On Duensing and the Cubs bullpen

Joe Maddon, the manager of the defending champs, is taking some criticism in the wake of Sunday's game, which was decided without the participation of Wade Davis, the Cubs' best reliever and closer (the two concepts are not identical). #OldFriend Brian Duensing opened the bottom of the ninth for the Cubbies, and John Lackey ended it with a gopher ball. Duensing took the loss.

Maddon, postgame, on Davis:

“He had limited pitches. It was one inning only, and in these circumstances you don’t get him up and then don’t get him in. So if we had caught the lead, he would have pitched. That’s it.”

I buy that. Davis threw 45 pitches in that bizarre Game 5 to beat the Nationals. He hasn't worked that deep in years, probably since the Royals gave up trying to make him a starter. I'm sure Maddon's preference was not to use him at all.

I think Davis is not totally healthy; I didn’t like the way he looked last game. That might be the reason why Maddon didn’t use him tonight

— Pedro Martinez (@45PedroMartinez) October 16, 2017

Maddon appears to be managing the Cubs as if they don't have a lockdown bullpen right now, even though a number of relievers had strong seasons.

Duensing was one of those. Not just a 2.74 ERA. but 61 strikeouts in 62.1 innings. He coughed up only one lead for the Cubs. He didn't have a big platoon split; in fact, he held righties to a lower slugging percentage. A nice season for the former Twin.

The Cubs pitching staff is based on its solid rotation (Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, Kyle Kendricks, Jose Quintana). But Maddon, by choice or circumstances, is getting just five innings or so a game out of these guys. Which means the bullpen has to pick up the rest, and he rode Davis really hard against the Nationals. He went through three of his middle bullpen guys Sunday (Carl Edwards Jr., Pedro Strop and Duensing) before turning to fifth-starter Lackey.

The decisions Maddon made in previous games led to the decsions he made Sunday. He couldn't go deep with Lester because he was on short rest after pitching 3.2 innings in relief Thursday. Davis's availability was limited. He hasn't gotten a quality start since Game Two against the Nationals, and the bullpen coughed that one away.

Maybe today's offday will straighten things out. Seven or eight innings from Tuesday's starter would help more.

Notes, quotes and comment

Bartolo Colon made what was presumably his sole minor-league tune-up start Thursday night for Rochester, the Twins' Triple A affiliate. His stat line was not particularly encouraging: 3.2 innings, 4 hits, 4 runs, 2 walks, 5 strikeouts. He threw 76 pitches.

Those determined to find a reason to believe can latch onto the strikeouts. I'm inclined to pay more attention to the walks, because Colon's success in recent years was based largely on the fact that he almost never walked anybody. His command was impeccable until this season. This year it has been emphatically peccable.

Still, the Twins roster lacks a fifth starter, and somebody's going to get called up to start Tuesday against the Yankees. Colon is lined up for that assignment. I expect him to get that start, and I expect him to get shelled.

I would also expect Felix Jorge to get shelled if he gets the start. It's not like the Twins are sitting on Clayton Kershaw. They have no good answers available.

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The Chicago White Sox picked up another prospect haul Thursday by trading lefty-starter Jose Quintana to their North Side neighbors. The Sox got four minor leaguers, including current Baseball America coverboy Eloy Jimenez and pitcher Dylan Cease.

Quintana is a quality pitcher, and he's under team control for several more seasons; that's the kind of asset any organization would value, and I'm sure the Twins would have loved to land him. But they do not have any prospects as highly regarded as Jimenez, a power-hitting outfielder, and their best pitching prospects are roughly comparable to Cease. 

The Sox farm system is getting pretty stocked up with the returns of the Adam Eaton, Chris Sale and Quintana trades. If their player development system gets this right, they figure to be mighty tough around 2020.

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Baseball's back today from the All-Star break, and hooray for that.

A big celebration

The scene at Chicago's Grant Park during the Cubs victory
celebration on Friday.

Supposedly 5 million people came to the Cubs victory parade and rally Friday.

