vance_the_cubs_fan

Zambrano makes good work of the anemic White Sox.

Zambrano looking good so far.

Erstad breaks more often than Ken Griffey.

26 pitches so far for Buerle.

If Bowen is aware, yes, he'll share.

Who's Mark Buerle? :lol:

Nice opposite field shot there!

Welcome back, Ramirez!

424 ft on Soriano's homerun.

I'm sure Hawk will be rambling on about that catch well into the eighth inning.

Damn...nice catch by the grittymeister.

Nice way to start the game! 1-0 Cubs!

I see them as very similar pitchers. Hill is older and has better numbers. My biggest concern with Marshall is his health. If I had to choose one or the other, I'd probably hang on to Hill and trade Marshall. Of course, I agree with the idea that maybe we should trade Lilly and keep the two guys who are a little more cost effective.

Orioles do that, too. Pretty much every team does.

I like Fox, a lot. But from what I have heard Fox is not a strong defensive catcher. If Barrett was bad back there, I think Fox might be worse. If Fox makes the team, it's going to be as a OF/3b/1b/C utility type player.

I'm curious about that as well. Perhaps there are some other things he overlooks and he's just threatening to enforce those things if teams don't cooperate. There's the money rule in trades, where the commish can veto any trade involving more than $1m. It would be like cops harrassing somebody by ticketing them every time they go 1 mph over the speed limit. He's probably threatening to screw them when it comes to ejections and suspensions....

I'd probably take the 9/16....but having the second pick isn't bad.

Sunny, I'm pretty sure that use of the term "albatross" is usually restricted to situations where a player is a problem for a team because: 1) the team gets almost no production out of the player (sometimes this is evaluated against salary rather than absolute production vs. league average) 2) the player is highly paid 3) the player's contract is long-term 4) the player is essentially untradable Normal usage of the term, at least in the analytical baseball community, seems to require all four of those conditions, so that an albatross player is one who sucks, will suck for a long time, and must be expected to continue dragging the team down for several seasons to come. Obviously, the term is not precisely defined. Reasonable people might disagree about what constitutes "almost no production" or "highly paid," although it's clear that "highly paid" must mean "highly paid relative to other major league baseball players of comparable skill" or "highly paid relative to the baseball talent market" or even "highly paid relative to an idealized model of the baseball talent market," and emphatically not "highly paid relative to your average blue collar worker." A standard exception to these requirements is somebody who has met the criteria for several consecutive years immediately prior to this one, but is now in the last year of his contract. Obviously, to use the term albatross correctly, it is neccessary to show that the player's low production resulted from conditions that can be expected to persist into the future; one-time injuries, bad luck, and other external factors need to be removed from the equation. Often it is neccesary to look at available levels of replacement talent as well. I didn't begin this post to take issue with your classification of Barrett as an albatross, but it is interesting to compare the Barrett situation with the definition of albatross that I have proposed. It would be possible to argue against your assessment of Barrett on the basis that Barrett has been unlucky or, alternately, on the basis that two months of poor production, even if genuinely bad, are not enough to make it reasonable to expect him to suck for the indefinite future. More obviously, and more relevantly for the definition of the term albatross, Barrett has not sucked in the past, and as an upcoming free agent would never have been in a position to become a long-term problem for the team. I'll leave it to others to draw the conclusions. Nice post. :) It's a top ten post of all time. In fact, in my mental recollection of top ten posts, Saors has three of them.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v257/vance_the_cubs_fan/rangers%20v%20Cubs%202007/PicsfromCarrie125.jpg The swing! http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v257/vance_the_cubs_fan/rangers%20v%20Cubs%202007/100_0205.jpg The hop! http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v257/vance_the_cubs_fan/rangers%20v%20Cubs%202007/PicsfromCarrie126.jpg The fireworks http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v257/vance_the_cubs_fan/rangers%20v%20Cubs%202007/PicsfromCarrie127.jpg The Rangers mob him at home plate. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v257/vance_the_cubs_fan/rangers%20v%20Cubs%202007/100_0222.jpg The scoreboard http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v257/vance_the_cubs_fan/rangers%20v%20Cubs%202007/100_0223.jpg Sammy is in some rare company. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v257/vance_the_cubs_fan/rangers%20v%20Cubs%202007/PicsfromCarrie139.jpg Replay on the board http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v257/vance_the_cubs_fan/rangers%20v%20Cubs%202007/PicsfromCarrie164.jpg And they raise the banner!

while having Bowen be your #6 hitter is like a punch in the pills Well that's what happens when you trade the only catcher on the team who can hit.

If Jon was still making his great Cubs photoshops, this would be an easy choice for me. On the other hand, it's hard to vote against Slugger. But since Jon was the one who created my avatar and created the Mitre bandwgn with the Scooby Doo mystery machine, he gets my vote. I just wish he'd continue to make those again.

Letting Ramirez ease back in at DH is probably a good thing.

One could argue that's what the Barrett trade was. That was tossing deck chairs off the titanic, because they thought the deck chairs were weighing the thing down. Very true. Unfortunately, we may have tossed off the wrong chairs.

I'm not sure I'd give up Marshall for Griffey. I'd rather have Dunn. :)

You made it!