Cubs 'closing in' on deal with Taiwanese RHP Jen-Ho Tseng MLB.com's Jesse Sanchez says the Cubs are close to a deal with the Taiwanese pitcher, who is ranked 29th in mlb.com's list and 23rd on BA's. For a while he projected to be the #1 prospect in this year's class, but he scuffled a bit this year. GW points out …
Mr. Zambrano Goes to Wrigley (Maybe?)
ESPN free-lance reporter, and all-around good guy, Sahadev Sharma tweeted out one of the more interesting Cubs tweets I have seen in quite awhile: Big Z just pulled into Wrigley players parking lot. No joke. I'm assuming he's just visiting… or looking for a job. #zambranoforcloser — Sahadev Sharma (@sahadevsharma) April 17, 2013 HOW AWESOME WOULD IT BE TO HAVE …
An early look at the 2013 rotation
Assuming health, the Cubs rotation appears to be set with Matt Garza, Jeff Samardzija, Travis Wood, Scott Baker and Scott Feldman. I was curious what we could reasonably expect from this group next year and decided to use the CAIRO projections to calculate percentile forecasts. Before that, there's been some recent talk about how this rotation is better than last …
AL Scout on A-Rod: I can't believe anyone would be interested
AL scout on arod: "I can't believe anyone would be interested." #114MIL plus #30MIL in milestone HR bonuses — Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) October 19, 2012 Every single year we hear about this. Player makes lots of money. Same player isn't worth what he's paid. Not even close. People say this player can't be traded. Every. Single. Year. Yet every single …
Revisiting the Cubs offseason transactions
Since the Cubs changed management this past offseason I thought it might be fun to look back at the transactions and see how they've turned out so far. Keep in mind these are a final analysis. There's still much time left for some of these deals to look different than they currently do. I considered breaking this into parts, but …
Player Behavior
I don't know how many times I've said I don't care about the players in any other way than their performance. Over the years I have stressed this so many times I've lost count. One of the reasons why I wrote each year about how good Carlos Zambrano has been in his career was to point out that all that …
Series Preview: Chicago Cubs (29-49) @ Atlanta Braves (41-37)
The red hot Chicago Cubs travel to Atlanta fresh off sweeping the super-talented Houston Astros. The Braves lost 2 of 3 to the Nationals over the weekend. Teams at a glance Stat Cubs Braves wOBA .297 .317 wRC+ 80 (16) 98 (5) UZR 2.5 (6) 35.7 (1) BsR 1.2 (7) 6.0 (2) SP ERA 4.32 (15) 4.22 (12) SP FIP …
Handling Starlin Castro
The other day in San Francisco Starlin Castro lost track of the number of outs and failed to complete the second half of what may or may not have been a double play. As you'd expect, Dale Sveum was quite unhappy about it. "It's something that's obviously unacceptable at any time," Sveum said. "Whether we could have turned the double …
Today in cognitive dissonance
Brad at Cubs Stats and Tom Loxas at Cubs Den both put up interesting posts today discussing criticism (and merit thereof) of the Theo Epstein/Jed Hoyer era. They're both great reads, and were prompted by Notorious Douchebag Paul Sullivan's appearance on Chicago Tribune Live the other day. They made many good points about looking at the long term plan but …
The 45%: When Theo Epstein Is Wrong
During Theo Epstein's introductory press conference, as well as the many rounds he made to various radio and tv shows, there is one line that I remember more than any other. if you do a great job, you're right 55 percent of the time. Of the many hours Theo spent talking with people about the Cubs on that day, I …