If that figure is accurate, it would be one of the 10 largest gatherings on record.

The Telegraph, a British newspaper, compiled a list in 2015 of the biggest gatherings on record, Most of them are religous events -- Hindu or Moslem pilgrimages, funerals, papal Masses.

"I believe in the church of baseball," Annie Savoy intones off camera as the movie Bull Durham opens. It may not be that far fetched to call the Cubs a religion. It certainly takes a sizable fevor to attract 5 million people to an event.

On to the offseason

Meeting at the mound.

A World Series Game Seven. Extra innings in Game Seven. A rain delay in extra innings of Game Seven.

Until the final out was actually recorded, I half-believed that the game was going to continue, and continue, and continue, that the kids who were put to bed hours earlier would get up to find the Cubs and Indians still locked in this stuggle.

And then Michael Martinez, probably the weakest hitter (excluding pitchers) on either roster, hit a weak grounder to third, and it was over.

It was an outstanding World Series. It was a great Game Seven. And we're going to get throughly sick of the Chicago Cubs in a few years. They're the new shiny thing now, but -- unlike, say, the 2015 Royals -- they're built for years and have the resources to keep it that way.

And now the Twins can get Derek Falvey officially on board, and get going with their offseason.

A pre-emptive comment on Bartman

The Chicago Cubs now have a 3-2 lead in the NLCS. The last time they were this close to the World Series was 2003, and the popular shorthand for what happened is "Bartman."

Which is enough sewage to clog a waste treatment plant.

Fox and ESPN being ESPN and Fox, we will be inundated with the Steve Bartman story now. Let it be said right here, right now: Steve Bartman, wherever he is now and under whatever name, did nothing wrong in 2003. He was just a fan reaching for a ball that was in the seating area. Moises Alou had no more chance to catch that ball than I did sitting in Mankato.

The Cubs lost that game and that series because they made too many mistakes. The Cubs deserved, in a karmic sense, to lose that game and that series because the Cubs of that era and that managment -- Jim Hendry as general manager, Dusty Baker as manager -- acceptted no responsibility for anything that went wrong. For some reason, the national broadcasters went along with it. And the local broadcasters? Well, Steve Stone got fired for speaking truth about the Cubs.

It's a different owner, different front office, different manager, different players. But the Cubs have not earned their way back into my esteem, not that my esteem matters to them or anybody else. And if they play along with the Bartman nonsense, they never will.

The Cubs bullpen

Aroldis Chapman may have the fastest pitch in
major league history. 

A big deal went down Monday: The Yankees shipped fireballing closer Aroldis Chapman to the Cubs for a rather impressive package of prospects. I don't much care for what we know of Chapman the human being, and this piece from the Chicago Tribune's David Haugh defines the uneasiness that should accompany rooting for Chapman. (He only details one incident, but there have been others.)

But as far as the Cubs are concerned, Chapman really only has to behave himself for three months or so. Then he becomes a free agent. The Cubs are willing to overlook his character flaws in pursuit of their first World Series title since 1908 and their first World Series appearance since 1945.

But then there's this:

The Cubs are 55-1 going into the 9th with lead, 53-1 going into 8th, 53-5 into 7th.  The upside for *any* reliever add is limited.

— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) July 25, 2016

The Cubs have fallen off their early-season pace not because of its lack of stars in the bullpen but for other reasons. Example: Ace Jake Arrieta allowed four runs in six innings Monday night; it was the fourth time in five starts he's allowed that many runs. His ERA has risen from 1.74 to 2.76 in that span.

Still, it's the bullpen that the Cubs are aiming to beef up. Chapman is the second lefty reliever the Cubs have traded for -- they got Mike Montgomery from the Mariners for a couple of prospects last week.

And Old Friend Joe Nathan, back from another Tommy John surgery, made his first appearance of the year Sunday and struck out the side against Milwaukee. Nothing's certain about Nathan, of course; he's 41 and there's a lot of mileage on his arm. But if he is sound again ... well, he and Chapman and Hector Rondon (1.95 ERA with 18 saves) look like a pretty darn impressive crew for the late innings.

