No Cub o’ Coffee this week. So instead, you get this:
This week marks one of my favorite parts of the sports year. On Tuesday, the Cubs’ pitchers and catchers (and Tyler Chatwood) will report to camp at Spare Toilet Repair Parts Park in sunny Mesa, Arizona and they’re going to play catch!
It’s majestic. You have no idea. First, they’ll play catch from about 100 feet and then back up and try it from progressively greater distances.
Then, at some point the catchers will crouch and the pitchers will throw to them from 60 feet while standing on flat ground. Once they master that, the pitchers will get up on mounds and do it. Mind you, all of this is so complicated that they need to do this for five days before the other players get there.
“Dave, you’re the manager now, you don’t need to wear the gear.”
“Oh, I was just playing catch with Chatwood.”
I wonder if there’s a text alert system or a phone tree for the position players that David Ross has to activate if things don’t go as planned. “Guys, maybe hold off until next Wednesday. We’re getting closer, but Willson’s still pretty exhausted from chasing down Dillon Maples’ pitches.”
But spring training really is a great time. For those of us who foolishly choose to live in the north it’s a reminder that winter is inexorably crawling to a close. For those of us who choose to live and die from April to, hopefully, October following our favorite baseball team it is our notice that it’s almost time saddle up and start the ride again.
I don’t think I’m alone in being less enthused this year than in recent years. The Cubs, it seems, have been actively trying to lull us into a coma by standing pat with a roster that spent six months last season proving to everyone that it wasn’t good enough.
But, it’s also foolish to write off a team that can choose to bat Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez and Contreras back-to-back-to-back-to-back.
If you’re a Cubs fan old enough for kindergarten, this season marks a throwback. We’re back to something more like what we’d always been used to before the 2015 team started a run that blew our feeble minds. Before that, we spent every spring training trying to convince ourselves that there was enough good on the roster to overcome all of the not-good-enough.
Sometimes, it was. Most of the time, it wasn’t.
But if you look around the rest of the National League Central you are met with heaping mounds of mediocrity. Yes, two teams from the division made the postseason last year, but one of them was only in the playoffs for two hours and 55 minutes, and the other made the NLCS but forgot to bring their third base coach home because nobody ever got close enough to talk to him.
The Cubs are counting on better health than last season, that their magic pitching camera thingy can turn a bushel basket full of nameless relievers into the next Rowan Wick (dare to dream) and that Yu Darvish and Kyle Hendricks can make 52 starts a piece.
What those of us who are going to be watching them play are hoping for is that the Cubs’ fascination with doing everything just like the Red Sox skips a step. Fixing up a beloved but creaky ballpark was good, breaking a ridiculously long championship drought was great, buying up every parcel of land around the ballpark and somehow still crying poor is not so great, but the trading your best player for pennies on the dollar should be avoided.
The Red Sox trade of Mookie Betts to the Dodgers includes a lesson the Cubs are sure to learn from, and it’s not the one you’d want. The lesson you’d like for them to learn is that it’s impossible to get an adequate return when you trade your best player in at least a generation in their prime. It’s hard not to get the impression that the lesson Cubs’ ownership will take from it is “who cares what the return is if you can make a team take a really bad contract in the deal, too?”
“If some team will assume a bunch of David Price’s contract in a trade, who’s to say we can’t put Jason Heyward on the plane with Kris Bryant?”
The Cubs plan to get Craig Kimbrel back to his previous dominating form appears to be to let Pedro Strop sign with the Reds so that Kimbrel can start wearing number 46 again.
Maybe it’ll be like Michael Jordan returning to 23 from 45 back in 1995?
Then again, the Bulls didn’t have to get rid of Ed Nealy to give it back to him.
The Cubs’ website ran a story last week about the “intense showdown” brewing in spring training for the second base job. David Bote, Daniel Descalso, Robel Garcia, Nico Hoerner and Ian Happ will all be vying for playing time. I guess that’s more flattering than what it really is shaping up to be. A pillow fight.
Hoerner has never played at AAA, and only made his big league debut because of a late season rash of injuries. The Cubs seem to be leaning toward starting Hoerner in Des Moines, and if they do I’m sure it will purely with his long term development in mind. The team is surely chastened by the Bryant service time grievance ordeal and will no longer indulge in service time shenanigans.
Then again, some time at at Iowa might not be a bad idea. Hoerner’s clearly a quick study. Even though he played in just 20 big league games last year he managed to pull off an accelerated version of the big league development path of all of the Cubs’ non-Bryant recent top prospects. Start fast, then slump.
In his first nine games, Hoerner hit .351/.400/.568 with three walks, two homers and 11 RBI. In his final 11 games he hit .220/.214/.317 with no walks, a homer and six RBI.
The Cubs appear to still be looking for another lefthanded alternative at second to throw into this vaunted mix. They were connected to Scooter Gennett a couple of weeks ago and Glenbrook North’s Jason Kipnis this past week. Kipnis hit what was apparently a terrifying foul ball in the ninth inning of game seven of the World Series. I don’t remember worrying about it at the time, but maybe it was hard for me to see it from the fetal position.
He has had three pretty rough seasons since that World Series. Last year was the “best” of the three, but even in a platoon he’d have limited value. He hit only .244/.311/.446 against righthanders last year.
Granted, that looks like Rodgers Hornsby compared to Descalso’s splits against righties in 2019 (.173/.275/.253).
Fine, I guess Kipnis would be worth a flyer. Just make sure he brings his pillow.