Weekend Not Warriors, Darvish, Estrada, Palencia, PCA, Strasburg, Clark, and Other Cubs Bullets

Sounds like Taylor Swift is pretty popular. In all seriousness, I’m happy so many friends are getting to see her concerts this weekend. There should be some joy in Soldier Field.

  • The Cubs are now 3-16 on the weekends this year. That means the Cubs are 22-16 on weekdays. Think about that disparity, and you will – as I have – start to wonder what the odds are that it’s entirely a coincidence or whether there is some signal there. It’s just such an extreme, extreme, extreme difference.
  • Cooooool cool cool cool cool cool:
  • Cubs: we’re gonna load up on lefties! Yu Darvish:
  • Increasingly, it seems like Owen Caissie is going to have to carry the Yu Darvish trade entirely on his own. To be sure, when you acquire four teenage prospects who’ve barely played pro ball, the whole idea is that you’re hoping at least one will break out. So it’s not as if the trade is a failure already. But you certainly would’ve liked to have seen more progress from any of Reggie Preciado (injury issues), Ismael Mena (only just now got a full-season assignment), and Yeison Santana (may be stalling out at Low-A/High-A border).
  • Jeremiah Estrada was tasked last night with keeping a three-run game a three-run game and instead he doubled things up, as the Padres went rocket, rocket, rocket, homer off of him. He HAS the fastball and slider to be a quality big league reliever, but he’s been giving up rockets all year because (1) he rarely seems to actually have his slider available, so he’s just constantly throwing fastballs with little variation, and (2) the fastball has to be located up to be successful, which means a mistake is going to get hammered.
  • I’m an Estrada believer because the raw pitches are each so good when they’re on, but clearly, there’s still a ways to go there. He’s gotta figure out the slider, especially. He threw it just twice out of 25 pitches last night, and one of those two was a hanger that became this:
  • You wonder at what point Daniel Palencia is going to get a big league bullpen look (not necessarily as a direct swap-out for Estrada, but the home-grown reliever thing had them both on my mind):
  • You are reminded that Palencia was converted to relief in TANDEM with a promotion to Triple-A, so the Cubs are clearly not going to mess around if they think he can get big league batters out. He’s also Rule 5 eligible after this season, so there’s just no reason to wait. As soon as they feel like he can handle the big league moment, he’s coming up.
  • It’s so beautiful when he gets ahold of one, especially lefty-on-lefty:
  • PCA’s mini slump didn’t last more than a couple weeks, and in the last week, he’s once again started raking again.
  • James Triantos’s start at High-A really couldn’t be going much better:
  • The Iowa Cubs had a very special guest:
  • Stephen Strasburg has been shut down once again, and it sounds bad from a pure quality-of-life standpoint:
  • Even as of the moment it was signed, the new deal for Strasburg seemed incredibly extravagant and improvident. But to ALSO do it in the face of him being essentially uninsurable? Unbelievable mistake on top of a mistake. At this point, you just hope the guy can live pain-free.
  • Heh. Michael’s lake-jump adventure made it all the way to San Diego:
  • 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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