TCR Friday Notes
- Bruce Miles and the beat writers are back in business with the start of spring training. Miles says Geovany Soto has come to camp in great shape, Z is sporting a 'stache and will not pitch for Venezuela in the WBC. He also says that Z is holding off on laser eye surgery due to an infection and some odd eye geometry on his behalf. There appears to be some video at the Trib of Z and the Cubs in Arizona on the sidebar, but I can't get it to load.
- Fangraphs takes a look at the best outfield arms and comes to the shocking revelation that Alfonso Soriano is good and Juan Pierre is not.
- An interview with the Phils former GM, Pat Gillick, gives some insight on the Cubs corner outfielder pursuit this winter.
--On whether the Phillies may have overpaid for Ibanez (three years, $31.5 million), given the one-year, $6 million deal that Bobby Abreu just signed with the Angels: "The Cubs were after [Ibanez] pretty thick. Lou [Piniella] and he had a good relationship, so I think Lou was plugging pretty hard for him. I don't think [the Phillies could've waited]. The Cubs were searching for left-hand hitting. My opinion is I would prefer Ibanez to Milton Bradley, just from an injury standpoint. Milton Bradley to me is an American League player, a DH/part-time outfielder. He's not a day-in, day-out player in the National League."
- Former top Cubs prospect Billy Petrick has signed on with the Windy City Thunderbolts of the Frontier League to try and get his career back on track.
- The hits keep coming for the Brewers. Bill Hall is out 4-6 weeks with a partial tear of his left calf muscle and Tom Haudricourt goes over their - ahem - starting pitching depth (Cliff Notes version....not much).
- I've got the bulk of our archives from May 2005 to present day finally in (with February 2006 curiously missing) after a few false starts. I still have to finish up 2007 which should happen this weekend. I'm hopeful we can still locate and secure 2003, 2004 and the rest of 2005, but I'm not holding my breath either (thank you MVN.com). Unfortunately when they imported our archives from all-baseball.com to mvn.com, all the articles defaulted to different authors depending on when they did it. So a lot of the material is currently attributed to me or Arizona Phil for whatever reason, but eventually we'll get it fixed and cleaned up to the best of our abilities.
In the meantime, reading through the comments and articles of old has been quite fun the last few days for myself. A few examples (I'm linking to the month rather than the individual article so you can scroll through some other headlines if you wish):
- The Fun that was 2006 (the snark in the headlines is fantastic)
- The End of the Baker/McPhail Era
Enjoy the holiday weekend....
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