loukycub

trey lewis from cleveland state is transferring as a grad student to the university of louisville. we get the one missing piece we didn't really have last year- a shooter.

yesterday was a good day (kevin notwithstanding). louisville was the best team in the tournament hands down. but they were going about games with a business-like attitude. now the best team in the tournament is playing with extra motivation. (insert diety here) help the other teams in the tournament.

i think the low average with risp is a symptom of a bigger issue. this team has shown very little power so far this season. whenever the first game with saint louis was, it was 13 hits, all singles, 4 runs. i believe that at one point the cubs had a collective 20 or 25 hits spread over a few games, all singles. if the team mixes in maybe 4 or 5 doubles, the risp may go up some and there are 3 or 4 more wins on the board. if all that i being hit is singles, the defense can gameplan for that with the psn being down the last 3 weeks i haven't been able to see a lot of the games but i don't seem to recall a whole lot of xbh this season, granted that there are more singles hit than any other type of hit. maybe our resident stat geeks could list how many xbh the cubs have had this season vs other teams in the league (if that is even possible)?

i was going to ask who won, but i decided to look at the website instead. i won in another group i belonged to and i did not want to seem like a jerk and go off bragging. turns out i won here too. and the second chance bracket as well. which is nice. but you want to know something really, i dunno how to put it, not right? after louisville lost, i completely tuned out. and after yuk went on that run, i avoided the tournament completely. in other words, other than literally from the second game of the tournament to the last game, i had no freaking clue what was going on. you want to talk about completely messed up, there you go.

i don't know if i could answer that had circumstances not played out the last season as it had, those being such a dramatic drop-off from 2010 from 2009 and lou's mother being ill. if the team had won the division or finished a close second in the division, i could have seen lou coming back. i think of it as the assumed end result if the Piniella era had done nothing to change the club's fortunes. if lou is winning games, and improving the team's fortunes each year, he probably gets a contract extension. but if he's falling off the cliff and the team is getting worse, management lets him "retire" and they bring in sandberg. when you think of it in that way, theoretically the cubs are coming off 7 disappointing seasons so who better to bring in than the cubs legend and fan favorite ryne sandberg to generate some positive off season buzz? consider that we were coming out of the dusty baker era and the low note it ended on. the only thing that screwed up that plan was lou retired early, the iowa cubs were in a playoff push, so ryne couldn't be called up to give him the opportunity to manage the big club. conspiracy theorist and convoluted as hell i know, but it does follow logically and something i could easily see this organization doing under tribco management.

granted you (ssr) have a point that no one promised him the gig officially and on the record, but you could logically imply that ryne was going to get the job for the 2011 season. look what cl smooth posted from the last page that is in bold. i don't think it was coincidental that lou's contract ended the same year that ryne managed the aaa team. i am convinced that was the plan. sandberg got screwed when the team performed under quade plain and simple. i'm not sure if i mentioned it in this thread or another one, but i would be leery of any person becoming a major league manager after not having any major league coaching experience, especially one who is attempting to manage a big market high pressure job like the cubs. he doesn't think he needs to sit on a major league bench. i think he does. i'll bet that 30 other major league teams do to. i guarantee that should charlie manuel get fired, ryne sandberg is not going to be the interim manager.

this is how i see it. subtract the name and look at his resume. i still see a man who only has 4 years of baseball coaching experience. there have been other baseball coaches who have put more years in and been more successful than sandberg was who still don't have a major league job. rick sweet for example has spent 7 years here in louisville as manager of the louisville bats and has 3 straight division titles to his credit, this after spending time the years before at chattanooga. according to the apparent thinking here, sweet should have been managing the cincinnati reds for the last 6 years now. i have no basis in thinking this, but ryne's promotion year after year leads me to believe that in 2006 sandberg went into the organization thinking that as soon as lou's contract was up, he would be anointed the job just because he was cubs hall of fame legend ryne sandberg.

Yeah, this is really surprising. I wouldn't have been surprise to see a continuing decline, but that drop is insane. You had Byrd taking over in CF, which is a plus. You had Fukudome moving back to RF which is a plus. Is it the number of errors? it may be. aren't we tops in both unearned runs and errors? i have no idea what happened to the defense either. but it has become an issue that needs to be fixed. The errors seem to be the issue, but is it really something that can or should be "fixed?" If you end up looking to fix defense uber alles you tend to end up with some really underwhelming offense. It seems a ton of it can be attributed to to Aramis and Castro and Theriot. Aramis is definitely having an off year, and it seems to be a pretty safe bet that Castro will improve plus Theriot is gone, so there doesn't really seem to be a pressing need to "fix" the defense over the offense. i will grant you trades may have helped in that getting some of that bad defense out. i think it may be better when a new manager comes in, because i don't think fundamentals were addressed very well though the season or in spring training. but i also know that d-lee saved a bunch of errors too. how many errors do you think we pick up now that he's gone? no bs serious question. personally i would rather have players who can catch the ball rather than hit the ball. and if a player can do both well its a bonus. i don't think having dunn at first base nets a positive runs produced/runs given up and dunn is in his 30s now. i don't think his defense is likely to improve much more.

