What the hell is that?Another long baseball season, full of excitement and promise and good times is right around the corner.  Not for the Cubs, but for some teams.  For the Cubs, 2013 is year two of the “Hey we haven’t won in a long time, but at least now we’re trying to lose” era.  How long this era will last is unknown, the plan says two more years.  What we do know is that Cubs’ plans are always for shit.

The 2012 Cubs were awful, and hard to watch, and right-minded Cubs fans were cool with it.  We will be again this year.  We waited a long time for the Cubs to hire someone with the sense, and balls, to stop trying to patch the sinking ship, and instead pull it out of the water for a while and rebuild the damn thing.

That is what the Cubs are doing.  We all know that they hired three pretty good guys to do it in Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer and Jason McLeod.  Well, two, at least. We’re not sure what Jed really does.  His job appears to be to look serious, wear snappy team-branded polo shirts and be short.  He’s terrific at all three.

The hard part, of course, is that these guys could do everything right the next few years: make shrewd trades, draft well, find impact international players and spend wisely on free agents, and it might not work at all.  That’s baseball.

However, if you don’t do those things you have no real shot.  So, we sit back, watch the process slowly–very, very slowly–work itself through and we remember that bad baseball is still better than a lot of things.  It’s far better than herpes for instance.

Or so we’re told:

braun-flareup

Last year, the Cubs roster was in constant flux.  They used 53 players to lose 101 games.  Pretty sure they can do that again with half as many guys, but the fact remains half the guys on this opening day roster aren’t going to make it to the end of the season, and I don’t mean that in a drunken Cardinals’ bullpen pitcher kind of way.  Chances are these guys will still be alive (though, I’m not entirely sure Dioner Navarro is alive now), but someplace else.  On contenders, working at Walgreens or in a Mexican prison.  The options are endless.

But since we basically know what the opening day roster will look like.  It’s probably time to do what we do best.

Make fun of them.

On the shelf

The season will start with three Cubs pitchers on the DL.  Two screw up their plans for this season, the other was part of their plan.

When he left his July 21 start in St. Louis with a sore arm, Matt Garza was on the verge of being traded, probably to the Rangers for third base prospect Mike Olt and others. At the time it looked like a minor inconvenience.  Garza didn’t thing it was a big deal, the Cubs thought it was just a cramp in his triceps.  They hoped he could make his next start, then trade him.  But he didn’t.  Then they hoped they could get him back on the mound in August and maybe sneak him through waivers.  That didn’t happen, either.  Then his cramp, which had been upgraded to tendonitis, was labelled a “stress reaction” in his elbow.

Then the emphasis shifted to getting him healthy for this year, and trying to get a nice return for him in the final year of deal.  And, of course, he’s hurt himself again.  This time it’s not an arm injury, it’s a strain of his lat, and it’s not even on his pitching arm side.  Still, he’ll start the season on the DL, hopefully rejoin the team in May and…oh, hell at this point who knows what they could get for him.

He’s pitched well in both of his seasons with the Cubs, and he’s still young, at 29.  Other than a complete inability to throw a fielded grounder to first base, he’s been everything they thought they were getting.  Maybe they should be the ones to take advantage of his recent spate of injuries and re-sign him at something of a discount?

That might happen.  But it’s certainly not the plan.

After Garza was shut down, and the Ryan Dempster hostage crisis was concluded, and Paul Maholm’s fractured skull was traded to Atlanta, the Cubs starting pitching was a joke.  You know it was bad when Justin Germano starts were upgrades over the guys pitching before hand.  So the Cubs tried to rebuild some depth this offseason.  One of the guys they signed was Scott Baker an actual talented pitcher with a proven track record.  Of course, he’s also fresh off a bout with the Tommy John Disease, and while recovery is usually complete, his isn’t…yet.  He’s been shut down for a month due to problems with a muscle near his elbow, and our buddy Gordon Wittenmyer said Baker will miss “half the season.”  Gordo did not say which half.

The third guy who is going to open the year on the DL, was supposed to do that.  When the Dempster trade to the Braves don’t got did, the Cubs did a different deal with Atlanta and traded Maholm for a package that included Arodys Vizcaino.  Vizcaino is a big time prospect, but one who also has Tommy John Disease.  He’ll start his season, whenever that is, in Iowa, and when he makes it to Wrigley it will likely be as a reliever, though his future role will be determined later.

