The Cubs Chronicle

Before the season began, The Cub Reporter held a Cubs Blog Army roundtable Q&A, in which The Cubs Chronicle participated. The following is a review of my part in that roundtable. This is part 2 of the review, which focuses on the offense. See part 1. (Note: The idea for this column comes from the Cubs Pundit, who reviewed his spring training comments a while ago.)

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Before the season began, The Cub Reporter held a Cubs Blog Army roundtable Q&A, in which The Cubs Chronicle participated. The following is a review of my part in that roundtable. This is part 1 of the review, which focuses on pitching. See Part II. (Note: The idea for this column comes from the Cubs Pundit, who reviewed his spring training comments a while ago.)

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I’m sure most of you have seen this, but David Geiser has been guest blogging at The Cub Reporter. He’s got three posts up now – here, here, and here – on what the Cubs need to do in the offseason. Well worth reading.

Thank you. I have fun watching you every year. This year, I had a little more fun.

Are you kidding me? Could this day have gone any better? Astros lose their second in a row to the Brewers, while the Cubs sweep a doubleheader, clinching the division, allowing Kerry Wood to rest until Game 1 of the playoffs. I’ve had a smile on my face most of the day.

Bring on Atlanta.

In Thursday’s Chicago Tribune, Paul Sullivan names five things the Cubs must do in order to win the National League Central:

1. Get rid of Antonio Alfonseca. Rumors have it that the Marlins are interested in him. You know how rumors go. Unfortunately, Sullivan doesn’t name who the Cubs should replace him with. I vote for Francis Beltran. But I don’t expect Alfonseca to be as bad as he has been. And given that, the difference between him and a young Beltran over 70 games isn’t much difference at all (actually 40 games, because if the Cubs want Beltran in September, they’ll be able to call him up). Additionally, unloading Alfonseca would likely mean still paying the remaining portion of his contract (about $1.8M) and still not getting much in return.

2. Replace Estes with Cruz. Hey! Does Sullivan read The Clark & Addison Chronicle? It would seem so. The question has been asked before, along with whether he reads other Cubs blogs.

3. Get a third baseman. The yearly refrain.

4. Stick with Tom Goodwin in center, unless someone really good is available. In the process of saying this, Sullivan also writes that “Mark Kotsay is serviceable but is not an offensive threat.” But Goodwin is? In 2001 and 2002, Kotsay posted adjusted OPS’s 8% and 10% above the league average, respectively. He’s battled injuries this year, so his production is down. But his disappointing 668 OPS this year is still better than Goodwin’s 632. And Goodwin’s career high in OPS, which he posted five years ago, was 7% below the league average. Now, I think there is a legitimate justification for giving Goodwin a significant amount of the playing time in center through the rest of the season: that being 1) the Cubs not being able to get enough other help to become good enough to win the division and 2) David Kelton not being able to play center. But there’s no way sticking with Goodwin will aid in winning the division.

5. Smash the boom box. Uh-oh. Apparently Sammy Sosa is back to blasting the music on the infamous boom box, leading to all sorts of team chemistry problems. He’s also apparently changed his tune – he’s playing Eminem these days. What happened to the salsa? Sullivan concludes:

If Baker ever did what former manager Don Baylor once threatened and smashed the boom box, the clubhouse would have a better environment and the team concept would be enhanced. But he probably won’t, and the boom box is likely to remain as a metaphor for another lost season. Lots of noise, but no substance.

I don’t know if it has any effect on what goes on between the lines, but you know, if I was on the team, I’d be annoyed with Sosa’s boom box. Yes, I’m a prude. But if I was on the team, and was something more than a rookie, I also wouldn’t have any problems asking Sosa to turn it down. And somehow I think guys like Kerry Wood and Eric Karros aren’t afraid of asking him to do that, either, if they have a problem with it. Which leads me to believe that the Cubs beat reporters enjoy playing up this story to an extent that is disproportionate to how much the players actually care about it. In any case, has anyone ever thought to buy Sosa some headphones?

After losing to Atlanta 7-2 Wednesday night, the Cubs enter the All-Star Break 47-47, 3 games behind the NL Central leading Astros and 2 games behind 2nd place St. Louis. The Cubs’ Pythagorean won-loss record is also 47-47, with the team having scored 417 runs (12th most in the NL) and allowed 419 runs (6th fewest). They are 6-13 in their last 19 games.

