Why I'm a Cubs fan, reason #23705

I want this man to see the Cubs win a World Series before he dies

Cubs MVPP (Most Valuable Position Player) - believe it or not!

Cubs position player WAR through games of 7/23.

Player	wOBA	WAR
Theriot	.344	2.3
Fukudome	.352	2.1
Lee	.370	1.8
Soto	.323	0.9
Ramirez	.368	0.7
Fox	.394	0.7
Fuld	.407	0.6
Fontenot	.296	0.2
Scales	.348	0.1
Bradley	.336	-0.1
Baker	.264	-0.1
Hill	.257	-0.3
Hoffpauir	.310	-0.4
Miles	.228	-0.9
Blanco	.232	-0.4
Freel	.192	-0.5
Soriano	.319	-0.5

Believe it or not, Ryan Theriot has been the Cubs most valuable position player so far this season.

To get these numbers, I split the PAs based on the number of innings each player had played at each position. The defensive UZR values used to find the WAR are what they have accomplished SO FAR this season. I did not include baserunning or catcher defense. I guess Theriot lucks out for the lack of TOOTBLAN penalties (dying laughing)

Fuld scores highly because he hit very well and posted good UZR in the small sample size we've seen so far from him.

link to spreadsheet

I usually like Neyer, but...

Do Phillies Need Halladay (or Lee)?

Can the Phillies go to war with the Dodgers (etc.) with their top four starters, as they stand right now? We're talking about Cole Hamels, Joe Blanton, Jamie Moyer, and Happ.

Is Rob kidding? The Phillies pitching has been terrible this year. Terrible. They're no longer last in the league in FIP, having been passed by the Indians, Orioles, and Brewers in the past few days, but a 4.71 FIP is pretty awful (4.88 starters, 4.42 relievers). The Phillies bullpen posted a 3,82 FIP last season, while their starters posted a slightly less terrible 4.53 FIP.

Fundamentally, the Phillies' top four starters right now are just as good as the Phillies' top four starters last year. And just in case anyone's forgotten, last year the Phillies won the World Series.

Neyer addresses this to some extent here, though he doesn't mention the bullpen stuff. Yes, the rotation isn't that fundamentally different. However, Moyer has been especially terrible this season, and Happ has outperformed his FIP by a run and a half. It's more likely that he's just an average pitcher (or worse - ZiPS still has him pegged as a 4.7 FIP pitcher).

Now though, Halladay. You don't think the Phillies would love to replace Moyer (5.58 ERA, 5.58 FIP, 4.79 ZiPS FIP) with Halladay (2.73 ERA, 2.75 FIP, 3.15 ZiPS FIP). Those Halladay numbers aren't league adjusted either. Look, I don't think they need him to win the division (see 2008 Rich Harden), though he is worth about 2 extra wins to the team by WAR. But you'd love to have that kind of pitching in your playoff rotation.

Book Review Clearinghouse: The Master and Margarita

I was very excited to read this book, due to references to it in Everyone Drunk But Me, not to mention that Keith Law put it as #1 in the Klaw 100. I came away disappointed though, finding the main characters unlikeable and the plot too scattershot to keep me very interested.

One of the main things that bothered me about the book is that you don't really meet the title characters until halfway through. The Master is a tortured writer, shattered by the fact that his bizarre (and interesting, from what we see of it) history of the death of Christ from Pontius Pilate's point of view has been rejected by publishers, and mopes around an insane asylum. Margarita, his lover, makes a deal with the Devil (who has shown up with a cast of amusing cohorts to make mock of Soviet society) to bring him back to her so they can live together. Shenanigans ensue and she gets some measure of revenge, and the quasi-religious stuff from the Master's book is folded into it as well. I didn't really get either of them I guess. - I thought the Master was a jerk and can't really understand why Margarita would be in love with him.

As for the other (human) characters, I found them pretty unlikeable/uninteresting as well. The first half of the book was pretty much the devil and co wreaking havoc on all the social climbers etc within the communist society. I guess this was supposed to be a scathing indicment of the communists, but it all seemed pretty tame to me. Maybe I would have liked it if I was reading this from the perspective of someone who thought atheism was inconceivable or that soviet society itself is amusing in and of itself. Social climbers tend to be idiots, no matter what form of government you're operating under.

What I did like about the book was the excerpts/history from the Master's book about Pilate. I'm really just a sucker for biblical history (true or not), so I thought all of that was pretty cool. You do end up feeling sorry for Pilate in this account, but he's a pretty pathetic guy. The Devil's retinue were fairly amusing, especially Behemoth, the flippant giant cat who had "an affection for chess and vodka".

Maybe I'm just a Philistine, I don't know. But this book was not very enjoyable.

Fun with reference sites, part 1

Over at ACB, we were talking about the awesomeness of Bob Gibson. As these things tend to go, I spent the next half hour or so poking around b-ref and fangraphs looking at the careers of other big name pitchers. I'm not going to make an attempt to rigorously rank any of them vor various reasons (valuing peak v longevity is hard). I just wanted point out their awesomeness.

