Twelve

By now, pretty much everyone agrees the recent skid is due to the perennial Cubs problem, not scoring runs.  Which, of course, is due to their whole approach at the plate which is characterized, in the main, by terminal impatience and dumbness.

Not to belabor the obvious, but this is really a dumb team and has been for years.  Lets take Garza, who in addition to not being able to throw the ball to first base, has now become afflicted with ideas.  Apparently, Garza thought that he could fool the Pirates by sneaking in a couple of change-ups, his fourth best pitch, when he was throwing upwards of 95 mph all day.  All of them got deposited in the seats, resulting in seven unanswered runs.

But not to worry, Garza is now aware of this and thinks, on balance, these pitches were not a good idea.  The thing that is bothersome, however, is how he was even allowed to throw these pitches in the first place.  I had always supposed that the catcher was in control of the game, kind of like in Bull Durham when Crash Davis comes out and tells Nuke that he is doing the thinking, not Nuke.

The point here is not to just make a joke, but to note that the Cubs decline is coincidental to the spate of injuries to all the Cubs legitimate catchers.  Not that Soto, Castillo, and Clevinger are in Yadier Molina's league, but the catcher is so important in controlling the game, and it just seems the Cubs are sadly deficient in this respect.  For example, the Marmol situation.  Sure, he doesn't like to throw his fastball, but somebody has to make him do it, and that duty, I'm afraid, belongs to the catcher.

The other instance of terminal dumbness has to do with the lineup.  I had some hopes when Epstein and Hoyer took over that we would see some change of philosophy here, but unfortunately we got Dale Sveum at the helm.  Sveum seems sadly out of step with what one supposed was to be the prevailing approach of the front office.

I don't want to beat this to death, but somebody is supposed to be looking at numbers.  Here's an interesting set of numbers.  The Cubs have one of the worst batting averages against left-handed pitching in all of baseball.  They invariably start a right-handed hitting lineup against lefties.  Their record this year is 1-9.  Draw your own conclusions.

The thing is that when he explains all this, Sveum sounds like a replay of Quade who sounded like a replay of Lou Piniella.  I don't expect this team to contend, but you can at least pretend you are able to think your way out of a paper bag.  Right-handed hitters are supposed to have an advantage against left-handed pitching.  Cubs right-handed hitters, however, clearly do not.  Time to stop pretending that a superficial generalization has anything to do with real world performance and maybe dig a little deeper.