2009 Cubs: Autopsy Report

Its been quite a while since I've written about the Cubs, but what has there been to write about really? My last post was in mid-August, when the season was on the precipice of falling apart, and after that point the Cubs season seemed to slip into a sort of catatonia, which the monumental tailspin that was looking possible as the Milton Bradley fiasco heated up not coming to pass, but with the team also never seriously threatening to get back into the race. Bradley--who, with two full years left on his deal, is perhaps now destined to go down as one of the worst signings in Chicago sports history--was eventually suspended for his behavior and his vague accusations of racism coming from Cubs fans. A few other players were shut down with injuries that they likely could've played through were the team still playing meaningful baseball. Even still, the openings left by these players were filled out for the remainder of the year mostly by "quadruple-A" type players who have been lingering around in Iowa for a while. As such, it was hard to even drum up any excitement for next year watching the team in September, as there wasn't really any sort of crop of prospects chomping at the bit for big-league at bats.

The team eventually finished the year 83-78, which actually gives them their first streak of three years with a winning record since the early '70s, more an indictment of how inept the team was for much of its history than anything else. A just over .500 record and missing the playoffs is plainly unacceptable, given the money that was spent on building the roster, and given that in many ways the Cubs' front office completely hedged their bets on winning either last year or this year. Now, the Cubs have a lot of players locked into expensive, long-term deals who probably aren't going to get any better or, in some cases, may not even play in a Cub uniform again. The team's new ownership isn't expected to be able to add much to the already massive payroll, as it tries to deal with paying off some of the debt from the purchase, and looks at options to renovate the stadium. In order to keep the team competitive in the coming years, its going to take some creative moves with limited resources, and I'm not sure that Jim Hendry--who as of right now is still going to be the team's GM next year--is up to that task.

No player better exemplifies the failed expectations of the team as a whole moreso than Milton Bradley, the team's biggest free agent signing of the off-season. Bradley, oft-injured throughout his career managed to get on the field for 124 games, but hit for an OPS barely above the league average, and manged just 40 RBIs despite batting mostly in the middle of the order (he moved to the #2 spot late in the year, and seemed to fare a bit better there). Other free agents from last year that were discussed as other options for a left-handed power bat were Adam Dunn (38 HRs, 105 RBIs with the Nationals) and Raul Ibanez (34 HRs, 93 RBIs with the Phillies). Both of them are also true left-handed hitters, as opposed to Bradley, a switch-hitter who is actually a worse hitter from the left side, despite being brought in to be an RBI producer against right-handed pitching. Beyond his bad production, his the effect of his constant negative attitude and oft-times laziness on the field can't be discounted. Normally I stray away from stuff like "clubhouse presence", which is unquantifiable, and which I'm not really in a position to know anything about except secondhand from columnists and reporters who sometimes don't seem to know what they're talking about either in spite of their greater access. With Bradley, though, it was stark enough and obvious enough to seem to be a significant distraction for the team. Bradley still has two years left on his deal, and now face a situation in which they seemingly have to trade him, even though its difficult to see how. The Giants expressed some tepid interest immediately after the season, but nothing concrete has come from it up to this point. Any trade made would most certainly involve the Cubs eating the bulk of the salary.

There were many, many, other problems besides Bradley, however. Alfonso Soriano, another owner of a huge contract, had his worst year in a Cubs uniform, hitting a meager .241 with 20 HRs and missing a big chunk of the back end of the year with an injury. He'll be 34 next year, an age at which hitters often start to see a marked decline in their hitting. Was this year a fluke, or has that already started with Soriano? After winning NL Rookie of the Year last year, Geovany Soto hit a putrid .218 and ended up splitting playing time with journeyman Koyie Hill at the end of the year. Kosuke Fukudome had a marginally better year than 2008 at the plate, but still only hit .259 with 11 HRs. Finally, there's Aaron Miles, who made a couple of million dollars this year to fill in for Mark DeRosa after he was traded. He played below replacement level and, pathetically, hit 5 RBIs all year. A couple of days ago, the Cubs signed Rudy Jaramillo, the former Ranger's hitting coach, who has a ton of respect around the league. Its certainly plausible that he could correct some flaws that have crept into the batting stances of some or all of the above players, but really the lineup as a whole has to be dramatically better and, as I mentioned earlier, financial constraints are probably going to limit how different the lineup can really look next year. One name that's popped up as a possible target for the Cubs is Mike Cameron, who at 36 still has decent pop in his bat and still plays a good defensive center field. Without a real possibility of signing an absolute top-tier free agent, Cameron would probably be a good addition.

