Chicago -
By Jim Coffman
Now the bullpen isn’t just good, it’s perfect? Is there any limit to how well this Cubs team can play after Sunday’s 2-0 victory over the Dodgers that featured starter Jason Hammel and four relievers combining to retire the last 25 batters in a row to up their record to an audacious 35-14?
Posted on May 31, 2016
By Marty Gangler
As you may remember, last week in the Cub Factor I mentioned that I was going to the game on Friday against the Phillies. And I did go and the Cubs won, because that’s what they do. But something really struck me while I was down in Rickettsville. It was, Why bother?
They are rebuilding everything so much in and around the park that there is kind of no point. Wouldn’t they just be so much better off building something brand new in Schaumburg or Naperville, or wherever else in the area? The behemoth parking garage is just a huge monstrous “thing” that takes up so much of the old look of the place, it’s like, why go through the trouble?
I mean, it’s huge, and only like 5% of the people going to the game are going to park there anyway. OK, I didn’t really do the math, but it can’t be that many fans, right?
And then there’s nothing you can do about some of the park, like getting in by the old (looking) marquee, which has fans waiting in line at the metal detectors and pouring into the street to do so. Yeah, that’s safe.
Posted on May 31, 2016
By Roger Wallenstein
Memorial Day Weekend. Honor our veterans. The beginning of summer. A three-day break. The beaches are open. Temperatures in the 80s. Burgers on the grill. Cold beer in the fridge. How could the Sox screw this up?
But they did in a fashion so unexplainable and surreal that the baseball history buffs will have to scour the Internet to discover when it was this alarming in the past.
Posted on May 30, 2016
By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes
Warranted on the other side of town. Plus: Save The Intentional Walk!; Bulls In Quicksand; Golden Slumbers; Blackhawks Sign A Bunch Of Guys We Don’t Care About; Bad Man Still Owns Chicago Fire; Chicago Sky Falling Already; Illinois Finally Tops Baylor; and The NFL Is Its Own Organized Crime Family.
Posted on May 27, 2016
By Dan O’Shea
How long can you let valuable fantasy roster spots be taken up by players who are vastly underperforming?
The answer, of course, can depend on who they are, when you drafted them, how strongly you believe that they will eventually play up to their traditional fantasy output, and perhaps a number of other criteria. The hardest ones to part with are those who had been awarded pre-season rankings in the top 40 or so. No one wants to believe that anyone among their first three or four draft picks turned out to be a dud.
Yet, unless you’re in first place despite your underperformer – or in a keeper league – you will probably have to let go at some point. June 1 seems like a good date. The first two months of the season gone, weather warm enough that cold bats or arms should no longer be an issue, and also roughly when we see a big batch of prized prospects making their first big-league appearances (trading in something worn for something shiny and new is at least a defensible position).
Here are a few guys I would definitely cut on June 1, barring any sort of phenomenal rebound in the next week or so – a couple of poor performers I would hang on to:
Posted on May 25, 2016
And Then Stuck Taxpayers With The Cost
“At least a half-dozen top NFL health officials waged an improper, behind-the-scenes campaign last year to influence a major U.S. government research study on football and brain disease, congressional investigators have concluded in a new report,” ESPN’s Outside the Lines reports.
“The 91-page report describes how the NFL pressured the National Institutes of Health to strip the $16 million project from a prominent Boston University researcher and tried to redirect the money to members of the league’s committee on brain injuries. The study was to have been funded out of a $30 million ‘unrestricted gift’ the NFL gave the NIH in 2012.
“After the NIH rebuffed the NFL’s campaign to remove Robert Stern, an expert in neurodegenerative disease who has criticized the league, the NFL backed out of a signed agreement to pay for the study, the report shows. Taxpayers ended up bearing the cost instead.”
From Outside the Lines:
Posted on May 24, 2016
By Jim Coffman
Does it even matter if Draymond Green kicked Steven Adams in the balls on purpose?
It does not.
Posted on May 23, 2016
By Marty Gangler
So this is what a slump feels like when your team is still really good.
Can’t say that the Cubs themselves and the fans didn’t need some reality in their lives. Week after week of insane record-breaking or matching or last times since 1907ing was starting to feel really weird.
Like, let’s just have a good year, get completely healthy come October and stay a good six to 10 games in front of everyone in the division and we can call it a good season and take our chances in the payoffs.
The pressure will be enormous anyway, why tack on the extra burden of an insanely good record and all of that? Not sure if it would matter, but yeah, I’m kinda OK not lighting the baseball world on fire and just cruising to the playoffs.
But first things first, these guys need to get out of this slump. With this in mind we here at The Cub Factor have come up with a few slump-buster options for the 2016 season:
Posted on May 23, 2016
By Roger Wallenstein
I’m still not sure about this replay review that’s in its third season of use in MLB. In this Instagram-Twitter world, I don’t ignore that fact that the technology is available to try to make every umpire’s decision accurate. Nor am I opposed to tweaking the game to make it better.
But I have questions, ranging from the mundane to the pertinent.
I continue to be amused every time it takes two – not just one – umpires to apply the earphones for contact with the people in New York who make the ultimate decision. I can only assume that this is perpetuated for security purposes. Like what if an umpire is crooked or his ego won’t permit his decision to be overturned? Is the second ump listening so that no one can disregard instructions from Review Central? Has it never occurred to Commissioner Rob Manfred that the fellows looking at those screens might also keep observing long enough to make certain that their instructions are followed?
That’s the mundane.
Posted on May 22, 2016
By Thomas Chambers
Exaggerator, son of the millennial all-timer Curlin, and under the savvy ride of an experienced Kent Desormeaux, used Nyquist’s precociousness against him to win the 141st Preakness Stakes, dashing Nyquist’s hopes of a Triple Crown.
Yeah, the angle for Exaggerator was the mud, but he won this race. He won it.
Posted on May 21, 2016
