The Same Old Played-Out Scenes

The first installment in a series of updates on Chicago sports focuses on the perpetually snakebitten yet dearly beloved Major League franchise residing on the North side of Chicago

Pretty much the only bright spot this year

Chicago Cubs (56-72, 5th in NL Central)

Without question, it has been a difficult and trying year for the Cubs, and that’s being pretty generous.  While nobody really thought that this team was anything special, I don’t think anyone expected the 2011 campaign to play out this poorly.  As for myself, I thought a final record anywhere around .500 would be a decent step in the right direction.  The Cubs must have thought so, too, because they hit every level of .500 (1-1, 2-2, 3-3, etc.) through 20 games before finally going under for good in May. In fact, from May through July, the Cubs were an impressively awful 31-51.  While pretty much everything that could have gone wrong in those three months did go wrong, in my eyes there are a few major areas that were greatly responsible for the early death of the 2011 Cubs.

Zero Clutch Hitting

The Cubs as a team are batting .263, good for 3rd in the National League, yet are only 9th in runs scored.  You know what that means? A terrible batting average with runners in scoring position.  Just the other day at Wrigley against Atlanta, the Cubs had 6 walks and 9 hits (that’s 15 base runners, if you’re counting at home) and were predictably shut out, 3-0.  15 left on base in one game? That’s pretty damn rough.  Just missed opportunity after missed opportunity.  The one guy who we could usually count on in years past in these clutch situations, Aramis Ramirez, has had a down year in that department, as his average with runners in scoring position is in the low .200s*.  While there have been occasional successes, too many times this year we have seen major opportunities get squandered and cost the team a win.  This is something that must change going forward, and it’s obviously not something that can be easily learned (if at all), so we’ll see.  Definitely something to keep an eye on in 2012. 

*That being said, credit where credit is due: A-Ram has been an absolute BEAST since the end of May, being among the league leaders in all the major offensive categories.  I had almost written him off after those horrific first two months when he had 1 homer and 17 RBI, so touché, Aramis. You’ve probably played your way back onto the 2012 Cubs, as there is no heir apparent ready yet in the farm system (whither Josh Vitters?)

Starting Pitching

The starting pitching for the 2011 Cubs has been, in a word, atrocious.  They’re 15th (out of 16) in the National League in ERA with a cumulative 4.56, have a gaudy WHIP (walks plus hits per innings pitched) of 1.43 (which means Cubs pitchers have, on average, allowed nearly one and a half base runners in EVERY INNING THEY’VE PITCHED THIS YEAR), and have allowed more than a hit per inning.  It doesn’t help when your fourth and fifth starters (Wells and Cashner) both hit the DL for an extended period of time in the first week of the season, but I don’t think that really mattered in the grand scheme of things.  

Ryan Dempster (10-9, 4.60) has bounced back somewhat after an awful April (when the team actually needed him to step up with all the injuries), but is still having a down year.    

Carlos Zambrano, before his well-publicized “retirement*,” was an average pitcher at best, going 9-7 with a 4.82 ERA.  He had some outings where the Z of 4 or 5 years ago appeared and dominated, but it’s quite clear that he’s no longer even close to being worthy of the ace-type money he’s being paid.  

Matt Garza has been the lone bright spot in the rotation, and Jim Hendry should be commended for grabbing him from Tampa Bay, as this guy is going to be the ace of the staff for at least the next 4 years or so.  His record is not great at 6-9, but consider the fact that he’s left six starts with a lead that was subsequently blown by his bullpen.  His ERA is a solid 3.62, and would be much better if not for a couple of forgettable starts (most memorably a shelling in Washington in a game the Cubs somehow came back from an 8-run deficit and won).  I’m happy he’s in the fold moving forward.

