Baseball

Series Preview – Cubs vs. Pirates: Because They Say You Have To

By Sam Fels 1066 0

vs.

RECORDS: Cubs 64-57   Pirates 50-70

GAMETIMES: Friday 6:05, Saturday 12:35, Sunday (In Williamsport) 6:10

TV: WGN Friday, ABC 7 Saturday, ESPN Sunday (oh boy)

THE ALREADY DEAD: Bucs Dugout

I can’t decide if it’s better that the Cubs get right back at it tonight at whatever the fuck that was in Philly or if they should have to stew on it for a day, like a child sent to his room. The fear is that whatever hangover/malaise/soul-death is emanating from those three games carries over and the Cubs continue to play like the undead. Which still might be enough against this outfit, as the Pirates have called it a season but keep showing up because it’s mandated. Fuck, both of these teams feel like they’re here this weekend merely because they have to be.

This series takes place in two locations, as Sunday night they’ll decamp for Williamsport to add to The Little League World Series, which in no way has gotten creepy and weird tanks to television and sponsor money. It also could be considered child abuse to make kids watch the Pirates right now.

Because this team is a bloated carcass being poked with a stick some kids found. They’ve gone 11-27 over the past six weeks, put up a 4-18 stretch after the break and clearly just want things to be over. They’re fighting with each other and their coaches. When they’re not doing that they’re fighting with other teams. Or they’re throwing at people, leading to the aforementioned bullshit. In the middle, they suck at actual baseball. Or at least they suck at pitching it.

The offense has been somewhat ok over the last month. Bryan Reynolds and Starling Marte have hit over .330 in that span. Josh Bell has cooled off but can still pop here and there. The rest of the infield is a major issue, as Colin Moran, Kevin Newman, and Adam Frazier are basically taking cardboard up to bat right now. Get through the outfielders and Bell, and this team can’t really hurt you.

The pitching staff is where the fun starts. With Jameson Taillon now down for good and for next year as well, there’s just no frontline starter here. They are “guys” at best, with Chris Archer decomposing in front of everyone’s eyes. The Cubs will see Musgrove, Brault, and Keller, the latter of which has some eye-popping numbers at AAA but is far from the finished product. Brault is just back from the IL and has been getting turned into pudding since. There are no monsters here.

It’s even better in the pen, where everyone hates Felipe Vasquez because he’s actually good and the rest are Kingston coal bags. Michael Feliz has been all right over the past month, but the rest of the crew have hitters sprinting to the plate. And apparently Kyle Crick and Keone Kela are raging assholes that have the rest of the team unable to wait to get to their offseason homes. A very healthy outfit here.

Which should make it the perfect tonic for the Cubs, who haven’t won a road series since there was snow on the ground. If they can’t get it together, no matter the morale, against this collection of fuckwits and dipshits for at least two wins, you can give up hope. The Pirates are begging for it to be over and would just like you to help them along to the back of the barn where they can be put out of their misery.

The Cubs should get Brandon Kintzler back this weekend, and Craig Kimbrel shouldn’t be far behind. It won’t feel good, but take all three from this roadkill and it’s a .500 road trip and you can at least argue it’s a starting point. Otherwise, what the fuck are we even doing here?

Baseball

Pirates Spotlight: Dysfunction At Every Junction

By Sam Fels 1295 0

Everyone knew that when the Pirates were flirting with the top of the division at the beginning portion of the season it was something of an illusion. Even with a healthy Jameson Taillon, and health elsewhere, this was based on Josh Bell’s freak-onomics at the plate and some other blind, dumb, idiot luck. What no one could have expected is that the market correction would be so harsh, so violent, and so complete.

The Pirates have gone 11-27 since July 1. They’ve lost 18 of 22 at one point. They have losing streaks of eight and nine games just in the past three weeks. They have the second-worst record in the National League, with only the we-don’t-even-try Marlins propping them up.

And what’s it’s done is expose rifts, stupidity, and simply indifference at the playing, managerial, front office, and ownership levels. This is a fine mess, and maybe something a real commissioner might feel tempted to do something about. But we’ll get back to that in a minute.

