Dale Sveum Says Starlin Castro is on “Last Straw” and Other Bullets

As Luke noted this morning, today is Day Two of the Draft, and rounds two through fifteen will go. It starts at 11am CT, and you can follow along with the Cubs’ picks here at BN and/or on MLB.com. We’ll have more on the Cubs’ first three picks last night in a little bit. Until then, there are some other items of note in the Cubs’ world…

  • Dale Sveum ain’t saying “golly” anymore. After Starlin Castro lost track of the outs yesterday on a play that could have resulted in a double play (and prevented a run from scoring), Sveum was blunt. “It’s something that’s obviously unacceptable at any time,” Sveum said. “Whether we could have turned the double play is irrelevant to not knowing how many outs there are in the most important part of the game. These things have to stop happening or we’re just going to stop playing [him]. These kind of things are things my son does in high school. Maybe …. I’ll have a good talking to him. It’s the last straw. If he wants to play, he better start getting his head in the game, period.” Oh my. That’s firm. But it’s also the way it’s got to be. Castro keeps having these very public lapses in concentration, and, talented or not, it’s got to stop.
  • Castro, for his part, said he was embarrassed. “It’s very embarrassing,” Castro said. “I apologized to my team and everybody. That kind of thing is not supposed to happen.”
  • The Cubs don’t plan to call up Anthony Rizzo for an interleague stretch that begins on Friday. Sveum suggested a little while ago that it might happen, but now says it isn’t in the plans. Calling Rizzo up would have put the Cubs in a tough spot: they could either keep him up, and lose an extra year of control, or they could send him back down after interleague play was over (but what if he’d been raking?).
  • Reliever Michael Bowden, who was DFA’d to make room for Jairo Asencio, cleared waivers and was outrighted to AAA Iowa. I’ve got the 40-man roster at an even 40 right now.
  • I was on the radio in Green Bay/Appleton yesterday, talking about the Cubs’ futility and the upcoming series against the Brewers. You can download the appearance as an MP3 here if you’d really like to listen.
  • Chris Jaffe at the Hardball Times notes that the Cubs are one more one-run loss away from a franchise mark. That’s because the Cubs have lost an incredible 10 straight one-run games. The only time the franchise lost 11 straight one-run games was almost 100 years ago.
  • written by

    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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