Posts Tagged ‘Cubs’

1/2 over.

Monday, July 5th, 2010

I remember a few weeks ago thinking there was over 100 games left to the season. I couldn’t believe that there was so much left. Now that it’s past the half way point it seems like it’s time to get ready for 2011.

So how’s everything going? I’d have to say worse than I expected. Although the past week was pretty good, the Pirates were playing the Cubs and Phillies, two teams in huge declines. Then the rest of this month there are a lot of games against the Astros and Brewers, so the next few weeks shouldn’t be too terrible. After a very rough start for Pedro, he’s started to turn things around the last week. Milledge has picked things up, although he still lacks power. Tabata is doing as well as can be expected for a 21 year old and both McCutchen and Jones continue to do well. What’s really killed the team this year is the starting rotation. The team is getting killed by the 5th inning a lot and then they’re wearing down the bullpen. So clearly, pitching is a problem that needs to be addressed by the start of next season.

I think that JR actually made a good point last week. The Pirates are making a lot of mistakes due to youth and inexperience. If they can avoid that, then maybe they can have a decent second half.

Meanwhile, like I predicted before the season, the Reds and Cardinals are leading the division, although both the Brewers and Cubs aren’t doing as well as I thought they would and the Astros are doing better than I thought they would.

The big problem with the Cubs is that they’re old. Looking at their starting 8, only two are under 30 right now, Geovanny Soto and Starlin Castro. Besides Castro, they are an aging team that’s only going to get worse as they get older. And even worse, they aren’t going to be able to trade most of the guys on the team as a lot of them have huge contracts that last a long time. The Cubs went all in for 2007 and 2008 and now they’re reaping the consequences of not planning long term past 2008. Also Carlos Zambrano is being a bit of a jack ass, which doesn’t help anything. However they did get lucky with Carlos Silva, but that isn’t going to last forever either.

Overall, right now, I think the Pirates have a much brighter future than the Cubs do at this point.

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Do Panic!

Friday, May 7th, 2010

The Cubs have decided that with a three game sweep (OMGZ! That’s never happened before), that they need their best prospect, Starlin Castro, to come up to the majors now. Never mind that he was in AA, hasn’t played one game in AAA and is only 20 years old. This whole thing could be Jose Guillen all over again…

Clearly, Cubs GM Jim Hendry is worried about his job and has hit the panic button that Lou Pinella hit a few weeks ago when he moved Zambrano to the bullpen. The window for the Cubs to win anything with the current group of players is quickly closing and the Cubs are hoping to grasp on to one more winning season and moving Castro up is just desperation.

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Road Trip 2010.

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

So I’m thinking of going to Pittsburgh again. The thing is that I’ve noticed that the airlines are too freaking expensive and inconvenient. Here in Dubuque, for example, the ticket price for the days I wanna go are nearly $600. Even the ticket prices for the Cedar Rapids airport are nearly $500. So doing the math in my head tonight while milking, I’ve realized that driving there makes a lot more sense. First of all, we have the driving time. I might miss one full day of work more than originally planned, which would be a Thursday. I’d get there Thursday night after a full day of driving. Originally, I figured leave on a Friday morning and come back by Monday afternoon with the plane from Cedar Rapids. Sadly, however, hotels are fucking expensive. I remember when I could go to Pittsburgh on a plane and stay at a hotel for a few days and go to a few games for less than $500. That just isn’t possible anymore.

But mostly, I want to drive there for the car, because he’s always stuck in the garage and not doing anything and not going anywhere. He needs a nice long road trip. Just me and the car and that awesome iPod car stereo I bought last year. It’ll be fucking awesome.

Also the game tonight was fucking awesome. The Pirates beat the Cubs 11-1. The Cubs starter was out after just two innings and the Pirates Brian Burres really shut down the Cubs, which is cool considering he was a minor league free agent they signed.

Watching Judge Judy now. Judy asks the asshole defendant how much money he got from the plaintiff and he says $2080. In the audience behind him this woman opens her mouth and her eyes bulge out. It’s fucking funny.

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Stupid things going on…

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Why does anyone care if Rush Limbaugh owns an NFL team? I mean, should it matter what the team owner thinks about politics or government? No, of course not. Makes me wonder if that’s the reason the Tribune Company turned down Mark Cuban’s bid to own the Cubs. I suppose if you want to own a sports team in this country be politically correct and keep your mouth shut. Unless you want to own a MLS team, nobody gives a shit about soccer.

Secondly, I was watching the MST3K episode Soultaker and they’re in a hospital. In this specific hospital, the invisible soultakers take an elevator that goes to the 7th floor of a 6 story hospital. But usually the numbers at the top show it on the 6th floor. You just have to wonder if the soultakers are doing this, then they might be causing deaths because they’re hogging up the elevators.

