Big Mike: A Strength Becomes A Problem

My hopes that the Cubs may actually do something in 2010 begin with the team’s strength — the starting pitching. For the past three years, the Cubs have had one of the top starting staffs in the game.

The team’s recent phase of division title contention may have begun, symbolically, when then-owner Sam Zell ordered Hungry Jim Hendry to pad the payroll in order to make the property look more exciting to potential buyers (resulting in the ridiculous Alfonso Soriano deal) but the wins on the field have come about as a direct result of the development of Carlos Zambrano and Ryan Dempster and the signing of Ted Lilly. So, the Cubs’ run began, actually, in 2002 with the insertion of the 21-year-old Zambrano into the rotation.

Big Z ain’t the ace everybody wants him to be (and the Cubs are paying him to be), but he’s a fine major league pitcher whom any team would love to have. I say this despite the fact that his mercurial emotional displays drive me batty and sometimes are detrimental to the team’s success. He shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as Tim Lincecum or Johan Santana but he’s a solid hurler. If you have three guys with the talent and capabilities of Carlos Zambrano in your rotation (minus the infantile displays), you’re gonna win a pennant or three.

The Cubs’ outlier division championship in 2003 hinged on a rotation of Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, Zambrano, Matt Clement and Shawn Estes. That’s what won them 88 games that year. We all expected Wood and Prior to be flinging for the Cubs and making all-star teams well into the ‘teens. They would be next Johnson & Schilling, Maddux & Glavine, Koufax & Drysdale or even Washington & Jefferson. Sadly, we discovered that they were so spectacular because each was throwing in a way guaranteed to make spaghetti out of the tendons, ligaments and other soft tissues of his elbow and shoulder.

Not long ago I watched a replay of Wood’s brilliant 20-strikeout one-hitter against the Astros in May of 1998 (MLB has forced You Tube to remove the video due to copyright restrictions — it can be watched for a price). If you ever get a chance, try to see it. Your jaw will drop, as mine did, at Wood’s repertoire of 96-mph fastball, physics-defying curve and downright unfair slider. The movement he put on those pitches made him unhittable on that day (Houston’s only hit was a weak grounder that flicked off third baseman Kevin Orie’s glove).

Was Wood the most talented pitcher in the history of the game? The answer is quite possibly yes. Unfortunately for him — and me and the rest of Cubworld — the reason why no one before or since him has been able to make the ball do the things he did is because the human body will not allow it over a period of years. He must have endured unspeakable pain before his right arm joints broke down.

As for Prior, his motion, which included the now notorious “Inverted W” position, guaranteed his inevitable arm woes.

Sigh.

Anyway, Hungry Jim found a way to rebuild his staff around Big Z and by 2007, Cubs pitchers ranked second in the league in runs allowed despite doing their work in a bandbox. They ranked second again in ’08 and fourth last season.

I flog Hendry regularly for his inability to build a team in a true sense (he’s more a fantasy league-type GM, buying names as opposed to constructing a machine of interacting parts) but I’ve got to hand it to him for inking Ted Lilly as he (Hendry) was hooked up to an EKG monitor in a hospital ICU in December 2006. Lilly’s the kind of pitcher I’d look for in free agency even more than a Sabathia-type ace. At one-third or one-fourth the price of a superstar, Lilly eats innings, almost always turns in a quality start, and frees up money for other needs.

Last season. Lilly was the true ace of the Cubs staff, even making the all-star team. As Cubworld was creaming over his performance, he and the team kept secret the shoulder pain he began to feel in June. Then out of the blue, it was announced that Lilly had undergone arthroscopic surgery on that shoulder in early November. Eek. The Cubs and Lilly are all giddy over the results of the procedure but he won’t be able to start a game until late April at the earliest.

With the loss of Rich Harden to free agency (which is hardly a loss at all, really, because his short outings nuked the bullpen for weeks at a time) the Cubs opening day rotation will be Zambrano and Dempster along with the surprising Randy Wells (can he continue to surprise?) the iffy Sean Marshall, the mediocre Tom Gorzelanny and the overhyped Jeff Samardzija.

Suddenly, that team strength is now a big question mark. My philosophy has always been you can win a World Series with three good starters and a shut-down closer. Now the Cubs have two good starters and closer who’ll either be lights-out or a walk machine.

I’d hate to think my hopes for 2010 will be dashed before the calendar even turns.

Big Mike: My Heart Bleeds Only For Me

I agree 10,000 percent with your last point. And I wonder if I hadn’t made myself clear in my Nomar post. Hendry was jobbed on that trade. Not necessarily because of anything he gave up (primarily Francis Beltran — ugh! — and Brendan Harris — meh) but because he thought he was getting Nomar Fucking Garciaparra, the great shortstop.

