Baseball season can't get here soon enough. Watching the Cubs get swept 3-0 in the NLDS at the hands of the Dodgers, making a 97-win regular season all for naught, was kind of like getting kicked in the nuts in super slow-motion. Neither a respectable, but not particularly memorable, 9-7 Bears season nor the possibly playoff bound, but still terrible outside of Derrick Rose Bulls have done much to take the sting away. Now here we are and February and, well, that sting is still going to be there for a while. Spring training games just started on Wednesday and we're still a good 7 weeks away from the regular season starting. And to be frank, its hard to imagine the regular season being all that satisfying an experience either. The Cubs won the NL Central pretty comfortably last year, are returning rougly the same team as last year, and the rest of an already pretty bad division would seem to have gotten substantially worse. As such, the Cubs winning the division this year wouldn't be a huge deal at all, and not winning it would represent a monumental collapse. The only thing that's going to remove the sting of getting swept in back-to-back NLDS series is going to be getting back to the playoffs and getting to the World Series. Even still, there's always a degree of excitment that comes with baseball starting up again, so let's talk about it.
Probably thanks in part to the recession, it was a pretty quiet off-season around the league with the exception of the Yankees, who threw massive piles of money at Mark Texiera and C.C. Sabathia. The Cubs are returning a roster that's largely the same at its core but its been tweaked a little bit. The two most significant losses are Mark DeRosa and Kerry Wood. Seeing Wood go is kind of bittersweet because, even with all of his injury issues he's been a member of the Cubs for a decade, and he seemed like a genuinely good guy. Although, I have to say, going to mlb.com and seeing a news story that Wood's back was bothering him and knowing that I didn't have to worry about it was something I can get used to. It seems like Carlos Marmol will be handed the reigns of the closer's job, although Kevin Gregg was brought in as well from Florida and could probably do an adequate job in a pinch. Provided Marmol doesn't have a huge breakdown (and the prospect of that is always going to scare the hell out of me so long as Lou's having him throw 40+ pitch outings and come right back the next day), the loss of Wood shouldn't be hugely crushing.
The DeRosa loss might be a bit more significant. DeRosa was brought in two years ago as a super-sub type of guy, and indeed, he's played admirably all over the field with the Cubs. Last year, though, DeRosa did more than just field a bunch of positions, he put together a career year at the plate, hitting 21 home runs and driving in 87. It would seem that, in dealing DeRosa to the Indians for pitching prospects, that the Cubs figure that DeRosa is not going to repeat that performance again (he did just turn 34), and decided to "sell high" if you will. Still, it is a little disconcerting that, to replace DeRosa, the Cubs went out and got Aaron Miles. Miles is a switch-hitter and the Cubs made it a goal to get less righty heavy after getting shut down by the right-hand dominated Dodgers pitching staff in the NLDS last year. The thing is, compared to DeRosa, even if he starts to decline, Miles isn't really all that good. He put together a .317 average last year with the Cardinals, but even still he had an OPS of .753 which was good for an OPS+ of 99 (an OPS+ of 100 represents an average hitter). The Cubs do have the left-handed Mike Fontenot, who isn't really that great either, but he's younger than Miles and I'm not convinced he'd be all that worse. The Cubs saved a little bit of money trading DeRosa and getting Miles but not all that much. I think the gap in production between DeRosa and Miles is probably wider than the gap in cost. So I think the Miles signing was somewhat dubious.
Maybe the biggest signing of the offseason for the Cubs was Milton Bradley. The reaction to the signing was immediately polarizing amongst fans, as the Cubs gave a pretty lucrative 3 year deal to a guy with undeniable hitting prowess but also with equally undeniable injury problems. Last year, Bradley had a fantastic .436 OBP with 22 HRs and 77 RBIs for the Indians in 126 games, but was used almost entirely as a DH, something which obviously isn't an option for the Cubs. You have to go all the way back to 2004 to find the last time Bradley was able to play in as many games as he did in 2008, when he appeared in 141 with the Dodgers. If he could stay healthy, the switch-hitting Bradley would likely be a huge upgade over Kosuke Fukudome, should he struggle as he did in the 2nd half of '08, but that's an enormous if. Bradley didn't exactly restore confidence in his health by leaving a spring training game with a quad injury after taking a walk in his first at-bat. It seems like the injury is pretty minor, but its hard to imagine a more ominous sign than that. The Cubs also said goodbye to backup catcher Henry Blanco and brought back Paul Bako, who caught alongside Michael Barrett for the Cubs in the '03 and '04 seasons. I don't really understand why they did this, as Blanco is the exact same age, is a slightly better hitter who every once in a while would inexplicably go on a tear offensively, and seemed to do an excellent job of handling the pitching staff. Bako, again, makes them more left-handed, but we're talking about the backup catcher here. Presumably Bako isn't going to be the first option brought in as a pinch-hitter against rightys. I dunno, this move really isn't a big deal, but I always had an irrational love for ol' Hank White.
In terms of the rotation, the Cubs re-signed Ryan Dempster who had a career year last year. He probably isn't going to repeat quite the success that he had last year, and honestly the Cubs probably paid him more than he's worth, but he seems like a genuinely good guy and he's fun to watch pitch. The Cubs also brought in Aaron Heilman from the Mets, who has split time between being a starter and a long reliever throughout his career. Heilman's numbers aren't stellar at all, but he gives them some pitching depth, which is good because its already being said that Rich Harden is going to be good for maybe 20 starts this year. The Cubs also have Sean Marshall still in their back pocket, but they haven't shown a willingness to put him in the rotation and keep him there yet, and he's going to be 26 next year. At this point you have to believe that the Cubs aren't counting on Marshall's upside being all that much more that what he's shown to this point.
Some of the moves by the Cubs are head-scratchers to an extend, but none of them seem egrigiously bad at this point. The Cubs were looking for fill-in guys, and while I'm not convinced that this group of guys is the absolute best to fill those roles, I think for the most part they'll do an adequate job, and the Cubs have a lot to fall back on this year as well. I think they may have overreacted a bit with just how crucial it was that they got more left-handed at the plate, to the point where they brought in guys like Aaron Miles who clearly weren't the best overall hitters out there, but who knows. If the Cubs run into the Dodgers again in the playoffs, which is certainly possible, those leftys may look like Godsends.
Nothing earth-shattering has happened in Spring Training thus far. Carlos Zambrano went 3 IP without allowing a run in his first start. Hopefully that suggests that he'll get off to a good start again in '09 as he did in '08, breaking a streak of a bunch of bad Aprils from years prior, but who knows. As I said, there's only so much you can read into Spring Training games. Micah Hoffpauir has been getting some ABs, and has hit a couple of home runs already. He'll probably make the roster and, hopefully, will hit a couple of those as a pinch hitter later on in the regular season.
That's all I've got for now.
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