surprises like Wood or Prior pitching in April, Pierre hitting over .300, or Murton hitting like he did last year, we could have the 2004 Cardinals on our hands. BTW, the consensus on this board in the Spring of '04 was that the Cardinals were in serious decline. Full circle baby.

That's the only reason. I hope you're kidding.

That's meaningless. I remember once Dante Bichette hit 20 HRs and 15 SBs and went to arbitration and argued that only he Rickey Henderson and Barry Bonds achieved this combination and thus deserved his figure in arbitration. Why don't we see where Pierre ranks in lack of power and out-making ability.

How is trading for Nomar a bad idea? It didn't work out as planned, but I don't think it set us back much. We got Murton, and Neifi played for KGon.

If his injury history continues, he'd be a giant waste of that $8m, especially since he'd be coming into a logjam. If

I've posted this a million times. We could get Vidro for nothing if we pay his salary. Considering our payroll is about $8 million below target it seems to fit. Look at Vidro's road stats last year.

That's pretty humbling. I guess I couldn't have done worse, but it makes you appreciate how good major league hitters and pitchers are.

Haven't you seen his wife?

Against a lefty no less. Make me look like an a** JJ. It's OK with me.

Boy that #5 hitter sticks out like a swollen middle finger.

No doubt all of them winners. The lineup is really an afterthought. Once you've filled your positions, you then figure out an order to maximize what you have. To trade for a "prototypical" leadoff hitter is prototypical Cub stupidity. If the Cubs had Edmonds in CF leading off, would they be better or worse? The Cubs OF is awful and that's why Murton might be their best OFer, not because he is the second coming.

And if Adam Dunn didn't have plate discipline, he'd have a .270 OBP. And if Barry Zito had an average curveball, he wouldn't be in the major leagues. It's not reasonable to remove a player's most valuable asset in order to show a lack of productivity. My point was that his speed is reflected in the traditional stats. To start ascribing all this value to speed as an intangible is silly.

His speed has value, and it's already reflected in his production by means of beat out singles, extra bases on balls in the gap, stolen bases, etc. Murton's still pretty likely to match or better Pierre's production, and there's not a lot outside of that helping Pierre's cause. Speed can't only be measured as tangible. This has been argued over and over here though, so I'll leave it at that. 90% it can be. If Pierre had average speed he'd be a .150 hitter with no power. That's a pitcher. So his presence in the major leagues and his $5.5 million contract is due to his speed. That's tangible. There are few NL CFs clearly less productive than Pierre. Hardballtimes.com recently did a study to see if there was a "disruption effect" when the top base stealers were on first base. It found little correlation adjusted for a whole bunch of stuff (e.g., with a man on first BA goes up no matter who is on) and some standard deviation. At best no more than three runs a year could be attributed to such an effect. If Pierre goes 70/80 as a base stealer, unlikely, he would add about ten runs or one win for the Cubs. Add in a few disruption runs, big deal. It's the same as 10 HRs. All of Hendry's talk of a leadoff man is BS. If the Cubs had Edmonds in CF, would they be better with Cedeno, Walker, Hairston or Murton leading off? It's a joke.

AA and AAA are the "Pros" too. Guys who hit there, adjusted for context, hit in the major leagues too. It's possible that 2005 was Murton's career year with his excellent minor and major league numbers combined. But given his age, that is unlikely. While I'm here. I spent a few days this winter with a coach on the Texas Rangers staff. I will second what was written in the paper that they thought he was a terrible defender. I saw the Texas Rangers Spring Training Instructional tape from last year, and you wouldn't believe how many times Soriano was out of position. And this tape was shown to the team when Soriano was still there. This coach assumed Kinsler would start at second. But if he flopped, this coach thought that Mark DeRosa was still an improvement over Soriano! I think he's nuts, figuratively, but this guy's job is at stake too.