Alright guys, welcome to my game thread. We haven't won in one of my game threads yet this year, and we're terrible right now, but nonetheless I have a good feeling about this. Hot takes incoming: Pitching for the Cubs is Dallas Beeler, who sucks but is in the process of doing that annoying thing where some fringe-average AAA guy has a not-terrible callup and suddenly half the fanbase is on his jock. Alfredo Simon goes for the Reds, and here we have found the evil wizard who is stealing all of Edwin Jackson's peripheral>ERA conversion mojo. 5.49 K/9, 2.13 BB/9, 1.06 HR/9, 8.5% swinging strikes, 48% ground balls ... all pretty bad and boring and yet ... 2.48 ERA. He has been doing this for three years totalling 250 innings, in which he has accrued 1.0 fWAR but 4.1 bWAR. I'm sure he'll do it again to the Cubs. The whole Reds team is a collection of crummy players playing over their heads. The only good players on the Reds are Joey Votto and Aroldis Chapman, and Votto is slipping fast. Everyone else is some variation of stupid and lucky. The only good thing about their existence is that they are hanging around in mediocrity getting their fanbase's hopes up to be crushed by the Brewers and Pirates and Cardinals. Arismendy Alcantara is being called up for this game for the Cubs, for a two-day callup while Darwin Barney is on paternity leave, which is apparently a thing that can happen. This seems like good news, but it is not, for two reasons: 1) We all know he's going to ride the bench for those two days and it's going to drive us mad. 2) He's BABIPing about like .600 in AAA and the transition to MLB is going to destroy him so he better be really good defensively. Alright, here we go. Go Cobs. One more year of this crap before we own for a decade. http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpzbojfGTU1qjvn2d.gif