Learning to Lose

I was actually out at the game last night.  It was a tense and close game up until the 7th inning when the Cubs made three errors, two on one play, to blow the game.

Rather a shame. Samardzija pitched pretty well except he needs to understand that he doesn't have to try to strike out everyone and run up the pitch count in the process.  Deep down, I knew that sooner or later the Brewers would scratch out a run and that there was almost no chance the Cubs would even threaten to do so.

This happened in the 7th when Samardzija misplayed a bunt by Nyger Morgan and then threw the ball away.  After Jose Segura singled him in the game was as good as lost, but the Cubs managed to put the seal on things by botching up a stolen base with two egregious errors. First there was a wild throw by Castillo that Castro played off to the side.  Then there was a really dumb attempt by Segura to advance that should have resulted in an out but instead led to a misplay by Valbuena to let a pretty good Barney throw go by.  Naturally, Samardzija was watching the play instead of backing up third, allowing an insurance run to score.

When you are actually out at the park, you see a lot more of just how badly this team is playing, both in the field and at the plate.  This season there have mercifully fewer defensive breakdowns such as last night's, but that doesn't mean they have played well at a fundamental level.  Now granted there are a lot of young kids here and the team is rebuilding and all that, but really you would suppose that by the time you make it to the big leagues after playing organized baseball for nearly a decade you might at least have some notion of where you are supposed to throw the ball and who should be positioned as the cutoff man and a whole host of other little things.

Just as an aside, Soriano actually appeared to reintroduce the infamous hop on one flyball he caught last night, and, of course, to my recollection, never threw the ball accurately in the direction of the appropriate base or cutoff man once.

What's disappointing here is that there is virtually no discernible progress through the season.  This is especially the case with the hitting and the strikeouts, which are just plain inexcusable for a major league team.  Last week, the Cubs struck out 38 times in the Brewers series in Milwaukee.  In this week's series, the number is 41.  That's better than a ten plus average per game.

Not to be entirely negative, the Cubs did manage to pull off a nice come-from-behind windblown win in the bottom of the ninth today, stringing together several lengthy at-bats.  Soriano's flyball over a drawn-in outfield was a rare example of successful situational hitting for this team.

Incidentally, the photo above shows Starlin Castro getting ready to strike out with a man at first in the 9th inning last night on a pitch that was probably at leat a foot outside the strike zone.  To his credit, though, he had a really nice battling at-bat in today's ninth inning that ultimately resulted in a single that drove in a run and kept the rally going.

September Comes Early

September call-ups have arrived early for the Cubs, not that they had much choice.  They are 5-17 since the trade deadline.  We've already noted that the Cubs collapse since that fated day really has not had that much to do with the overhaul of the pitching rotation.  That overhaul was dramatic, but, by and large, the youngsters they have brought up have not pitched all that badly.  Rusin and Raley, in particular, have shown some promise, and Germano has done a creditable job.  Volstad is Volstad, but then no one would have expected any better.

This team still won't work the count or play baseball.  So they just do not score runs consistently.  I haven't seen a lot to be confident about so far among the new Cubs who seem determined to hit a home run or strike out no matter the circumstances.  Brett Jackson might become a good hitter if he could control the strikeouts, which, right now, make Tyler Colvin look like Pete Rose.  Welington Castillo, to my mind, looks like the only one of these youngsters who is ready to play at a major league level now.  Vitters might make an interesting platoon in left field with someone like Bryan LaHair, but he is not a good third baseman and looks to be the farthest away from the majors.

The Cubs probably did the right thing in signing Castro long term, especially as they seem to have gotten a favorable deal and they can still trade him.  I'm not sure what it is about young players who come up now, but they seem to have one or two physical skills, but no real baseball sense.  They are just unfinished and it takes a lot of coaching, quality coaching, to get them where they need to be for a team to contend in the long run.  So far I haven't seen real evidence of this coaching taking effect since the regime change.  This has to be the most disappointing aspect of the new era of the Cubs under Epstein and Hoyer and Sveum.  This team is still worse than the sum total of its individual components.