What he really got, as I implied, was nomar garciaparra the fairly decent hitter and liability in the field.

My feelings on Hungry Jim have changed through the years. That’s probably because he’s the most Jeckyll and Hyde GM I’ve ever seen. Within his first two years on the job, he flushed Todd Hundley off the roster and swindled the Pirates and Marlins out of corner infielders who each can be reasonably argued as among the greatest ever in Cubs history at his position. Hendry exiled the drunken, bitter, impotent Son-of-the-Sainted-Randy to LA for Eric Karros and Mark Grudzielanek, who played key roles on the 2003 division champs. That summer, he shipped a minor league catcher, a grossly overhyped Triple A second baseman and an eminently forgettable major league infielder to Pitt for Aramis Ramirez, whom the Bucs had soured on for reasons known only to a team that has spent the last 17 years under .500. A few months later, he sent Hee Seop Choi to the Fish for Derrek Lee.

So for a brief shining moment, I hailed Hungry Jim as a cross between Branch Rickey and Isaac Newton.

But then…, but then, but then. Hungry Jim, the big boss man of the Cubs allowed Johnnie B. Baker to cripple Mark Prior and Kerry Wood. Hendry signed everybody and his brother on the team to big, fat, long-term, no-trade-clause contracts and now he’s stuck with them. He showered Alfonso Soriano with gold through 2014 (when he’ll be 38 years old, unable to run around the mound — much less the bases, and still incapable of laying off the outside curve.) He allowed Baker to miscast LaTroy Hawkins as a closer. When the time came to dump Sammy Sosa, Hendry did everything he could — up to and including releasing security video of Sammy ditching the last game of the season — to destroy whatever trade value he had left. After losing out on free agent Rafael Furcal, Hendry panicked and traded a trio of decent minor league arms for the indecent Juan Pierre. Then he upended the roster of a team that had just won 97 games to sign the Lee Harvey Oswald of Major League Baseball, Milton Bradley (I didn’t do what they say I did…, I’m a patsy!)

Every night before I go to bed, I pray to the god I don’t believe in to make Jim Hendry suddenly want to up and join the Peace Corps.

Yeah, you’re right. To say, as you did, that the Cubs have not shown savvy in acquiring players (even allowing for the aforementioned glaring exceptions) is to utter the understatement of the century. And, yeah, I’m jealous as hell of a guy for whom 95 wins isn’t enough.

That said, let’s get down to cases. Is it possible for the 2010 Cubs to win anything near 95 games? Phe-e-e-e-w!

I’ll go so far as to say I’d bet the new home deed that they won’t. They can, though, win 85 to 92 games — anything within that range might well be enough to cop the NL Central. And, as I’ve said many times before, once you get into the playoffs anything can happen.

They need, as even a teething baby knows, to get rid of Gameboard. When Bradley was suspended for the remainder of the season in September, players literally lined up to tell reporters how much they approved of his banishment. That’s unheard of. It’s also prima facie evidence they see his mental illness (trust me on this diagnosis) as an unneeded distraction.

If they can palm him off on a sucker, they need to find a second baseman, a shortstop and a centerfielder. Yuck. Conventional wisdom holds that the core of a good team is up the middle. And if Geo Soto doesn’t lay off the post-toke munchies, they’ll need a catcher, too. Yikes!

Did I say 85-92 wins?

Well, yeah, I did. They have a terrific starting staff, even if it is nominally led by the puerile, bullying, prickish knucklehead, Carlos Zambrano. Ted Lilly really is the ace of the staff (his signing is another example of Hendry as Dr Jeckyll.) Ryan Dempster is a decent number three and Randy Wells appears to be a nice end-of-the rotation guy. Sweet Lou will choose between Tom Gorzelanny, Sean Marshall and Milo Samardzija’s bastard son for the fifth starter spot — not a bad choice to be faced with.

The bullpen looks fine as long as Hendry can re-sign lefty John Grabow. Carlos Marmol now seems to be taking to the closer’s role better than the set-up man’s. Angel Guzman and a slew of live-armed kids (Berg, Caridad and Stevens) will fill out the pen.

The entire staff ought to keep the team ERA hovering around 4.00, which should be good enough as long as the Cubs can find a way to score runs. If Soriano and Soto bounce back nicely, D-Lee doesn’t suddenly grow old before our eyes and Aramis simply does what he’s been doing for seven straight years, that division title is no pipe dream.

My fingers are crossed that — in lieu of some shocking blockbuster deal — Ryan Theriot and Jeff Baker can man the keystone without embarrassing themselves. As for centerfield, well, um, Hey AJ, you got a mitt?

Big Mike: The Nomar Trade

MLB Trade Rumors, one of my favorite sites, talks today about the Red Sox shortstop hole since the team traded Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs in 2004. According to mlbtr, the Cherry Hose have used 19 shortstops in the intervening years. Yikes.