My greatest source of frustration with the rotation, though, has nothing to do with those guys.  It’s with the fact that Rodrigo Lopez, James Russell, and Doug Davis somehow have started a combined 24 games for this team, and the team predictably went 6-18 in those games.  I saw Davis pitch in person on May 23 in Boston, and he was basically throwing batting practice in a 15-5 loss.  While Lopez has had some decent starts, he’s tailed off lately (he got shelled for 4 homers in the Sunday night loss to St. Louis).  With Davis and Russell in particular, it was basically as if the Cubs were writing off the games they started as losses before they happened.  It was pretty clear that both of them had nothing to give as far as starting games goes (the Cubs’ record in their 14 starts? 1-13.  Yeah, you read that right. 1-13).  The fact that the team felt they had no starters in the minor leagues close enough to come up and take a shot with the big club is really disturbing to me.  Casey Coleman is supposedly the most major league-ready starter in the system, and he has not impressed at all.  After him? Zip, zilch, nada.  Cashner has promise, but can he stay healthy? Who knows, he might be the next coming of Kerry Wood - all the talent in the world, but the arm can’t hold up to the rigors of starting.  The way this situation played out this year leaves me with very little faith in the farm system’s pitching depth, and while the organization apparently had a great draft last month, none of those guys will be ready for years.  We better hope some kid in AA-ball figures it out and makes the leap, or else this staff could be in really rough shape next year. Garza and Dempster are locks to return, but after that? Wells has had a rough year, I’m not sold on him yet.  Cashner’s got the health question.  Zambrano is as good as gone.  Is Casey Coleman really going to be your number 3 or 4 starter? We’ll see.

*Hendry absolutely did the right thing by effectively suspending him for a month without pay, and while I understand why the MLB players’ union has to file a grievance on Z’s behalf, who are they kidding? This is far from the first time Zambrano has acted out (showed up teammates on the mound too many times to count, fought his catcher in the dugout, disabled many a watercooler, nearly came to blows with Derrek Lee, of all people, and then was sent to anger management, etc., et al); can he really say that Hendry and the Cubs didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt many a time, and that this is really just the unpaid bill from all those transgressions?  Regardless of how that plays out, it’s pretty clear that Carlos has thrown his last pitch for the Cubs, as Tom Ricketts was in the booth on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball, and said that it would be hard to imagine Zambrano coming back to the Cubs after the incident in Atlanta.  Such a shame to think of all the talent wasted...but really, could it have ended any other way? Don’t think so

Lack of Fundamentals

It’s actually quite embarrassing to watch this team play baseball sometimes.  Little things here and there, like taking your eyes off a routine ground ball, all contribute to being near the bottom of the league in fielding percentage and having over 100 errors on the season.  While physical errors happen to everybody, it’s the glaring mental errors that seem to happen all the time that kill me and every other Cubs fan paying attention to the team.  Take this past weekend, for example.  Two inexplicable plays illustrate everything you need to know about the way this season has gone thus far.

Exhibit A

In the bottom of the ninth inning of Friday’s 5-4 win over the Cardinals, Tony Campana reached first on a Ryan Theriot error (bahaahahaha how’s it feel to be on the other side of this occurrence, Cardinal fans?).  Campana is obviously the winning run at this point, and is perhaps the fastest man in baseball - an overall good situation for the Cubs.  Campana is 16 for 17 in stealing bases this year, so it was a pretty good bet he’d be running at some point during Starlin Castro’s subsequent at-bat so as to get into scoring position for the team’s best hitter.  Well, he did attempt to steal - and then things veered off the tracks.  Castro swung at the pitch, popping it up into shallow CF.  Campana was totally deked by the Cardinal middle infielders, and got up from his slide and started for third before promptly realizing he was screwed, as the center fielder caught the ball and tossed it back to first for an easy double play, killing any chance of a winning Cubs rally.  


