Those of us who follow the Cubs a little too closely know by and large what to expect from the 2012 version: mediocrity will hold sway. Bountiful and unabated mediocrity. The question that has kept us on the edge of our seats over the past roughly five months is: “how will the new front office put its stamp on this …
RLYW’s Annual Projections Blowout
For the last several years, SG from RLYW has run simulations for various projections. This year, the average for the Cubs is 71 wins, which is good for 5th place (1 win behind the Pirates). If you go to their home page you can find the various projected standings for each projections (clidk on the image to the right). The …
Daily Facepalm 4.3.12
Was there a Cubs game yesterday? The Cubs hit roughly 37 sac flies to beat the DBacks yesterday, and drag their spring trianing winning percentage to .500. Clearly I should place a big bet on the Cubs winning 81 games this year. Kerry Wood pitched a scoreless inning, and Jay Jackson had a meh start. Jeff Samardzija threw four scoreless …
An Obstructed View Contest: Enter Now And Win Big
Over the course of the offseason we've published the various projections for players and have been calculating an average with them. One thing we like to talk about is whether or not a player is going to beat his projections, or underperform them. Over the course of the season we tend to say we thought whatever was happening at the …
Daily Facepalm 4.2.2 – Almost there edition
Was there a Cubs game yesterday? Hola amigos. It's been a long time since I rapped at ya. The Cubs pounded the LAAoLAoAoDLoBA yesterday 8-1. Jared Weaver shut the Cubs down for five innning and fell apart in the sixth. Jeff Baker and Reed Johnson treated him like a lefty, hitting a monster HR off the batters eye and not …
How good is the Cubs rotation?
Player IP Matt Garza 193 Ryan Dempster 188 Paul Maholm 165 Chris Volstad 155 Jeff Samardzija 122 The Cubs opening day rotation is set with news that Randy Wells and Travis Wood have been optioned to AAA. That left Jeff Samardzija and Chris Volstad to join Ryan Dempster, Matt Garza and Paul Maholm. Using our playing time projections and the …
Projecting the 2012 Cubs – Carlos Marmol
Marmol followed up his stellar 3 WAR 2010 season a much more heart-attacky 2011 season. Marmol's ten blown saves led all of baseball last year (tied with LAAoLAoDoQEoA's Jordan Walden). Marmol walks (and hits) a ton of batters, and continued that trend in 2011. However, his K/9 dropped to a "mere" 12 batters per nine, down from the record-breaking 15.99 …
OV 2012 Predictions: An Attempt at Unrediscreditation
What kind of a discredited blog would we be if we didn't occasionally put our collective butts on the line by making wild and highly improbable predictions about a 162 game season? We'll see which one of us is most scarily accurate and which of us is most hilariously wrong. The winner gets their OV salary doubled. The loser, of course, …
Other transformed Cubs
With Jeff Samardzija's "transformation" I thought it would be fun to find other Cubs player who have transformed this spring. Joe Mather: With a .412/.455/.745 batting line through today, he's established himself as a completely different ballplayer. We know this because he's had 55 plate appearances and that's absolutely enough to know whether or not a transformation has taken place. …
Wells and Wood optioned to minors, Clevenger over Castillo
I'd much rather have seen Randy Wells in the Chicago Cubs rotation, but rather than bullpenning him the Cubs have at least done the only other smart thing possible by optioning him to the minors. Good call on that even if it's the result of other poor decisions. I've been saying for awhile that Steve Clevenger is the better catcher …