Just today, The Athletic in Pittsburgh broke a story about how the Bucs have had to suspend two pitchers and one coach for insubordination. This follows their actual brawl with the Reds, caused by the Pirates either encouragement of pitchers throwing at hitters’s heads or their inability to get them to stop, or an unwillingness or lack of motivation to even try. Pitchers and players have openly balked at the Pirates still cutter-heavy teachings and shift-heavy ways, even though they’re one of the worst ground-ball producing pitching staffs in the majors.

Secondly, you can’t lose that many games in that big of a bunch without some players quitting. And yet there’s been little mention of Clint Hurdle being fired, even though he’s got open insubordination and a team that doesn’t seem to care. This runs through the Pirates organization as a whole, as when owner Bob Nutting is reminded he actually owns a baseball team he’s shown loyalty over anything else, though that could just be indifference or laziness to not even wanting to bother.

The Pirates have been unlucky with injuries, as Taillon is headed for a second Tommy John surgery, and the pen can’t seem to keep anyone upright for very long either. But that doesn’t explain it all.

The dysfunction flows upward. Neal Huntington, the GM, doesn’t seem to have worry about his job status much either, and in the interest of fairness he does have his hands tied by strict payroll limits from his owner. Still, this was a team that tried to force Gerrit Cole into their very limited view of how pitchers should work, and then sold low on him to Houston and watched him become perhaps the most dominant starter in the American League. And all that was a result of the Astros just letting him be what he wants. Michael Feliz, Colin Moran, and Joe Musgrove either are or could be nice pieces, but none are defining a team.

But Huntington has always struggled to know what he has. Only Bell has come through the system to be a star under his watch, and that was only this year. Gregory Polanco has flattered to deceive, Taillon is hurt, and he gave up on Tyler Glasnow and Austin Meadows way early to bring in the husk of Chris Archer. Sure, Glasnow has the same injury problems as Taillon, but Meadows has been a borderline star, and in the outfield where the Pirates are currently sporting Melky Cabrera. And if you’re sporting Melky Cabrera in 2019, you suck. This list could go on.

But the rot starts at the head, and that’s Nutting. There’s no better example of a MLB owner just pocketing his BAMTECH and revenue sharing money and leaving the team he owns to flounder and turn weird colors, but still produce a profit. The Pirates drew over two million fans for five years running, covering both ends of their three wildcard berths stretch. But do you remember the Bucs ever adding to those teams in an ambitious way with a free agent pitcher or hitter they desperately needed to stick with the Cubs and now Brewers? Hey, the Brewers have swung trades for Christian Yelich and signed Lorenzo Cain and Yasmani Grandal, and they’re the same sized market as Pittsburgh or thereabouts (at least in baseball terms, Milwaukee has nearly twice the population).

Nutting rarely talks to the press, and is heavily guarded when he does. So we have no idea what he thinks. Yet being in Pittsburgh doesn’t seem to hold the Penguins or Steelers back much, even if they exist in leagues with salary caps.

The Pirates have been caught and passed on the field with their once-forward-looking methods, and don’t do much about it. Their front office seems helpless to add anything with the budget they have or to rightly evaluate what’s around. Their owner doesn’t seem to care. It’s rotten in The Iron City.

 

Baseball

This Team Doesn’t Have Moments, So This One Won’t Be Either

By Sam Fels 1171 0

The baseball season is so long, that we have a need to identify certain games or plays that signaled something, otherwise we’d have to admit we’ve just spent six months kind of watching the same thing over and over. Especially when it’s a team like this Cubs team that can never spend that much time being bad or good. It’s all dependent on location. Combine it all so far and you get a big bunch of mediocre, a colorless canvas, something that just kind of makes you make a sound like, “PHWA?”

You only can “identify” these moments in review, and that’s only when something much bigger happens at the end. Tell me, what was the defining moment of the 2017 season? I can’t really think of one, because that was a 92-win season that ended in the NLCS rather meekly. Wade Davis striking out Harper to end the series before (oh, the symbolism)? Max Scherzer’s inning? Certainly can’t think of much during the season.

