From Bad to Worse

I didn't think the Cubs could blow last night's game, but they came up with a way to do it in the bottom of the 13th after a Valbuena home run put them up by two runs in the top of the inning.  The Reds rally hinged on two keys plays.  The first was Sappelt not making a difficult play on a blooper earlier in the inning that resulted in a double.  The second was the decision to allow Bowden to pitch to Jay Bruce with first base open.

Which brings one to the question of whether Sveum is watching the same game everyone else is watching.  In the post-game interview, Sveum kind of blamed the implosion on bad luck and the Reds superior talent.  Kind of like, hey, guys, we don't expect to beat a better team without getting lucky, so just step off, OK.

First Sveum said the Phillips bloop was a fluke hit.  OK, maybe so, but Sappelt's approach was very tentative.  You either play that ball on the bounce and try to hold Phillips to a single or you go all out to try to make the catch.  Sappelt did neither, making a late dive for the ball that failed.  Second, Sveum said he thought about intentionally walking Bruce, but that would put the winning run on base and Bruce was not swinging the bat well that night.

Wait a minute, Bruce hit a home run to lead off the seventh against arguably your best starting pitcher and each lefty Bowden had faced had hit the ball really hard.  Since the Cubs had already used their only left-handed relief pitcher and no one was warming up, this looks to me to be a no-brain decision.

Another thing Sveum said in the post-mortem that bothered me is that with a little luck, the Cubs might have won the game earlier when Castro lined out to right field with the bases loaded and two out in the eleventh.  Sveum thought that Castro had a great at-bat, battling to work the count to 3-2 and fouling off good pitches before he finally hit a screamer to right field that Bruce caught.  I saw a guy who got himself in a hole swinging at bad pitches and taking hittable pitches, then took a big swing at a ball that was low and away at least a foot out of the strike zone.  It's 3-2, so ball four potentially wins the game here.  So it goes.

Actually Sveum got himself in trouble with some critical remarks he made over the weekend.  He pretty much said he was fed up with the team's sloppy play and seemed to single out supposed rising stars Castro and Rizzo as being far from untouchable.  I didn't see anything especially wrong with his remarks, other than that they are unlikely to result in real action or change.

There is a pretty good article at Cubs Den that focuses on the Cubs defensive woes and attempts to analyze Starlin Castro in particular.  The writer actually gives a pretty good account of a couple of innings in Milwaukee that saves me from another diatribe about their performance.

Reading between the lines, you have to conclude that most baseball insiders pretty much know that Castro is not a major league shortstop and probably never will become one.  I'd like to pitch in here with the opinion that Castro's offensive process is very much over-hyped as well.

Castro is now riding a 14 game hitting streak.  Not that it makes much difference as the Cubs have lost most of those games.  Castro is hitting around .300, actually a little below that mark after last night's game.  His OBP, however, is .309.  That is because he never walks.  Until last weekend, he had not taken a single base-on-balls.  I think he walked twice in Saturday's game.  The league average for OBP, which includes everybody, usually hovers around .330, so, for a #2 hitter, this is pretty bad, downright awful.

If I were an opposing team, the one guy I would want to have up there with the game on the line is Castro.  Well, maybe a tie with Soriano.  These guys swing at everything all the time.

All this brings one to the conclusion that, as a baseball player, Starlin Castro is very much over-rated and very much under-productive.  Castro has a lot of talent.  However, to succeed in baseball, to realize one's full potential, you need more than just talent.  You need skill and finesse as well, things that can be developed in a player, but things the Cubs seem rarely to be able to cultivate within their organization.

In evaluating the new Cubs regime, you need to consider how much they get out of the talent they have.  How much they can develop.  So far, I don't see much from the Epsteins and Hoyers and Sveums beyond talk.