Faxes from Uncle Dale

When they designed inter-league play, this wasn’t a matchup they were thinking about. Still, the way it’s worked out it’s become kind of intriguing, and not just because the Cubs end up in Seattle twice a decade. The Mariners are the surprise team in the American League, if not the whole of MLB, and the Cubs are rounding into sharpness.

So what are the Mariners doing crashing the private party that the AL West was supposed to be for the Astros again so far? Well, they’re pretty weird. They’ve had an offensive bonanza, with basically every fly ball they hit landing out beyond various walls. Four players are currently seeing a quarter of their flies turn into homers, and six are seeing 20% or above. That’s almost unheard of, even in this era of baseball where they’re using swollen Titleists as baseballs. You’d think that has to come down at some point. Jay Bruce’s .192 average and yet .552 slugging is particularly goofy.

And yet, there is some validity to some of it. Bruce, large adult son Dan Vogelbach, and Brewers castoff Domingo Santana are all hitting the ball extremely hard and aren’t benefitting from a bloated BABIP or anything like it. Santana has done this before in Milwaukee, and then was squeezed out by the Yelich and Cain acquisitions, as well as Jesus Aguilar‘s emergence (how’s that look now?). Vogelbach always threatened this in the Cubs’ system, he just needed a DH spot to do it at the top level as putting a glove on him would cause various air-raid sirens to sound off.

Tim Beckham might see his bubble burst, but Omar Narvaez’s on-base skill aren’t on luck either. Edwin Encarnacion is apparently not dead. and Mitch Haniger has been a plus-plus as well.

The flip side to this is that the Mariners are one of the worst defensive teams in recent history, as they have three or four players who should be only a DH for their own safety but only one spot occupied by Vogelbach. So Encarnacion has to be in the field. So does Bruce. Dee Gordon has to be at second, and he played himself out of there once already in his career. You know what Tim Beckham at short looks like. They’ve given up an unearned run per game so far this year.

The staff that has to work around this includes yet another undead ballplayer in Felix Hernandez. There was a real fear of what watching Hernandez this season could be in spring training, such has been his decline since being maybe the best pitcher in the American League for a minute. But Felix has been able to be better than simply a seat-filler or place-holder so far by cutting his walks down to next to nothing and upping the grounders he gets. He’s using his curve more for both, and pounding the strike zone with the rest of his arsenal.

The other hurler the Cubs will see is Marco Gonzales, who’s been magnificent through not giving up homers at all. He doesn’t get a lot of grounders but a lot of harmless flies. Gonzales flashed this a bit last year with a 3.5-fWAR season no one noticed, and being let down by a dreadful defense. The last part is still there of course, but he’s doing even better by also throwing nothing but strikes.

The pen is something of a cast of thousands, with six different yahoos collecting at least save. Old friend Zac Rosscup is here but he can’t hit a bull in the ass with a snow-shovel at the moment, which has helped him collect Ks but a ton of walks. Roenis Elias and Brandon Brennan have been the best out of there. The rest have benefitted from fortune, and this is the unit probably headed for a collapse first.

The Mariners have been fun thanks to all the fireworks, but they’re likely to not out-homer their Python-esque defense or Felix’s age for too much longer. But until then, it’s a fun ride.

Everything Else

The Doll’s Trying to Kill Me and the Toaster’s Been Laughing at Me – FFUD ’18–19 Player Reviews – Gustav Forsling

By Adam Hess April 30, 2019 1957 0

When I was a child, I had this one specific Spider-Man action figure that I loved playing with. Inside the creativity of my chilhood mind, that little Spider-Man was not just Spidey, but he was also a professional baseball/football/hockey player, soldier, what have you, depending on the day and my mood. But one day I dropped that Spider-Man action figure in a parking lot without knowing it, and he got run over by a car, and when I found him I was in tears. My mom loves to tell the story of me sobbing about Spider-Man and me declaring I had lost my “best friend,” as I put it through my tears. Now, dear reader, you are probably thinking “what the fuck is this guy is talking about this for?” Good question. My point is Gustav Forsling may need to be run over in a parking lot.

