NEWSLETTER
THE CUBS OWN THE CACTUS LEAGUE, BABY. That trophy is gonna look sweet.
Cubs beat the Giants today 10-8 to open up the Spring Training slate. Mostly the Giants beat themselves, but it was nice to watch some baseball today. I don’t even care if it’s a fake game. Cubs winning is fun.
The pace of the game was snappy from play to play, even if the game itself actually lasted way over 3 hours. That’s the idea, by the way – it’s not just about reducing game length.
- We got our first looks at Dansby Swanson, Cody Bellinger, Trey Mancini, and Eric Hosmer in Cubs uniforms. Nothing SUPER remarkable about their brief appearances, other than the fact of their existence. Marcus Stroman got in his two innings of work. The regulars departed. It was fine, and it’s what you want from a spring training game (other than Seiya Suzuki being scratched with oblique tightness … we’ll see if it’s a real issue soon enough).
- Adrian Sampson gave up three homers in his brief appearance, which is not an issue he dealt with last year. It’s spring, so whatever, but we do know that the risk with Sampson’s contact-management approach is that some days the batted balls might fall in, and worse, some days he might get barreled up.
- I’ll watch this again:
- The Cubs’ first homer of the spring goes to David Bote:
- Professional hitter, Trey Mancini:
- As is often the case in early Spring Training games, the young guys got a whole lotta run in this one, and it was particularly fun to see Brennen Davis, Pete Crow-Armstrong, and Matt Mervis up there multiple times. We also saw a lot of Yonathan Perlaza and Darius Hill, too.
- Christopher Morel looks OK at third base when he’s gathered himself, but when he’s throwing on the run – charging in – he has a tendency to lose his throws arm-side. It happened again today, as he plunked a runner with an errant throw as the runner approached first base. It was the primary issue Morel needed to correct at third base if he was going to see regular time there. One game, one throw, but I didn’t love seeing it today right out of the gate.
- The Giants made SIX errors today. Spring Training.
- Dexter Fowler, who stopped by the booth, has also made his presence felt with the team:
- No context:
