Everything the Cubs do seems to go wrong, but even if we don’t go to the playoffs this year, I at least expect to see better baseball than last season (which isn’t saying much). I am particularly relieved to see the back of Corey “He’s a five tool player!” Patterson, since he’s caused me much angina over the last several years.
Basically, my two major problems with Patterson is a) that he sucks, and b) that he’s a lazy bum. That’s a bad combination.
Last year when the Cubs dumped Sammy Sosa, the Worry Wart Brigade warned that we’d rue the day after he went on to hit 40-50 home runs and knock in 100 rbis in 2005. I wasn’t that concerned, and it turned out I was right not to do so.
Now we keep hearing the same stuff about Patterson, which amazes me, because he’s been so awful the last couple of years. Last season he hit .215, which for someone with over 425 at bats was the worst batting average in team history. And we’re talking about the Cubs, not the Marlins. The team’s been around for over a hundred and twenty-five years. And after he got sent down to the minors for a month, which is about as humiliating a thing as can happen to a major leaguer, he came back and hit under .190 for the rest of the season.
Then this morning I saw this on a Cubs blog:
“I perused the Baseball Prospectus stats archive to see if I could dig up anything interesting from last year. You can sort by RBI per Runner which is basically the number of runners a batter has driven in not including himself. I suppose as good as measure of “clutch” as there is in the game, at least as far as a single season goes. I set the cutoff at 400 PA’s [plate appearances] and it yielded 223 major leaguers.
Take a guess who was the worst hitter in baseball in this regards for 2005. Go ahead, come on, he really sucked last year…..Yep, Corey Patterson (0.0753). We’ll miss you so.”
Sosa was the 16th worst, by the way.
Believe me, if Corey can get his head out of his ass, good for him. I honestly wish him well and hope he does wake up and plays up to his potential.* But I’m not exactly haunted by the possibility. And I’d rather see him playing well for somebody else than stinking up Wrigley for another year, in any case.
[*I will note that despite his amazingly stubbern local supporters, no team was willing to give the Cubs *anything* at all of value for him, even a little, so obviously other organizations no longer see him as a very viable reclaimation project.]