Just watched Starlin botch up two double-plays in the same inning, giving the Rockies the lead.  So it goes.

Speaking of the Epstein legacy, it looks like the Dodgers are out to spend as much money as they can and to reconstruct the infamous 2011 Red Sox, acquiring most of the Epstein "mistakes" in the process.  I put mistakes in quotes mainly because of Adrian Gonzalez, whom I still regard as a premier first baseman and pure hitter.  Gonzalez is probably worth the haul of over-rated minor league talent the Red Sox are likely to acquire in the mega-deal.  Of course, the rest of the baggage the Dodgers are taking on kind of means you are really paying Gonzalez upwards of $50 or $60MM a year.

Just as an aside, we finally have found out the secret of Melky Cabrera's remarkable improvement, as well as Bartolo Colon's comeback season.  Not exactly edifying, and the case of Cabrera, some monumental evidence of terminal stupidity as well.

Back to the Cubs.  Just so we all know, Dale Sveum is frustrated as well.  Good news.  However, right now the Cubs are following the Astros/Pirates/Royals model and you kind of wonder how long they can get away with it, considering they have the most expensive tickets in baseball in terms of the likelihood of seeing a win, and really, I think, the second most expensive tickets in baseball straight up.

Cubs Winless since Trade Deadline

The Cubs lost their sixth straight last night to the lowly Padres whom they swept at Wrigley Field a while back to stop another woeful losing streak.  I guess we can expect this sort of performance from here on out, though, to be honest, none of the losses would seem to stem from the trades they made which largely shed veteran pitching.

Two of the losses were to lefties, so you might argue that the departure of the the right-handed platoon players Johnson and Baker could have affected the outcome, but, really, the Cubs always lose to lefties anyway and the presence of either of these guys in the lineup does not seem to matter much one way or the other.

As far as the pitching goes, the starting rotation is a mess, but actually Samardzija probably pitched the worst game of the six.  Volstad pitched unexpectedly well, as did Germano.  Coleman pitched badly, but no one expected him to do well.  Wood pitched two decent games without any support.  With Garza out probably for the season, Cubs fans cannot expect much in the way of pitching from here on out.  Perhaps the rookie Raley will provide some hope tonight.

Which makes things especially depressing because the real reason they have lost six straight is they don't score runs.  They have scored twelve runs in this stretch, an average of two per game, and six of those were Sunday in a tough walk-off loss to the Dodgers.

In this respect also, things are not likely to get much better.  Jackson and Vitters were promoted to the team, though only Jackson seems poised to play every day.  Jackson had a nice debut game Sunday, but struck out four times yesterday.  Vitters hasn't shown much so far and it seems likely that Sveum will platoon him with one of his favorites, Luis Valbuena, who, last time I checked, was hovering around or below the Mendoza line.

Another reason for lack of hope seems to be the odd decisions Sveum makes with his lineup.  It took him the better part of three months to settle on a steady set of platoons and a consistent batting order and bullpen rotation.  So the Cubs had, at long last, a pretty good July.  This whole process was wrecked by the trades and call-ups, so it is going to take him a while to get his head screwed back on.

Last night we had the strikeout machine Jackson batting leadoff and Castro in the five hole, both, in my opinion, not the best spots for their respective talents.  If you are stuck with players who are impatient and do not get on base and, in general, have very little or no idea of situational hitting, the lineup is very, very important to maximize the slim chances of scoring runs.  Again, in my opinion, though stats will back me up on this, Sveum is not very good at this and this is likely to lead to a lot more losses than even this flawed team merits.

Speaking of disconnects between upper management and management at the field level, I read where Bryan LaHair, who was finally showing signs of snapping out of a two month slump, will find it hard to get any playing time after Jackson's promotion.  Am I missing something here?  I mean, granted that LaHair has slumped since his promising start, but he is 29 years old.  He belongs in left field, at least on a platoon basis.  Right now he or any other outfielder is blocked by two players who do not figure to be part of a winner.

