Big Mike: Making A Cadillac Payment On A Chevy

John Lackey is good. That’s as far as I’ll go. As I wrote earlier, I like good, smart pitchers. I’d rather have a staff filled with competent, cagey starters than one top heavy with an ace and a near-ace followed by a bunch of question marks.

Theo gave Lackey $17M/year for five years. The Boston boss can afford the investment even if Lackey breaks down or suddenly becomes more hittable. The Sox and the Yanks are the only two teams in baseball that can make such a deal with a pitcher of his caliber and not be financially hamstrung for a half decade. More power to Epstein and Brian Cashman.

Had Hungry Jim Hendry or Kenny Williams made the deal, though, I’d have called for their scalps.

Let’s take a look at your new mound star. He has excellent control, rarely gives up a home run and has a decent strike out rate. I’d be worried, though, about his hit-ability. For his career, Lackey has given up 9.1 hits per nine innings. He’s not dominating. At $85M, I’d want dominating. Then again, I’d never make an $85M investment in a pitcher in the first place, even if he gave up only seven hits per nine.

It seems that Lackey hit his peak in 2007, when he was 28, and now has settled in as a nice, plus pitcher. His value isn’t in being the untouchable force of nature that Pedro Martinez was. It’s that, with him, the Boston rotation is becoming full. It’s solid from 1 through 4 with only joker being Clay Buchholz, in the back-end spot. I agree with you — I’d turn the kid over to the highest bidder in a heartbeat in exchange for some more offensive firepower and then look for a number five guy at a bargain rate.

Here’s where I’ll give Theo even more credit. He was reported to be interested in Rich Harden. Thank your lucky stars Harden signed with the Rangers for one year plus a mutual-option second year with a $1M buyout. He’ll make at least $7.5M for 2010 and could, conceivably, earn $20 for the full two years. He ain’t gonna make the 20. Harden’s got electrifying stuff but his control blows and he kills bullpens. I’ve got to think that Theo knew that even better than I do and his purported interest was nothing more than smoke being blown by Harden’s agent.

Instead, Epstein gets a good, solid, dependable righthander. I like the additition of Lackey, AJ, I just don’t like the amount being sunk into him. But, If you’ve got it to sink, you may as well sink it.

Speaking of sinking, the Cubs are still looking for someone to take Milton Bradley off their hands.

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.