Well, my son is FINALLY on the board with a Cubs W after 3 losses this year. My record moved to 4-3 which means I'm 3-0 without him, but he finally got to sing "the song" today. Boy, there were a LOT of Cardinal fans, but every time they tried to get a chant going "Let's go Cards!" they were quickly overrun by Cubs fans so that was good. I will say they don't know how/when to exit the ball park though...it took forever to make it out from my upper deck box seats as they were just standing around blocking the paths to get out of there.
This has obviously been a pretty disappointing season as even after back-to-back Ws against the hated, rival Cardinals still leaves them 8 games under .500 and 9 1/2 games out of first in a pretty weak division. The problem is that the most expensive guys that we've counted on over the years are ALL having brutal years at the same time - D-Lee, Aramis, and Big Z. Soriano has been OK, but Fukudome and Dempster are in that list of underachievers as well.
Now what has been a big surprise, especially with Lou remaining at the helm, is the play of the youngsters. Lou has a definite reputation of not playing too many rookies, but he's been forced to go against his rep this season not only because of the make-up of his team this year, but also because the kids have proven one thing - THEY CAN PLAY! It started with Tyler Colvin setting the world on fire in Spring Training forcing his way on to the Opening Day roster; not as a starter but it was promised he would be playing somewhere (he can play anywhere in the outfield) at least a few times per week. It took a little while, but Colvin has now forced his way into the lineup virtually every day. Rookie left-hander James Russell also made the Opening Day roster as well and he's been pretty solid if not great. Then they brought up Starlin Castro in early May as well to try and spark the under performing team. That didn't work, but Castro has started virtually every game since his call-up. Andrew Cashner was brought up at the end of May and he is a fixture in the bullpen.
After hitting his second lead-off HR in as many days, Tyler Colvin is now 2nd on the team in HRs with 15 which leads all rookies including the much-hyped Jason Heyward (11). He's only 8 RBIs behind D-Lee in 145 fewer ABs.
Castro has been simply amazing. After a rough start defensively and a rough month of June offensively (.227 BA), he has proven himself as a real MLB SS. He has come back strong offensively with a .389 BA in July following a 3-for-4 day today with his 3rd HR, 2 more runs scored and 2 more RBI. Andrew Cashner is proving to be an asset out there in the pen. He entered the game in the 7th inning today with runners at the corners and nobody out with Pujols and Holliday coming up; that's confidence in your rookie! He got Pujols to fly out for a sac fly, Jon Jay was caught stealing 2nd for the second out and then ended the inning when Holliday grounded out to Aramis. I thought Lou should have taken him out to start the 8th (why not stick with the plan - Marshall in the 8th and Marmol in the 9th?), but he left him in. It looked like a bad move to start with back-to-back singles, but he got Brendan Ryan to hit a double-play ball to Theriot who ended up booting it for a run-scoring error (rough day for The-Riot with this error, another one that should have been called on a hard hit grounder by Holliday and following his lone hit, he was picked off) leaving runners at 1st and 2nd and nobody out. But pinch-hitter Randy Winn flied out to Byrd in CF and then Tyler Greene hit into an inning-ending DP. Cashner then turned the ball over to Carlos Marmol who pitched a near perfect 9th for his 18th save.
So that's 4 rookies playing significant roles on this team; add that to Randy Wells who played a significant role on last year's team and that's a pretty nice young core. Unfortunately, we have to wait for all of Hendry's mistakes to play out their contracts unless he can erase some of the mistakes sooner (the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned) before we can really get this team going in my opinion. Ironically, the one guy most linked to trade talk is Ted Lilly; I say ironically because that was one of Hendry's best moves. He was able to dump his second biggest mistake Milton Bradley (biggest mistake is still Soriano - 4 more years!) on the Mariners for one of their biggest mistakes Carlos Silva...but the question is, can he work that same magic to dump Fukudome, Aramis, and/or D-Lee? I'd be OK with him sticking around next year if he could get rid of two of these guys and actually get something back in return (yes, a bag of balls would be something). Otherwise, he remains #1 on my "hit list" of people that MUST go from this organization - NOBODY has spent more money for less playoff wins in the last 7 years - total Cubs payroll from 2004-2010 was $769,201,597 for an average of nearly $110 million per season and ZERO playoff wins.
The Cubs even got a few more guys down in the minors that are looking pretty good too. Josh Vitters at 3B (ba-bye Aramis!), Brett Jackson in CF, and as good as Castro has been, I read that Hak-Ju Lee is even better and could force Starlin to 2B. If Hoffpauir could ever figure out how to hit at the MLB level consistently, he could play 1B. There a couple other pitchers down on the farm too from what I've heard - Jay Jackson and Casey Coleman. What a difference to actually have some talent in the minors as opposed to having to overpay for free agents every year.
The last question is how much credit does Jim Hendry deserve for all this talent in the Minors. I obviously can't answer that for sure, but it would seem to me that the GM of the big club wouldn't really have all that much to do with the college draft or signing free agents in Latin America. According to Ken Rosenthal's article last week, "Tim Wilken, the team’s scouting director since December 2005, delivered virtually all of the Cubs’ young talent" and "Oneri Fleita, the team’s vice president of player personnel and head of international operations" seems to be handling Latin America. That's enough for me - Jim Hendry had little to do with the organization's current young talent. The problem according to Rosenthal is that dismissing Hendry would mean losing Wilken and Fleita as they're close with Hendry. To me, why not promote Wilken to be GM?
Anyway, there's one week left until the trade deadline...we'll see what happens in the next 7 days...
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