Posts tagged Alfonso Soriano at FanHouse

Cubs manager Lou Piniella has made no secret of the fact he would like another left-handed bat to put in the middle of his lineup next season, and that is no doubt the reason that the Cubs are currently pursuing Milton Bradley pretty heavily. Still, Bradley has a few teams who are interested in signing him so it's no guarantee that the Cubs will be that team. So maybe that's why they went ahead and signed former Tampa Bay Ray -- under Lou Piniella -- and Kansas City Royal Joey Gathright to a one-year deal on Tuesday.

"We're thrilled to have him," Jim Hendry said. "We've been really looking for a guy like this for quite some time. He's arguably one of the fastest guys in the game, if not the fastest. Our people think he can be even better in the National League because of double-switches and the other roles.''

Gathright is incredibly fast, but if the Cubs are planning on using him as anything other than a defensive replacement in the outfield, pinch-runner, or car-hurdler, they're going to be sorry. Even though Gathright is one of the fastest guys in baseball, and has stolen 78 bases in his career, he's still been thrown out 27 times. Someone with his speed should have a much higher success rate than 74 percent.

He's also a career .263 hitter with an OBP of .328, so he can't be considered a replacement for Alfonso Soriano at the top of the order either. Still, Gathright's skills probably are better suited for the National League rather than the American League, where he spent his entire career, and considering he'll only cost the Cubs $800,000 for a year it's a low risk/high reward type of signing.

Footprints in the Snow is FanHouse's look at the paths to be forged by MLB teams this winter as they look ahead to 2009.

This past season the Cubs treated their fans to the best season of their lifetime ... only to rip their hearts out of their chests with a pathetic playoff showing, getting swept by the Dodgers without so much as a whimper of life.

The task in front of Jim Hendry is to evaluate if anything needs to be done to a team that was the class of the NL in the regular season with 97 wins. Do you just assume the team hit a rough patch when it mattered, or is the team only built for the regular season?

It's a tough task, for certain, but the fact of the matter is that the window of opportunity with the Derrek Lee/Alfonso Soriano/Aramis Ramirez offensive nucleus is limited. It's not totally closed yet, but it is closing. In order to capitalize on the excitement they started to develop in Wrigleyville the past two seasons, it would behoove Hendry to push all his chips to the center of the table. Making a trade like he did yesterday shows me that's what he fully intends to do. What good is a prospect who won't be ready for another two years to a team that wants to win it all in 2009?

Is it just me, or are we spending way too much time talking about the Cubs on this blog lately? We're one day away from the start of the NLCS, and instead of talking about the Phililes and Dodgers, we're reporting on every little thing the Cubs do. This needs to change, and I promise you FanHouse readers I'm going to stop writing about the Cubs for the rest of the week. Right after this post.

You see, apparently after the Cubs were finished getting swept by the Dodgers on Saturday night, somebody on the team did some damage in the visitor's dugout. Now the Chicago Sun-Times' Rick Telander is on a one man mission to find the perpetrator(s).

Moments after the final out (Alfonso Soriano fanning on three pitches), one of the Cubs -- maybe two, maybe all 25 -- took something large and hard, like a shoe or bat or sledgehammer, and busted a fair-sized water pipe at the back of the visitors' dugout.

Water gushed out, and very quickly the floor of the area leading into the locker room was flooded.

Blah, blah, blah, poor sportsmanship, blah blah blah. Listen, is this really that hard to figure out? It was Carlos Zambrano, okay? I don't know if you've noticed, but he's a somewhat angry individual. We know it's Z because it obviously can't be a member of the Cubs offense.

As they showed us throughout the Dodgers series, they're fine when it comes to swinging the bat, but making contact is another story.

It's a few days after the tragedy of a baseball team not winning the World Series, and Chicago's media is still searching for explanations to this Great and Sudden Collapse. The latest? The crumb-bums should have traded for Brian Roberts!

In the bitter end, the difference might have been Brian Roberts, after all. Maybe he wouldn't have overcome the walks in Game 1 or the errors in Game 2, but the Cubs' woeful lack of playoff hitting comes down to two big deficiencies:

Notice, if you will, the contradiction in the first two sentences. The difference was Brian Roberts! Or maybe not, really, but still!

The reasons given here are: The Cubs have no "true" leadoff hitter (yes, they do: Ryan Theriot, though it doesn't matter because Alfonso Soriano is a terrible, inflexible meanie), and the Cubs need more "respected" left-handed hitters. Maybe. Or maybe the lineup that was arguably the best in all of baseball in the regular season had a bad three games, had them just as easily as they could have had three really good ones. Maybe wishcasting for Brian Roberts sort of misses the simple nature of the playoffs: The Cubs were really good, and then ... weren't. Just like the Angels.

Nahhhhh: It was definitely Brian Roberts.

A quick word about the lack of Dugouts lately ... as it turns out, we write about baseball so much that we love baseball, and when the playoffs start we're rarin' to go with Dugout after Dugout of wacky dialects and references to Watchmen. Then, two weeks pass we haven't done anything because we've been sitting around watching the playoffs.

I personally thought the Cubs were going to go all the way, because I have brain damage and never learned basic reasoning. Four out of ten Fanhouse writers picked the Cubs to go all the way, because when we aren't running a sports blog we're picking our nose and eating paste.

