As Bad as Bad Can Be

The Cubs and Brewers managed to trade blowouts before the Brewers took the rubber match on Thursday.  As usual, the Cubs fielded their right-handed lineup of losers.  They only got into the game when the Brewers removed Randy Wolf.  This gave Sveum leave to insert some left-handed hitters and to take the lead behind Bryan LaHair's two-run homer.

Sveum chose to rely upon his new favorite has-been reliever, the well-traveled and incompetent Manny Corpas.  Corpas quickly blew the lead, setting the stage for the 10th inning heroics of Norichika Aoki, who hit his second home run of the day.  Aoki looks like a diminutive version of Kosuke Fukudome in batting style.  Until Thursday, his only homer was an inside-the-park job.  Go figure.

The Cubs, Astros, Padres, and Twins are the four worst teams in baseball right now.  So far the Cubs have been able to master only the Padres this year.  Which tells you a lot.  Maybe more than you need to know.  Is this team built to lose?

Friday night's game was a nip and tuck affair.  The Cubs bullpen managed to blow a 5-2 lead and lose again in the tenth inning.  Even when they score runs, the Cubs usually score these days as a result of home runs.  Home runs are nice, but if you just score when you hit home runs, it is usually an indication not of a good offense, but a flawed one.  In the case of the Cubs, it is a team that just will not take base-on-balls.

Here's Dale Sveum's quote on his management of the bullpen, particularly the decision to leave Sean Camp in the game for the tenth inning after he had blown a lead in the ninth.  I thought that Epstein and Hoyer had put their managerial candidates through a rigorous in-game strategy grilling as part of the selection process.  Guess I was wrong.

"I went with the two best guys I've had all year," Sveum said. "Once we battled back, with Russell and Camp, you're going to ride them to whatever their pitch count is. They're the two best guys we've had. All season long, they've gotten the job done. One of them had to be on the mound as long as he could go."

Duh!  I mean what is this guy thinking?  I've watched a lot of baseball games and one observation I can make is that when a relief pitcher has a tough, game-on-the-line inning like Camp did in the ninth, he never comes back to give you another quality inning.

The ninth was a stressful inning for Camp and that should have been it.  He gave up a single and a triple to the first two guys he faced then.  He did well to get out of it with the game tied, but you do not have to be a genius to realize that he would not do it again.

He didn't.  A walk, a sacrifice, and an infield hit set the stage for Willingham's solid game winner.  As soon as I saw Camp take the mound in the tenth, I knew it was over.  So did the Cub players.  On the game winning hit, nobody moved a muscle.

Just as an aside, is it just me or was there something peculiar about the defensive alignment on that play?  The Cubs brought in Mather from left field to be a fifth infielder.  From the replay, though, it looked as if the Cubs were playing two third basemen.  Stewart and Mather lined up within a body length of each other, and neither one was guarding the line.  Not that the result of the play wasn't a forgone conclusion anyway.