Pitchers and catchers report for the Cubs in three days. Based on tweets from Carrie Muskat, it looks like quite a few players are already in Mesa:
Need a shot of spring? Lester, Wood, Motte, Arrieta doing drills. #Cubs pic.twitter.com/HjNf6DIqta
— Carrie Muskat (@CarrieMuskat) February 16, 2015
Bryant, Szczur, Lopez, Russell prep for BP. #Cubs pic.twitter.com/XWQMpcKx8l — Carrie Muskat (@CarrieMuskat) February 16, 2015
Cubs baseball is coming.
And for the first time in forever we’re ACTUALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO IT!
We’re expecting Baez and Soler to be on the team from the start. We expect Bryant within a couple of weeks after the season begins. The Cubs have assembled a pitching staff that is not designed to be traded by the July trade deadline.
THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR!
This is why we have put up with the years of trading anyone who is worth anything not named Rizzo or Castro. This is why we have sat through season after season of having guys like Ryan Kalish, Ryan Sweeney, Donnie Murphy, and Cody Ransom get way more at-bats than any sane person should be able to view safely. This is why we didn’t kill ourselves every time someone like Edwin Jackson, Justin Germano, or Chris Volstad got start after start. (Fun fact: Chris Volstad started the third most games on the team in 2012. Holy shit! How did we not gouge our eyes out?)
We finally have a team that isn’t a complete embarrassment at the major league level! We don’t have only MiLB.TV and box scores from Tennessee and Iowa to cheer us up! Andy at Desipio (yes, he’s blogging more regularly now and it is fantastic to have his voice back in the Cubs Blogosphere) ranked the NL Central players by position and THE CUBS WEREN’T LAST IN MOST OF THE CATEGORIES! In fact, there was some significant room for realistic improvement in some of his Cubs player rankings. It’s all happening!
So why the hell am I so nervous?
Because the planets have all seemed to line up in the Cubs favor this off-season and that is, uh, not something that happens to the Cubs.
Joe Maddon is somehow the Cubs manager. I still don’t even think that is real and I fully expect to wake up and it’s still October 2014 while the Cardinals are still alive in the playoffs and Patrick Duffy is in my shower and Suzanne Pleshette is in my bed. OK, this got weird and extremely dated, but you catch my point. If I had told you during the playoffs of last season that Joe Maddon would be managing the Cubs in 2015, I would have won a lot of damn money in bar bets.
Jon Lester decided that the Cubs’ dumptruck full of money was more attractive than the Red Sox’s dumptruck full of money. Again, I still can’t believe this happened. Granted, the Cubs’ dumptruck was a decent amount larger than Boston’s but that in and of itself is very un-Cubs-like. Aside from the Soriano deal, the Cubs haven’t really been the kind to go balls to the wall to get the #1 Free Agent target of an off-season.
What is this sorcery?
The Cardinals haven’t really gotten significantly better since their main move was to replace Oscar Tavares, who died tragically in the offseason, with Jason Heyward. That’s a great move since all they really gave up was the corpse of Shelby Miller, but the rest of their roster will basically be the same as last year, only a year older (and that could matter since Molina, Holliday, Peralta, Wainwright, and Lackey are all on the wrong side of 30).
The Pirates lost Russell Martin, and as much as I didn’t want the Cubs to pay his free agency price, he was quite valuable to the Pirates and they have replaced him with Francisco Cervelli. Ew. AJ Burnett is somehow still pitching and will replace Edinson Volquez, so… yay? I guess? The real question marks will be where Korean infielder, Jung-ho Kang, will fit and whether Gregory Polanco will rebound from a rough rookie year. So maybe the Pirates are a little better or a little worse, depending on how things break for them. But they probably won’t be a ton better.
The Reds are meh and if Joey Votto doesn’t rebound and/or Johnny Cueto is traded, they will be pretty shitty. The Brewers are basically some halfway decent pitchers, whatever Ryan Braun has left, and Jonathan Lucroy and his torn hamstring.
So the NL Central has basically treaded water this off-season.
This all just seems to line up so perfectly for the Cubs to storm in and make some noise and that is what worries the hell out of me. Vegas is setting the over/under of Cubs wins at 82.5 and most of my Twitter feed, from the looks of it, is falling over itself to lay heavy money on the over.
People are dreaming about Jake Arrieta and the multiple no-hitters he can throw if Len Kasper would just keep his yap shut about it while he does play-by-play. People are expecting the Jason Hammel that started last season with the Cubs and not the Jason Hammel that was pretty much every part of his career. And we all talk about regression and Kyle Hendricks, but let’s face it, we’re not really prepared emotionally for him to, you know, actually regress.
The variables on this team are gigantic between the best and worst case scenarios and I’ve been a Cubs fan for too long to just brush those fears aside. I have to expect the other shoe to drop. On my head.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is much better than the alternative and I’m still awfully excited that we’ll start having some of these questions answered, but I’m afraid the expectations have gotten out of hand at this point. Cubs Twitter, while entertainingly stupid when the Cubs are expected to be losing, is going to lose its shit completely when they go into a losing streak this year and I don’t know if I have the energy.
What happens when Lester blows out his elbow? When Arrieta starts walking everybody in the ballpark again? When the only wind blowing at Wrigley is provided by the whiffing of Cubs batters at record paces?
Sports talk radio in such scenarios will be so toxic all of The Score’s listening area will have to be cleansed by Hazmat teams and Dave Kaplan will probably straight up murder Javy Baez when he gets another golden sombrero. God help us all if Kris Bryant struggles like Baez did last year. BCB’s comment section will turn into the internet version of a George R.R. Martin wedding scene.
Cubs world is gearing up for armageddon, and it’s all going to start soon!
See you at Opening Day in 6 weeks!
What could possibly go wrong?