Pitchers

In case you didn’t notice (and nobody did), Michael Bowden, he of the 87 MPH fastball and oddly shaped head, was lights out last year after he came back from Iowa on August 14.  Seriously.  Check this out.  In 27 innings from that date to the end of the season, Bowden gave up only 16 hits, struck out 21, opponents hit only .174 off of him and he had a .133 batting average.  I’m not making this up.  I don’t know how the hell he did it, he just did.  This spring, he’s been really good, too.  He has a 1.74 ERA in 10 innings.  So that’s nice.  Maybe Dale Sveum won’t pitch Shawn Camp every day this year.

Camp pitched in 80 games last year, all of them losses.  (Not really.)  Until the closer woke up late in the year, Camp was the best thing the Cubs had in that bullpen.  He’s 37, and had only one other good season in his career, so chances are we won’t see that level of competence from him again.  We might see his arm fly off his body into the stands though, and that’s always fun.

Scott Baker wasn’t the only Scott the Cubs signed this offseason.  Scott Feldman will open the season in the rotation.  Feldman, was the unsung hero of the 2009 World Series bound Rangers, going 17-8 in 31 starts.  He split time between the bullpen and the rotation in 2010, injuries limited him to 11 games in 2011 and last year he made 21 starts with piss-poor results (6-11, ERA over five).  He’s 6’7, but that’s still three inches short of a full Volstad, so that’s a good thing.  The Cubs wanted Feldman to eat innings.  Judging from his spring performance (31 baserunners and a 10.34 ERA in 15 innings) those innings, and the bases, will come fully loaded.

A lot was made when the Cubs traded Carlos Marmol to the Angels last year, only to kill the deal and keep him when either the medical reports or financials (likely both) didn’t look right on Dan Haren, and then the Cubs signed Japanese League closer Kyuji Fujikawa.  The Cubs are obviously intent on trading Marmol somewhere this season (the last one on the last Cubs contract he’ll ever get) and they’re going to turn the closer duties over to Fujikawa when that happens.  Fuji has been solid this spring, and his Japanese numbers are impressive, but he’s 32, and the Japanese League sucks.  Come on, admit it, it pretty much does.  Tuffy Fucking Rhodes is an all-time great there.  So while trading Marmol is the right thing, value-wise, let’s hope Fuji is more 2004 Shingo Takatsu and less 2005 Shingo Takatsu.

The big free agent the Cubs signed his year was Edwin Jackson.  Nobody really knows why, well, other than because Anibal Sanchez turned them down.  Jackson’s talented, but there’s a reason he’s been on eight teams in ten years.  He’s erratic.  Some starts he’s awesome, some he’s awful, sometimes he’s both at the same time.  (His eight walk, 149 pitch no-hitter for the D’bags in 2010, is a pretty good example.)  The Cubs need somebody to make starts.  Edwin does that better than anybody.  He’s averaged 32 starts per season and has never sniffed the DL.  But on a good team, he’s a fourth starter.  On the Cubs…if Garza were healthy…he’d be the third starter.  Just seems like a lot of money for a guy you would be tempted to skip in a five game playoff series.

Marmol’s 2012 season was pretty fascinating.  As erratic as he is, he’s one of my favorite Cubs of recent vintage, because a) when he’s on he’s unhittable, b) when he’s off he’s unwatchable and c) he’s a very level-headed, cool guy.  He lost his closer job in the first half, but the Cubs didn’t really have anybody to give it to, so he got it back, with one proviso.  Pitching coach Chris Bosio told him he could not, for any reason, shake off his catcher.  The idea was to force him to throw more fastballs.  Because his slider can embarrass hitters when thrown correctly, he fell in love with it and threw it all the time (plus, as bad as his control can be, he actually has better control of the slider than the fastball.)  The result was too many sliders, and as a result a loss of velocity on his fastball.

In the second half, when he was told what to throw, his numbers went from awful to filthy.  His ERA fell from 5.61 to 1.52.  He allowed the same amount of hits (20) in 29 second half innings as he did in 25 first half innings, his walks dropped from 28 to 17, and his strikeouts went from 33 up to 39.  He was good again.  Teams get desperate for closers as the season goes on.  Some teams’ closers will get hurt or flame out, and the Cubs are counting on Marmol looking more like second half Carlos than first half Carlos (both have huge ears) and cashing in for a prospect or (gasp) two.  Good luck with that.