Yeah, this is really surprising. I wouldn't have been surprise to see a continuing decline, but that drop is insane. You had Byrd taking over in CF, which is a plus. You had Fukudome moving back to RF which is a plus. Is it the number of errors? it may be. aren't we tops in both unearned runs and errors? i have no idea what happened to the defense either. but it has become an issue that needs to be fixed.

productive offensive player? sure. but with the team as it is constructed now, adding him in is worthless when the defense is this bad. if we fielded a better defense, dunn even at first base is worth it for the runs he would give up. i'm not opposed to the idea. but i think and i think you would agree, there are higher priorities that need to be taken care of first, the defense being one of them. if you can improve the defense AND get adam dunn, go for it.

our other in-house 1st base candidate is micah hoffpaiur. we would still be negotiating from a point of weakness regardless. i know it would go over like a lead balloon over here but the only thing trading derrek lee does in my mind is eliminate the possibility he comes back next year. i don't know of the upcoming 1st base fa class next year, but i'm betting there aren't any big names on it that can help other than adam dunn and i don't want him and his high triple digit k totals anywhere near this offense which has trouble hitting anyway. my thinking has been, okay don't offer arbitration, don't sign him right away, but sign him to a lower dollar, high incentive laden deal. his defense still has value even though it appears his bat no longer does. if there aren't any medium names available i would have liked to stay with what he had and see if anything would have shaken out next year. as it stands now it looks like its going to get much worse before it gets better.

=D> :good: my hate of saint louis is rivaled by my hate of cincinnati. barely.

the cubs have never played a regular season game in oakland. going to boston just eliminates one stadium, i would have thought for sure we would have played in oakland this season.

glad to see my votto hate justified. you never heard this kind of talk while he was here with the bats. methinks he's upset cub fans travel better to cincy than cincy fans do. especially when the cubs aren't good. btw, i blame bartman only for getting in the players heads making them feel like there was a curse. my opinion only but it seemed to me in game 7 the team were going around waiting for the bottom to drop out.

if a dl stint was all it took to get aramis right, then i should be mad at somebody. the problem is i'm not sure who i should be mad at, because all of the relevant parties are equally culpable imo for him struggling for as long as he was. right now, i'm leaning 41% lou, 39% hendry, and 20% aramis.

To be fair, I guess, one would expect a team to have gone 1-8 against the Pirates to be a LOT worse than 5 games under .500. I'm not saying that Lou's is off the hook, but whatever. if it weren't for the fact that as a whole, the national league sucks and is rather unimpressive, my opinion is that lou would have been long gone by now. in a normal year, any team that is that close to .500 but is 1-8 to the pirates should have been fired well before the start of june. the extreme mediocrity of the nl is saving a lot of jobs now.

when silva starts your in trouble

how many people were hating on d-lee this same time last year? at the end of the year he was probably one of the regular hitters who earned his money. i think that we are 2 games under in a bad national league with no production from aramis and not much from lee is an encouraging sign. lee is notorious for slow starts. i think that when we get production from 3rd base we will be fine.

meanwhile, back on topic, carlos silva is 5-0 with 3 no decisions and a respectable 3.35 era. i think through may, the question has been answered, and silva has not only been useful, he's been the second best pitcher in the lineup so far.

it's not so much lack of interest as it is i know the game is over if the opposing team has scored its fourth run. because its either the offense can't hit or the bullpen will give up the lead in short order late in the game and then the offense can't get a hit. i think a lot of the fanbase would be a lot more calm if we were just losing because we have been unlucky. besides, i think i would have a lot more interest in the games if they were 9-8 contests every game instead of these low scoring affairs or the cubs offense not showing up affairs. it's too bad i have already committed some cash to the cubs-seattle series. 2500 miles is a long way to drive to watch your team play out the string. i think i'm going to treat this baseball season in the interim like i treated the 08-09 colorado avalanche season- my active following of the team will be directly proportional to the .500 mark. unfortunately i wasn't watching much hockey at the end of that season.

Lou is not going to be the difference in making the playoffs or not. He's made some bad decisions, but let's not forget that many of these high profile situations come in close games because of poor pitching or hitting. He bears very little of the responsibility for our start. And ultimately, what is the list of complaints against Lou? Bullpen management, his handling of Soto, the end? The Cubs are mediocre because their offense and pitching have been up and down, not because Lou is going to Grabow too much or hitting Soto 8th. Also his absolutely atrocious in-game management, moving Z to the pen, etc Lou's not nearly the only problem, but he's one of the bigger ones. at the time, no other starter deserved to go to the pen. out of the 5 zambrano had been the one who underperformed versus their talent level. but given another bad gorzelany start and i would advocate switching the two, even if it puts another lefty in the pen.

i was listening through at-bat, and correct me if i'm wrong, but didn't starlin castro hit his first home run on his first major league swing?

so why freak out about it?

is this thread going to be the nsbb silva version of the "if zambrano starts your in trouble" thread, cause if so, silva sucks, and he's a horrible pitcher.

i know it sounds a immature and illogical, but when it comes to a short term decision like this, i would rather go with the short term data. i am in no way advocating this as a long term move. if that was the case i would go with silva to the pen (only because we have 3 lhp already). plus if your most talented starter is playing like crap, i don't think it automatically gives him a free pass to stay in the rotation either. (for the record, i don't think zambrano has been crap this season, just one start. but so far silva has out performed zambrano this season and i think everyone can agree with that.) this may be a bad decision based on 7 years of data, but i would rather go with the hot hands right now. if someone plays themself out of a rotation spot i'm perfectly fine with putting z in their slot. i see this as a numbers game. someone had to get pulled to make room for lilly and zambrano's performance so far i don't think justifies him starting compared to the other 4 this season.