If Nathan is sound. If Chapman behaves himself, If, if, if.

An evening with the Cubs at Giants

Jason Hayward makes a spectacular catch off Denard
Span in the first inning. (AP photo)

It was a study in contrasts from a distance. In front of me Friday evening at AT&T Park in San Francisco were a pair of first-place teams, one of of them threatening to be historically good; also in front of me on the scoreboard was the score from Target Field, where the Twins are threatening to be historically bad.

By the time Jake Arrieta took the mound, the Twins, playing two time zones earlier, were behind 7-1. By the time the top of the second inning ended in San Francisco, the Cubs led 5-0. Ultimately the Twins lost by less to the Toronto Blue Jays (8-3) than the Giants did to the Cubs (8-1), but the Giants looked, at least in the field, more competent than the Twins have for much the season.

I intend to write about the San Francisco park for the Monday print column. As for Friday's game:

Jake Peavy was in trouble from practically his first pitch. He entered the game with an ERA above 7 and didn't help it with five earned runs in 1.6 innings -- and one of those five outs was the result of a Cubs baserunning blunder.

Jason Hayward injured himself on a fabulous diving catch on the warning track in right-center field. No word on the severity of the injury. It reminded me of a catch I once saw Byron Buxton make, and it further reminded me that while I understand why the Twins sent Buxton down and why he remains down, the Twins really need to improve their outfield defense if the pitching is going to get better.

Arrieta was, in some ways, as close to ineffective as he's been all year, but he only allowed one run in seven innings. The Giants bunched three of their four hits off him together in the third to score a run, and they hit a few other balls well, but Arrieta pitched like the Cy Young winner he is.

A Theo-logical debate

What price for a top-grade big-market
general manager? What price for
him if he's NOT going to be your
general manager?

Theo Epstein has been running the baseball side (as opposed to the business side) of the Boston Red Sox for almost 10 years, which is a long time for a general manager with any team, much less one that gets the microscopic scrutiny of the Sawx.

His record in the job isn't impeccable, but no matter how one measures it, he's been the most successful general manager Boston's had since the job was invented. If, or rather when, he officially moves on to the Chicago Cubs, he will leave behind a better baseball operation than he inherited in 2002 — and a couple of World Series trophies.

The Red Sox gave "young Theo" – he may be a 10-year veteran of the job, but he's still just 37 — permission to pursue the Cubs job, but that's not the same as giving him permission to take it.
Epstein has a deal in place with the Cubs, and a year remaining on his contract with Boston. The two teams have spent about a week jawing over compensation for the executive, with the Red Sox supposedly opening negotiations with a demand for Matt Garza.

I don't see that the Sox have that much leverage here. Epstein may be, over the long haul, worth that price, but it certainly appears that the wunderkind's time with Boston has expired. If the Cubs walk away from the table, what will the Sox ownership do — keep Epstein in the job as a lame duck when they know (a) he doesn't want to be there and (b) he'll certainly be in demand from other teams next offseason? There's too much potential for mischief there.

One interesting aspect to this is that the Cubs have tried this before — almost 20 years ago, with Andy MacPhail. "Young Andy" — like Theo, he was, when he became the Twins general manager, the young man in the job in the majors — won two World Series titles at the helm of Minnesota, and then jumped to the North Side to try his luck with the Cubs.

And as with MacPhail, Epstein is apparently being pursued not so much to be general manager, limited to running the baseball side, but to be atop the entire operation as team president. I believe MacPhail's tenure with the Cubs ran aground on his poor hires as general manager (Ed Lynch and Jim Hendry) — the way I put it when MacPhail left Chicago a few years ago was that he never found his Andy MacPhail.

Titles and duties vary from team to team, and the Cubs are under different ownership now than when MacPhail was there. But the Cubs in many ways are in a similar situation to the Red Sox when Epstein became GM — a big market team with a large but restive fan base, a beloved but increasingly decrepit park, a farm system that has not been particularly well cared for, a history more noted for failure than success.

