Hairyducked Idiot

Then why would you even click on this thread?

Location? I'm watching it right now.

I enjoy it, but I still get tired of people overstating it.

Arrieta ruining them at Busch in the WC game would be the most cathartic thing ever.

How was I supposed to know then that Schwarber was our Pujols?

I'll just turn myself in.

81 wins clinches no losing season and eliminates the Rockies. Suck it, LeMahieu

I too knew a Phillies fan who was livid I thought the Howard extension was dumb.

It takes a special kind of ridiculous to blame the previous regime for how Castro ended up screwed up.

I posted from a hotel in Tulsa a few weeks ago on my way out here. I went from Illinois to North Dakota to Missouri to Illinois to California. I promised myself I'm going to an NLCS game if the Cubs play the Dodgers, so I'll probably die, but worth it.

I'm in Long Beach now. It turns out that living in metro areas is about a million times better than living in shithole rural towns.

First, I should note that I haven't done much more than check the score the last 2.5 weeks or so, so I may be a bit out of date on how some guys are doing. OK, first, I still don't think they meant for the rebuild to go like this. They thought they could have a season like this by 2013 or 2014. It wasn't some brilliant plan to be sucky for three years. They thought they'd be borderline competitive in 2013, dropped a ton of money on free agents the offseason, and whiffed. In the meantime, well-run teams *can* go from bad to good pretty quickly with good MLB-level moves. A guy like Arrieta wasn't a product of the rebuild, he was just a great decision. You make enough good decisions, you win a lot more baseball games than they have the last 3 years before this year. They made a lot of bad MLB-level decisions before this year, and this year they've made a lot of good ones. So they're having a very good year, and it's been buoyed by a lot of luck. Luck that I certainly don't begrudge them, we're due for a +6 pythagorean season. Does one good year erase three awful years? Of course not. So if you're asking me to grade them on what they've done to date, it's still going to be a bad grade. So we're probably going to want to project out into the future to get a total grade. And if you're one of those people that believe that a handful of great, young, cost-controlled hitters means you can ink in our playoff spots for the next five years, then they deserve a good evaluation. I tend to think those people are overestimating the Cubs' future for a lot of reasons: underestimating the challenges to putting together a healthy, productive pitching staff every year; overestimating how much those young hitters project to improve; forgetting that this team *is* overachieving on paper and we're not going into next year with a 95-win baseline; and most importantly just forgetting that this is a high-variance sport and sometimes a season in the heart of your golden era turns into what the Rangers or Nats are right now. Do *I* think they're going to have enough success in their overall tenure to justify the three bad years? It's going to be close, imo. Putting together a playoff season this year helps a ton. 1-for-4 is a huge improvement over 0-for-4 if you want the percentages to add up in the long run. But I wouldn't spike the football for them just yet.

If we do that four more times, we're the strong favorites!

NLCS minimum

If I were Jerry O'Connell, I'd assume this is the wrong universe and keep sliding.

lots and lots of dongs We appear to have traded for some kind of outfielder, called up CJ Edwards, Baez isn't pooping himself, and Arrieta is a god.

I've been busy. Anything interesting happen in the last week besides locking down a playoff spot for all intensive porpoises?

Are you in the process of making that move? Yup. If the hotel wifi is good tonight I get to start living the MLB blackout free dream

Posting from Tulsa, Ok /fred Go Cubs

#wearegood

#wearegood

Well, he still has medium amount of trade value imo, but yeah I am not worried about how we will replace his replacement level pwrformeance.

The future? It's here. It's the present. This is one of the best teams in baseball. This is the correct opinion.

Cubs have been relocated to the Dongminican Republic

I'm pretty bullish on Russell. He's the one guy who is legitimately at an age where lots of improvement is reasonable to assume.