Bob Gibson

Gibson was a fantastic pitcher, and famous for his intensity. His numbers suffer a bit though, as he pitched in one of the most pitcher-friendly eras in baseball history.

Year	FIP	ERA+
1961	3.58	137
1962	3.02	151
1963	3.13	106
1964	3.02	127
1965	3.33	126
1966	2.76	148
1967	2.34	110
1968	1.77	258
1969	2.30	164
1970	2.29	132
1971	2.70	119
1972	2.54	139
1973	2.83	133
1974	4.17	95
1975	4.50	76
Career	2.89	127

Cubs week in Review: 6/1 - 6/7

This week's Record: 3-2 (and one rainout)
The Cubs split the series with at Atlanta and won the series vs Cincinatti. Four of the five games went into extra innings, including a five hour and thirteen minute game on Sunday that kind of shot my afternoon. At least the Cubs won.

Current record: 28-26
Cubs Sweep!:2
Series won: 6
Series split: 5
Series lost: 4
Cubs Swept!: 2

Team Stats
wOBA This week:.291, Season: .323
FIP This week: 3.57, Season: 4.28
UZR Season: 0.2

Team Leaders
wOBA: Fukudome, .388
FIP (starter): Wells, 2.63
FIP (reliever): Guzman, 3.12
UZR: Theriot (SS), 3.5

Team Trailers
wOBA: Soto, .284
FIP (Starter): Marshall, 4.84
FIP (Reliever): Gregg, 5.13
UZR: Fontenot (3b): -3.3

Hitting performance of the week:
Carlos Zambrano hit what turned out to be the game-deciding HR to win his 100th start.

Pitching performance of the week:
Randy Wells took a no-hitter into the 7th inning of tuesday's game vs the Braves. He was taken out in the 8th after giving up a HR to Garrett Anderson and, in what should be familiar to him now, watched the bullpen blow the scant lead that the offense had given him.

Random thoughts on cub fandom

I've got a terrible secret - I actually haven't been a Cubs fan for all that long. I grew up as a Cubs fan (and pretty much a baseball-only sports fan), but I never really knew anything about the team. I imagine that's the way it goes with most kids growing up, especially if they don't live near the team that they root for. I knew that Ryne Sandberg was the best player on the team and I knew the names Mark Grace and Andre Dawson but that's about it. My baseball fandom really just amounted to watching the World Series and watching the home run chase in 1998. Since I was basically just watching the playoffs, I enoyed watching the Yankees teams in those years, kicking ass and taking names in the height of their mini-dynasty. It wasn't until my cousin got me hooked on fantasy baseball back in 2001, not to mention the fact that when I got to college I suddenly had easy access to WGN and had the time to actually watch a decent number of games, that I took another look at this whole baseball thing.

I loosely followed the ups and downs of the 2001 and 2002 teams, but 2003 (and what might have been in the playoffs that year) is when I was really drawn in. What a team that was - Cubs legend (and soon to be shamefully treated Cubs pariah) Sammy Sosa was declining but still carrying the sub-par offense on his back, Hendry fleeced Pittsburgh in the Ramirez trade and brought in Kenny Lofton to spark the offense, and the pitching, oh, the pitching. The Cubs had a pair of aces in Wood and Prior, backed up by an on-his-game Matt Clement, some goofy Venezualan kid named Carlos Zambrano, and, inexplicably, Shawn Estes. It was just my luck that Estes was pitching the only game that I saw in person that season. It's no conicedence that this team had my three favorite Cubs players of all time (Prior, Sosa, Z). It sucks that it didn't work out for that team, but as Santo likes to say, that's baseball.

What got me thinking about this, though, is the 1998 Cubs. A year or so ago, my in-laws bought me a cd that was made at the end of the 98 season with various audio clips and songs from the season (and of course, Go Cubs Go) and listening to it makes me both really nostalgic about that team and bummed that I completely missed out on it. It feels strange to feel this nostalgia even though I didn't experience any of this stuff at all, aside from the HR race.

• The 98 HR race between Sosa and McGuire


• Getting to the playoffs for the first time since '89


• Kerry Wood's rookie season


• Kerry Wood's 20-K game


• Harry Caray's death before the start of the season and the ensuinge tributes to him


• Rod Beck being Rod Beck


• And probably half a hundred other things that I've forgotten or don't know about, because I wasn't there

Maybe it's just because I still know who many of these players are that I'm feeling this, I don't know. After watching This Old Cub, the '69 Cubs are also up there too but I just don't get that same shiver I get when thinking about the '98 or '03 Cubs, even though I suspect that the '69 club was a better team than both of them.

UPDATE
I just went back and looked at the '98 Cubs roster and am floored. Despite all the nostalgia that team had going for it (above), that was NOT a great team. Any Cubs team since the 2003 run (excluding 2006, which we all should try to block out of our minds) was better than that one.