I suppose last year has one, and it’s Carl Edwards Jr. throwing up all over what should have been the biggest home run of the season, Anthony Rizzo off Josh Hader to take the lead. Get that one win, and then you win the division and we see where it goes. Sometimes they’re easy to find, but then again it doesn’t really matter if the Cubs find one more win anywhere else along the six month season.

So yeah, there’s a huge urge to label last night’s dance quintet/cycle as the moment that will tear apart the season and send the Cubs spiraling to a .500 record or thereabouts, Maddon off into his RV, possibly Theo into the sunset to wait for his Hall of Fame berth, and whatever else. Certainly the symbols were all there–the player the Cubs refused to even try to sign (and rightly, honestly), the bullpen meltdown, the managerial what-ifs, the middle infield defense, I could keep going.

But you forget that the Cubs rolled into The Zit after what seemed like one of the biggest wins of the season, the comeback one over their bogey team Cincinnati. And they responded to that by three lifeless or dumbass games. So it honestly wouldn’t be a shock, and truly fitting, but following the worst loss of the season by three ho-hum, whatever wins over the already-quit Pirates. And then that will be a .500 road trip which won’t be great but isn’t disaster and we’ll be right back where we started. And the whole season has been just about ending up back where we started.

And they’ve done this before. I thought they were pretty much left in the shit after biffing a road trip to Milwaukee and St. Louis. They swept the Brewers and took two of three from the A’s, an AL playoff contender. I thought that might spur them. They then came up with these seven games of pure brilliance. They roared out of the All-Star break. That road trip they fucked up I just mentioned followed. That roaring out of the break followed a road trip they limped out of as well. They keep doing this.

“Momentum” in baseball is either non-existent or non-quantifiable. I can never decide. In the end, you win seven in a row because you’re playing well and you get a little luck. And you lose seven or eight in a row because of the opposite. The Cubs aren’t good enough to do the former and not bad enough to do the latter. If they were a winning team, their lack of spikes in the EKG would be cited as just staying on an even-keel, a quiet cool, a steady confidence. Because they’re a gray, shapeless life form at the moment, it’s easy to label them as lifeless, as bored, as unengaged. And they’ve looked all of that at times, as all disappointing teams do.

But I don’t know which one they are, I don’t think anyone else does, and more importantly I don’t think they do either. This Cubs team has just kind of existed through this season. It’s just there, standing in the corner, eating just the right amount of appetizers and drinking just the right amount of free booze without indulging and barely talking to anyone while also not appearing creepily aloof (can you tell who I am at parties?).

And that’s what I would guess would happen now. They’re not so stupid as to not take the two or three games this Pirates team will just hand you because that’s a thing they do now. And then they’ll return home and probably win more than they lose because that’s what they do. And then they’ll head on the road and lose more than they should. And they’ll just continue to Billy Pilgrim their way through this campaign until it ends, and still the most likely scenario is them standing on top as the Cardinals and Brewers more violently thrash about to go nowhere even harder than the Cubs.

It could be by next week you’ll barely remember last night. Or by the middle of September you won’t. There’s a small possibility it’ll become a comedic note, one we giggle about after the Cubs actually do turn it around and the Phillies continue to go straight to the middle. Most likely, it’ll just be something that happened. as pretty much all of this season has been.

Baseball

Series Recap – Cubs Swept By Phillies Because They’re Dead Inside

By Sam Fels 1360 0

Game 1 Box Score: Phillies 4, Cubs 2

Game 2 Box Score: Phillies 11, Cubs 1

Game 3 Box Score: Phillies 7, Cubs 5

If you’ve come here for a rant and rave…well, you might get one. I’m not sure. I don’t really plan on it, but it might just happen. Once you start talking about this team, the anger and bile just tend to flow.

Let’s get one thing straight, no matter what you’re thinking about Joe Maddon, any selection of brain-addled morons should be able to get six outs with a five-run lead. I was actually with Joe after seven, thinking that pulling Yu there with an extra day of rest will leave him full tank for his next couple starts after that. And hey, it’s five runs. If you think he should have left Yu in for the 8th, I don’t think you’re wrong. There shouldn’t be a wrong answer, because it’s a five-run lead with six outs to go. There are tons of ways to get those.

