A Very Revealing Loss

The loss to the Phillies on Thursday afternoon says a lot about the character of the 2010 Cubs and even more about the deficiencies of their manager. First, as to the team, they continue to battle and to play close games. However, they also continue to fail to score in situations where you just cannot fail to score. Witness the ninth inning when Castro and Ramirez struck out with runners at the corners and Soto popped up on the first pitch. Something happens to these guys when the chips are down. Castro is a young player and maybe Contreras outsmarted him, but Ramirez swung at a pitch that was a good two feet outside.

As to the manager, I just keep wondering what is going on in his head. In the seventh inning, he was just weirdly out-managed, using Nady to pinch hit when he had to use Soto anyway to come in and catch the next inning. Of course, the Cubs are short a left-handed bat, namely Tracy, who for some reason is playing for Iowa while Baker continues to warm the bench in the major leagues.

They say that managers do not win games, but that they frequently lose them. Lou loses a lot of games. I'm not sure what the problem is, but Piniella has five starters who routinely give him six or seven innings, meaning he has at most maybe ten innings to fill with the remaining seven pitchers over the course of any five game cycle. Marmol and Marshall can be counted on to fill five of these, leaving five innings to fill with the remaining pitchers. Now granted that Zambrano is ill-suited to relief and that Guzman and Caridad have been hurt, but why is it this simple manipulation cannot be accomplished by the Cubs brain trust and that they consistently have the wrong guys in in the wrong innings unless they have a lead after seven and can simply go to Marshall and Marmol?

In this loss, Piniella had evidently decided that Marmol needed a day off (fine) and that Marshall would be his closer (not so fine). In the eighth inning, Stevens got the first out, bringing up a succession of left-handed or switch-hitters, all the best Phillies hitters in fact. You would suppose that this would be the most challenging inning and you would want, if you were going to go with the percentages, to bring in your best left-handed reliever. But no, Grabow, who has an absolute aversion to throwing strikes under most circumstances and who almost succeeded in blowing the game the previous night, is summoned. And that, fans, is the ball game. Marshall finishes the afternoon warming up while the winning run comes home.