Stats

43 GP, 3 G, 4 A, 9 P

47.81 CF% – 43.73 xGF% [5v5]

It Comes With A Free Frogurt!

Listen, I am not trying to take an easy way out here — I have very little good to say about Gustav Forsling based on 2018-19. It honestly just feels like trying to make anything sort of positive sweeping declaration about his season would be either stretching the truth to an almost irresponsible extent. There are not many redeeming moments I can think of or point to that would give me reason to say, “sure, but look at that!” And the thing about it is, I can’t really for the life of me figure out why.

If there was any redeeming quality about Forsling, it’s that he has the tools to at least be a not terrible player. He has the stride. He has the hands. He has the vision with the puck. He can pass, skate, shoot, whatever. In a vacuum, it all looks like it’s there. Then you take it out of the vacuum, put him on the ice of an NHL game, and he’s like a 3-year-old trying to hit a pinata – either someone is losing an apendage or there will be guts spilled all over the floor, or perhaps both. I don’t know what it is about this young man in his own defensive zone, but he seems to have no clue what to do when it comes to playing defense. And as a, uh, defenseman, that’s a bit of a problem.

But again, if he was a baseball prospect, you’d grade most his tools in the 50-55 range, meaning average or slightly above. But the thing about tools is that without a proper toolbox (player) and tradesman (coaching), they’re going to go to waste. Forsling still needs to put it all together, and he still has barely played more than 100 games at the NHL level. But the time is quickly running out, especially if the Hawks pick Bowen Byram at No. 3 this year.

The Frogurt Is Also Cursed

So let’s talk a bit about what actually makes him so damn bad. As referenced above, Forsling is clueless as far as what to do on the ice in an NHL game, especially in his own zone. I’m not sure if the game is just too fast for him, but it kinda looks that way. He looks like he can’t fully process everything going on around him properly in real time, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record I again note that it’s particularly noticeable when he is in the defensive zone. To take it a step further than that, it almost feels like he’s altogether lost when the other team has the puck, regardless of where it is on the ice. He doesn’t pinch well in the offensive zone, he doesn’t position himself well in the neutral zone on the way back, which leads to bad positioning in the d-zone. It’s all ugly.

On top of all of that, the things that it appears in the vacuum he does well, like skate and pass, end up falling apart in practice. If you had an iso-cam on him, you might watch him grab a puck behind the net, skate it out and make a pass, and it would look fine. Again, the vacuum view is fine. Zoom out, though, and you’ll see the pass is across his own zone to the right wing on the far board and he’s trying to thread the needle between the two forecheckers. It’s another processing error, thinking he can do something that he cannot, that stems from not being able to keep up with the game mentally.

I had high hopes for Forsling from the moment he was traded to the Hawks because the reports seemed promising. At one point, and I am not proud of this, I said from what I had seen of him I thought he could be the next Duncan Keith. I walked that back quickly and said the next Nick Leddy. I wrote it in his 2017-18 player preview, and then in his review for the same season I remained high on him because the tools were still there. I don’t think I am wrong on that at all (save for the suggestion he play with Seabrook, because we all saw how that went). But again, Forsling is either not the proper toolbox to put those tools together, or CCYP is not the proper tradesman to put it together for him. But Quenneville wasn’t either, based on the usage. So who would be? At a certain point, the least common denominator is the player himself.

At this point, I cannot in good conscience pencil Forsling into any future plans for this team. I think his best value to the organization moving forward may be as a potential trade chip. That would require other teams to be willing to take on a bad player, but as long as Peter Chiarelli has a job you know there’s at least one team who fits the bill.

Everything Else

You Can Spew Anything When No One’s Listening

By Sam Fels April 30, 2019 1669 0

In one sense, this is the easiest time to be Stan Bowman. Your draft position is set, the exit interviews are done, and thanks to the playoffs (both NHL and NBA) and baseball, no one’s really paying attention to you. Throw in the fatigue most Hawks fans had from watching and thinking about their team, and that’s even more indifference and apathy that keeps them in the dark. Nothing can really be done until after the Final is over. While the Hawks would prefer to win, I’m sure that if you asked them honestly they would tell you one silver lining of being bad now is the shroud of anonymity it’s provided them. These are people who would prefer to not be looked at too closely.