DeJesus is 32 years old and strictly a journeyman platoon player with a .261 average.  It is hard to envisage this guy as anything other than a placeholder and even harder to see him as a major contributor to a winning team.  Soriano has been showcased throughout the season in a desperate attempt to get someone to take him off their hands even if they continue to pay his salary.  Every day Soriano shows why, despite his decent stats, he has no idea how to play baseball and is a menace in the field even when he catches the ball.  But these players will play every day in preference to a player who might have the ability to contribute as a left-handed power hitter for several years to come and costs you virtually nothing.  Shouldn't you at least try to find out if he can be straightened out, or are we dealing with an advanced case of Quade-itis?

Further Notes on Ryan Dempster

I don't always agree with Steve Rosenbloom.  As a matter of fact, I almost never agree with the feisty Tribune pundit.  This time, though, I have to say he has written a pretty accurate column.

One additional reason he might have cited for Dempster's rather gentlemanly treatment by Epstein and Hoyer is this.  I think they felt they had to let the fellow listen in on the conversations with LA management to finally convince him there was no interest in him by the Dodgers, there was no deal there, and there never was any.  Just as a further note, one wonders where on Earth Dempster's agent was during this whole fiasco and whether the guy ought not to let him handle matters of this sort in the future.

One game does not a season make, but I note that old Demp got lit up big time in Texas Thursday night, 8 runs, 9 hits, 2 homers in 4.2 innings.  He wasn't throwing strikes either, only 59 of 103 pitches.  Left trailing the Angels 8-7, but the Rangers came back to win a wild one 15-9.  Welcome to Arlington and the American League.

Dempster Finally Traded

My guess is that Dempster is going to be pretty sorry he didn't take the Braves deal and that the Cubs were unable to work out a deal with the Dodgers who were unwilling to offer anything of value in exchange.  The main reason, I think, is that he is likely to get lit up big time in that awful little stadium where the Rangers play baseball.  Lets face it, the wind howls out to left center there and the average temperature is like 100 and it is the American League.  So good luck, guy, you are going to need it.

I've got nothing personal against Dempster, but I do think he overplayed his hand.  He's had a good season thus far, but, on the whole, he is a middle of the order rotation pitcher on a good or even half-decent team.  Given the fan reaction, justified or not, the Cubs more or less had to trade him for what they could get and Dempster had to approve any reasonable deal.

The initial reaction to all the deadline trades the Cubs have made is somewhat underwhelming, but, lets face it, they didn't have much to sell, and that includes Garza who, should the Cubs be determined to deal in the off-season, is going to be worth much more then if he rescues an up and down year.

I've become more and more convinced there are three kinds of trades that are made.  One type is the exchange of players of similar perceived talent and experience.  You can think of these as trading seasons or years.  A good example from the last off-season was the Cashner/Rizzo trade.  In these trades, both sides are often better off.  At bottom, they are a good test of front office judgment of talent and assessment of need.

Then there are the uneven trades where years or seasons are traded for accomplished talents.  Teams nowadays, probably because of salaries and contracts at stake seem to overvalue their veteran assets as well as their prospects.  Most of the deadline trades involve dealing veterans for players who are likely to equal or approach the value of the veteran exchanged in one or more years.  Obviously, the fewer years you give up, the better off you are and the less risk you take.

So far Epstein and co., at least until the trade deadline, have concentrated on obtaining equivalent or short term risks in exchange for the players they have dealt.  I'm thinking here of the Marshall/Wood and Colvin/Stewart deals.  I'm rather convinced they deviated from this plan out of necessity at the deadline, simply because they couldn't do any better, especially with the rules and the personalities involved.  Here I have in mind the aborted Dempster/Delgado trade which would have been something of a coup.

Just to follow up on this line of thought, Maholm, the best player they traded, is still a soft-tossing lefty who is a back of the rotation starter.  Johnson is a useful but aging role player.  Soto has been a flop since his rookie season.  Dempster is a rental and getting a little long in the tooth.

