I usually wait until the day with the Cubs are officially eliminated to post this, but why wait another two weeks?
Folks might have been wondering at the absence of Cutesie (at least until today), and really, it’s just because this year is a write-off anyway. I mean, it could be a good write-off, we’ll just have to see. Realistically, though, the new ownership is completely handcuffed by contracts from the previous owners; this year, something like eight players are owed $115 million. Do the math there if the rest of your payroll is like $15-20 million.
And really, the Ricketts family–astoundingly, some morons are beating on them after they’ve owned the team one year–won’t have complete control of the team until Alfonso Soriano’s contract runs out after four more seasons (five, including the current one) at close to $20 million a pop. In other words, until 2016.
Still, this off season will be an important one. Many of the higher priced players–Zambrano, Ramirez, Fukedome–will be coming off the books, freeing up a goodly amount of cash. Of course, that leaves a lot of holes to fill.
That’ll be the other interesting thing to see, if Ricketts will let GM Jim Hendry go this year, given that his contract will also be up. Unless we miraculously get into the playoffs and win at least a round of them, I don’t see how he could. The fans would go ape, and this time, for good reason. I think Hendry takes more crap than he deserves, but he’s been here a long time, and we need to sweep the place out and start building a better year-to-year organization.
In the meantime, we have a couple of promising kids, including authentic star-in-the-making Starlin Castro. I’d like to see us playing just some fundamentally sound baseball this year, and see signs of improvement on the basics, like base stealing, hitting cut-off men, etc. Set a tone so that when we do bring in an entire fleet of new players next year–including, one would think, at least one big name (either at first or third, probably)–they know what we’re looking for.
So yeah, this is a classic “wait until next year.” This time, though, next year could really be a major, major change. I’d like our veterans to play well enough–particularly Zambrano–that we can offload them all in the fall for good prospects. Until then, we’ll just take it day to day, and hope to catch an occasional good game. In the end, though, don’t try to do anything this year that adversely affects the team down the road. It’s just not worth rolling the dice this time around.
Prediction: Cubs finish the year at just about exactly .500, finishing probably around third in the division.