So it was again when Bowman granted the Sun-Times’s Jason Lieser a lengthy interview, and boy is there some Grade A horseshit in here. Even better it came out on a Saturday, to lower the odds that anyone would see it to just above nil. But it didn’t escape my eye. Nothing does. I am Sauron. Let’s dive in, shall we? And I want to start with the end of the article first.

“Having the opportunity to start the season with a training camp and to have the time to establish a standard, that allows you to be a little more direct and aggressive about enforcing how we need to play to win,” he said.”

This is a narrative I was sick of by March 1st, and it’s one that both Bowman and Jeremy Colliton are going to pedal until the next training camp to try and save their ass. Plain and simple, Jeremy Colliton was in the job for five months. He had 67 games. While he may not have been able to do everything he liked, the idea that he was trying to install Matt Nagy’s offense on the fly is just laughable. Yes there were changes made and it’s not totally simple but it does remain hockey and it’s not that hard.

If making changes is that hard midseason, why was Colliton allowed to switch the defensive system at all then? Because he did, and you saw the results. If he can perform this massive switch the moment he shows up, and provide us with Connor Murphy roaming around the blue line by design, then why couldn’t he tweak it in February and March when it was painfully obvious that the team couldn’t run what he wanted? Or if changes are so hard…why fire Quenneville at all?

You have to hope Stan knows, and this isn’t encouraging either, that he put together a blue line that was simply unacceptable and there was no saving it. But he can’t say that, otherwise he’d be signing his own pink slip if McDonough weren’t so busy either patting himself on the back or yelling at low-level employees or both. But you wonder if that’s what Stan really thinks when you get to this mess…

“That’s something people have a hard time grasping,” he said. “What was is not always a perfect indicator of what will be.”

He’s acutely aware of every team’s trajectory at all times, and just in case everybody hasn’t been studying the New York Islanders’ defense the last two years, he’s happy to offer a quick sketch: same defensemen, new goaltender, new coach — substantial improvement.

The Islanders were way out of the playoffs a year ago, but leapt to 48-27-7 and swept the Penguins in the first round last week. They went from dead last in goals allowed, shots against, penalty kill and five-on-five high-danger chances against to average or better in every category. They allowed the fewest goals in the NHL this season.

Their situation wasn’t that different than the Hawks’ other than they were slightly younger.

Their top seven defensemen this season were already in the organization, and the only newcomer was a rookie. The Hawks have Adam Boqvist, the No. 8 overall pick last year, in the pipeline.

Robin Lehner was second in the NHL in save percentage this season and was a major upgrade at goalie, but the improvement in shots against and high-danger chances didn’t have anything to do with him. The Hawks might get a similar boost if Corey Crawford stays healthy next season.

Bowman believes coach Barry Trotz was instrumental after taking over for Doug Weight, and the Hawks are heading into Colliton’s first full season running the team.

It’s not a step-by-step guide for the Hawks, but it’s plausible to Bowman that his team could pull off that type of transformation.

“People would say that sounds good but that doesn’t ever happen,” he said. “And my point would be that it can happen — it just did happen.”

I nearly passed out when I read this. Let’s see if we go through it together if we can survive or this becomes digital Jamestown.

To compare the Hawks to the Islanders is so incomprehensible I have to put my head through the drywall just to feel anything again. One, while the Islanders might not have any stars, Adam Pelech, Ryan Pulock, Scott Mayfield, now Devon Toews were all highly regarded prospects and already in the NHL or right on the doorstep (Toews). Nick Leddy and Johnny Boychuck have been plus-NHL d-men for years. Thomas Hickey has at least been serviceable most of his career.