Unfortunately, the All-Star Break interrupts Cubs baseball for 4 full days. The Cubs don’t pick up play again until Friday, against the Marlins. The Marlins series starts a really tough stretch after the Break for the Cubs. Their next six series are against Florida (3 games), Atlanta (2), Philadelphia (2), Houston (3), San Francisco (3), and Arizona (3), all winning teams. The Cubs then get San Diego on the road for three before playing 6 more consecutive series against teams that currently have winning records. Things don’t start looking up again schedule wise until September.

One of the reasons the Cubs got off to a good start this season was a relatively easy schedule the first two months of the season. They’ve already started paying for that this month, and will continue to do so through August. If the past two weeks, at least, is any indication, the Cubs as currently constructed do not have the offense to stay in the race through this tough schedule.

In an unrelated note, Bobby Hill has been hitting well at Iowa lately, as Michael Caldwell at The Cubby Hole has been noting. Hill’s numbers are up to .282/.360/.408. It doesn’t appear, though, that he’ll be the stolen base threat in the majors that it once looked like he would be. Hill is just 7-for-12 in stolen bases this season.

Finally, the AP has a nice write-up on the Cubs’ oldest fan, 113-year-old Mary Crombie. I like to think Ms. Crombie has The Clark & Addison Chronicle on automatic refresh.

UPDATE (11:25pm): Brian Carstens has more on the Cubs record in various splits. In essence, they’re a .500 team anyway you look at it. Scott Lange gives us reasons for hoping. And the Yarbage Cub Review (blogging from Austria no less!) has a 4-part mid-season review.

UPDATE II (7/15/2003 1:45pm): Dennis Goodman on the best and worst games of the year so far.

Led by Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, the Cubs pitching staff is still on pace to break the all-time record for strikeouts in a season. The 2001 Cubs set the record with 1344. While this year’s staff has fallen off the pace they were setting in mid-May, they’re still on pace to record 1406 strikeouts after today’s game, easily beating their own record.

Only Shawn Estes, Antonio Alfonseca, and Mark Guthrie have strikeout rates below 7 per 9 innings among those having pitched at least 10 innings for the Cubs (which excludes Dave Veres and Phil Norton).

In his recap of Friday’s loss to the White Sox, the Tribune’s Paul Sullivan writes in his opening sentence: “The Cubs haven’t been a clutch-hitting team all year . . . .”

I immediately thought, is that true?, for Sullivan offers no evidence in support of his assertion.

In fact, it is.

As a team this year, the Cubs have hit .260/.329/.411 overall, for a 740 OPS. In “close and late” situations, all those numbers drop: .225/.306/.355, for a 661 OPS (which is, incidentally, almost exactly what Cub opponents are hitting in such situations this year). The Cubs are 10th in the NL in team OPS overall. But they are 15th out of 16 teams in OPS in clutch situations, and just barely in front of Pittsburgh for last in the league.

It might be easy to chalk up the discrepancy to the horrid pinch hitting (which often occurs in close and late situations, one would assume) offered up by Lenny Harris, Troy O’Leary, and Tom Goodwin this year. But that only tells part of the story. Of the regulars, only Alex Gonzalez has done significantly better in clutch situations (707 OPS overall versus an 882 OPS in the clutch, thanks to his extra inning home-run heroics) and only Eric Karros has been about the same (833 OPS overall v. 864 OPS in clutch). Every other regular has been worse. Hee Seop Choi has the biggest drop-off, going from 886 overall to 197.

No Cub player has near enough at-bats in clutch situations for their numbers in those situations to mean much in assessing them individually (and I will definitely take issue with anyone who would try to draw a conclusion regarding Choi’s “clutch hitting ability” based on 24 plate appearances). But what these numbers do tell us is that as a team, the Cubs have had an OPS drop-off in clutch situations bigger than what we would expect despite the good relief pitching faced in those situations. As a result, we can expect to see those numbers in the future to fall more in line (or rather climb more in line) with their overall hitting, hopefully providing the team with more late-inning runs.

From the Chicago Tribune recap of today’s game:

[T]he bullpen, usually a dependable and efficient unit, had an awful day. Five relievers—left-handers Mike Remlinger and Mark Guthrie and right-handers Antonio Alfonseca, Joe Borowski and loser Todd Wellemeyer—gave up 11 runs and 11 hits in four innings.

After last year’s terrible performance by the bullpen, it’s really nice that today’s performance is the exception rather than the rule.

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt my mood that the Diamondbacks have turned into a good team again, sweeping the Astros.

I had a lot of fun watching the Cubs hit six home runs on the way to defeating the Brewers 9-1 tonight (yes, it’s my wedding anniversary, but the official Clark & Addison wife chose this week to come down with pneumonia, so instead of going out, we watched the Cubs). In fact, I have fun everytime the Cubs act like they’re a human playing the computer in RBI Baseball.

