Big Mike: My Heart Bleeds For You, AJ

Poor AJ. His boys won 95 games in 2009. Apparently they were the wrong kind of wins. Or something.

I would have sawed off my right pinkie for 95 wins (not my left pinkie, though, since I’m trying to learn how to play the guitar.)

Are your fears for the Flaming Hose really warranted? Ortiz’s RBI were “quiet”? Bay “put up terrific numbers but… he’s a bit overrated”? Papelbon “gave up walks or hits and often had difficulty finishing batters off”? Ellsbury “can be pitched to by better pitchers”? Sheesh!

Whaddya want 105 wins?

I suppose the answer yes. Who wouldn’t want 105 wins? But no one — repeat, no one — can construct a team with the expectation that they’ll win 105. Not even the colossus that occupies new Yankee Stadium won 105 (of course, they did knock off 103 opponents but let’s not quibble.)

Have the Red Sox and their fans become — dare I say it — too demanding? It seems a short half decade ago, il Nazione del Calzini Rossi would have been thrilled to string up 95 fascisti. Now, 95 wins — bah! A bag of shells.

Were I the majordomo of the Sox, I wouldn’t worry too much about Papelbon’s walks or hits (his WHIP stood at a fine 1.15.) If Bay’s putting up terrific numbers, I’d say, Keep it up, Jason my boy. As for Ellsbury’s problems with better pitchers? Um, I’d guess the reason those guys are “better pitchers” is because they get most guys out, period.

I would fret a little about David Ortiz. He’s now 34 years old and weighs 230 pounds — at least that’s what the Red Sox web site claims. His bathroom scale might dissent. His best years are like a big ass — behind him. Then again, most AL teams would drool over the prospect of their DHs putting up mediocre Ortiz numbers. The Boston club really ain’t got much to worry about does it?

Sometimes fans and even GMs can overreact. Take last off-season. After the Cubs had led the National League with 97 wins, they went out and jumped in front of that speeding bus from LA. Fans boo-hooed as if the Cubs had gone sub-.500. Lou Piniella suggested that maybe the team needed a left handed bat to counteract teams loading up with righthanders against them — as the Dodgers did. Hungry Jim Hendry promptly turned over 40 percent of his roster, mainly in an effort to afford the $30M/3-year deal he bestowed upon Milton Bradley.

Pardon me while I have a seizure. Gurgle, gulp, ack-ack-ack. The memory of the Bradley signing is now a lesion in my brain that occasionally causes electrical disturbances among my remaining several hundred neurons. Ah — all better now.

Hendry dumped Mark DeRosa, Kerry Wood and Jason Marquis, all in an effort to squeeze Gameboard into the budget. The 2009 team could have used a nice fifth starter like Marquis (who, by the way, went to the all-star game.) They would have benefitted greatly from DeRosa’s 23 home runs, especially in Aramis Ramirez’s absence. Wood? Well, he stunk the joint up with the Tribe but he still was better than the execrable Kevin Gregg.

Be careful what you wish for, AJ. What’s Theo Epstein to do? Look for a centerfielder? Yeah, you could do better than young Jacoby. You could grab Carlos Beltran from the Mets and hope he thrives in Fenway. But at what cost?

Should Theo let Bay or Drew walk? Whaddya gonna do then? Play Joey Gathright and Rocco Baldelli?

In terms of planning, a good GM walks the tightrope. He (or she — Kim Ng, I hear, is in the running for the Padres job) can’t rely on an unchanging roster year after year. He also can’t swap his assets like so many baseball cards.

The Big Mike Philosophy of Building a Baseball Team, taught at the better universities around the country, holds that the GM should build his team with an aim to win 90 games. If your team is a consistent 90-game-winner, you’ll be battling for the division title every single year. And while the team may occasionally dip to 84-78, it’ll just as often rise to 96-66. That’s definite Champagne territory.

Now you may say 96 wins is fine for the Minnesota Twins or the Colorado Rockies but the Red Sox share a division with the Yankees. Okay. Let the Yanks spend $200M every year and win the East. It’s no dishonor to sneak into the playoffs via the Wild Card. In fact, the Red Sox of 2004 rode that ticket to their first World Series win in 10,000 years (that ancient triumph over the hated Jericho Palms!)

Just because New York assembled an all-star team and danced to the division title doesn’t mean Theo (and you) should panic. Theo (and you) should start planning for a future without Big Papi but the current lineup built around Pedroia, Bay, Youkilis and Martinez (assuming everybody’s re-signed) is scarier than a Glenn Beck commentary.

Boston is a lock to win at least 90 in 2010. Even if David Ortiz’s bat continues to soften and Josh Beckett’s back continues to throb, the Red Sox, along with the Yankees and Angels, will be the cream of the league. You worry too much.

Me? I’ve got Bradley in right field, Carlos Zambrano on the mound, and a century-plus of losing on my mind. I worry.

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.

Big Mike: A Couple Of Suckers

Howdy. This blog is dedicated to the delusions of a couple of baseball fans: AJ, who follows the Red Sox, and me, Big Mike, who lives and dies — okay, just dies – with the Cubs.

I’ve always felt there was a kinship between Red Sox and Cubs fans — although residents of the Hub have enjoyed a couple of World Series wins within the last few years, the bastards.

Anyway, both sets of fans have always reveled (wallowed?) in the unrequited devotion they lavish upon their respective nines. Honestly, up until 2004, why on earth would anybody in his or her right mind choose to become a fan of either of the teams with the longest championship droughts in American professional sports? Being a fan of either the Cubs or Bosox is something bestowed upon one, not exactly akin to an inherited fortune or a hereditary trait like courage or brilliant intellect, but closer to the alcoholism gene.

Bostonians now are fat and happy with their ’04 and ’07 triumphs. Yet, they still retain vestigial memories of the too many years they spent gritting their teeth as the Yankees and the likes of the Blue Jays, the Angels and — for chrissakes — even the goddamned Marlins won championships, so AJ and my baseball hearts still beat, more or less, as one.

I’d predicted a Cubs-Yankees World Series before the start of the season and I just might be half right. The Cubs forgot to ask me my opinion, though, and so they sleep-walked through much of the campaign. The hitting went to holy hell and Jim Hendry’s big off-season gamble — signing the troubled Milton Bradley — turned out not to be such a huge gamble after all. He blew up, as any good bettor would have guessed. Gameboard turned out to be such an annoying, disruptive and destructive pain in the ass that the Cubs literally paid him to stay away from the team for the last three weeks of the season.

Much of the North Side wants to wring Bradley’s neck for his antics this year but not me. Milton Bradley is a troubled human being. He’s a mental case — and that’s my professional opinion. He deserves pity not rage. I reserve my ire for Hendry, who elected to believe that Bradley had turned over a new leaf. That hope was about as ridiculous as predicting the Cubs would go to the World Series.

There you have my first pompous oration on the state of the Chicago National League Ballclub. Stay tuned, there’ll be many, many more. AJ and I will alternate posts — that is, unless one of us turns out to be a smidgen more ambitious than the other — on our respective towns’ baseball crews.

As we begin this new, semi-cross continental exchange of missives, AJ’s thinking about how his beloveds are going to win next year; I’m gonna try to figure out how my boys can win sometime within the next century. We’re going to lay our harebrained opinions out here for each other and any idlers and lunatics who come across this site.

Welcome aboard.