Who on the Hawks fits any of these categories that’s going to be on the roster next year for sure? Connor Murphy and Erik Gustafsson are solid NHL-ers, and maybe nothing more. Henri Jokiharju might be the prized prospect, except really all he did was look better than the trash heap Bowman foisted upon the world in some Joker-esque prank. Forsling and Koekkoek are simply not NHL players. Dahlstrom can maybe has a crimp-hold on being a #6-7. Brent Seabrook may not be an NHL player either. Duncan Keith gave up. What’s left?

Second, Barry Trotz has been coaching in the NHL for two decades and has made three different teams into solid defensive outfits. Jeremy Colliton has one season at the AHL-level and four-fifths of one at the NHL-level. You really want to bet your future on his transformational abilities?

Third, Trotz teams get their defensive prowess from basically stripping any offensive impulse and creativity from their system. You’re not going to do that here with the forwards you have. Remember, the Islanders had one player over 60 points. The Hawks had four and another in Strome who was just off a point-per-game pace since arriving. Those two simply don’t line up.

At the season wrap-up, Bowman swerved from a question on Seabrook’s play by pointing to Toews’ resurgence. The message between the lines was that the Hawks need Seabrook to have that type of offseason and come back somewhere near peak form.”

This is rich, considering the Hawks were pushing the “best shape of his life” stories on Seabrook last training camp and he still looked beached orca-like during the season.

I don’t want to rule out Seabrook changing his body and game for next season. Maybe professional pride kicks in, though it hasn’t in about four years. And Toews wasn’t out of shape, he was in the wrong shape. Toews kept bulking up for a game that was getting faster. The change he had to make wasn’t working harder or finding motivation. He just had to change how he went about it.

I have no idea what Seabrook’s offsesaon regimen looks like, if it even exists. But we’ve been talking about his sluggishness since 2013 and it’s been consistent since 2015-2016. I understand he can’t really go anywhere, at least in an organization that doesn’t seem to have any balls, but this is truly the most wishful of thinking.

This is from earlier in the article:

Playing the results, the Hawks could’ve used Panarin and Teravainen this season. But based on the circumstances at the time, Bowman doesn’t second-guess himself.

“The makeup of our team and the makeup of our competitors — you wouldn’t redo those deals,” he said. “I think we were one of the first teams — I guess you could say Los Angeles as well — where this became a big issue for managing your assets. There are some other teams that are bumping right up against it now.

“It’s hard to navigate that without something giving. The whole hope is that you can manage it well enough that you don’t flounder for a long time.”

I understand no GM is going to admit a mistake on a player currently on the roster, and I say this as Brandon Saad’s last remaining fan, but if you wouldn’t redo that Panarin deal then you’ve got the wrong combo of medication. And the Hawks can’t squawk about how much cap space they have now and then turn around and claim they never would be able to re-sign Panarin, combined with the half-hearted noise they’ve made about trying to do it this summer anyway. Same goes for Teuvo, though not wanting to badmouth Bryan Bickell is understandable.

Isn’t it fun to work in the dark?

Baseball

Series Preview – Orioles vs. White Sox: Building In The Muck

By Sam Fels April 29, 2019 1299 0

vs.

RECORDS: Orioles 10-19 White Sox 11-14

GAMETIMES: Monday-Wednesday 7:10

TV: NBCSN Monday and Wednesday, WGN Tuesday

GIARDELLO’S ARMY: Camden Chat

PROBABLE PITCHERS

John Means vs. Manny Banuelos

Andrew Cashner vs. Ivan Nova

TBD (maybe David Hess) vs. TBD (possibly Carlos Rodon, possibly Dylan Covey)

PROBABLY ORIOLES LINEUP

Jonathan Villar – 2B

Trey Mancini – RF

Dwight Smith Jr. – LF

Renato Nunez – DH

Rio Ruiz – 3B

Jesus Sucre – C

Joey Rickard – CF

Chris Davis – 1B

Richie Martin – SS

PROBABLE SOX LINEUP

Leury Garcia – LF

Tim Anderson – SS

Jose Abreu – 1B

James McCann – C

Yoan Moncada – 3B

Jose Rodon – 2B

Yonder Alonso – DH

Ryan Cordell – RF

Adam Engel – CF

If taking two games on offer against the Tigers is any kind of signal for a turnaround, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep that going against the Baltimore Orioles. That is if they get any of these games (Tuesday looking particularly dicey), and also that didn’t work out so well the last time they faced the Charm City Orange.

