Treading Water

After the first two and a half weeks of baseball, the Cubs seem to be putting forth about the amount of success as last year's group.  With today's loss to the Rockies, the Cubs fall back under .500 again to 7-8, but now return home for a nice nine-game homestand.  Pitching has not been a great strength of the Cubs, and the rotation especially has underperformed quite a bit.  Carlos Zambrano, Matt Garza, and Ryan Dempster have all not pitched well really at all this season.  The injuries to Randy Wells and Andrew Cashner have hurt as well as James Russell was slammed his first start and Casey Coleman has had mixed results.

The bullpen, not including today's performance by Marcos Mateo, has been very good in general.  Carlos Marmol thankfully hasn't thrown out his shoulder yet (knock on wood), which is a concern I have for him just about every time he throws the baseball.  But the rotation has the Cubs playing more high-scoring games than usual.  The Cubs offense has scored 4.5 runs per game this season, and that should be enough to win with the rotation we have.  But Dempster, Zambrano, and Garza have ERAs of 6.30, 6.11, and 6.27, respectively.  Come on now guys, that's no way to run a railroad.

But the offense cannot go unnoticed.  Although they are averaging 4.5 runs a game which is near league average and only a bit above the 4.2 from last year, the Cubs are fourth in MLB in batting average, and fifth in hits.  We can owe plenty of those hits to a certain Starlin Castro, who as of Sunday night led baseball in hits with 28.  In my wanna-be highly-educated fan opinion, Castro is unbelievable.  Watching him out there is like watching a 12-year-old in park district game.  He just comes to play the game and nothing else, just trying to have fun.  It almost seems like he doesn't even feel the pressures and expectations of playing in the bigs, not to mention with all of the hype around him and the Cubs as a franchise and Chicago as a city.  Today watching the Cubs-Rockies game, I watched him bend over the plate to go get a ball well off the plate and ground it to Todd Helton at first base.  Len Kasper picked up on his anger with himself over becoming overanxious on the broadcast.  And after the inning ended and the camera was on him right before commercial, he swung up his helmet as if he was about to slam it in frustration.  This from a guy with a .418 batting average, four hits just the night before, and Chicago status as a fan favorite.

Although fielding has been an issue with this team so far as well, there's been an improvement over last year's performance and Castro has gotten much better so far, making better plays quicker despite two errors.  Basically, this team is waiting on the starting pitching.  It's not time to sound the alarm on the Garza trade yet, but he should know that that is exactly what will happen unless he starts putting up numbers and soon.  The poor performances from Zambrano and Dempster are surprising, to be honest, despite all the Zambrano haters who may have correctly pegged his successful comeback last season as a fluke.  Dempster's success seemed too easy last season, and it's finally catching up to him.  So far I've seen a whole bunch of - to use a Bob Brenly term here meaning a slider that spins but doesn't move hardly at all - cement mixers in the low 80s left high in the zone, right where hitters can get at them.  Hopefully he'll improve, because we need it.

NOTE: There's been some confusion on the results of the quiz giveaway from a few weeks ago.  I apologize for not making this clearer, but if you did win the free app then they would have replied in an email with the code to get the app free.  If you did not get this email, unfortunately you didn't win.  Thanks to all participants, I have deemed this partnership a success.  There may be future similar opportunities, so stay tuned.