The one problem I would point out is that once you hit Kemp for Darvish, then he should stay in the game. He’s your best second baseman defensively, and that’s what matters. Happ has no range and no hands. I don’t want to get too upset with Bote, because he’s not really supposed to play short but has to once a blue moon.

So yeah, I’m not advocating for him to be on the team ever again, but all those who kept wailing about why Addison Russell was still playing even though he was going up to the plate with a toothbrush, it’s defense. He was good at second, despite the errors you remember and were looking for. It’s hard to remember too many other games that the Cubs lost because they were simply bad defensively, but aside from mistakes. Sure, they’ve made errors and bad decisions, but that came from everyone. Just being unable to actually play the position…well here you go.

And Joe even has his hands tied with the pen. Kyle Ryan and Rowan Wick have probably the ones you can count on most there lately. They couldn’t get it done. Now you’re into the clown’s mouth, literally. Strop’s fastball has been missing to arm-side all season, and he had no business trying to throw it inside because of that. He doesn’t have the control. Start it above the zone in the middle. But no, that’s too simple.

Six outs. Anyone should get six outs with five runs to play with. You have to actually work to blow that. And all the Cubs did.

As for the rest, I’ve seen enough of Albert Almora Jr. for my life. Tuesday’s loss pivoted on him trying to yank another hairball that human sweat-stain Jason Vargas coughed at the outside corner, when it’s all he can do. Almora shouldn’t be playing, which is weird to write after just complaining about the defense. He can play late in games then, but Happ’s bat is probably more needed, especially with Heyward and Baez at least ailing.

You have to do better than two runs off Jason Vargas, with his jersey yellowing by the third inning. Is that on Joe? Can they blame another hitting coach? Or maybe it’s that Theo and Jed filled out the lineup with players who aren’t any good? Just a hunch.

I thought about writing something today about the home and road splits, except on the ground it’s basically the starters have been much better at home than the road, and Wrigley has played to the pitchers more this year. That’s the big number you see. They score the same amount of runs, basically. The bullpen sucks just about anywhere. So whatever.

Still, maybe it’s because they lose on the road all the time now, but maybe it’s because they just don’t like being around each other. Sure feels that way. At home they get to go to their own homes. On the road they’re stuck with each other. But that’s a stretch. A guess. I don’t really know. No team looks like it’s having that much fun when they’re getting their dick kicked in on the road night after night.

The easy call is to say it’s Maddon’s fault. I don’t see it. I think this team is maxed out. He has had no bullpen to work with, whatever missteps there have been in games here and there strategically. Everyone he turns to out there is either terrible or hurt or both. I don’t know what he’s supposed to do.

Is it his fault that his starters seem to share the belt of “Tonight’s my night to get turned into dog vomit?” It seems like they do that at least once per turn through the rotation. It’s not his fault that he wasn’t provided any depth that this team had enjoyed the previous four seasons. You can blame the front office. You can blame ownership. They’re both at fault.

I would say one of Maddon’s strengths, and a bigger portion of a baseball manager’s job than we think, is to create a comfortable atmosphere and keep players loose. Well, the front office decided he can’t do that anymore, so what’s left? A bunch of players on edge with not enough talent to just stroll through the regular season and ease those fears through wins they just accrue because they’re that good. The talent base isn’t Maddon’s problem.

Me, I’m curious to see if this is the breaking point. If this is the finally the point in the season where someone like Rizzo or Bryant (not his style) or Baez (old enough?) closes the doors to the clubhouse and tells everyone to get their head out of their ass and start playing like it. Would it matter? With this pen in this condition? I guess we could find out. They can either look at this as the bottom and decide it’s time to knock it off, or they can use it as an excuse to quit.

