Well, the Cubs lost yet another series to a team that will ultimately be under .500 at the end of the season.
Outside of an unbelievable catch by Marlon Byrd (if you haven't seen this catch, than you need to go to cubs.com an look it up), the game yesterday was an absolute dud.
What the hell is going on here? The starting pitching has continued to be fantastic. The bullpen has actually started to pitch better, but this team can't hit worth a lick.
Look, the Cubs statistically aren't that horrible, offensively...they are 6th in the NL in hits, 5th in homers, 6th in batting average and in the middle of the league in runs and RBI...
But the problem is, their situational hitting has been down right awful in the games they've lost this year...they can't move runner over, they can't steal bases.
Here is an interesting stat...guess what team leads the NL in fly balls? The Cubs. What does that mean? I'm not exactly sure, but when you have a team with Ryan Theriot, Mike Fontenot, Kosuke Fukudome who are not power hitters, and then you add Marlon Byrd and Geovany Soto into that who will likely end the season with under 20 homers as well, you have a team that is making a lot of fly ball outs.
It would appear to me that these guys are swinging for the fences an awful lot. Since the Cub first series win of the year, the Cubs have lost 7 times...here is the number of runs scored in each of those losses...3, 2, 1, 0, 2, 1, 2. These game were not lost by the bullpen. These games were not lost by the starting pitcher. These games...every single one of them...were lost because the offense faltered.
Outside of the pounding the Cubs have given the Brewers this year, the Cubs have scored 5 or more runs in only 3 games...and one of those was the opening day blowout loss.
You can't blame any of this on injuries like you could last year. Everyone is healthy right now.
Why has this been such a consistent story for this franchise over the last 10 years? Wasn't Rudy Jaramillo supposed to fix all this? We are paying him a shit load of money, and all I've heard out of him over the last 3 weeks is that he hasn't been able to implement his program the way he wanted to because the facilities available to the Cubs players are inadequate. Great...now our over hyped and over payed hitting coach is already making excuses.
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The fact I'm writing this blog and publishing it at this time should give you an indication that I'm not going to the game today. I'll post a series preview shortly.
