Posts tagged Carlos Zambrano at FanHouse

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?

I was talking to a friend of mine last week about baseball, and we were both spouting off our ideas of what the city of Chicago's two teams should be doing this offseason. Since my buddy is a Cubs fan, he presented his plan for Jim Hendry, and in it he was adamant about the Cubs getting Jake Peavy from the Padres. "Imagine a rotation of Carlos Zambrano, Jake Peavy, Rich Harden, Ted Lilly, and Ryan Dempster. They'd win 110 games!"

It was at that point I said that while they would win 110 games, unfortunately none would come in the playoffs. Of course, neither of us thought twice about the fact that Ryan Dempster would be back with the Cubs next season. Sure, he's a free agent, but considering the success he's had in Chicago, his return is a given. Well, according to Ken Rosenthal, it's not such a sure thing after all.

It seems apparent at this point that the San Diego Padres are intent on trading Jake Peavy this winter. Sure, they just signed him to a three-year extension last December worth $52 million, but they thought they were going to have a good team at the time. A 63-99 record this season proved otherwise, and now the organization is heading in a different direction.

The Padres want to rebuild, and they could use all that money they promised to Peavy to do it, so they're going to try and move him. The problem is that Peavy had a full-no trade clause put in to his new contract, so their options are limited. In fact, there are only five teams they can trade Jake to at the moment that he'll be cool with.

[Jake's agent Barry]Axelrod said Padres General Manager Kevin Towers told him late in the season that the team was looking to rebuild and that could benefit from unloading Peavy's contract. Axelrod said he recently gave Towers a list of teams to which Peavy might consent to being traded. On that list were the Dodgers, Atlanta Braves, Chicago Cubs, Houston Astros and St. Louis Cardinals.

"This isn't Jake asking," Axelrod said. "He wants to stay in San Diego."

Of those five teams, I'm guessing you could take the Dodgers right off the list. I don't think the Padres would trade Peavy to a division foe unless they got a lot in return. As for the Cubs, I'm not sure if they have enough in their system after the Harden trade to get Peavy, though maybe if they were willing to give up Jeff Samardzija and Carlos Marmol, the Padres would listen. Can you imagine the Cubs with a rotation of Carlos Zambrano, Rich Harden, Ryan Dempster, Ted Lilly, and Jake Peavy? Why they might win 120 games before getting swept out of the first round next season!

You'll also notice that the Yankees, who have expressed their interest in Peavy over the last few weeks, aren't on the list.

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.

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?

I had the displeasure of attending last night's game between the Cubs and Dodgers. I'd like to thank everyone who played for the Cubs last night other than Mark DeRosa -- and this girl with the awesome shirt -- for not showing up. I've heard from several people today that Dick Stockton -- Fornelli's favorite announcer -- kept proclaiming that the crowd was dead. We stood and cheered at several big moments, only to see a walk or inning-ending double play (thank you 6-4-3 Lee). When the pitcher can't throw a freaking strike, it's sorta difficult to stay loud the entire time. Fans are funny like that.

Anyway, I'm bound to my fandom, and that is why I'm still on board with my Cubs in four games prediction. Carlos Zambrano is going to pitch like an ace tonight, and the offense will show up. Consider Game 1 a wake-up call in which the team played with significant rust.

The one thing I will not tolerate is more piling on the fans. It's pathetic and lazy. Fans had nothing to do with that team not showing up last night, and every person in my section was paying attention to the game. People on talk radio today spewing crap about how Cubs fans don't care need to get a life. It's a farce, and on behalf of my entire extended family, I'm offended. We care. Quit overgeneralizing and come up with an original thought for once.

I've included more pictures from the atmosphere after the jump.

Stop that, Cubs fans. You know what I mean -- the repeated mumblings of "That's why they call it a series" followed by the "Something-something ... don't mind if I do!" Homer Simpson-like behavior. Seriously, stop. It's totally okay to freak out.

After all, you are down 1-0 in the National League Division Series to the Dodgers, and as TBS was kind enough to squeeze in between "I Love This Town" soundbites, the team that wins the first game of such a series has gone on to win said series 24 of 28 times.

Of course, it didn't have to be this way. There were a lot of things going in your favor. On paper (in theory) you had the better team. You also had a hefty wind (17 mph at last check) blowing into Wrigley. And Joe Torre made the mistake of using ground ball pitcher Derek Lowe tonight instead of saving him for a change in weather.

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.

On Deck is FanHouse's look at the day's most intriguing baseball matchups.

Little did these furry creatures know back when this friendly picture was taken that they would be fighting to the death just two and a half short months later on the last day of the season ... albeit in different cities. But with the White Sox and Twins both refusing to the chokeslam down on their respective weekend opponents (the Indians and the Royals), this divisional fight to the death is looking like what you would expect a fight between furry mascots to look like: sloppy, clumsy, and downright hilarious.