But if they quit, it won’t be on Joe. At least not completely. It’ll lie with the front office that failed to buttress a roster that wasn’t the sure thing they wanted you to believe it was. A front office that bought into its own products far too much, and ones that haven’t helped. It’ll be the fault of ownership that for reasons they have yet to explain to anyone decided it couldn’t spend to secure the bullpen and maybe a bench player or two. And maybe the players that are here felt just a tiny bit abandoned by those above.

There’s been a malaise to this team. If you want to use those intangible reasons for tonight’s and this week’s performance, I won’t stop you. Or you can simply look at a pen that is missing its three top arms and simply doesn’t have enough after that. Maybe both are right.

Onwards…

 

Baseball

If You Want To Keep Castellanos, It’s Probably Going To Cost You Schwarber

By Sam Fels 2004 0

I guess it’s Kyle Schwarber Week here at the lab. Then again, it’s always Kyle Schwarber Week here at the lab.

There’s still a lot to be sorted this season, and even thinking about another confounding and infuriating offseason–as the next one is assuredly going to be because the Ricketts Family can’t manage a piss-up in a brewery–is a great way to make yourself miserable. But this season is already kind of miserable, and also I want to get out ahead of an already growing movement.

You can hear it in the wind, and you can see it in the sky. Greater Cubdom is starting a “Re-Sign Castellanos!” movement. You can certainly understand why, as after two weeks with the team he’s hitting .370 as a Cub and has a wRC+ of 194. He’s been a spark, at times, for a team that clearly looks like it needs it far more often than it has in the previous five years. To only focus on these two weeks is obviously a flawed process, so it’s better to be looking over the whole.

Even with this Cub-binge, this isn’t even Castellanos’s best season. That came last year, mostly because he hit the ball slightly harder. Still, Castellanos is only 27, and has at least two or three years of prime production left. The Cubs will clearly need a bat (or two), as Nico Hoerner isn’t going to be ready in 2020 thanks to his wrist problems this year. It all comes together for bringing Castellanos back.

But the issues are clearer than most want to see. The Cubs simply cannot get away with an outfield defense of Castellanos in right and Heyward in center for a full season. especially with Heyward getting a year older. J-Hey isn’t all that good in center, he won’t kill you there but he’s far from the stud he is in right. This might be especially true as the Cubs are likely to lose one of their biggest strikeout pitchers and ground-ball pitchers in Cole Hamels, who negates a bit the need for a good defensive outfield .And unless the Cubs are going to sign Gerrit Cole, that’s an issue. And they’re not going to sign Gerrit Cole (though they should). The need for outfield defense becomes slightly more acute.

Also, if you’re going off simply two weeks, you’d be tempted to hand next year’s centerfield job to Ian Happ, but that’s why we don’t do these things.

You have to project out what you think Castellanos will be. He only has a career 111 wRC+, which is good but not the kind of production one loses their mud over and centers their offseason plans around. However, if you take the last four seasons, where you could say the light went on, it’s 120. That might be a player you center plans around.

A theme that the local scene has been eager to pump is that the change from Comerica to Wrigley will boost his slugging and homers. That’s true to an extent, but how many more homers are we talking? Five at home? Maybe seven? That seems the extent. But even if you add ten more bases to Castellanos’s totals this year (five homers instead of doubles), his slugging goes up 20 points. So a consistent 115-120 wRC+ player is hardly out of the question, and with a couple bounces more than that.

But the defense. You can’t have that. The Cubs are already one of the ten-worst fly-ball defensive efficiency teams in the league. And that’s with Almora out there in center and Heyward in right a decent portion of the time. How much worse do you really want that to get?

Which means signing Castellanos puts him in left. And you already have someone there. The question one would have to ask is will Schwarber ever produce that kind of offense consistently for far cheaper than Castellanos on the open market (leaving you more money to address other concerns)? Keep in mind that Schwarber’s ’18 is about as good as Castelllanos’s current campaign (no fooling, 115 to 116). Castellanos has reached 130, and if you project that he’ll get near there again in the next three years however many times, can Schwarber ever do so? He’s only done it for 70 games four seasons ago now.

