I am mighty tired this morning. Dear Cubs, Please don’t trade Matt Garza in the next eight or so hours.
I don’t know who Mike Bailey is, but he writes for a CBS affiliate in St. Louis, and he wrote this:
St. Louis Cardinal fans are acknowledged throughout baseball as knowledgeable, sophisticated and baseball-savvy. It is a reputation well-deserved and appreciated by ballplayers and managers who covet the weekend series in St. Louis where sell-out crowds enthusiastically cheer good plays by both teams.
But if St. Louis is the Mensa Society of the baseball university, then Cub fans are still using coloring books. They enthusiastically boo an intentional walk in a game situation, cheer for fans to throw an opposing team’s home run ball back onto the field and delight in mocking their team’s efforts when they lose and exaggerate the significance when they win.
This was not written ironically. I’m guessing Mike Bailey has not seen Baseball’s Best Fans on Twitter. If that’s sophisticated and baseball-savvy, I’ll gladly take the crayons employed by FacebookCubs.
Dale Sveum on Starlin Castro’s pre-swing approach, which is apparently improving. “He has the leg lift,” Sveum said, per Cubs.com, “but now he’s using it for the purpose it’s meant to be. He’s getting on his backside and the knee is getting over his back foot and he’s not front forward. It gives you the ability to use your hands and get to a fastball when you do that.”
Credit to Carlos Villanueva: in just his second start since returning to the rotation, he went six innings and allowed just six base runners yesterday. However you slice the outcome, that’s a great outing.
The Cubs’ top pick this year, Kris Bryant, officially signed yesterday and did the show-him-off-at-Wrigley thing, together with his family. His dad, joking about the pre-Draft process, per CSN: “They totally vetted him. He was vetted more than the President. They talked to his high school math teacher, his English teacher, all his coaches in high school, all his coaches at San Diego, his teachers at San Diego, athletic administrators, sports information directors. They knew what they were doing. They definitely did their job. I’m really proud of that.” I dig that.
Theo Epstein on the state of the farm system, in light of the Bryant signing (per CSN): “I feel really good about [where we’re at]. It’s obvious what direction we’re going and how important a robust farm system is for us. It’s one thing to talk about it. It’s another to start to feel like you’re making some headway. I like the people we have in player development. I like a lot of the talent we have. Hopefully one thing that will separate us as a farm system are the numerous potential impact guys that we have. We’ve had some depth for a while. Now, there are a handful of guys that we can look at and think ‘if we do a nice job of helping their ceiling, they can be potential impact guys in the big leagues.’ You need those guys to get where you want to go. It’s nice to look at the progress we’ve made, but we’ve got an awful long way to go still.”
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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NEWSLETTER
I am mighty tired this morning. Dear Cubs, Please don’t trade Matt Garza in the next eight or so hours.