We’ll start with the Sox, who will begin life without Eloy Jimenez for a couple weeks at least. Eloy won’t even be reevaluated until then, so it could be longer. Tonight that sees Leury Garcia shift over to left with Adam Engel and his pool-noodle bat move into center. He can rob a home run for you, he just might not get any ball out of the infield when at the plate. Nicky Delmonico and his handsomeness could see more PAs in Eloy’s absence, which is something that should make you shrug at best, and roll your eyes hard enough to hurt in the worst.

Also in the news is that the Sox have called up Dylan Covey, or Dylan Arrieta as Fifth Feather calls him. He will most likely help out the pen in Nate Jones‘s absence, but they have stretched him out in Charlotte and could take a spot start somewhere along the line. That will depend on Lucas Giolito‘s recovery from a hamstring twang, which he can’t come back from until next week anyway.

So to the O’s, who spent the weekend picking up various pieces of their skull that the Twins bashed out of them. They lost the three games by a combined 19-4, and it’s the kind of stretch whatever Os fans that haven’t bleached their eyes will have to get used to. As we said last week, there just isn’t anything here resembling a major league team, and the Os are going to get their bones ground up pretty good all season.

Trey Mancini has been something of a bright spot offensively, though his .413 BABIP might have something to do with that. Renato Nunez hasn’t been terrible, but is something of a lottery ticket in the hopes that he could be a fifth infielder one day. This is the best the Orioles can do, as they might not even be at Year 1 of their rebuild yet.

Their rotation has been the expected tire fire, with tonight’s starter Means the only one to not turn into something you’d find on a Nickelodeon game show, and he’s mostly a reliever and spot-starter. Still, he held down the Sox last week with six Ks over five innings, and he’ll look to repeat the feat. Other than that, god help you.

The Os and Sox in the cold and rain on the Southside. Catch the fever. Literally.

Baseball

“Stubbing Your Toe” Will Now Be Known As “Being The Chicago Cubs”

By Sam Fels April 29, 2019 1521 0

If you thought the Cubs, and perhaps you as a Cubs fan, would escape their self-created hell of an offseason just because baseball games were being played again, then the world is going to have some awfully violent market corrections in store for you. But I admire your optimism and hope in these times. It appears that the Cubs stepped in it again, or more to the point it became public knowledge that they’d stepped in it again, yesterday with reports that the Cubs were declining access or threatening writers who did not give positive coverage of Addison Russell. With his return to Wrigley now imminent, and most everyone except Russell wishing it would never happen for a litany of reasons, the Cubs are clearly going to a prevent defense of the highest order. The problem with a prevent defense of course is that it does give up a ton of yards.

It started with Sheryl Ring of FanGraphs. That was picked up by NBC’s Hardball Talk. This was followed by a few beat writers who follow the team saying they hadn’t heard this and certainly hadn’t been threatened by the team, and then some other writers or media members not as close to the team saying they had heard this or been on the receiving end. You know us, we go by the amount of smoke something has, and this one has a ton. Sheryl Ring and FanGraphs aren’t just some yahoos in the dark, even if some would like to still portray them as such, and all this comes from somewhere and something.

And really, when you’re on the side of Bob Nightengale on anything, you’re on the wrong one.

There is nothing comfortable about anything surrounding Russell right now. His suspension, the Cubs handling of him, his impending return, but most of all who he is and what he’s done, and whether or not he has any interest in not being that (sure doesn’t feel like it). While I am as uncomfortable as anyone, just because I’m uncomfortable doesn’t mean I can’t see where the Cubs are on this at the base level. Since the suspension, which at first they didn’t handle well at all, Theo Epstein’s openness has been if not welcome, at least a change. There is no clear answer on whether or not heaving Russell out of Chicago and his job is beneficial to Melisa Reidy and to survivors at large. Some say it does worse damage, others say it doesn’t. Perhaps the Cubs cherry-picked the experts they talked to, but in this day and age a sports organization talking to anyone is a step in the right direction.