The best component of the team throughout the year was its starting pitching. Even though four of its five main starters (Ryan Dempster, Ted Lilly, Carlos Zambrano, and Rich Harden) spent part of the year banged up, and the fifth (Randy Wells) started the year in AAA, the starting pitching was remarkably consistent. Even Rich Harden, who had a ton of issues with high pitch counts in his starts, managed a 9-9 record and a slightly above-average ERA. Cubs starters averaged about 5.97 innings per start, with a 3.71 ERA. In other words, they basically averaged a quality start. The bullpen wasn't horrible either, but had a higher ERA of 4.11 and its back end of Carlos Marmol and Kevin Gregg both went through significant periods where they struggled mightily closing out games. Marmol clearly regressed from where he was in 2008, still proving hard to hit, but giving up 24 more walks in 13 fewer innings. Gregg was passable for much of the year and managed to amass 23 saves, but collapsed in the 2nd half of the year and finished with a 4.72 ERA. One thing that can be said about the bullpen is that--in a year in which there weren't many true prospects ready to come up in the Cubs's system--it did provide a couple of possible bright spots. 25 year olds Esmailin Caridid and Justin Berg both got to pitch some down the stretch and put up good numbers, albeit in very small sample sizes. You can find an infinite number of relievers who started out their careers with a good dozen or so innings and turned out to be nothing, but I'm straining to come up with something positive to write here.

Basically, it seems to me that if the Cubs are going to be any good in 2010, a couple of players have to have a year that comes completely out of nowhere. They kind of got that guy this year in Randy Wells. They may have to somehow find a couple more guys like that next year who excel beyond what they were projected to be, because there isn't much to be done by way of free agency, and the team as constructed seems to be slipping into a malaise of mediocrity. Uh... go Cubs go?

Perfect Game

Again, not a Cubs post, but I feel like I should acknowledge Mark Buehrle's perfect game which happened yesterday against the Tampa Bay Rays. It was the 18th perfect game in the long history of Major League Baseball, and the first since Randy Johnson's in 2004. It was the second no-hitter of his career, the first being in 2007 against the Rangers. That game itself was also a perfect game. As I recall, the only batter to reach was Sammy Sosa on a walk, and he later got picked off of 1st. As always, Buehrle worked incredibly fast. He threw 116 pitches, and the Sox scored 5 runs in their halves of innings, and yet the game lasted all of 2 hours and 3 minutes.

This perfect game in particular is an impressive feat and sort of a strange event for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Buehrle is a guy who pitches to contact, and the White Sox defense has been pretty bad this year. Yesterday he struck out 6, and so 21 outs were left up to the defense. The play that will be remembered for a long time is the play that saved the no hitter in the 9th: Dwayne Wise scaling the outfield wall in left-center and just barely hanging on to the ball to rob Gabe Kapler of a home run. Wise had just entered the game as a defensive replacement in center, subbing in for Carlos Quentin and moving Scott Podsednik over to left. Podsednik, who isn't as fast as he used to be due to injury and who often takes bad routes to balls, most certainly doesn't make the catch. Its very much possible that Brain Anderson wouldn't have either, who was recently sent down when Quentin was activated from the DL. A lot of people, myself included, were pretty confused when Wise was kept on the roster over Anderson. Anderson has had a pretty tumultuous MLB career with the Sox, having not turned in to the top-level prospect he was once projected as, but he certainly is a better player than Dwane Wise, who has spent most of his career in the minors and is currently hitting under the Mendoza line. At least for a day though, the White Sox looked like geniuses, as a career minor league, below replacement-level player saved the 18th perfect game in Major League history. Sometimes baseball is weird like that.

Debating Nothing

I'll make another full Cubs post at some point in the near future, but for now I feel the need to rant about something which comes up every baseball season and is starting to crop up again now that we're through the All-Star break and down the backstretch. There's a whole lot of conventional wisdom held by sports fans, and a lot of sports commentators as well, that's just completely odd. For example, turn on any sports radio station at pretty much any time, and regardless of what sport is being talked about, at some point you'll probably hear someone saying, "Look at their home record! You can't win in this league if you can't win on your own park/field/court!" Oft times later in the same conversation you'll hear "Look at their road record! Sure they can win at home, but if they can't win on the road, how good are they really?" Look, a team only ever plays home games or road games and they count exactly the same in the standings. Ideally you want to win every game. If your team is either like 8-16 at home or 8-16 on the road, chances are your team is bad, not because of some mythical importance in winning one of those subcategories of games, but because if your record is that bad in the one case then it has to be 16-8 in the other just to get you back to .500. That's just how math works. Obviously winning on the road is harder because of the nation of playing on the road, but winning is always going to make your team's situation somewhat better and losing is always going to make it somewhat worse. That's the nature of playing a sport with a league schedule.