Epstein in Boston dealt with only part of those problems, and did his job well. He fixed the farm system. He didn't fix the problems at Fenway Park; somebody else — co-owner and team president Larry Lucchino — did that.

Epstein, like MacPhail, may be eager to move up the ladder to other, more corporate, duties — if the reports of his rivalry with Lucchino are correct,  he may be really eager to prove that he can fix Wrigley Field better than Lucchino did Fenway. If that's the kind of thing he wants to do in Chicago, he'll need to do a better job than MacPhail did at finding his Theo Epstein to handle the baseball operation.

Jim Hendry and the damage done

Jim Hendry is out as general manager of the Chicago Cubs.
He leaves a legacy of nine years of rosters crammed with the
irresponsible, the overpaid and the excuse-makers.

There was a time, kiddies, back a couple of decades ago, when it was easier to find a Cubs game, or a Braves game, on the local cable than a Twins game.

It was the era of the superstations. WGN (with Harry Caray) carried pretty much every Cubs game; WTBS, later shortened to TBS (with Harry's son Skip) the Braves. In the 1980s and '90s, the Cubs and Braves won national followings — even with frequently lousy teams — simply by being there.

Harry and Skip are both dead now, and so is the era of the superstations making "local" broadcasts national. Someday the national appeal of the Cubs and Braves will wither away; it's already diminished, especially that of the Braves, who are no longer carried by TBS. The Cubs are less accessible than they were on WGN outside Chicagoland, but still there to some degree.

But when they are on, I almost always root against them, and that simply wasn't the case back in the day.

Randy Bush, who played on two Twins
World Series winners (1987 and '91)
is the interim general manager, but
will not be considered for the job
long-term.

And that's Jim Hendry's fault.

Hendry left his job as general manager of the Cubs on Friday, at which point it was revealed that he had been fired almost a month ago; he was a dead man walking during the trading deadline and the period of signing draft picks. He held the job for nine seasons and lost it, he said Friday, because his team simply didn't win enough.

Which is true, but which doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. What has stood out to me over Hendry's tenure — not just as general manager but before that, as the Cubs director of player development — is his eerie ability to acquire players lacking in personal accountability.

Hendry lost his credibility with me in 1999, years before he landed the top job, when he drafted pitcher Ben Christensen in the first round. Christensen was notorious for the blinding of Anthony Molina, whom he hit in the eye with a warm-up pitch while Molina was on-deck. When Mickey Morandini, the Cubs second baseman, reached out to Molina, the Cubs released him.

Christensen didn't make it; he had injuries, but I wrote at the time that the Molina incident suggested that he lacked the emotional stability for the majors.

Christensen was the early poster boy for that kind of thing on Hendry's teams. Carlos Zambrano. Milton Bradley. Alfonso Soriano. Hendry's Cubs pouted publicly when Cubs broadcasters praised opposition players. Sammy Sosa walked out on the team in 2004; Zambrano walked out on the team in 2011. Nothing every really changed.

Jim Hendry had a fatal attraction to jerks, and his player choices transformed the Cubs from the Lovable Losers to just plain losers.

Contemplating Lou Piniella

Citing pressing family issues --specifically the grave illness of his mother -- Lou Piniella walked away from his job managing the Chicago Cubs on Sunday.

This was about 40 games earlier than planned, and (at risk of being overly brutal) about 120 games too late. But these Cubs — overpaid, oversensitive and emphatically unproductive — may be impossible to manage anyway. Pity the fool who lands this supposedly plum job for 2011.

The general consensus on Piniella's managerial career is that it's Hall of Fame worthy. I'm not so sure about that. Yes, he's 14th on the career wins list, he guided the 1990 Reds to a surprising World Series win and even his record with the Cubs is probably better than I give him credit for.