Theo has been careful to mention Melisa and their child’s interest at every turn, and even has said Melisa herself didn’t want Russell cut loose. Maybe that’s not exactly what went down, but if it went against her wishes I think we’d know at this point. And considering the hell she and their child have been through, they are deserving of whatever share of a major league paycheck they get. Maybe it’s uncomfortable and upsetting that Russell will continue to get to work here specifically for most, and I get that because no one wants this around. At the same time, it may be that it has to be somewhere. You’re not supposed to feel good about it, or like it, or comfortable, but just because it lacks all of those things doesn’t mean it’s completely wrong. Yes, the point of sports fandom is to feel good and happy and fun, but this is also real life, which is basically none of those things most of the time.

I won’t really know what’s going on until Russell screws up again, which it seems like he will because no one other than those with vested interests have made it seem like he’s even considered at least contrition. Or maybe until the Cubs make it clear what they feel like is screwing up again and then cut him loose. What’s their threshold? Then we’ll know where their interests lie, whether it truly is a life concern and helping or whether it’s simply about baseball concerns (and considering the makeup of the Cubs infield right now, even that seems like it shouldn’t be much of a concern for them either).

But with this, the Cubs aren’t taking responsibility as they’ve said they would and in some ways have. The awkwardness, to be polite, of the the whole thing is part of the story. Trying to whitewash what Russell has done and who he is is part of the problem. Russell carries this with him everywhere he goes, and will from here on out, which is part of what I would assume his therapy is. The Cubs, by deciding to keep Russell for whatever process they want to run through, chose to take that on. They didn’t have to. So coverage of that isn’t wrong or unfair. It’s the story.

The Cubs can’t have it both ways, though lord knows they’ve spent the offseason and now into this season trying. They made work of making it clear just how transparent they’ve been to everyone about everything, but then are snippy when that bites them in the ass, however true it may have been. The Cubs could have avoided this conflict, at least on this particular problem, and these kinds of tactics by not choosing to retain Russell. Here we are. One wonders if they’re so thorny on this because they know that Russell is just a fuckwad who will do fuckwad things again and are trying to shield themselves.

Figuring out the endgame of this particular tactic is not uplifting. One can only assume the Cubs thought that a rash of positive, “overcoming” stories would make fans forget what had gone on, bringing questions about it to an end, and smoothing over as much as possible what is going to be an even stickier situation than it already is when Russell gets here (if he gets here, which he doesn’t have to, and the Cubs might want to consider that one strongly. Iowa is…well I don’t care what it is this time of year, but an extended stay there is certainly a card to play). Which is in direct opposition to the things they’ve said since Russell got suspended, which has emphasized what he did and what he must do pretty much at every point.

The Cubs keep saying they want to be part of the solution and lead. It might be just words. But if they’re truly to set a new way of sports dealing with domestic violence, that means accepting all that comes with it and not just the aspects that make yourself look good. No one is going to look good out of this. That’s the path the Cubs chose, and I don’t know if it’s necessarily the wrong one. It’s just the much harder one. And maybe they’re balking at just how hard it is. But it’s too late for that.

Everything Else

The Doll’s Trying to Kill Me and the Toaster’s Been Laughing at Me – FFUD ’18–19 Player Reviews – Henri Jokiharju

By John Pullega April 29, 2019 2198 0

Under normal circumstances, having a 19-year-old defenseman break camp, lead the D-men in possession, and contribute 12 assists (7 primary) would be considered a coup for an organization that hasn’t brought a quality D-man up through its system since Niklas Hjalmarsson (skypoint Cam Barker). Likewise, having a 19-year-old D-man posting 17 points in 30 games in the AHL would be cause for cautious optimism.

Henri Jokiharju managed to do both, and thanks to his bosses, he managed to do it in the most back assward way possible. And here we stand in puzzlement, wondering whether Harju will be anything more than a trade piece when it’s all said and done, despite all the good he did.