Game 16 Thread - Wells vs. Cueto

they better do it while they can still get 10K into the park.

im actually kinda surprised they're still putting 30K in the park for games.

Ted Williams took care of pigeons in the OF at Fenway with a shotgun. Different time.

This looks like a below-average lineup, but not a piss-pour lineup (unless Stewart and LaHair become useless or something along those lines). It's the rotation and a few bullpen arms that have the potential to move the team out of the cellar or way down into it.

I was going to tell you, "Wait O & B! Their starting pitching has been very good. If they could only hit!"

Then I looked it up.

14/16 in the NL, 4.74 Team ERA

"Well, what about fielding, then? With the Cubs Way, surely they are helping the pitchers out, right?"

Next to last in the NL with 16 errors (last today is a tie with the two NL Sans' - Diego/Francisco)

Just a big pile of shit. And, selfishly, I would like to look forward to seeing SOMETHING at Wrigley when I go other than Joe Mather, Chris Volstad, Soriass, and company. I would like to see some of the prospects and not have to go to Des Moines to do it.

Hey, I owned Bulls tickets when Jalen Rose and Eddy Curry were on the team so I know things can get better.

But this is really going to be the longest Cubs year I have experienced since 2002.

But then again, they all run together after a while.

I haven't watched this team in years and I can say it makes your life much better than getting angry over it. I still think the long term future for this team is better than under Hendry and Lou though. We got pretty good starting pitching #1-3. A star SS. A 1B hitting everything that will bring us some possibly quite useful piece. A possible star 1B in Rizzo and a possible really good OFer in Jackson. We have some pretty good catchers it seems waiting to take over for Soto once we can trade him. Vitters might not be the star people were hoping for him but he should still hit well and with Rizzo and Castro might not have to be a star.

Overall it seems we're gonna have a very good top half of the lineup top part of the rotation. Relief pitching is bad but generally seems to be something you just can't spend money on to be successful with. This year might suck if you have any hopes for competition but for me I'm enjoying seem some players do well, seeing a consistent system put in place bottom to top and having some hope that with the team being built on young players if Castro, Rizzo and Jackson all do pan out we could be a very good team for a long time.

I think you're giving up on Stewart a little early. His numbers are ugly, but I actually think he's looked decent at the plate. He's not a candidate to turn into a star or anything, but he's looked in control and like he can hit the ball. His numbers, granted, don't show it yet, as his slash line is hideous.

When I say that his BABIP has been low, nay-sayers are likely to point to his BABIP last year and call it a trend instead of bad luck. Certainly, his BABIP last year (.224) was even worse than it has been so far this year (.244). But both are way below his career average (.295).

And when we talk about BABIP, we should also take his type of contact into account. In 2011 he had a horrendous line drive rate of just 11.9%. If you hit that few line drives, you'd better jack a lot of fly balls out of the park. In 2011, he definitely didn't. 0% HR/FB (no homeruns). In 2012 Stewart has a much, much healthier line drive rate of 22%. With one HR, his HR/FB is a mere 6.7% (for comparison, Blake DeWitt's percentage in 2011 was 6.8%).

Meanwhile, his K% and BB% have been pretty consistent throughout his career.

So, it seems to me that as the season progresses if we want to draw conclusions about whether Stewart is returning to the player he once was or whether he's staying closer to what he was in 2011, we need to pay attention to the following things in addition to his slash line and his HR total: Is his line drive % closer to 10 or 20 (or over 20)? When he hits a fly ball, is it leaving the park 10-15% of the time, or is it leaving the park 0-5% of the time?

Everything else has been pretty consistent for Stewart in his career. I suspect the power is going to take a little bit longer to come back, if he is on the way to returning to his career averages, due to that wrist injury. If he comes all the way back, you might have a guy who can play decent defense at third, pop 20-25 HRs a season, and walk enough to get on base about 32% of the time or so. We might even expect him to improve on that, a bit, since he's in the prime of his career right now at age 27.

You know, I don't know if LaHair is going to be some great shakes, but with his numbers, especially compared to Baker's, at least let him play until his numbers come down. It's asinine to keep him on the bench with the kind of hitting this team has, even if he has had 5 strikeouts in 6 PAs against lefties.