I didn’t think I’d ever see someone hit a home run like Glenallen Hill hit when he hit one that landed on the rooftop of one of the apartment buildings across Waveland. But Sammy Sosa’s second home run tonight, off of Luis Vizcaino, was just as amazing. In fact, it may have gone further than Hill’s. Fox Sports Net estimated the distance at 520 feet. The ball was hit just to right of the building Hill hit and looked to me like if it had been hit to the left a bit would have also landed on that building. Instead, it went down a side street. If Sosa can get on a hot streak, perhaps Dennis Goodman’s wish for a team hot streak will come to pass.

Milwaukee’s starting pitcher was Ruben Quevedo, whom the Cubs knocked out in the 1st inning. I was disappointed when the Cubs traded Quevedo to the Brewers in July 2001 for the half-season services of David Weathers. At the time, the Cubs weren’t as stocked in pitching prospects as they now are. And I thought Quevedo had shown that he could be a good major league starter, if only Don Baylor wouldn’t lose track of his pitch counts. He hasn’t done anything since arriving in Milwaukee, however, that would justify my disappointment with that trade. And I have to agree with Steve Stone, who said tonight that Quevedo looked like he wasn’t completely healthy. His fastball never got higher than 86mph. He’s still 24, though, so he has some time to turn his career around.

UPDATE (11:00pm): Scott Lange has posted a picture of the last known position in the solar system of the ball hit by Sosa.

UPDATE II (6/25/03 10:15pm): The Waveland Chronicles has a first-hand account of Sosa’s homer. (Link via Let’s Play Two.)

UPDATE III (6/26/2003 11:05am): According to the Daily Herald, “WGN radio’s David Kaplan said he walked off Sammy Sosa’s tape-measure home run Tuesday night and reported the ball carried 538 feet. Sosa homered over the left-field wall onto Kenmore Avenue.”

On Sunday, I wrote that Wade Miller’s strikeout rate had gone down this year, and that likely had something to do with his struggles thus far. Miller apparently decided to make up that reduced rate in one game. His line against the Cubs Friday afternoon: 9IP, 2H, 1ER, 1BB, 14K. He did it in 102 pitches and with the wind blowing slightly out. And he really was that good.

If you didn’t see the game, and just saw the box score, you might chalk this up to the Cubs poor hitting. And while that’s part of the problem, Miller was just outstanding Friday. Sure, the usual suspects – Corey Patterson (who did hit a home run, however) and Lenny Harris – helped him out by regularly swinging at first pitches without hitting the ball hard (Alex Gonzalez would be included in that list, too, but he couldn’t hit any of Miller’s pitches, even to foul them off). But even if the Cubs didn’t swing at the first pitch, Miller was just throwing strike after strike (76 of them in his 102 pitches) and in the spots he wanted to. It was a bit similar to Jason Schmidt’s performance against the Cubs April 30. But better. (Even the home run allowed to Patterson wasn’t a bad pitch, as it was outside the strike zone low.) It might be the best pitched game the Cubs face all year. I at least hope it is.

Cubs still in first after long road trip (AP, 5/25/2003)

The Cubs have completed their longest road trip of the season. One postponed game made it 13 games. The Cubs went 8-5 during the trip. And they did it without Sammy Sosa and with Lenny Harris apparently taking over the starting third base job. The trip included a game winning home run by Tom Goodwin, a 4 game winning streak, and a 3 game losing streak. Not to mention that the Cubs finished the trip taking 2 of 3 from the Houston Astros, and the two wins came from Shawn Estes and Carlos Zambrano while the loss came from Mark Prior. The Cubs now start a 12 game home stand – against the Pirates, Astros, Devil Rays, and Yankees – with a 2.5 game lead over the Astros and Cardinals.

A few other notes while wondering how much longer it will be before those of us who have questioned Mark Grudzielanek’s role as starting second baseman and leadoff hitter will have to admit we were wrong:

Recently on a Cubs discussion list I belong to, someone argued that Alex Gonzalez should not be moved from the #2 spot in the lineup because that’s where he hit in Toronto and he had success there. I responded that, yeah, that line was repeated over and over to us in spring training by Dusty Baker and the media, but it’s not actually true. It’s not true because Gonzalez hasn’t hit well in any spot in the lineup. And, in any case, last year was actually Gonzalez’s best full season in terms of OPS+ (94) and he spent most of the year hitting 6th or 7th in the lineup (see splits).

