They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue!  That's the Chicago way!This is the kind of season that drives people completely insane. Honestly, if the Cubs intend to make every month as torturous as they have April…we’re not going to make it. I’m going to be wearing a coat that belts up the back by June at this rate. When you go back to last September and then add in this April, it’s a wonder the Cubs have any fans left at all. I don’t mean that I’m surprised Cubs fans haven’t given up the team. I mean I’m surprised we all haven’t taken big handfulls of sleeping pills and washed them down with whatever’s left of that bottle of vodka we all almost forgot we had stashed in the freezer.

Last night, of course, was no exception. One night after I found myself on the ledge after watching Dusty somehow bungle a ninth inning in which he had a seven run lead, the Cubs were at it again.

Carlos Zambrano started out the game with absolutely no control. That has to be fun for the batter. You’ve got a 265 pound Venezuelan stomping around on the mound, swearing at himself, yelling at his glove and then taking a baseball and throwing it as hard as he can in your general direction.

At one point during the mess of the first two innings, Carlos faked a throw to second base, and for a moment it looked like he was going to just run, with the ball, as fast as he could at the runner, Javier Valentin. I immediately imagined, what I figured was the inevitable sight of Carlos chasing Valentin through the outfield and towards the ivy, holding the ball up in the air over his head. I know that if Carlos ran at me, I’d let him have second base. And my car keys.

In the second inning, with the Reds thinking they were comfortably ahead 5-1, Eric Milton summoned up the sack to hit Neifi Perez in the ribs. You knew it was on purpose, because Neifi has destroyed the Reds this year. No warnings were given, and Neifi strolled down to first base, where, as always, the Cubs stranded him.

After two horrific innings, Carlos settled in on the mound. He zipped through the third and fourth and got the first two outs in the fifth. Then, he got a pitch a little bit up to Adam Dunn who hit a flyball that looked like if it was long enough to reach the stands (and that seemed doubtful) that it would end up foul. But it landed in the basket in right.

Comcast decided to show us three replays of it, doing what they do best–missing actual game action. So we heard Len Kasper say that Zambrano had plunked Austin Kearns with the next pitch. We hadn’t seen it. Apparently, the guy who directs the Cubs’ games for Comcast must be the same guy who does their Bulls’ coverage because the stupid f@#$er misses lots of game action in those games, too.

We finally got a replay of it, and yeah, Carlos drilled Kearns on purpose. It was the most accurate pitch he threw all night. And, considering in five starts he’s now been tossed from two of them, Carlos is going to get suspended. If he were Roy Oswalt, he wouldn’t, but he’s Carlos and you just know it’s going to happen. It’ll be one of those dumb five-game suspensions they give starting pitchers where you don’t even miss a start, you just have to take an extra day off between starts, but still. Mark my words, Carlos is getting a vacation.

However, I have a fool-proof way that the Cubs can appeal the inevitable suspension and get it not only reduced but eliminated.

First, they start with this. They say that it’s obvious that Milton hit Neifi on purpose and no warnings were issued, so that when Carlos hit Kearns, that’s when both benches should have been warned.

When that fails, then they break out a video tape of Chad Fox’s ninth inning from Monday and they explain that Carlos knew he was at 105 pitches in less than five innings and he feared Dusty would leave him out there until his arm fell off, so he intentionally got ejected to save his career.

Man, I should charge for advice like this.

Later on in the game, I thought that D’Angelo Jiminez was going to cost the Reds a victory. In the seventh, the Cubs were clinging to an 8-7 lead and Dusty brought Mike Wuertz in. You can’t blame him for that because the game was on the line, Wuertz has been your best reliever and the situation called for him. But Wuertz couldn’t throw a strike. And the Reds scored two runs. Then, you can blame Dusty, because he’s got four lefties in the bullpen and Dave Miley sent up lefty Jacob Cruz to pinch bat. I’d say pinch hit, but Jacob Cruz can’t hit.

So Dusty goes to Mike Remlinger. Guh. We’ve seen this movie. Suddenly, Jacob is a pinch hitter because Remlinger can’t get lefties out. Cruz, predictably singles in a run.

Then, D’Angelo Jiminez comes up. He’s a switch hitter. For some unknown reason, he turns around to bat RIGHT-HANDED against Remlinger. It’s like Christmas for Mike, who eats righties for lunch.

Lefthanded batters are hitting .417 against Remlinger with a .750 slugging percentage.
Righthanded batters are hitting .067 with an .067 slugging percentage.

So why did Jiminez bat righthanded? They don’t have stats in Cincinnati? He hit a weak liner to Hairston to end the inning.

But, despite a frantic eighth inning rally started by Neifi and Hank White, the Cubs didn’t score and though they got one run in the ninth, it was too little, too late.

Speaking of statistics, it’s now completely obvious that baseball does not have a stat adequate to measuring Hank White’s excellence. His current batting average is a ludicrous .067. That’s just not accurate. Too many things can happen to rob Hank of the credit he’s so richly due. Why just last night he was jobbed by the Wrigley Field official scorer when he reached on a Joe Randa error, though clearly, Hank’s world-class speed would have made getting an out on that play impossible. Earlier in the year, Hank was robbed of at least two hits on spectacular defensive plays. On one, memorable play, Brewers’ left fielder Carlos Lee had to field a pop-up without sunglasses. Now that’s a tough play.

So, we set our Desipio Sabermetric Research team to work and they have devised a new stat. It’s called the HWEqBA. Pronounced “hweck-bah”, it stands for the Hank White Equivalent Batting Average. It takes into effect all those things that can artificially cause a players’ batting average to be inaccurate. Things like bad scoring calls, incredible, superhuman defensive plays, foul balls that just barely miss being extra base hits, really good swings that come up just shy of actually hitting the ball. Stuff like that.

After analyzing every Hank White at bat this year (all 15 of them), we have calculated Hank White’s HWEqBA to be .600 (9-15). Personally, I think it’s on the conservative side, but hey, sometimes science isn’t pretty.

Conversely, the HWEqBA can show when a players’ batting average is artifically high. You know, if a guy’s getting a bunch of Judy hits just over the infield, or getting gift hits from a hometown scorer. We used the same method to calculate Albert Pujols’ batting average and incredibly, his average drops from .332 (23-74) to .139 (11-79). As you can see, we found that five of his six walks were the result of bad calls, including one of his intentional walks, where those pitches seemed to have a lot of the outside part of the plate. We also found that one of Pujols’ homers looked like it was foul, especially if you closed one eye and leaned way over to your right. Clearly foul.