In return, the Cubs got a potentially very good pitcher in Vizcaino who is admittedly a project because he is hurt.  They got two other pitchers who throw hard.  They have major league potential but do not project out as impact players.

Actually, the players they got from Texas look like more legitimate higher ceiling prospects.  Christian Villanueva is a third baseman with some pop and Kyle Hendricks is a pitcher who has pretty good numbers in A ball.  Unfortunately, all these guys are a little further off than one would like them to be and anything can happen.

The return for Dempster, though, is better than they would have got had they let him finish the season and they did not have to risk making a qualifying offer he might have taken.

One disappointment, however, was the failure to move Soriano.  Maybe they can do it as a waiver deal, though, as his contract is likely to scare any potential claims.

A Belated Tribute to Ron Santo

The Cubs held another belated Ron Santo Day Friday after his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame last Sunday.  I wasn't at the stadium, but from the replays, it looked like standard issue tributes that featured Ron's family and some of his former teammates.  Which is OK I guess.

I always liked Santo as a player, although he was not the superstar that his teammates and now fellow Hall-of-Famers Banks, Williams, and Jenkins were.  His stats compare favorably and even more than favorably with the best third basemen of that era.

Santo was apparently not the funny, nutty uncle persona he affected in the radio booth during his playing days, and this somehow seriously affected his election chances during the period immediately after his retirement.  That and the fact he took a long hiatus from the game, something like fifteen years until he returned as the radio color man.

I was living overseas for many of Santo's best seasons, from 1966 to 1971, so I wasn't able to closely follow the Cubs then, when, arguably, they had their best teams.  Still, I never have been able to figure out why, with a roster full of really great players like the aforementioned Hall-of-Famers as well as other stars like Ken Holtzman and Randy Hundley and Don Kessinger, the Cubs were never able to win a Division title.  That might have had something to do with the difficulty of electing him to the Hall as well.

Santo fought a courageous battle with diabetes and its complications throughout his life and never seems to have lost his courage or his sense of humor.  Most fans now know Ron from his days as the somewhat demented press box companion to Pat Hughes.  This act was no doubt amusing, but, in a sad way, its current exploitation shortchanges Santo's achievements and personality and genuine knowledge and appreciation of the game.

His posthumous election adds yet another note of sadness to his life and career.  Too bad he was unable to enjoy these days.  Rightly or wrongly, I think it meant more to Ron to be recognized for his abilities as a player than as a person or a personality.

Reaction to Latest Trades

The Cubs traded reserve outfielder Reed Johnson and starting pitcher Paul Maholm to Atlanta for two minor league pitchers, one of whom is on the DL recovering from elbow surgery.  I wasn't surprised to see Johnson go.  He is a solid enough platoon player who can help a contender.  He seems to play well only for the Cubs these days, but, although he was an important cog in the Cubs outfield platoons and a good pinch hitter, his value to a team like the Cubs was pretty limited.  Maholm was a little more of a surprise, as he has settled in to become, arguably, their most consistent pitcher of late and he is a pretty cheap middle of the rotation kind of guy.

In return the Cubs got a AAA reliever in Jaye Chapman who throws pretty hard but walks a lot of people and a guy who was one of the Braves top pitching prospects until he had Tommy John surgery this spring.  This is Arodys Vizcaino, who is the key to the deal.  He is said to be rehabbing well and is expected to be on schedule to be healthy by spring training next year.

All in all, a risky business, but the Cubs brass must be pretty high on him to pull the trigger for this sort of deal.

The Cubs also dealt their everyday catcher Geovanny Soto to Texas for a fringe minor league relief pitcher, Jacob Brigham.  I'd have expected to get more in return for Soto, but he is having another bad year, so this just looks like a salary dump.  Actually, all three players will take $9 or $10 million off the books for next year and maybe a third of that for the remainder of the season.  Perhaps the front office is considering plowing this cash back into a subsidy to anyone who will take Soriano or Dempster.  Soriano reportedly nixed a deal to the Giants.

More later.

I'm sure this is not the last deal that is in the works.