Also, today was the 17 year anniversary of the worst day ever in the history of the world. Yes, much more annoying than October 30, 2005 or December 10, 2006 or August 12, 1994….

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Week 1 and the Pirates win!

Monday, September 14th, 2009

The Lions march on with another loss and they are now at 18 games in a row and are 1-24 since that mirage of a 6-2 start in 2007. Magic numbers, 8 more to tie the record and 9 more to get the record.

The Steelers won on Thursday. That’s very redundant. :-)

The Packers prove that the Bears really got nothing in Jay Cutler. Talk about pissing draft picks away on that guy. There’s still a lot of season left, but I have a feeling that the Bears fans won’t be raising any beers to Jay Cutler in the years to come.

The Vikings won, but the real story there wasn’t Brett Favre, it was Adrian Peterson. The Vikings are clearly the early favorite to win the NFC North, but I doubt Brett Favre will be as big of a help as the Vikings would like to think he will be. The Vikings already had a good team when Favre showed up. And the Browns lost. Brownies being Brownies.

And the big story from yesterday, the Bungles were up 7-6 against the Broncos with about 25 seconds left. The Broncos had the ball with 87 yards to get a TD, not much of a chance for the Broncos at that point. Kyle Orton, the QB the Broncos got from the Bears threw a pass that essentially hit a group of Bengals and a Bronco, bounced up in the air and looked like it’d fall incomplete when the Broncos Brandon Stockley caught it and ran untouched for the TD and the win. Bungles being Bungles. Damn shame the Ravens won.

Mr. September, Tony Romo, helped the Cowboys win. The 49er’s dropped the Super Bowl Cardinals. The Rams will go in to week 2 looking for their first points of the season. And the Astros announcers didn’t say who scored first yesterday, the Astros or Texans, as the Texans took until the 4th quarter to get their first TD.

As for the Pirates, who were 1-14 and had lost 13 straight road games, they pulled off a nice win yesterday. McCutchen got the first run in the first inning and later on Doumit came up big time with a solo shot that put the Pirates up 2-0. Maholm had a very nice game as well. John Russell continues to go “by the book” with Matt Capps and put him in save situations. I’m not sure who else he could go with, but Capps hasn’t been that strong this year with the closing job. Sure, he’s 24 for 28, but he’s lost some big games this year. So, Capps gave up a solo shot to Lance Berkman (big surprise). A few minutes later, he had one on, one out when Hunter Pence hit a ball right at Capps who started the double play. Lucky they got that as Hunter Pence was probably safe at 1st. Umpires being umpires. Oh well, on to Mannywood and the Dodgers. If the Pirates keep it up, they’ll give the Dodgers some breathing room against the Rockies.

The Cardinals dropped a series against the Braves. Not good, their magic number is 11 at this point, which is the lowest in baseball still. Hopefully, they’ll be able to take some games from the Marlins and the Cubs won’t get anywhere with the Brewers this week.

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Cucking Fubs.

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

It’s a 3-1 Cubs lead heading in to the 7th inning at Wrigley. It’s likely that this game is over. The Pirates have scored 4 runs in the last 33 innings. It’d be a miracle if they win this one.

However, one thing has made me happy about the Cubs. It’s the fact that they owe him $18 million each year for the next four with a no-trade clause. I hope that if Huntington’s minor league guys can turn this thing around that in four years, that Soriano looks terrible in 2013 while the Pirates are running circles around the Cubs…

More on Soriano I found at Cot’s Baseball Contracts website:

award bonuses: $0.25M for top vote-getter in All-Star balloting, $0.35M for World Series MVP, $0.25M for LCS MVP, $0.3M for MVP, $75,000 for Gold Glove

Wow, none of that’s gonna happen. Certainly not the Gold Glove.

Another Update 2:25 PM: Since I’m watching the game live, I’m actually watching the commercials. One of them is for Southwest Airlines and they’re talking about other airlines being mean to your bags, like charging extra for them. Then they say “Bags fly free”. No they don’t! This just means that they’ll add the cost of shipping the bags to everyone’s tickets, not just the bag taker.

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Brutal.

Friday, August 14th, 2009

It was a 14-0 Cubs lead after two innings. At that point I turned the game off and it ended up being a 17-2 win for the Cubs. To get over that brutal loss and with nothing else on TV, I put in the 79 World Series DVD. Some day, they’ll be back in the fall classic and I would bet that they get there before the Cubs do.

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Stupid WGN.

Friday, August 14th, 2009

The WGN announcer just said that this game is in HD. Sure it is, if you’re not watching it on DirecTV or Dish Network, it might be in HD. I really wish they’d stick to Comcast SportsNet Chicago instead of WGN so I could see it in HD. It would be nice to see the Pirates broadcast though….

Bob Brenley: They’re free swingers because they want to play on next year’s team. Ya know, I’m pretty sure that if they really want a spot on next year’s squad, they’d be more patient…

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