The Cubs have another recipient of the David Patton Career Memorial Award, better known as a Rule 5 bullpen arm.  This one is Hector Rondon and unlike our albino friend of a few years ago, this might actually work.  Rondon is the same age, 25, that Patton was in 2009 when Jim Hendry tried to hide him in the bullpen of a team that was allegedly going to contend.  But Rondon has actually pitched in both AA and AAA before, where Patton had never pitched above high-A.  Rondon was a highly thought of prospect until he caught the Tommy John Disease in 2010, which ruined that season and 2011, and he had some issues last year that limited him to four games.  But he’s looked good in spring training (then again, Patton was unhittable in the spring of 2009 and look how that turned out.)  Rondon eventually projects as a starter, but he’ll spend this year in the bullpen trying to resuscitate his career.  This is a pretty good, low-risk move for the Cubs.  If it pans out the Cubs get a good arm for $50K.  If not, well, the world needs ditch diggers, too.

Two weekends ago I was at a charity event in northern Michigan and the silent auction was full of the same kind of stuff you see at every event like it.  But then my wife started waving me over to a table.  She was pretty excited.  She pointed and said, “Bid on this.  It’s a Cub!”  Sure enough, there was an autographed 8 x 10 glossy of James Russell.  Why?  What was his connection to the event or even that part of the country?  The bid started at $15 and you had to increase the bid by at least two bucks to bid on it.  So I wrote down $17 prayed someone else would bid on a framed glossy of a perfectly serviceable lefty middle reliever.  An hour later the silent auction ended.  $17.  I paid 17 times more for his autograph than you would have to pay to buy him in any NL only fantasy draft.

There’s a lot of chatter about Jeff Samardzija telling Dale two years ago that he was serious about becoming a starting pitcher and that he had dumped his girlfriend so he could focus on it.  Samardzija says he was kidding, or that he just summed up a bunch of choices he made to show his dedication into that one statement.  Who gives a shit? The story was told in an excellent piece on Theo Epstein by Joe Posnanski, and for some reason there’s a video interview between Theo and Illini men’s basketball coach John Groce at the top of the page.

What is impressive is that Samardzija really has turned himself into a good starting pitcher.  Two years ago he was the Cubs best reliever posting a sub three ERA in 75 games and last year he made 28 starts with a 103 ERA plus before he hit the 175 innings limit the Cubs apparently put on him.  It was never a case of how good he was, but of whether or not he’d ever learn to command his pitches.  Looks like he has.  He just turned 28, has low miles on his arm and should be a good starter for a while.

Thanks to the injuries to Baker and Garza, swingman Carlos Villanueva and lefty hillbilly Travis Wood will be in the fourth and fifth spots in the rotation to start the season.  Carlos is perfectly mediocre and serviceable but a team would rather have him in the bullpen than starting every fifth day.  His career ERA is more than a run lower (3.76) as a reliever than as a starter (4.80).

Wood was pretty good in the first half of the season, going 4-3 with a 3.05 ERA, but awful in the second half (2-10, 5.07).  To be more exact, Travis was awful in July, when he posted an ERA of 7.36 in five starts.  In a ten day stretch he made three starts in July, one against the Marlins and two against St. Louis and gave up 22 runs in 15 and two thirds innings.  Ouch.  But in his next 13 starts to finish the season he had only one bad one (six earned runs in Cincinnati) and a 3.54 ERA.  So let’s just avoid July this year, eh Travis?

The last spot

Then there are three guys pitching for one last spot in the bullpen.  Deluded Japanese lefty Hisanori Takahashi, former Yankee Cory Wade, and former Indians and Rockies righty Zach Putnam.  Takahashi insists he’s a starting pitcher, and if he makes the bullpen it’ll be as the long man.  Given his age (he’s in his mid 60s) and the fact that he’s a lefty without a pitch he can use to routinely retire lefty batters, I’d skip him, though he’s the front runner for the job.  Wade has pitched four big league seasons, two each for the Dodgers and Yankees.  In his first year each place he was excellent.  In his second?  No.  He played a crucial role in the building of this Cubs team.  On the final day of the 2011 season, Wade is the one who gave up the pinch hit homer to Dan Johnson in Tampa with two outs in the bottom of the ninth that eventually led to the Red Sox elimination from the playoffs and Theo Epstein’s departure from the Red Sox.  So thanks, Cory!  the last one in the mix is Putnam.  Putnam is the most age appropriate for the bullpen, given that he’s still somewhat of a prospect at 24.

Sveum seems to like Putnam the best of the three.  That might be enough to make him stick.

When you look at this pitching staff it’s pretty thin, and it’s a lot better than last year’s.  Wow.  Last year’s was pretty awful, eh?

Next time: A look at the offensive players.  And, I mean offensive.