The discussion then turned to whether we could find out what the median OPS is for batters hitting in the #2 spot. Thanks to ESPN.com’s amazing stat service, we can. Here’s a page that ranks the teams based on OPS out of their #2 hitters this year. It’s not pretty. Cubs #2 hitters are hitting .230/.285/.357 this year. Their .642 OPS is second to last in the big leagues, behind only Detroit’s amazingly bad .571. The median OPS is approximately .768. Can someone explain to me again how it is that the Cubs are currently 5th in the NL in runs scored?

Gonzalez didn’t hit in the #2 spot last night, but Dusty Baker is quoted in today’s Daily Herald as saying he’ll be back there tonight.

UPDATE (12:15pm): Jayson Stark has a bunch of information on Gonzalez’s proclivity to hit extra-inning home runs in his column today.

The Cubs lost to the Pirates tonight 5-2. It was their third straight loss and their first losing streak over 2 games this year. The Cubs had a chance in the top of the 9th when they loaded the bases with no one out when both Troy O’Leary and Hee Seop Choi reached on errors by Pirates second baseman Abraham Nunez and Mark Bellhorn drew a walk. Unfortunately, Tom Goodwin then struck out on a 3-2 pitch and Eric Karros ended the game by grounding into a double play. (See play-by-play.)

Something unusual happened in the Pirates half of the third inning. Kenny Lofton stood at third with one out when Kerry Wood got Aramis Ramirez to pop up to very shallow right field (the AP says the ball only traveled 100 feet from home plate). Mark Grudzielanek easily caught the ball. The AP describes what happened next: “Lofton came down the line casually, retreated to third to tag up, then broke quickly to the plate and scored almost before Grudzielanek could react.”

The AP got the play wrong. Lofton tagged up and came off the bag slightly, hesitating. Only when he saw Grudzielanek fail to react did he take off. Thus, it is inaccurate to say, as the AP does, that Grudzielanek almost didn’t have a chance to react. In fact, Grudzielanek’s failure to react is what gave Lofton the opportunity to take off for home. And, as a result, we are left with a line in the play-by-play that reads: “Ramirez popped out to second, Lofton scored.”

Grudzielanek was not charged with an error on the play. I think he should have been charged with an error, but I also think, after looking at the official rules, the official scorer got the call right. Rule 10.13 reads, in part: “An error shall be charged for each misplay (fumble, muff or wild throw) which prolongs the time at bat of a batter or which prolongs the life of a runner, or which permits a runner to advance one or more bases.” “Misplay” is thus defined as a “fumble, muff or wild throw,” but the rules later state that the fielder does not have to touch the ball in order for it to be a “misplay.” Consequently, Grudzielanek’s “misplay” could qualify. But Note 3 to Rule 10.13 states that “[m]ental mistakes or misjudgments are not to be scored as errors unless specifically covered in the rules.” And, after a cursory glance at the rules, I can’t find anything that would qualify Grudzielanek’s “mental mistake” as “specifically covered in the rules.”

So no error. And if Grudzielanek’s misplay isn’t an error, the rules need to be changed.

UPDATE (5/22/2003 12:40am): The Tribune’s Paul Sullivan, unlike the AP, gets the Grudzielanek play right: “Lofton made a fake toward the plate after . . . Grudzielanek caught the ball, then took off when he figured Grudzielanek was napping. Hee Seop Choi cut off the late throw as Lofton scored easily to make it 2-0.”

Somewhat amazingly, Grudzielanek actually blames Choi. He’s quoted by the Trib as saying: “I saw him kind of cheating and moving, moving, moving, so I threw a pretty strong throw in and as I was throwing it he took off. He maybe thought I was going to lob it in or something. I don’t know if Choi was paying attention or not or what happened there, but I thought we had him out. It’s just something that happened. I don’t know what else to say about it.” Grudzielanek is wrong. After he hesitated, there’s no way his throw was going to beat Lofton. Neither Steve Stone, nor Chip Caray, nor Dusty Baker after the game pointed any sort of finger at Choi at all, instead insisting that Grudzielanek wouldn’t let something like that happen again.

UPDATE II (5/22/2003 12:25pm): The Daily Herald gets the play right as well: “Lofton tagged and bluffed down the line. Grudzielanek hesitated throwing, and Lofton kept coming to score. First baseman Hee Seop Choi cut the ball off, but it looked like Lofton would have scored with ease anyway.”

UPDATE III (5/22/2003 12:30pm): Both Scott Lange and Dennis Goodman wonder what in the world Goodwin was doing pinch-hitting for Damian Miller with the bases loaded in the 9th. Meanwhile, the rest of us wonder why in the world Goodwin is ever allowed to hold a bat.