In essence, you’d basically be guaranteed a push by swapping out Schwarber for Castellanos in left, though you’d cost yourself spending power which is a concern over there because the Ricketts are so poor, don’t you know? You might do better. Depending on what the return is on any Schwarber trade, maybe you’re a better team. Or then maybe you watch Schwarber pop for 42 home runs in Tampa or something as a DH and you feel shame, especially if his trade value has been neutered over the past few seasons.

If Castellanos keeps this up for the season’s last six weeks, he’s probably looking at a $20-$25M payday per season. That’s essentially Hamels’s money, leaving you with some of Zobrist’s to play with after arbitration raises and such, along with other free agents maneuvering in and out.

This the debate. It’s not so easy, is it?

Baseball

Can We Turn Kyle Schwarber Into Joey Gallo?

By Sam Fels 1488 0

It’s an admittedly random comparison. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Kyle Schwarber, because I am lost and perhaps helpless. Still, I’ve spent a fair amount of time defending Kyle, rooting for Kyle, hoping this week or this game or even this plate appearance is the one that opens the floodgates for him.

But it hasn’t happened. Schwarbs is still hitting under .240. He’s still slugging under .500. His wRC+ is a mere 107, which is hardly bad, but this offense needs more from left field than that. Especially when Schwarber is not going to provide really anything defensively.

I thought of Gallo, because Schwarber is still on course for 30 homers, 35 if he were to have one more binge this season. That’s something. Homers out of nothing is what Gallo used to be. Gallo of course hit 40 the past two seasons, but while he was doing that he was failing to reach a .210 average or even a .340 OBP, which Schwarber eclipsed last year. Still, there are some similarities.

They both walk more than average, although this year Gallo has walked a ton. They both strike out a lot, but Gallo strikes out far more often than Schwarber. But Gallo is hitting .253 this year, slugging nearly .600, with a 145 wRC+ and on his way to a 4.0 WAR season, something we’d all die for Kyle to become.

Kyle is eight months older, so if you’re hoping for just natural evolution or aging, that’s out. Schwarber does hit the ball hard, but he’s not hitting it as hard as Gallo. Gallo has rocked a 45+% hard-contact rate before the baseball became flubber, and is over 50% this year. Schwarber is around 40%. This has allowed Gallo to run a .368 BABIP, which is obviously high but when you’re hitting the ball as hard as Gallo does, it’s not that high.

Now, it would be easy to say that Gallo just hits the ball harder, is stronger or has a more natural swing or whatever. But if you travel into the StatCast lands, you’ll see that Schwarber’s and Gallo’s average exit velocity are almost identical (92.5 MPH for Schwarber and 93.0 for Gallo). Though Schwarber probably has gotten a boost from the baseball, as this is new territory for him whereas Gallo has always done this. Still, they’re on the same plane, now, so let’s work with that.

So how do we get Schwarber there, if we can? One change Gallo has made this year has been far great discipline. He’s swinging at almost a quarter less pitches outside the zone, nine percentage points less inside the zone. He’s been far more selective. But the thing is, his numbers now are just what Schwarber is doing, as far as what he’s swinging at. The difference is that Schwarber has better coverage, making contact on far more pitches outside the zone than Gallo does. Still, that’s not really it.

It was thought that Gallo would always suffer from shifts, and he would lose out on hits because he would keep lacing balls into infielders standing in right field. It was thought he would have to go the opposite way more often. Well, Gallo told all of that to fuck off, because he’s pulling the ball even more than he has in the past. He’s just doing so more on a line, and that’s where the real difference is. Gallo has a 25% line-drive rate, which will always drive up your BABIP, and Scwharber is at 18%. Gallo keeps his ground-ball rate around 25%, whereas Schwarber is up near 40%. That’s probably the change here. As strange as it sounds, Schwarbs needs to get more balls in the air.

Whether that will work for Schwarber is up for debate. Schwarber crushes the ball to the opposite way, slugging .765 when going that way this year, and being more damaging doing that than when he’s pulling the ball.

While Gallo can still get caught out by change-ups, the ground-ball rates on slider and curves is markedly different, with Schwarber’s ground-ball percentages some 10-15% higher than Gallo’s on those pitches. Schwarbs is going to have to find a way to get those in the air, and hard.

