Rites of Spring

I haven't found myself too motivated to update this thing lately. In my drafts is a half-finished Crazy Heart review that I'm not sure is ever going to be actually finished. For the record, I agree with what seems to be the consensus about it: Pretty good movie, the best part of which is Jeff Bridges' performance. I'm still going to finish my Cowboy Bebop posts, but haven't found the time to watch episodes for it, and I'm still going to finish my FF7 posts, but I've been off playing other stuff. So, with opening day just around the corner this coming Monday, here's a Cubs preview post to attempt to break out of this blogging malaise. Really, I'd be lying if I said I was that optimistic about the prospects of the Cubs' season, but it's nevertheless hard not to get excited for the return of baseball in general.

PART I: OFFENSE

Most computer projections that I've seen (i.e. PECOTA, CHONE) have the Cubs projected at somewhere around 78 wins for 2010. As much as I hate to admit it, in a lot of ways, this makes perfect sense. The Cubs managed just 83 wins last year and are returning pretty much the same club as last year, except that will be a year older on a team that's already relatively long in the tooth. With the Cubs finally pretty much hitting the apex of what they can reasonably spend as a team (the payroll has more than doubled over the last decade), and with the team bogged down with a lot of expensive, backloaded contracts, the team wasn't a huge player in free agency in the off-season. Their biggest acquisition was Marlon Byrd, who will come in to play CF, shifting Fukudome back to right. Byrd has been brought in to replace Milton Bradley, who the Cubs traded to Seattle in exchange for Carlos Silva, probably the best result possible amidst a lot of bad options for getting rid of Bradley. Silva's contract is really bad too, but on balance, they actually save a bit of money in the deal. Bradley will start the year as the Mariners' clean-up hitter. Good luck with that, Seattle. Setting aside the fact that he's not crazy, Bryd's arrival in Chicago isn't all-together dissimilar to Bradley's. Like Bradley, Byrd comes to Chicago coming off of career-high power numbers (20 HRs, 89 RBIs) playing for the Rangers. For the whole of his career tough, Byrd has been a roughly average player (99 OPS+). He's a pretty capable defensive player, though, which should shore up what is at times a brutal looking Cubs outfield, and he's played all three outfield positions during his career.

Most of the buzz around the Cubs during spring training was focused around Starlin Castro, who's just barely 20 years old and is now the Cubs top hitting prospect and pretty high up on many people's lists of the best prospects in baseball. Castro had a very good spring hitting the ball, but will nevertheless start the year in the minors. Were he able to come up at some point this year and play at a high level as a shortstop, though, that would change the calculus of the Cubs lineup quite a bit. Castro at SS would shift Ryan Theriot to 2nd, which is his natural position. It would also bump out of the lineup what the Cubs currently have at second base, that being a fairly uninspiring platoon of Mike Fontenot and Jeff Baker. Baker actually had a really good second half of 2009 after coming over to the Cubs from Colorado, with rate stats of .305/.362/.448/.810, but there's nothing to really suggest that he would put up numbers anywhere close to that over a full season. He's had a really lackluster spring as well, which might further the case for him coming back down to earth this year.

Another Rookie is going to make the opening day roster though, Tyler Colvin, who played a little bit with the major league team last year. Colvin is a former 1st round draft pick of the Cubs, and the fact that he's actually making it to the majors already puts him ahead of where other recent Cub 1st round picks have gotten, although there is some question about how big his upside is. As documented at Fan Graphs recently, Colvin's on-base percentage hasn't been that good thus far, and there are questions about his plate discipline. The biggest reason he's making the team is that he's had a very good spring. Colvin making the roster means that Micah Hoffpauir will be left off, something I'm not really that sad about. Hoffpauir is something of a liability defensively. He was on the team last year mostly to provide an offensive spark off the bench, similar to how veteran pinch-hitter Daryle Ward was used while he was a Cub, but he didn't turn out to be that successful at it. Also joining the outfield is Xavier Nady, who is coming off of Tommy John's surgery. Snagging pitchers coming off of major surgery for cheap is something that Jim Hendry has had a penchant for throughout his tenure. Sometimes it's worked (Ryan Dempster), other times it hasn't (Wade Miller). We'll see how it works out with a position player. Nady had a really good 2008, hitting almost 100 RBIs while splitting time between Pittsburgh and the Yankees. The biggest issue at this point is that he can't throw with anywhere near full strength right now, so he might be relegated to pinch-hitting for the near future (he's been playing DH in the Cactus League).

Ultimately though, it's hard to see any of the Cubs' new faces mattering as much as whether or not the old faces can turn it around. Alfonso Soriano plainly can't be the starting left fielder and put up the putrid numbers he did last year (.241/.303/.423/.726). The fact that his knee was reportedly still gimpy when he showed up for camp this spring isn't a promising sign, and neither is the fact that he's going to be 34 this year. Geovany Soto also had an awful year hitting, a night-and-day difference from his fantastic rookie campaign. He lost a ton of weight in the offseason, to the point where reporters at the Cubs Convention in January said that they almost couldn't recognize him. Hopefully he can translate being in better shape into more success in the batter's box. Sabermetric disciples have also cited his BABIP last year (batting average of balls in play), as evidence that some of it was just simply really bad luck. Another injury to Aramis Ramirez would also seemingly de-rail the Cubs' season. They added Chad Tracy to their bench, which would hopefully help to stop the Cubs from having to put out a really cartoonish lineup where somebody like Bobby Scales is starting at 3rd, but it's still hard to imagine the lineup having much pop without Ramirez in the heart of the order.

Still to come: Part II -- Pitching

As usual, stats are from Baseball Reference unless otherwise noted.