But the debate that I'm talking about is a different one, and one that's exclusive to baseball, though it bothers me for exactly the same reason. Every once in a while, when a team is trailing in both their division and in the wild card by a roughly equal number of games, you'll start hearing people give their opinions on whether they should "focus-on" winning the division or the wild-card. Obviously, its a legitimate debate to ask whether or not the team is more likely to win either the division or the wild-card. They may have to jump over more teams one way or the other, one might feel that the current leader in either the team's division or its league's wild card race is overachieving, etc., etc. But framing the discussion that way isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about when people are lamenting their team's situation in a pennant race and say either, "I tell you what, I think these boys have to keep their eyes on the big prize! They can't just settle for the wild card, they have to keep focusing on winning the division!" or "I tell you what, I think this division is probably out of reach, I think they just have to do everything they can to focus in on getting in by way of the wild card." This isn't just a phenomenon of talk radio, or a random group of people standing around the proverbial water cooler, but you'll actually hear it asked of players in locker room interviews whether their team is "focused" on winning either the division or the wild-card.

Here's my question: how the hell does a baseball team focus on winning only one or the other?? If this was people watching competitive Starcraft or something, and they were advocating that a guy focus only on taking out the base of what they considered to be the weaker player, that would make perfect sense to me. In baseball, I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever. In the MLB you have a set schedule. You can't call up the team leading your division and say "Guess what? We're gonna play you 10 times in a row so we can instantly gain 10 games on you in the standings and talk over the division!" Nor does a team have separate win and loss records for purposes of the division and wild card standings that are somehow calculated differently. You can't "win" a game for purposes of competing in the division and somehow "lose" the same game for purposes of the wild card. Like the home-road debate, people are completely overcomplicating the simple truth, that winning will always put your team in a situation better than before the game, and losing will always put them in a worse situation. Whether you want to try and win the division or the wild card, the way you get there is exactly the same: you win more than the other teams. I dunno, its just something I've always found incredibly bizarre.

Tim McCarver \ World Series Weirdness

Is there any conceivable reason for Tim McCarver being allowed to announce baseball, let alone have announced the World Series for... I don't even know how long? It's just brutal listening to him. I'm not a huge fan of Joe Buck either, but Buck is at least tolerable. I don't really like his announcing style, but he's certainly a very playable play-by-play man. The problem is when McCarver tries to interject something playing off of what Buck had just said and it comes out not making any sense whatsoever.

The thing is, McCarver is one of serveral announcers covering major televised sports whose continued employment is simply confounding to me. Before he finally retired, (a couple of years after he said he was going to retire initially) Fox would trot out Pat Summerall, who for all I knew was asleep during half of the games. There would be times going into or coming out of a commercial break in which you would expect the play-by-play guy to give a summary of the current situtation in the game, where Summerall would just sort of meekly say "The Bears.... lead......" and sort of trail off while you just sat watching a shot of the field in complete silence before the producer finally figured out, "Oh shit, he's not gonna say anything else." Hawk Harrelson does this a lot announcing White Sox games, but he does it because he's pissed that the White Sox are losing. Summerall just seemed completely disinterested in anything going on around him. Aliens could attack the stadium and Sumerall would just sort of say, "Well... we've got some... aliens."

Dick Stockton, who just announced the Cubs/Dodgers NLDS (making it that much more painful for me) sounds equally disinterested in what he's doing except he talks more. So instead of 3-hours of mostly silence you sort of get 3 hours of a long stream of monotone like HAL-9000 or something. The thing uniquely bad about Dick Stockton is that he can't seem to be bothered to learn how to pronounce anyone's names. In 2007 in the Cubs\Diamondbacks NLDS he consistently pronounced Mike Quade's name "Kwade", rather than "Kwah-dee." This year, every time he tried to pronounce Kosuke Fukudome it was a struggle. I've seen clips of old NBA Finals games with Dick Stockton announcing, and while I still don't really like him as an announcer in any era, back in the day he wasn't nearly as monotonus and sleepy sounding as he is now. How do these old crumugeons keep getting work in the biggest of sporting events? Is it just loyalty for the seniormost guys? TV executives are always thought of as being obsessed with ratings to an extraordinary degree. I've never once heard anyone say, either online or face-to-face, "You know who I love is that Tim McCarver!"

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Speaking of the World Series, Game 5 was just suspended in a 2-2 tie in a brutal cold rain in Philadelphia. After it was delayed in the bottom of the 6th, with the Rays having tied the game in the top half of the inning, Chris Meyers interviewed the Chief of Operations (I think that was his title) and he said that the tying run being scored had nothing to do wtih the decision. Yeah, I'm gonna call bullshit on that. He described conditions as having "deteriorated," but they were pretty brutal when the game was still 2-1. There was noticable water pooling on the corners of the infield. Had the game been delayed at 2-1 and not restarted, the game would've ended since 5+ innings had been played, and the Phillies would've won the World Series. From what I've heard, ratings have already been bad for these playoffs. Baseball isn't going to end the season on a rain delay. I wouldn't be surprised if the rules for calling World Series games were changed in the offseason. Its not like they have other games to schedule around. I guess there's TV to consider, but FOX is going to televise the conclusion of Game 5 tomorrow despite the fact that they were supposed to have new episodes of stuff on. At any rate, with Game 3 having ended at about 12:45 Central because of a rain delay and now this, this has been a pretty messed up World Series.