I got halfway through the last game thread and thought we were losing by 5. I turn on the game and Lilly’s given up 1 run and we’re winning a laugher. This place is silly sometimes.

This place is silly sometimes.

Sometimes?

addressing something MD wrote in the last thread:

Maybe one of these years the Cubs will stop acquiring relievers who are near 30 or above and have had only a couple good years.

Aren’t you essentially asking the Cubs to go out and find a unicorn?

If you’re a young reliever, either you blow, or you’re being groomed to be a starter or a closer.

If you’re an old reliever, and you’ve had more than “a couple good years” aren’t you a closer? I mean sure, the set up man is sort of becoming “Closer 1A” but (and correct me if I’m wrong) that’s still not something that you actively try and create in a farm system.

Middle relievers, by their very nature, are the worst players on your team, and are bad pitchers. They’re not good enough to start, not consistent enough to close.

IMO putting together a good pen is not so much a science as it is getting lucky. How many times have we seen a reliever be rock solid then inexplicably fall apart, possibly get phantom DLed or sent down, then brought back up and be effective again? Sometimes multiple times in the same season.

Look at Glendon Rusch and Jason Marquis, who, while starters, are really just long relief guys masquerading as starting pitchers. Both of those guys were considered among the worst starters in baseball the year before the Cubs acquired them, and both were able to become serviceable pitchers.

CC is going to have a stupid amount of CGs by the end of the season. jeez.

No.  I’m saying that spending $4 or $5 million a reliever that’s not your closer is not a wise investment.

Ok, that’s more than fair. I completely misread your point. I assumed you wanted them to go out and pay for a good, young middle reliever, which as we agree, really doesn’t exist.

I think Lilly got lucky today, too.  Although I haven’t seen a single pitch (on TV or in PFX) in over a week.  I’m chomping at the bit to get some new stuff posted now that I’m back from vacation in BC.  Lilly’s an interesting target, Marmol (smoke and mirrors?) and Fukudome are on tap, too.  Anything else compelling that I’ve missed?  I’m still going back to work on Dempster and Harden, if I can figure out where I left off….

Anything else compelling that I’ve missed?

Any chance you could take a look at Derrek Lee and maybe see what’s so different with him this year than last year?  I know Pinetar and I agree that he’s expanding the zone a lot more and trying to turn on outside pitches and rolling over on them.  But he’s also hitting a lot more grounders on inside pitches and even pitches above the belt it seems to me.  Are pitchers pitching him differently?

I should/can add “is he pulling more ground balls” type of questions, too.

I know Pinetar and I agree that he’s expanding the zone a lot more and trying to turn on outside pitches and rolling over on them.

Maddog, I’ve been paying close attention to Lee since the break and I’ve come to a hypothesis that I want to run by you and see what you think. As you stated he’s rolling over pitches on the outer half he used to drive to right center but as tall as Lee is 6’6” or close to it. It looks to me like he’s more upright this year than in the past which would cause that bat to stay on a higher plane and cause more ground outs. I maybe full of shit on this one, wouldn’t be the first time but I swear he looks like he’s almost standing straight up and down when swinging where before he was a touch more crouched or spread out. Might be a small mechanical thing that has slipped through the cracks and nobody has caught it yet. I know if you over stride more times than not you end up popping the ball up or hitting fly balls. I would expect the opposite to also be true. I don’t have any hard data to go by just what I’ve observed the last 2 weeks and comparing it to what I remember.

I should/can add “is he pulling more ground balls” type of questions, too.

Yeah.  Anything that might explain it or might give us reason to think he might change.  Batted ball data tends to be the quickest thing to become projectable.  It only takes about 200 plate appearances for it to normalize so what he has done recently is, at this point, I’d think, what we can expect of him going forward.

Oh yeah, Derrek Lee still sucks balls.

For a 1st basemen making as much money as he does you’re certainly not getting the kind of production you’d expect to get.  As I said in the last thread, he’s become a right handed Mark Grace.  And I think Grace was the most overrated Cubs player in my lifetime.  Ryan Theriot may take that honor away from him at some point though.