It may just be that Schwarber can’t consistently hit the ball that hard, or that he’ll never learn to get that contact more in the air with some violence. But his hopes, and ours, of being a plus-player kind of ride on it. Whether that’s pulling the ball to the same obscene degree that Gallo does, or whether he can find a way doing that hitting it the other way as he is now. Again, with no defensive contribution, Schwarber has to slug over .500 to be effective, and probably over .550. He has to get his average to .250, and his on-base over .37o or more. Otherwise, we’ll keep seeing these 1.0-1.5 WAR seasons, and you’d have to say the Cubs need better from that spot.

Baseball

Don’t Be Fooled by 6:40

By Sam Fels 1372 0

Baseball is strange in a lot of ways, and it being the only sport that announces the following year’s schedule before the current one is finished is way down the list of reasons why. Still, it’s a quirk that MLB has had for the past few years.

You may have caught a change to the normal slate of Cubs games, and that’s before Memorial Day and after Labor Day next season, night games will start at 6:40pm instead of the normal 7:05. It only ends up being about 10 games in total, but it does feel like some sort of trial balloon. Off the top of my head, Cleveland and the Rockies have started games before 7pm local time, as have the Giants. There may be others as well.

You heard it on the broadcast last night a bit, that the Cubs made this change because “they heard from fans” that this is a change they wanted, at least while the kids were in school. And if you think my brow isn’t furrowed about that one, you haven’t been around here for very long. Because we’ve seen this before, and it’s with one particular resident of 1901 W. Madison.

You’ll recall many years ago, the 2013-2014 season we think upon research, that the Hawks made a big stink about how they were moving all home games to 7:05 from the usual 7:30. They said the same things, that fans wanted the change, that fans wanted to get home earlier, that it would even be better for the press trying to get their game stories in for the morning paper (which upon reflection is uproariously funny). They said it was all for us.

And it lasted one season.

And the reason it lasted one season had to do with the real reason they made the switch. The Hawks thought that if they shrunk the time between when most people got off work and when the game started, they would force more people straight into the building before the game instead of people stopping at a different establishment between work and puck drop. They wanted everyone doing their pregaming in the United Center and not around it. It didn’t work. People were mostly just showing up closer to gametime, or even late, and the Hawks were actually missing out on concession revenue. So after all the hoorah they made about switching the games to 7, the following season with nary a mention they moved them back to 7:30. Your kids’ bedtimes be damned.

And the Cubs are no different. They don’t give a flying fuck how tired your kid is the next day at school because he attended a game at Wrigley. Or how late you get back to the suburbs or whatever. They’re attempting the same thing here, just not all at once.

If you work downtown, and get off at 5, catching the red line straight to Wrigley has you there what, maybe 5:30 if you’re lucky? More likely 5:45 or 6 though. But now instead of having an hour or more, you might only have 45 minutes before first pitch. Which might tempt you to just head straight into the park instead of hitting up somewhere else. Or if you really want dinner before the game, you probably want to do it as close to Wrigley as possible to cut down on transit team. Hmm, guess who owns a few of the restaurants around the park?

The Cubs sell over three million tickets a year, whenever they start the games. So they don’t have to care about what the fans want (and boy haven’t we seen overwhelming evidence of that this year). So their only focus is how to maximize revenue other ways. That’s all this is.

It’s not a huge difference. It won’t dramatically change lives. But keep an eye in 2021 whether they go to this full-time, or scrap it all together. And then you’ll know the real reasons why. And it won’t have to do with little Riker’s or Maya’s bedtime or science quiz in the morning, believe me.

Football

Matt Nagy’s Fixation On Kickers Will Surely Kill Us All

By Sam Fels 1395 0

I know that football coaches are obsessives beyond the point of comprehension. I get that every minute detail of the team is pored over to a degree that a lazy-ass like myself would think comes from another dimension. “Fixation” is a word that most NFL coaches are so far beyond it’s not even worth considering. And most of it is because they just feel the other guy is doing the same, even if it has no actual benefit and it wouldn’t kill anyone if these coaches actually bothered to learn their daughters’ names.

