The series against the Royals, which starts this evening, will be an interesting one for Cubs fans who are hoping for a full-on, multi-year rebuild. The Royals, of course, have been undergoing a rebuild for many multi-year stretches, but they certainly now have an exciting young core of players. They just don’t win very much. Would Cubs fans be willing to endure the same kind of team for two, three, four years?
With the site esss-splosion yesterday, I didn’t get to do a full write-up on Gene Wojciechowski’s take on the Ricketts regime. It’s a good read. His ultimate point is that Ricketts needs a plan (who’s to say he doesn’t have one?), and he needs to demonstrate that plan to us (ah, I see). The most interesting part of the piece to me? He says that “everyone assumes” Jim Hendry is a “Dead General Manager Walking.”
The heat is being cranked up on Cubs manager Mike Quade, now from additional, mainstream directions.
The Cubs have signed a handful of their later round, easy sign draft picks thus far. That handful is already seeing time in the minors:Boise (Low A)19th round: 1B Paul Hoilman
20th round: OF Ben Klafczynsk
42nd round: IF Brad Zapenas
44th round: IF Kenny Socorro
Mesa (Rookie Ball)
16th round: C Rafael Lopez
18th round: RHP James Pugliese
32nd round: RHP Pete Levitt
36th round: IF Travis Garcia
40th round: RHP Patrick Francescon
46th round: RHP Scott Weismann
Though I can’t quite pinpoint the problem yet, I strongly suspect that yesterday’s site issues were related to my attempts to improve our comments and integrate them with a message board. My ambition, it seems, exceeded my grasp. For that, I apologize – the test site has one daily visitor (me), while the actual site has thousands. Oops. I’ll regroup and figure out a new plan for improving the “community” part of the site. But, fair warning, it might be a while. For now, keep commenting!