Two things went glaringly wrong here; first, Castro swung at the pitch, and second, Campana completely failed Base-running 101.  If you know your best base-stealing threat is probably going to be stealing, and you have a hitter’s count (it was 2-1 at the time), why take a swing at a borderline pitch and potentially take that steal out of the equation? If it had been a hit-and-run and not a straight steal, that would be one thing, but Campana never looked back towards the batter, a move which typically signifies the former, not the latter.  Again, situational awareness is something the Cubs do not have in spades - Castro has to realize Campana is going to steal at some point during his at-bat, and once he sees the little guy get his jump out of the corner of his eye, take a pitch and see what happens!! OK, so Castro swings at the pitch and pops it up - here’s where the most egregious mental lapse occurs.  One of the first things Little Leaguers are taught about base-running is to always pick up your third base coach when rounding second.  Here, Campana wasn’t rounding second, but upon getting up from his slide into second, his first instinct wasn’t to look at his third base coach, or even find the ball...he just put his head down and started for third.  The obvious danger in assuming the best has happened and just starting to run was quickly demonstrated, as he looked fairly foolish rounding second the opposite way as he was doubled off first by a mile.  Had Campana picked up third base coach Ivan DeJesus immediately after sliding into second, like any normal big leaguer would do, he could have easily made it back to first with his blazing speed and perhaps preserved the inning and a chance to win the game in regulation.  Instead, the comical double play killed any chance of a Cubs rally that inning, and the game went into extras.  While the Cubs did go on to win, this play explicitly demonstrated, on several levels, that the team is on a Little League level in terms of fundamentals, which is something that Mike Quade pledged to change and has not happened thus far, a full year into his stint as manager.

Exhibit B

While not as egregious as the first example, this play left me just as dumbfounded as to where some of these players’ minds are at while certain things are happening on the diamond.  On Sunday night, with the Cubs trailing 3-2 with one out in the fifth inning, Darwin Barney stole second base with Carlos Pena batting.  Pena proceeded to nearly hit a home run to RF, instead flying out to the warning track in deep right center.  I was at Wrigley for the game, and after seeing Pena’s deep fly ball get caught, turned my attention to the infield, fully expecting to see Barney advancing to third on the deep fly ball.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I see him running at full speed back to second base.  I actually exclaimed, out loud, “What the hell is he doing?? What is he thinking?” to my dad, and he had no answer.  Barney apparently hoped that the right fielder would drop the ball, because there was no other reason for him to be hanging out 2/3 of the way between second and third base.  Good teams take the extra base when other teams are relaxed and let them, and great teams take the extra base right out from under even the most alert team’s nose.  This wasn’t even one of these two scenarios; in this situation, advancing to third is expected, even at the middle or high school level.  Let’s put it this way: I wasn’t the fastest guy out on the base paths, but even I would have been yelled at if I did what Darwin Barney did in this situation.  To make matters worse, he was the potential game-tying run; if he advances to third in this situation, any number of things could allow him to score.  A hit, an error, a wild pitch, a passed ball, a balk...there are quite a few ways to score from third.  The next batter, Reed Johnson, popped out to first base to end the inning, but that’s not the point.  If Barney’s at third base, perhaps that next at-bat with two outs goes differently.  Perhaps Barney dances down the third base line and distracts the pitcher, Jake Westbrook, who then grooves a fastball that Johnson smashes into left field for a game-tying RBI single.  Who knows?  Point is, Barney (like Castro above) did not display situational awareness, and might have cost the Cubs a run.  It was a little play, and not something that a lot of people probably were pissed at in the moment (like a dropped fly ball or booted grounder or something of that nature), but it was something that stuck with me that night as a perfect exemplar of where the Cubs are currently at in terms of fundamental baseball play.

Don’t get me wrong...I love watching Starlin Castro play ball and I like Darwin Barney quite a bit.  Castro is the clear future of the franchise, a cornerstone to build around.  The kid’s batting over .300 for the second year in a row (you don’t just do that by accident, and he’s collected over 300 hits in his major league career already, and he’s my age, for God’s sakes.  The focus incident on Sunday night aside, he’s got a blindingly bright future.  Barney is not in Castro’s talent class, but is a solid little second baseman who can handle the bat a little bit.  He might not be the starting second baseman for a contending team, but he does have some value.  These two guys are not bad baseball players.  But as illustrated above, they were in the middle of a couple plays last weekend (and have been parts of others over the course of the season as well) that demonstrated how far the Cubs have to go to be considered in the same breath as the upper echelon Major League teams, such as the Red Sox, Yankees, and Phillies.  

The fact that the Cubs have actually outplayed their expected win-loss record (determined by how many runs they score vs. how many runs they give up) tells you pretty much all you need to know about how bad this season has been.  But there is reason for optimism, as there always seems to be with Cubs fans.  But that’s for another time...

Coming soon: 

A look at Tom Ricketts’ decision to finally fire GM Jim Hendry, and what that means for the Cubs moving forward in this offseason and beyond