Are the Cubs Legitimate Contenders in the NL Central? Part One

Another way of asking this question is have the moves Hendry made in the off-season improved the team and have the moves their division rivals made improved those teams more? On the latter score, though the Brewers have improved their pitching, they have done so at the expense of their rather suspect defense, and, on balance, they remain a very flawed team. Lets remember they had C.C. Sabathia for the better part of a year and they lost.

The same can be said of the Cardinals, whose major move has been adding an ageing Lance Berkman as their everyday left-fielder, in the process weakening an already weak outfield defense. Adding Theriot as their regular shortstop doesn’t help them offensively or defensively, as the Cubs and Dodgers can readily attest. Aside from locking up Joey Votto, the Reds have made incremental moves suitable to a small market team. Their performance last year was a surprise, and with Dusty Baker managing their young pitchers, one would not be amiss in thinking their achievements might turn out to be a flash in the pan.

The truth is that all these teams, the Cubs included, are in that range of mediocrity where they are likely to win between 80 and 89 games no matter what and where a little bit of luck or someone having a breakout year or acquiring a difference-maker at the trade deadline will put them over the top. All that is predicated on the fact they play in a mediocre division. If they played in the AL East, they’d all be bringing up the rear and each GM pretty much knows it. In fact, that is one of my major gripes with Jim Hendry, that he is intent on building a competitive team in a weak division, not on building a really good team that will go to the World Series and win it. I’ve made this comparison before, both in this blog and in these pages. Look at the history of the Phillies in this decade, starting from pretty much the same place and having about the same budget, and you will see what I mean.

Getting back to the main question, though, you can argue that the Cubs were and always have been legitimate contenders in the NL Central, that so long as they replaced Derrick Lee with a decent first baseman, based on their performance after they dumped Piniella, they had as good a shot as any of their serious rivals. Hendry is surely of this mindset. He thinks the Cubs lost last year because they underachieved as a team, that because Ramirez was hurt and Lee had a bad year, their offense was lacking, that the middle of the bullpen was just bad and they lacked a reliable right-handed setup man most of the season.

So Hendry announced that the Cubs needed just a little tweaking to be back in business, a first baseman, a veteran starter, and a right-handed setup man. He got all of these, and on the cheap as well if you discount future considerations. Pena will hit home runs and he’ll probably bat at least .250. He cannot be any worse than Lee was, especially on defense, and he bats left-handed. So that’s a plus even though they probably should have gone all out for Gonzalez if they were willing to mortgage the farm for the likes of Garza.

Kerry Wood fell into their lap. If he hadn’t the Cubs were unlikely to have solidified their bullpen with a decent free agent and freed up any of their prospects to potentially fill out the back end of the rotation. But Wood is a plus nonetheless if they use him properly. He’s not an everyday guy anymore, and the Cubs are fortunate to have Marshall as a left-handed alternative for eighth inning duty.

Trading for Matt Garza was the other big move. The more you look at his stats, the more you think he is by no means the pitcher the Cubs or at least Jim Hendry think he is. He will eat innings though, and notwithstanding some of the comparisons sabermetricians are making to Tom Gorzelanny (sometimes statistics can be misleading), he is an upgrade and he does stabilize the rotation, even though the Cubs seem to have paid a Cliff Lee or Zack Greinke price for a pitcher who is at best a Ryan Dempster.

So based on all this, the Cubs are bound to be better and comparing them to their principal rivals, they are likely to contend. With a couple of breaks, they have a good shot at the playoffs where they will get killed by the Phillies if they get that far along. This is the best case scenario, and, as a Cubs fan, I hope it happens and anyway it will give us all something to watch this summer.

In Part II, I will look at the 2011 Cubs in an alternative and ultimately less optimistic fashion, taking the view that although the Cubs off-season moves make some sense if you think becoming a contender in a weak division makes a difference, they make less sense if you think building a genuinely good team, a championship team, should be the only goal. I have to warn you, though, I will still conclude they could win the division with a little luck.

The Gorzelanny Trade

This is a good deal for the Cubs no matter how the players they get in return work out. Gorzelanny has been around the league long enough to prove himself and the simple fact is that he hasn't measured up as anything but an adequate fifth starter or swingman. He just walks too many batters and pitches behind in the count, and as a result, he doesn't pitch deep enough into the game.

The Cubs now have a surfeit of starters and potential starters, so with Gorzelanny eligible for arbitration, it makes sense to dump him even though the savings are not great.