The Nomar deal was Jim Hendry at both his best and his worst.

I heard about the deal on the radio on a Saturday afternoon, the day of the trading deadline, moments before a game against the Phillies. The Cubs, of course, were scuffling to return to the post-season after they, gulp, had come within five outs of the World Series the previous year. In fact, Sports Illustrated’s baseball preview issue that March had featured Kerry Wood on the cover along with the heart-breaking prediction, “Hell Freezes Over: The Cubs Will Win The World Series!” The dopes.

Nomar Fucking Garciaparra! I could not believe my ears. He was one of the holy trinity of shortstops of the late 90 and early aughts. He, A-Rod and Jeter. The three had revolutionized the position. Oh sure, there’d been slugging shortstops before — our very own Ernie, Milwaukee’s Yount, the Tigers’ Trammell, and the Orioles’ Ripken, but they were anomalies, outliers. No team had a right to expect its shortstop to slug 30 homers or hit in the .370s. But Nomar and his fellow Short-sketeers did that kind of thing and more.

Nomar Garciaparra. The Cubs were nine games over .500 that day. They stood in second place 10 games behind the surprising Cardinals. There was still plenty of time to catch the Birds or, failing that, to win the Wild Card. All the Cubs had to do was make the post-season. With that starting pitching — Wood, Mark Prior, Carlos Zambrano, Greg Maddux and Matt Clement — the Cubs would scare the poo out of all comers in the playoffs. The shortstops prior to the deal had been Ramon Martinez and Alex S. Gonzalez. Nice fellows, I’m sure. Loved by their families. Upstanding citizens. Horseshit shortstops.

Jim Hendry smelled blood that Saturday and arranged the mother of all four-team trades. Working with Theo Epstein in Boston as well as the Twins and the A’s, Hendry snagged Nomar Garciaparra. The team was complete. Not a hole in the lineup.

When Hendry sets his sights on a target, he’ll move heaven and Earth to get him. When Johnnie B. Baker seemed to have fallen out of favor with the Giants at the end of the 2002 season, Hendry bided his time as all the other candidates he’d interviewed for his vacant manager’s position took jobs elsewhere. No one could say if the Giants would retain their World Series skipper. But Hendry still waited. Some ten days after the Series ended, Hendry and Baker held a press conference together.

After the Cubs had stunk up the joint in 2006, finishing last with a 66-96 record, Hendry identified Lou Piniella as the man who’d lead them out of the darkness. Lou, who was 62 at the time and happy doing occasional color commentary for Fox Sports, was persuaded to come aboard thanks to Hendry’s silver tongue and TribCo’s fat wallet.

Then Hendry spied Alfonso Soriano on the free agent market. Possessed of rabbit speed and Paul Bunyan power, Soriano was the jewel of the 2006-07 off-season. Hendry outbid the Angels and others for his services over dinner one November night. He told Fonzie they wouldn’t leave the table until the player had shaken on a deal.

Last off-season, Lou hinted to Hungry Jim that the Cubs might want to add a little left-handed thunder to the lineup. Whereupon Hendry inked Milton Bradley, who’d just turned in the season of his career.

It’s refreshing to have a Cub honcho who’s greedy, impatient, unafraid to take a gamble,  and doesn’t care how much he has to spend to bring a winner to Wrigley. And Hendry is nothing but greedy, whether it comes to Jack Daniel’s, crullers or big-name outfielders.

On the other hand, with the arguable exception of Lou, each of the aforementioned coups looks like the result of a man picking answers out of a hat. Yeah sure, Baker was known as a players’ managers who could handle moody superstars but he also had a rep as a destroyer of young arms. The core of the team Hendry entrusted Dusty with was that young pitching staff. Oops.

Soriano was hoped to challenge the 40-40 barrier every year for the foreseeable future when he became a Cub. But his are a young player’s skills and he was already approaching his mid-30s.

Bradley, of course, has long been known as the loose cannon of the big leagues. Yet Hendry still exposed him to the pressure cooker that is Wrigleyville. That big left-handed bat, impaired by several mini-nervous breakdowns this past summer, produced a single home run and a paltry nine RBI.

Even the Lou hiring can be second guessed. Piniella remade the team in his image, sure, refashioning the attitude in the clubhouse in the process. But when the Cubs backslid this year, the old goat seemed as interested in the proceedings as a freshman in algebra class.

So, yeah, the Bosox have burned through 19 shortstops since they exiled Nomar to the North Side. But they knew that despite his big name, Garciaparra was about finished being Garciaparra. He was rapidly and dramatically becoming just another ballplayer. They found a willing taker in a man who loves Big Names.

The Red Sox, though, have won the World Series twice since that deal. The Cubs? Well…, you know.