August 2009

Apparently Alfonso Soriano's cranky left knee was bothering him enough during his outfield play this past Friday that his plans to get an elective MRI (magnetic resonance image) in a few weeks got moved up to Saturday morning since he wasn't going to start today. In this video interview he says it's been sore for four months but with (approximately) 40 games left why can't he keep playing with the same pain? The pain seems to bother him more when he runs (rather than when he hits) so it's affecting his limited outfield abilities and I expect it's been a factor regarding his on and mostly off offense this season too.

Soriano was in no hurry to get the MRI as recently as this week.  He originally expected to take the time to get it on their next day off, Sept 10th (after returning from the trip to NY and Pitt), but his limp became more noticeable after his game winning 3 run HR on Friday so they moved it up to Monday and when it was clear he couldn't start today they sent him for the test this morning.

Carrie Muskat from cubs.com reports that the MRI results just showed inflammation and the outfielder will likely get a cortisone shot (based on the manager's postgame comments) and be sidelined a few days. From the horses mouth, in the postgame interview, Lou Piniella said  the team orthopedic specialist (probably Dr. Gryzlo) will look at Soriano on Sunday, and he most likely will get a cortisone shot to alleviate the pain.

You can't say that Jim Hendry isn't trying to still do his job. Reports came out today that Aaron Heilman and Rich Harden have both been claimed on waivers, Heilman definitely by an NL Team and Harden most likely by a pitching-starved NL team. Rosenthal's report says the Cubs have until Monday afternoon to complete a deal, but that seems longer than the normal 48 hour window to complete this type of transaction.

Heilman is owed about $270K on his contract this year, might as well just save it if you're the Cubs and let him go to whatever team claimed him if a deal can't be worked out. I highly doubt any team that did claim him was trying to block him from somebody, since you know, it would probably actually hurt most teams that he joined, so there must be some interest there or maybe some drunk GM'ing. Since the Cubs aren't going anywhere with Heilman on the team and they're not going to offer him arbitration this offseason, hopefully Hendry can take advantage of this opportunity and send Heilman on his merry way...where he can win a World Championship and then go broke in the offseason.

Rich Harden is owed about $1.2M on his deal, but his true value will be beyond this season. The Cubs could try and resign him to a long-term deal, although that's doubtful. With a pretty bare market for starting pitchers, Harden will likely snag some sort of multi-year deal, so offering him arbitration is a no-brainer and if he does happen to accept it, I'm sure not going to complain about getting him back in a Cubs uniform for 2010. If Hendry does work out a trade, he will have to get back something resembling two 1st/2nd round talents from whatever team claimed him and in this case, I could see the Giants trying to block the Dodgers here and they're probably not looking for starting pitching right now.

And while teams generally put the bulk of their roster through waivers during this time period, it's somewhat interesting that the Cubs waited until the end of August here to put one of their most tradeable pieces in Harden. If Hendry can squeeze out two top prospects, preferably at higher levels in the minors, he can avoid the arbitration and paperwork headache in the offseason, avoid any potential late season injury to Harden that we're always worried about and hypothetically pick up two prospects closer to the show. A prospect in the hand is worth two in the draft so to speak....

UPDATE: Bruce Levine has a source that says the Minnesota Twins put in a claim, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were awarded it. On cue,  Paul Sullivan says it was an NL team that won the claim but does not specify which team. Baseball Musings cites Andrew Kneeland saying it's probably the Rockies, but the link goes to the Paul Sullivan article which does not mention the Rockies at all, although the Rockies, Dodgers and Giants all had scouts at Harden's last game according to Levine's article.

Rosters for the Arizona Fall League should be announced sometime this week.

To say the least, I'm not particularly motivated these days to write about the Cubs. The road trip disaster and the reality of the standings coupled with the anemic offense has pretty much put an end to the season. Never say never and all and Carlos Zambrano will be back this week, but I'm expecting nothing more than the same frustrating Cubs team the rest of the way. At 62-60, I figure 90 wins gets them in the picture and that means a 28-12 run over their last 40 and that still might not be enough for the wild card or the division. So as the season winds down, I'll probably be talking a lot about the new ownership and 2010 and the Chicago Bears. Live with it...

I did go to the game Saturday afternoon...happened to be the AngelFan Wife's birthday as well. I know how to treat the ladies. For her gift, I got her a washing machine...for Christmas I'm thinking a vacuum cleaner or a big screen TV.

Brief description of the day and photos after the jump...

Sorry about the rather epic error message at the top of the site, working on trying to isolate the problem which seems to be somewhere on line 174 of the database. Considering I haven't changed anything recently, not sure what's going on and unfortunately I've got a full day planned around the Cubs game and the Angel Fan Wife's birthday. I hope to get it fixed by tonight.

UPDATE 7:47 PM: I think it's fixed.

UPDATE #2 7:48 PM: I'm done with this season.

Pinpointing the Cubs demise this year is worthy of a dissertation, but if I were to paint some broad strokes, I'd start - in order of importance -  with the overreaction to last year's playoff loss, injuries, underperforming players (duh!) and good-old fashioned luck (good last year, bad this year). I did take a look at some team offensive numbers from ESPN.com and Baseball Reference just for fun.