I’m not sure I could get the video anyway.  I might watch an archived game from last year (do they still have that on mlb.tv) later on and then watch a recent game as well and maybe watch them in 2 different windows to see if I notice something.

It didn’t look good in the first couple of innings for Lilly.  Looked like the Pirates may score 10 in 3 innings the way he was going early on.  He really settled down though and managed to work into the 7th.

This rotation is something else right now.  After Lilly, who is a pretty good pitcher, you’ve got 3 guys who could shut you out in Zambrano, Dempster and then the best of all in Rich Harden.

It didn’t look good in the first couple of innings for Lilly.  Looked like the Pirates may score 10 in 3 innings the way he was going early on.  He really settled down though and managed to work into the 7th.

Exactly. And yeah, this is a pretty sick rotation. And the bullpen is starting to take shape, with Marmol exhibiting improved control, Wood apparently on his way back by the end of next week, the acquisition of Gaudin, and Samardzija’s sudden emergence. Add in a solid long reliever (Marshall), and you have the makings for a tremendous bullpen behind that rotation.

tremendous bullpen behind that rotation.

We all said it somewhat knee-jerkedly right after the trade, but I still think it’s true (despite what Maddog and ccd say): this team, if healthy 1-25, is the World Series favorite. At the very, very, very least, it’s the NL favorite.

Ok, here’s a couple of images of Derrek Lee.  The first one is from June 20, 2007 at Texas (the game Sammy hit number 600).  Can anyone see anything here that Lee is doing differently?

And this one is from today’s game

He does appear to have the same upright stance though, Cone.  Something in his left leg, the front leg, is different as well, but that could be video quality, or at least partly because of that.  WE’d have to have a different angle, but it seems in 2007 Lee had more spacing with his legs than he does now.

In this one, Lee was further into his leg kick in 2007.  The hands in 2008 still appear to be a bit higher, above the ear where the left hand is about ear level in 2007.  Also, the bat is at about a 60 degree angle in 2007 and it’s about a 15 degree angle in 2008.

And check out the location of the leg kick and the angle of the bat on these images.

2007

and 2008

I wonder…

(dying laughing), yeah.  Didn’t really answer any questions, did it?  Probably just added more questions.  Oh well.

I’m not a scout so I knew I wouldn’t have any answers.  He is doing something differently though it beats me if it has any impact on what types of batted balls he’s hitting.

I’m going to take a look at 2 games from Wrigley tomorrow because they’ll have the same camera angle, but I do think we found something.  Don’t know what the result is, but last year was better than this year so…

Here’s an image of Derrek Lee batting in Denver on April 24, 2008.  Compare it to the 3rd groups of pictures where the leg kick is completed.  That month Lee hit .371/.446/.705. 

I was going to suggest that.  His kick does seem less and his bat angle is different.  Good observations, but I’m not sure what we can derive from this.

I’ll take a look at a couple Wrigley games later on today.  I downloaded 1 from last year and one from this year so we’ll get the same camera angle, which would give us more details.

I don’t have any idea what this means.  His mechanics, at least in the one at-bat I looked at yesterday, seem to be off from year’s past, but who knows what impact it’s having.

I was just looking at the first set of images I posted.  Does he look more closed off in the 2007 image than he does from yesterday’s game?  Closed off in the shoulders, I mean.  Maybe it’s the angle, but it looks to me like his shoulders are more in line with the pitcher in 2007 than in 2008.  Also, Pinetar is right in that he looks much more crouched in 2007 right at the top of his leg kick than he does now.

It’s quite possible he was more closed off in 2007, but I can’t be sure with the different camera angles.  The Texas angle seems so much more lower to the ground that it is hard to determine if the angle is the same or not.  You’re right in that he definitely has more crouch in his step/loading portion of the earlier plate appearances.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this is related to the problem, as it makes it so his hands have to do more during the swing.  I’m not a scout, so that’s mostly just guessing, but it seems to me that the more horizontal your bat is when it’s loaded, the more horizontal it will be when you are swinging through the zone.

that was some impressive stupidity, pmayo…

In seven innings since the break, Carlos Marmol has struck out 12 while allowing two hits and no runs earned or otherwise.