Minutes after I posted yesterday’s Dose, which was somewhat about how Marquis Grissom should give it up, I heard that Marquis had in fact, given it up. I was then tempted to write one encouraging Red Kerr and Jeff Joniak to give up their broadcasting gigs to open a Thai Fusion restaurant.

But I got distracted by the thought that maybe Marquis Grissom’s decision to retire wasn’t as selfless as we’ve been led to believe. It’s nice that he had a chat with Angel Pagan, a guy nobody’d ever heard of until…oh, sometime last week…, and a guy that will fill Marquis role. (That role is apparently to wake up sometime around the seventh inning and get ready to play Gary Woods to Matt Murton’s Sarge Matthews.)

But what if Marquis quit for a different reason? Not because he felt he couldn’t play, but because he didn’t want to play for the 2006 Cubs? Grissom quit on the day that is an even surer sign of spring than setting your clocks forward an hour. The day the Cubs put Kerry Wood and Mark Prior on the disabled list. Jim Hendry’s got it on a list that also includes things like “rototill the garden” and “get drunk and sleep through the final round of the Masters.”

What if Grissom looked around the clubhouse yesterday morning and thought to himself:

“Holy shit. This team has Jock Jones batting fifth? Their three best relief pitchers are guys who weigh 300 pounds, do magic tricks in their underwear in the clubhouse and…uh…Bob Howry? Michael Freakin’ Restovich might make this team, even if I don’t retire? Screw this. I’d rather go play for the St. Paul Saints.”

Hey, I’m not saying it happened. I’m just saying that stranger things have happened.

Because I’m obsessed with tHom Brennaman, in much the same way that a cat is obsessed with calculus, I was surprised at how much I’ve pondered one of his typically inane, and loudly shouted proclamations. I talked about it on Monday, but we’re going to revisit this. I watched part of Sunday’s Cubs-Diamondbacks game on FSN Arizona (or Southwest, or America’s Catbox, or whatever they call that one), and tHom said that he didn’t think he’d ever seen a team fall so fast from the precipice of a World Series to where the Cubs currently are. In three short years they’ve gone from America’s darlings to an afterthought.

I pointed out that three short years after the Diamondbacks won the World Series, they lost 111 games WITH Randy Johnson still on the team.

So screw, Brenneman. But what rankles me (yes, rankles) is that the Cubs are improved at most of the positions on the team from three years ago, and yet rightly are dismissed from any list of serious contenders.

Think about it.

In 2003, the infield was Hee Seop Choi/Eric Karros/Randall Simon, Grudz, Goat Boy Alex Gonazalez, and a mess of Mark Bellhorn/Lenny F. Harris/Ramon F. Martinez and eventually E-ramis.

In 2006, the Cubs are better at…every spot. Derrek Lee’s coming off an MVP caliber season, the three headed Neifhairalker should be able to outdo Grudz’s 2003 season, Ronny Cedeno’s better than Gonzalez, because really, anything with a pulse is, and E-ramis is better than he was then.

The catching situation is much better with Michael Barrett and Hank White than with Damian Miller and our old pal, Gabor.

The outfield? Moises Alou didn’t have a particularly good 2003, center field was interesting though, the Cubs got the best half season of Corey Patterson’s life, followed by the halcyon days of Trent Hubbard (very few, thankfully) then a career rejuvenating two months from Kenny Lofton, and Sammy Sosa was still good, though not the great player he’d been just a few months before.

Can Matt Murton put up numbers to match Moises’ 2003? It was .280, 22 HR, 91 RBI. I think he can come pretty close. Can Juan Pierre match the Patterson-Hubbard-Lofton troika? When you consider that Patterson’s half season was really just three superhot weeks and about 14 more weeks of his normal, substandard crap, what you’re really asking is if Pierre can duplicate, over a full season, the 56 game run Lofton gave the Cubs, which was a .381 on base average, a surprising .471 slugging, 39 runs scored and 12 stolen bases in 16 attempts. Well, that’s the plan, and the reason the Cubs traded three pitchers for one Juan. Jock v. Sammy? Sammy hit 40 homers, drove in 103 runs and put up a .911 OPS in 137 games. Jock can’t do that.

The 2003 bullpen was a joke. It was Joe Borowski and the revolving five stooges. We won’t know until they get run out there, but there seems to be a dramatic improvement out there.

