Jon Heyman is providing some suggestions about how the Red Sox can be fixed. One of them is acquiring a starting pitcher and he names Ryan Dempster. One obvious suggestion could be Ryan Dempster of the Cubs. He has an 0.95 ERA, the lowest ever for a pitcher who has yet to win a game through five starts. He is …
Should managers be allowed to use the sacrifice bunt?
Before you read any further, please take the poll below. I'm curious what the responses are on this site. Tangotiger set up a poll yesterday asking whether people would rather live with the status quo of the sac bunt or do away with it all together. I was quite surprised to see that 65% had voted zero tolerance (stop it …
Cubs Put Marmol on DL, Call Up Casey Coleman
I'm not sure who had it first and I don't care enough to go back and look, but both Carrie Muskat and Paul Sullivan have reported that Carlos Marmol has been placed on the disabled list after injuring his right hamstring last night, with Casey Coleman being called up to replace him on the roster. Muskat is also reporting that …
10 Best Games By A Cubs Player So Far
We're only 31 games into the season, but I was curious for some unkown reason who had the best game of any player on the team. Win Probability Added (WPA) is the perfect stat for this. Below are the top 10 WPA's of the season for the Cubs. 10. Matt Garza, April 29th @ Phillies: The Cubs won 5-1 behind …
Bryan LaHair's Fantastic Start
Some Cubs fans entered the season with relatively high expectations for Bryan LaHair. Others weren't optimistic at all. I was somewhere in between. I was fairly certain LaHair's numbers were so damn good at AAA that it indicated he should probably be about a league average ballplayer at the MLB level. To this point we've all been wrong. MLB's best …
Where We Stand Now: Starting pitching
I already took a look at the team batting numbers, and now we'll look at the bright spot in the Cubs roster: starting pitching. Here's how the seven pitchers who have started games thus far have performed. Player GS IP K/9 BB/9 HR/9 GB% BABIP ERA FIP xFIP Ryan Dempster 4 28.1 9.21 2.86 0.32 41.2% .191 0.95 2.32 2.94 …
Blake DeWitt DFA’d
The Cubs have DFA'd Blake DeWitt and re-caled Travis Wood who will start today against the Dodgers. I don't believe Berselius published a projection for Wood, but Oliver did project him to be worth 2.5 WAR at the time the Cubs traded Sean Marshall for him. Wood has had mixed results so far at Iowa. He has struckout over 9 …
One foot on the Samardzija bandwagon
Jeff Samardzija transformed. We heard about it all spring. We were to believe the transformation began in the second half of last season in which he threw about 40 or so innings. We had to put all our faith in those numbers that were as a reliever and a scout or two, which was a little silly to me as …
Where We Stand Now 5.1.12 – Batters
Now that a month has passed, let's take a look back at what's gone wrong (and a few things that have gone right). First, a look at the batters. Here are the regulars' current slash lines, wOBA, BABIP, and preseason projected wOBAs. I'm only doing Johnson and Mather because they've picked up the most PAs of the bench guys, and …
When will we see Brett Jackson and Anthony Rizzo?
Everyone here has heard of a Super Two player. Here is the necessary criteria for becoming a super two: at least 2, but less than 3 years of service time with at least 86 days of service in the immediately preceding season. In other words, someone who has 42 days of service one year and 44 days the following year …