That .321 BABIP the Cubs put up last year was tops in the league by the way, so some of that regression should have been expected and i do think to a degree many of us expected some drop-off to the Cubs offense this year. The 30 pt drop in BABIP has contributed to the 30 pt drop in BA and SLG with RISP and Runners On, which has coincided with the Cubs leaving runners on base. The patience that many of us wished for during all the Dusty years is still there, but they basically just can't get the big hit. And I know we don't need a lot of fancy numbers to tell us that, but I like the fancy numbers and often times our perceptions don't match up with reality. In this case, they do seem to do just that.

Gordon Wittenmyer's tweets that the Cubs will go with Carlos Marmol as closer...as expected. It's like choosing your death by slowing draining the blood out of your body versus stepping on a landmine. Good luck with that Cubs...

Ryan Theriot is back tonight....and the great scrap-off of '09 can commence between him and David Eckstein, who scrapped out a the tying run with that walk in the 9th. Theriot, Bradley, Lee, Ramirez, Fukudome, Soriano, Baker, Soto and Dempster go for the Cubs.

The Cubs enter the Pacific Time Zone, which coincides perfectly with California native Ted Lilly's return to the Cubs. The Padres might as well just save their energy and give the Cubs this win. To make room on the roster, the Cubs optioned their entire pitching staff to Iowa¹, because they won't be needed anymore (I'm auditioning for the TLFC). 

Sadly, not much else going on, the Cubs trail the Cardinals now by 5 games which is my personal benchmark for dismissing a team, at least this late in the season². With only 3 games left between the two clubs, it's gonna take quite a streak by both clubs for the Cubs to make up that ground. The Wild Card is a little more attainable, trailing the Rockies by 3.5 games, but the Giants and Marlins are in the way and the Braves are tied with the Cubs.

I'll post lineups when they become available. Join the late-night fun in Parachat.

¹ - Justin Berg was actually sent down.

² -  Other worthy reasons to dismiss a team: the presence of Dusty Baker, Neifi Perez or Aaron Miles, batting Corey Patterson lead-off, having Ron Coomer as your first basemen, wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates uniform (list subject to change)... 

Aramis Ramirez should be able to play Friday and the Pittsburgh Pirates are coming to town...and we're on day 10,256,753(est.) of the last apocalyptic asteroid hitting the Earth.

That's all I got...hey, you get what you pay for here at TCR.

Okay fine, more ranting, raving and rumbling after the jump...

Pretty much everytime they flashed the boxscore last night after the 5th inning, I just had to cringe. Rich Harden continued his stampede to free agency with another brilliant effort. He held the arguably best offense in the league to....well nothing, for 5.1 innings and then gives up a walk to #8 hitter Carlos Ruiz before Jimmy Rollins sent one in the bleachers to tie what was looking like an easy victory. So while the Phils efficiently scored their first 2 runs on a hit, the Cubs managed 7 hits through the first six, a few double plays and line drives right at people and only 2 runs.

Was it worth all the trouble?

The Iowa Cubs had a 5:00 A.M. wakeup call after Saturday's game in Des Moines. The team's traveling party chartered to Midway and bussed to Wrigley for the ultimate matinee following a night game.

As for your intrepid correspondent, my trip began a week ago today when we piled the family into two cars instead of one so I could leave them a day early and triangulate my way home from our lake vacation in Minnesota via a stopover at yesterday's "Road to Wrigley" contest in Chicago.

The Cubs had to make a roster move today to accommodate Geovany Soto and the victim was Micah Hoffpauir. He'll surely be back up when rosters expand on September 1st and possibly sooner. After a good start to the season, he sort of crescendoed at a .920 OPS on May 20th and since then has hit 182/217/336 in 115 PA with 4 HR's, mostly in part-time duty.

That leaves the Cubs bench with Jake Fox, Koyie Hill, Aaron Miles, Sam Fuld and either Mike Fontenot or Jeff Baker depending on who gets the start. 

If Soto comes back with a vengeance, that has to be my favorite lineup of the season...hopefully they score some runs this weekend and Lou sticks with it.

By the way, the Rockies are the best team in baseball since June with a .661 winning percentage and 39 wins (tied with the Angels) including 14 straight wins versus NL Central opponents. It's gonna be a tough series...

UPDATE: Z didn't finish his warm-ups and Sean Marshall will make a spot start.

Hoping to understand Alfonso Soriano's hot and cold streaks this year, I turned to the incomparable Fan Graphs to break down his present and historical success against different pitches.  The results suggest that Soriano is losing the skill that made him one of the more feared hitters in the game, but that he might have found a method to compensate for this loss.  Below is a chart showing the percentage of fastballs Soriano has seen each year since 2005, with 2009 broken down per month. It also shows his ranking among hitters seeing the fewest fastballs, his "runs above average"  number on fastballs, (wFastball) and how high he ranks among all hitters, and his overall OPS. (As in, not specific to fastballs)  The most important thing to notice here is his wFB rank.

You probably have noticed a couple of striking trends going on here.  First, Soriano has progressively moved from being one of the most effective hitters in baseball against the fastball to being quite pedestrian. Second, pitchers have not noticed and adapted to this change:  They contiue to avoid throwing fastballs to Soriano as if he were the same hitter he was in 2005.  He's not.

So how do we explain Soriano's April and July, when he hit like the hitter for whom the Cubs offered that premium contract?

Finding  that answer requres looking at Soriano's results swinging at sliders.

I'm off for a few days, a little family trip down to San Diego. An easy $500 (if not more) to build Legos and see some fish. Next year, we're just going to Toys 'R Us and the pet store.

Try not to ruin the place while I'm away, but if you do throw a party, ask this kid to organize it for you.