The starting rotation is a question mark, though, of course. And it’s fair to say that the 2003 Cubs won with pitching more than anything else. But in 2003, Carlos wasn’t really Carlos yet, Wood had his best season and without his hellacious run down the stretch and through the first round of the playoffs, the Cubs go nowhere, and Mark Prior teased us with his first, and so far only, great season. Matt Clement was the best pitcher the Cubs had in the first half (except for that embarrassing “please get somebody up in the bullpen” pants crapping game at Wrigley against the Sox), and Shawn Estes was horrific.

Now, Carlos is better than we could have imagined, Greggie has returned to the fold, Prior and Wood are still around and the fifth spot is up for grabs among a batch of young pitchers (and Glendon Rusch) all better than Estes.

Of course, Wood and Prior are hurt, and Wade Miller, the big offseason starting pitching acquisition is also on the shelf, which complicates the issue. So there’s now way the Cubs 2006 pitching figures to match the 2003 group. That’s a big hit, there.

The 2003 bench, in hindsight, wasn’t that awful. Sure, Lenny Harris was a complete turd, but Karros came in handy, Simon was clutch down the stretch, even Troy O’Leary got a big hit once and a while (OK, maybe just the one against Arizona). The 2006 bench? Does John Mabry get you excited? Pagan? I suppose Neifi and whichever of Walker/Hairston doesn’t start is actually kind of solid, and of course Hank…

So what is all this babble about?

The 2006 Cubs have better players at first, second, short, third, catcher and centerfield, and leftfield could very well be a wash. They have a better bullpen, a comparable bench, and the same dopey manager.

And yet, they’re not better than the 2003 Cubs?

Well, they probably are, on paper. But what we have to come to grips with is that the 2003 Cubs “only” won 88 games. They won the Central in the one year since its inception that a record that poor would have won it. St. Louis has holes, the Astros do too, and yet you can’t sit here on March 28 and see any way that 88 wins would win the division this year.

It’s far more likely that the drop off between 2003 and 2006 isn’t that much. What it looks like is that 2003 was the year when a mediocre team had a shot to win the National League and the Marlins took advantage, and not the Cubs.

The Cubs have improved in many areas since then, and are still way behind the curve. What does that tell you? That the NL has become a juggernaut? Nope.

It tells us that the 2003 Cubs had a lot of room to improve, because they’ve done it, and they’re still not good enough. Maybe that’s the issue.

Maybe when Jim Hendry and Andy MacPhail have put teams together the past few years, they’ve been lulled into a false reality by the 2003 team.

Why pay for Carlos Beltran, Miguel Tejada or Vladimir Guerrero when you were five outs form a World Series with Corey Patterson-Kenny Lofton, Alex Gonzalez and an aging Sammy Sosa? It’s almost like they look back on that year and think, “Hey we don’t need to improve that much. We just need a little tweak here or there.

So tHom Brennaman’s not right (again.) The Cubs haven’t fallen. They just haven’t shown any urgent need to get much better.

Great?

Sean Marshall probably won’t be the Cubs’ fifth starter.  Looks like he might be the fourth.  Wait, is this good?

Hendry doesn’t want to pay Lucky Pierre what the Dodgers are paying Furcal.  This comes as no surprise, he wouldn’t even pay Furcal that much.

The Bears open the preseason in San Francisco and will pay the Chargers at home on CBS.  Whee!

Moron on Sean Marshall.

Kiley also says the Cubs will miss Grissom.  Much like you miss a rash.

Mariotti puts down the doughnut to urinate all over Indiana and Kelvin Sampson.  What should irk both fans of OU and IU is that Sampson’s primary motivations for leaving Norman are a) to get away from the NCAA posse and b) because he’s admittedly regretted not taking the Illinois job that went to our boy Bruce Weber.
Scotty Fabulous is hurt again.

The Wizard says that Jim Hendry doesn’t like it when people call him a liar.  I’m sure he hates it when they call him fatso, too.

There must be a typo in Bruce Miles’ game recap at the end here.  He says Mike Wuertz pitched a 1-2-3 ninth.  Sure he did.  Whatever.

ESPN with a handy list of the four preseason games that Joe Theismann will be announcing, so you can get your mute button properly limbered up.

Boston.com with an excellent frame by frame breakdown of the Julian Tavarez-Joey Gathright “mugging.”  Watch as our old pal Hee Seop comes running in at the end shouting, “Who wants to karaoke with Choi?”

The world’s greatest newspaper with concerns that Bigfoot may be getting too chubby.