Can Soriano or Fukudome be traded?
Following Tyler Colvin’s impressive spring performance, Lou Piniella has promised to steal three starts a week from Byrd and Fukudome and give them to Colvin. Xavier Nady, meanwhile, will replace Soriano from time to time. Truth be told–and the truth is seldom more than whispered when hefty contracts are in [...]
When it develops its own players, a solid baseball organization also produces tradeable veterans. Tradeability is something of a foreign concept to Cub fans. It does not apply to high-profile flops, players you wish had never come in the door. Cub fans are quite familiar with players of that sort. Recent examples are Soriano, Fukudome, [...]
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Posted 21 February 2010
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Hendry § Ricketts § prospect § trade
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Also tagged: d.j. lemahieu, geovany soto, hak-ju lee, jim hendry, john mcdonough, jose serra, marlon byrd, oneri fleita, rebel ridling, ryan flaherty, starlin castro, tim wilken, tom ricketts
Here are end-of-season numbers for Koyie Hill and Geovany Soto in terms of games won/lost and runs for/against.
It’s still a smallish data sample, as evidenced by the closing of the gap, under “average runs against,” in just the last week or ten days of the season. See my previous post.
Soto’s numbers are impacted by [...]
The answer depends on how much credit you are willing to give Joshua for Derrek Lee’s resurgence as a power hitter. The timing of Lee’s second-half power burst favors Joshua, as does the following syllogism.
a) Lee has been looking for–and turning on–fastballs middle-in, pitches that confounded him during the previous two seasons as he [...]
Theriot, Fontenot and Miles are often described as scrappy. I think the word is overused and misused.
Scrappiness is an attribute possessed by some smallish players with limited skills; but being smallish and having limited skills does not make you scrappy.
A scrappy player is aggressive on the bases. He crowds the plate to maximize [...]
Most days, the Cubs 1-2-3 hitters are Soriano, Theriot and Fukudome. In June, these players are hitting a combined .200/.306/.333. They have five RBI among them in June. Fukudome has two doubles and no home runs in June, and has hit one home run since April. (This from a #3 hitter.) All three players had [...]
One man’s injury is another’s opportunity. The Cubs were probably lucky to latch onto Ryan Freel just hours before Aramis went down; but Freel is something of a has-been, and ideally you would use the vacancy at third to give a farmhand some valuable exposure that is relatively low-pressure because unexpected.
There are three infielders at [...]
The easiest way to understand why Joey Gathright is on the Cubs and why the Ryan Theriot of 2007 was still the shortstop at the beginning of ‘08–and to gain an insight into various other personnel issues that are mysteries to many fans–is to articulate the following as Lou Piniella’s first rule for getting oneself [...]
Does anybody know what Lou means when he says that one of the team’s goals in the offseason is to get “more athletic”? He has said this in many interviews, most recently on XM radio yesterday. Lou often speaks cryptically but there’s usually a way to decode the message, and a meaning behind it.
Apart [...]
I’ve written a software program that combs through game logs and gathers baserunning data. The table below gives baserunning statistics for Cub regulars in games through August, 2008.
The stats are divided into five columns, plus a sixth column for cumulative stats. Here is a description of the five baserunning results being monitored.
1) runner on first, [...]