But I suspect that too many of his teams were working against him and his decisions. His Seattle Mariners teams may have done less with more than any club in history. Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez and Edgar Martinez were all together at one point, all at the top (or close to it) of their games, and they added up to what?

But then, he may be managing's Richie Ashburn. Ashburn's star was dimmed by being a 1950s center fielder, which means he was a peer of Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider. Piniella's managerial career may simply appear to be less impressive to me because it coincides with those of Tony LaRussa, Bobby Cox and Joe Torre.

It appears to me that the irony of the Cubs over the past decade is that when they had a stable of power pitchers, they had a manager (Dusty Baker) who handled the staff as if it were comprised of the sinker-slider types he succeeded with in San Francisco. And after the big fastballs vanished in the inevitable injuries, the Cubs hired Piniella, who loves power pitchers and ended with with rotations featuring pitch-to-contact guys.

If Wrigley was the right place for Sweet Lou, he got there at the wrong time.

Notes and comment

A rather self-destructive win for the Twins Friday: Yeah, any win helps — and Nick Blackburn may have righted his ship — but 53 pitches from Joe Nathan is not good.

*One reason the Detroit Tigers enter Saturday with a 3.5 game lead in the AL Central — they can win pitchers duels. The Tigers have 13 wins when scoring three runs or less, the most recent being Friday's 3-2 win over Oakland. (The Twins have nine.)

* The long awaited sale of the Chicago Cubs to the Ricketts family is virtually complete. The biggest hurdle now might be the fact that the Tribune Company, which is selling the team and ball park, is in bankruptcy.

* Dumb idea connected with the sale: A Tribune writer suggests that one of the first things the Ricketts should do is lower beer prices at Wrigley. Uh, no. They have too many problems with drunks there now.

* Cliff Lee career ERA pitching in the American League: 4.01. ERA since being traded to the Phillies: 0.82.

* Speaking of pitchers fleeing the Big Boy League for the Quadruple A National League: John Smoltz, released by the Boston Red Sox, signed this week with the St. Louis Cardinals, who will deploy him in the starting rotation.

If there's any place the aging Smoltz can regain his Hall-of-Fame form, it would figure to the St. Louis; Tony LaRussa and Dave Duncan have quite the track record with seemingly washed up pitchers. I still think he's best suited for relief work.

*What is it with the Twins and inner ear infections this season? First Denard Span, now Justin Morneau and even third base coach Scott Ullger.

Things I can't explain

* How the San Diego Padres have a 10-game winning streak.

*How the Chicago Cubs (100 wins in 2008) have an eight-game losing streak ... with half those losses coming to the Padres and Pittsburgh Pirates.

* How it is that the corpse of Gary Sheffield has been resurrected. He's hitting .277 for the Mets, but more impressively, his OBP is .417 and his slugging percentage is .494.

* How it is that Jason Bartlett is hitting .373-.418-.596. Again: Jason Bartlett's slugging percentage is just a nick below .600. (Yeah, I know: He's using a big Justin Morneau bat to warm up. Give me a better reason.) Nick Punto is a nick below that too ... several nicks. Cut Bartlett's percentages in half, and you've still got better numbers than Punto in two of the three percentages. (.181-.290.-.198). Punto hit .284-.344-.382 last season and Bartlett hit .286-.329-.361 ... but of course Punto had a similar season to this in 2007, the other time he came into the season with a regular job secured.

* Why anybody pitches to Joe Mauer at all. I was amused by the Terry Francona quote in the game story after Mauer hit his two-run pinch-hit homer (which left the Twins one run short: "I'm glad he came up where he could hit that ball as far as he wanted, and he about did."

*Why Dusty Baker keeps pulling this stuff. Last year he used starter Aaron Harang for four innings of relief in an extra inning game, then started him two days later; Harang's season went into the toilet. On Sunday, Harang started; there was a two-hour rain delay; Harang pitched after the delay too. He had 93 "real" pitches and Lord knows how many extra ones during the delay trying to stay loose. Harang's having a nice season so far; let's see if it survives this.