Still, the Bears’ offseason and now training camp being primarily focused on the kicking competition has been…well, there are a few words for it. Strange, annoying, needless, and inflammatory are some that come to mind. To the point where I’m wondering what’s really going on here.

Yeah, I get it. Cody Parkey made this worse by going on whatever national morning show and removing his own rib to show how much missing THAT KICK hurt him but what a big guy he was by moving on from it. That in itself is going to create more attention on the position than normal, whether the Bears booted him into the river or not (I’ll give Parkey this, he did the whole “Point To Jesus” thing after he fucked up as well, which is more than most fuck-you-pious athletes do).

But it’s gone beyond that. We had the “Kicking Cavalcade” in mini-camps, with everyone being forced to make a 43-yarder in front of the whole team. Or Nagy mentioning it while singing the stretch at Wrigley. Or his constant reminders in interviews about how the ending of last season haunts him. Or making the two kickers in camp make 43-yarders, and how the first preseason game contained a field goal of that exact length in the first half. And how symbolic that was.

We’ve been inundated with updates from all the Bears beats every day. Our Sons Of Wilber Marshall have had to address it here. You can’t escape. It’s everywhere.

Fuck right off.

At this point, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a cover. Because somewhere deep down, Matt Nagy knows that game didn’t have to come down to a makable-but-not-chip-shot kick. Somewhere, he knows if he hadn’t spent at least the first half against the Eagles calling plays with one hand around his throat and the other with the thumb somewhere sensitive, maybe the Bears are playing from on top. Maybe he knows that at the biggest drive of the season, his defense let him down and got run over by Nick Goddamn Foles and the wounded ducks he was tossing only in a general direction. He certainly would have to be aware of the former, as it would be the second straight year he spent at least a half of a playoff game making his offense run a three-legged race. If he’s not, that’s certainly a much bigger problem for the Bears moving forward.

I doubt he’s intentionally hanging Ryan Pace out to dry, but that’s certainly a knock-on effect. And while Pace is hardly perfect, he did construct a roster ready to turn Nagy into one of the most successful first-year coaches in history. Perhaps tone it down a notch there, visor?

And this isn’t healthy. What kicker is going to live up to this? Now you’ve whipped the fans into a frenzy, the press into one, and those two just keep feeding into each other. The Bears could gut the Packers in Week 1 34-3 (which they will), but if whatever kicker is chosen misses one field goal, you know what the calls will be about Monday, right?  What at least one article in each of the Trib, Sun-Times, and Athletic will be? It’s now a constant question until the end of the season, and nothing will ever be good enough until Mystery Kicker makes a winning kick in a playoff game.

Except that might not come up. Close games are inevitable in January, but they hinge on a lot of factors. Yes, field goals are directly tied to points in the way that a more adventurous call on second or third down at the 40 is not. Or a missed tackle behind the line that results in a three-yard gain instead. But teams have won the Super Bowl without needing a buzzer-beater. I know, hard to believe, but it’s true.

But still, it’s a kicker. It’s middle relief of football. You find one somewhere, he sticks around for a few years, and then you find another one. Had you heard of Aldrick Rosas before last year? Do you even know who it is now? He’s the Giants kicker and finished second in FG% last season. Mike Badgley? You don’t have any idea, and if you do it’s only because he was on your fantasy team, and he was assuredly your last pick or waiver pick-up.

They just come from somewhere. Even if it’s your team, you don’t really know where. And yeah, it’s noticeable when you pick a bad one, as the Bears did last season. It happens sometimes, but to say that’s the reason the season was torpedoed is missing the whole picture. Me? I’m much more worried about Mitch Betta’ Have My Money’s accuracy.

I don’t want to say it’s untenable. I doubt there’s no kicker anywhere who can’t put everyone’s mind at ease within the season’s first few weeks. But it shouldn’t have to be like this. If it works as a cover for other weaknesses on the team as they get worked out…well, ok. I guess. Seems like it’s a pretty elaborate and heavy-worked smokescreen, though.