Don't get discouraged, Cubs fans! They've still got a chance! Tonight's Dugout is after the jump!

Ever since the Cubs were swept out of the NLDS by the Dodgers on Saturday night, I've heard quite a few different excuses for their postseason collapse. First and foremost, there's the idiotic ones about the team being cursed, which we all know is a bunch of crap. Then there are some who just think that the team collapsed under the weight of a 100-year title drought.

While some of the excuses are viable, and others are just plain dumb, there's one explanation for the Cubs failures that rules the roost of ridiculousness, and it comes from left fielder Alfonso Soriano.

"Yeah, it's tough," he said. "We tried, but it just didn't happen. We played all year like a very good team and we expected a little bit more, but it didn't happen.

"We're a very good team for [162] games, but we don't do nothing after that. That's the difference. We're not put together for [a short series]."

That could honestly be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard, and keep in mind that I have to listen to myself talk 24 hours a day.

The Cubs aren't built for a short series? That's funny, because I always thought that the most important part of a team in a short series was their starting rotation, and last I checked the Cubs had a pretty good one. Ryan Dempster, Carlos Zambrano, Rich Harden, and Ted Lilly seem like a rotation that's built for a short series to me.

I mean, isn't the entire regular season just a whole lot of short series packaged together? They did pretty well there, didn't they?

In 2006 and 2007, the National League Central was the running joke of the National League. The Cardinals won the division with 83 wins in 2006, one of the lowest win totals ever for a division champ, and the Cubs followed up last year with just 85 wins, prompting people to dub the division, "The Comedy Central." The division rebounded this year, with the Cubs rolling to 97 wins, the most in the NL and the Brewers claiming the wild card with 90. Now both teams are on the verge of a playoff sweep. What happened?

The Cubs' problem is fairly obvious: the Dodgers are much better than an 84-win team. They played much of the season without Manny Ramirez and Rafael Furcal, two key parts of their NLDS lineup. Their lineup is a very dangerous one with those two in it. The Cubs have also failed to score. Five runs in two games are not going to get the job done in the playoffs. Alfonso Soriano and Geovany Soto have been terrible in the series. The Cubs' offense this year has been marked by a lineup full of guys that have been good but not great. Remove two bats from that mix and you've got a problem.

The Brewers' problem is easier to recognize. Down the stretch they buckled because their pitching staff fell apart and some hitters slumped at the same time. They rebounded behind the hitters clicking, an easy schedule, and CC Sabathia. The Phillies are much better than the Pirates or the understaffed Cub team they beat to get into the playoffs and Sabathia looks like he's finally run out of gas. That's a recipe for disaster in Milwaukee.

Two good opponents, some mis-timed slumps, and a pitcher with 260 innings. That's why the best regular season division in the National League is about to be swept out of the playoffs in one round.

At last, the playoffs are upon us. After a grueling 162-game regular season, it's time to finish with a flurry. There's a tripleheader on tap starting this afternoon, but until the games get underway, how about we here at FanHouse whet your appetite with some prediction-flavored hors d'oeuvres.

Our crack blogging team made their picks last night all the way through the World Series. After the jump you can see all the predictions, but before you check them all out, a few demographic notes:

--Despite the American League's clear dominance right now, an overwhelming majority picked a National League team to walk away with the title.

--The biggest underdog? The Phillies according to our guys. Only two people picked the Fightin's to beat the Brewers in the first round.

--No one picked the Red Sox to repeat. I guess everyone is spooked by Josh Beckett's injury.

--Both of our resident Cubs fans picked them to win the Fall Classic. They're either going to be very happy at the end of the month or are being set up for another tremendous letdown.

With that out of the way, enjoy, and feel free to make your picks in the comments. (And if you want a good laugh, check out our preseason picks).

Every four years, Major League Baseball's postseason intersects with a presidential election. This is one of those years. In the spirit of the season, we here at MLB FanHouse have divided the playoff teams up for a series of debates. Matt Snyder and Will Brinson discuss the NLDS between the Cubs and Dodgers.

We'll run through different aspects of each team -- starting rotation, bullpen, defense, starting lineup, bench, manager, and end with a prediction. We'll do it with numbers and snarky commentary (most of which was used by Brinson), and we'll get right to it after the jump.

The mantra of every single non-Cubs fan in the world is the same heading into this postseason, and it couldn't be more misguided.

If you really don't think the Cubs are going to the win the World Series, that's fine. It's neither offensive nor outlandish, as long as your reasons are rational. If your reason is something along the lines of "because they are the Cubs" or has anything to do with any circumstance outside Lou Pinella and his 25 troops, however, you have no idea what you're talking about. Wake up.

Let me lay it out for you. Jerseys and logos don't cause winners and losers. Players and managers do. The Cubs franchise hasn't won the World Series since 1908. That's as much a coincidence as anything else. There's been bad management, what some would call bad luck, and plenty of bad players ... none of which have been inflicting the team during this 2008 season.

If you think teams need postseason experience to excel -- you better not look at last year's Rockies -- then the Cubs have plenty of it. The team was in the playoffs last year. They got swept, but as Ryan Theriot said, "sometimes you have to lose before you win." It's a learning curve.