Jon Lester Paying $150+ million for a pitcher with 1600 career innings isn’t the safest of investments, but it sure is nice that the Cubs finally signed someone. After years of missing out on seemingly all of their big-name targets, I can’t have been the only person that was worried that the team simply didn’t have the TV revenue necessary to hang …
A Tale of Two Trade Deadlines
[Billy Beane and Kevin Towers] operate, as ballplayers do, without a fear of failure. This year Beane found too many phone calls that came his way that sounded like this: "I have interest in one of your players and this is what I'm going to give you for him." "That's not deal-making," Beane said. It's name-your-own price. The art of …
On Theo
The following comment by Smokestack Lightning was such a good one that it deserves to be highlighted on the front page. Quoting dylanj: Friedman is my first choice simply because I think what he is doing is harder than what Theo did. Go write him a very very large check. I have mad respect for Friedman too but to disregard …
The hunt for a new GM
Shortly after Jim Hendry was fired I wrote about why every big name GM, current or not, is a candidate for the Cubs job. If they are, so is everybody else. The reason I wrote that is that the GM who wins a World Series with the Cubs is going to be the most popular GM in history. He can …
Ricketts interested in Yankees GM Brian Cashman
Dave Van Dyck has an interesting article up this morning. In fact, according to reliable sources, the Cubs‘ chairman privately was feeling out the postseason availability of Yankees general manager Brian Cashman sometime around the All-Star break, which is when Hendry originally was “fired.” As I mentioned the other day, any current GM is going to have interest in taking the Cubs job. …
GM Candidates
It would be easy, and even lazy to put together a post with names most of you have never heard about and talk about why they may be a candidate to replace Jim Hendry. I seem to remember MLBTR even having a list and Baseball America used to put together similar lists. I’m sure many others have. So there’d be …
Even Phil Rogers is sometimes right
Phil Rogers wonders how much longer Jim Hendry and Crane Kenney will be employed by the Cubs in his most recent article. In baseball, you usually can see the end coming, whether it’s for a player, manager or executive. It was a relief for almost everyone, not a surprise, when Lou Piniella opted to resign last August. His team was …