Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Greatest manager ever.

The Cubs went out last night and destroyed a pitcher who had given them fits for years.

It can mean only one thing…Mike Quade is the greatest manager ever.

 Mike Quade's magic leads to a Cubs victory.

In reality, even though the Cubs approach at the plate was greatly improved last night, they team still showed some poor behavior including a failed hit-and-run (or, if that was a straight steal by Castro…bad move against Pudge!), Soriano dogging it out of the box resulting in a lost chance at an easy inside-the-park homerun, and some poor defense from Blake DeWitt.

But the Cubs won easily, and both Casey Coleman and Mike Quade earned their first big league wins.

But, back to the Soriano thing…I’m getting absolutely fed up with this crap. The Cubs are going to try to trade him this offseason and right now they really need him to be playing some great baseball to help increase his potential value. He’s not helping, though. We’ve seen the Cubs playing Kosuke more frequently hopes that his production improves and thus his trade value increases (which he has done slightly). But Soriano has been a joke this year. He’s has a couple of weeks where he pounded the crap out of the ball, but for the most part, this has been a most disappointing season. He might reach 25 homers, and is look at 75 to 80 RBI…so what are we to do with him?

I thought his production would increase this season, being his first full season as a Cub where he hit outside of the lead-off spot. That has proved to not be the case. Tyler Colvin’s production has been just as good (if not better). Colvin has one less homer and 13 fewer RBI than Soriano while batting in non-run producing spots in the lineup. Also, Colvin has 100 fewer plate appearances than Soriano.

So how will the Cubs use Soriano from here on out? It seems the more he plays, the less his trade value becomes. He’s like the anti-Kosuke.

But it has become apparent that Mike Quade is going to do things his own way. He stopped (at least temporarily) the foolish move of playing Tyler Colvin at first base, and I suspect he’ll bring some other saneness to the line up in an attempt to convince Jim Hendry to give him the permanent job next season.

And as for first base, the Cubs need to keep Nady there for the rest of the season. What he needs are ABs, and if gets to play on a consistent basis, he will show you how good of a hitter he actually is. I truly believe that the Cubs could have their first base solution already on the team with Nady. Nady is a player that needs to play every day. If you look at his splits for this season, his worst months have been the ones where he had the least at-bats. In fact, his OPS-per-month is almost directly correlated to how many plate appearances he has had.

With that being said, I’d love to see Adam Dunn in a Cubs uniform next year.

 I loved Dunn when he was on SNL.