It is too early to judge their return. The pitcher, Morris, they got in return is still in A ball. There is supposed to be another pitcher involved, but I haven't seen anything about him so far. The outfielder, Burgess, has put up some good numbers in A ball and briefly at AA. He is a left-handed hitter and seems to have some pop, so he may have a future down the road.

The Garza Trade

There are mixed reviews of the Garza trade and I have to admit it is pretty hard to assess a trade of prospects for what amounts to a single veteran. Short term it improves the Cubs. Long term is problematic and impossible to assess now for obvious reasons, though at first glance it looks as if the Cubs overpaid. Garza is certainly a pretty good pitcher who projects to be the #2 starter behind Zambrano. He's no Cliff Lee, though, even though he is still young enough to see his best years ahead of him.

The Cubs gave up a lot, however, in Lee and Archer. I'm not so much bothered by the others. Fuld is a good defensive outfielder, but he is the sort of player who never gets much of a chance in the Cubs scheme of things, a little like Andres Torres who ended up playing CF for the Giants in the World Series. But realistically, he, just as Torres, would have spent his career playing in AAA. Chirinos has potential, but he is blocked by both Soto and Castillo, so you had to suppose he was trade-bait after his breakout minor league season last year. The same goes for Guyer who projects as a fourth outfielder despite his AA numbers.

But Lee looked like the real deal even though he is at least a year and possibly two years away, and Archer also has looked like a potentially dominant pitcher. The Cubs evidently do not value any of these players so highly as Tampa does, or the Cubs don't recognize their real situation as well as Tampa. The Rays have lost quite of few of their star players, they still have a solid starting staff, and they know they are not going to be able to challenge the Red Sox or the Yankees this year no matter what they do. If any one of the prospects the Cubs have traded delivers a year or two down the road when the Rays are in a position to contend again - and it is likely one or more will - they have got the better of the deal.

The Cubs, on the other hand, have made a deal that makes sense from only two points-of-view, one of which, the first, makes sense only to people as seriously deluded as the Cubs brass who think Marlon Byrd is a marque player and that fans are actually going to hop on a plane to Arizona to see the highest paid reserve outfielder tune up for another season.

First off, this is a deal you make when you think you can win now, and I don't mean contend now against deeply flawed and mediocre teams in a weak division. I mean actually win, as in getting beyond the first round of the playoffs and at least winning the NL championship or having a shot at it. This is the deal that puts you over the top. Now I think the Cubs will contend for the Central Division title and could easily win it and I thought that even before this trade, but I don't think anybody seriously thinks this is a good team, not a really good team anyway.

Of course, the second viewpoint, and probably the real operating factor here, is that it makes sense for a GM in survival mode, and we all know how Hendry feels about survival. You go through an off-season when you essentially offer contracts to mopes like Hill and Baker, sign a first basemen who batted under .200, and pick up Kerry Wood at a bargain rate almost as an act of God while your division rivals and the arch-rival White Sox go crazy with changes. You get to act like you knew all along that all the team needed was a first basemen, a veteran reliever, and a veteran starter.

OK, mission accomplished. The Cubs are a lock on winning a few more games than they lose. If they win 85 in their division, they have a good shot, and the trade moves them into that range. Worst case scenario, you just miss, but you're safe for another year. So much for the big plans of nurturing your own talent and building that winning tradition from within.

Huh?

Here's another strange proposal from Ricketts and the Cubs brass, courtesy of Fred Mitchell and David Kaplan of the Chicago Tribune.

We hear the Cubs are quietly working to amend their proposal to renovate Wrigley Field. In simple terms, the team would match its previous tax payments to the city — $16 million in 2009 — while keeping any tax revenue above the base for park renovations and perhaps construction of the long-planned triangle building. Once the team has what it plans built, the Cubs argue the additional business will increase taxes collected.

Now the last time I checked the real world taxes were something the government, any government, assessed against income or receipts or the value of property and it was not something that is generally negotiated just because it is no longer your property, seeing as it is a claim asserted by the government against your property or assets. As I understand this proposal, Ricketts is suggesting that he will simply appropriate anything he owes the city in excess of $16 million and use it for whatever he wants.

An interesting concept. Following this reasoning, I could simply tell the Assessor's office that I really need to build a new deck for my condo, so I'll just skip that second installment on my property taxes this year and call things even.