I love you with all the love I can have for a young man with a bad heart… But your team is now in third place (behind the fucking CARDINALS FOR GOD’S SAKE), because you are johnny cowboy, who refuses to admit that he is in pain, suffering a back injury, and wants to show off in his home state. Working through an injury that can only get worse does not make you a tough guy, or are you forgetting a little year I like to call 1999???
Firstly, and most vehemently…I blame your recent wedding for your failure.
Secondly, your insistance that your pitching last night was ‘pretty good’ is near to psychotic. Admit that you need to sit out for one start in the rotation, get a nude massage from some girl on the North Side of Chicago and borrow some Vicodin from the 15 people on the team who are addicted to it. GET BETTER, and then COME BACK.
If not for the good of our love affair, or my fantasy league, then for the GOD DAMN CHICAGO CUBS WHO HAVE A CHANCE TO WIN SOMETHING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A MILLION YEARS.
I’m not that hip on the baseball scene. But isn’t it the manager’s responsibility to decide who plays and who doesn’t?
Athletes are supposed to be tough and play through the pain.
The manager’s are hired based on their decision making skills and knowledge of the game.
I think your bitching is slightly misplaced.
Don’t abandon your hope for an eventual romantic relationship with this athlete. Perhaps he will get addicted to those pain killers you mentioned, his marriage will fail because of it, and you will have your chance. Keep the faith, Sister.
Our manager, Dusty Baker, likes to make that decision WITH the players. He will ask Kerry how he’s feeling, Kerry will lie and say he’s fine, and we’ll continue to lose. At some point, a pitcher has to admit he isn’t 100%, like Mark Prior did a month or so ago, and sit out a few games to heal completely, specifically near the end of the season when we have a chance to win the division.
Athletes ARE supposed to be tough and play through the pain, but that’s not necessarily the best course of action. For example, it resulted in Kerry Wood missing an entire season of baseball because his arm almost fell off and he had to have reconstructive surgery.
I AM hip to baseball, and have been since I was a child, so I know where my anger lies. Dusty Baker isn’t HELPING the situation any, but Kerry does have some say in what happens to him.
C_M, staff aces pretty much get to say when they can’t pitch and when they can. Someone like Kerry Wood is allowed that luxury. There’s no reason he should have allowed himself to pitch as long as he did last night, especially given his last performance earlier this week against the Dodgers. There’s something wrong with his arm, and only he knows how bad it is.
I came to the conclusion after a long talk with Crunchy Frog (who despite his atrocious taste in teams knows a lot about baseball) that Kerry should step down from the starting rotation and be a reliever.
It would fit his skills and hopefully, he would stay healthier.
Now if only Crunchy would see the wisdom of trading Sosa for Edmonds, Drew and Pujols…he insists on getting Prior and that’ll happen over my dead body.
Eh, the Cubbies aren’t going to win anything anyway. That’s some atrocious offense you guys have going there. Adding Womack just isn’t going to cut it.
You should turn your attention to the team in the south, jarbaby. You may need to stop bathing and lose a few teeth first to fit in, though.
All kidding aside, Wood needs to sit down. He’s not effective and if the Cubs do make it to the post season they need him to be at 100% if they are going to succeed. They’re basically like the A’s (but doing it on twice the budget) in that if they don’t have their pitching at full strength, they don’t have the offense to get back in it.
Its Jim Hendry and his boss, Andy McPhail, who make these decisions. I’m sure Baker has input, but from everything I can tell, this is management’s show.
Womack hasn’t been swinging the bat too well, but the speed he brings is a considerable asset. Between Lofton and Womack, the Cubs have some legitimate baserunning and stealing skill. They haven’t had this type of speed on the bases since Walton’s rookie year.
Not sure about Simon and Glanville is Michael Tucker all over again. But certainly the wheelers and dealers deserve a little credit with our new thirdbaseman? That musketeer looks to be a better pick-up than Hillenbrand. I would say he is a considerable pick-up for the future.
Hey, jar, don’t fret … the Cubs were in the playoffs a few years ago.
Er, last decade sometime in the latter part of it.
But then they got swept. Oops.
[sub]I feel your pain, sort of. My Braves are playind sub .500 ball the last week or 2. I can only thank the Brewers for sticking it to the Phils while half the Braves either had vaginitis or played like it.[/sub]
Hey, speed. Great. Too bad Womack can’t get on base to use it. His OBP is .257. .257!
Dusty Baker is one of the most overrated managers out there. He can’t work with young guys, he gets outmanaged on a regular basis (idiocy in the All-Star game and in the World Series), and he abuses his pitchers. Wanna guess how many times Baker has had Wood throw 120+ pitches? 8 times. Including a 141 pitch gem, and two 130 pitch games. That’s almost a third of his starts throwing 120+.
His pitch counts on his previous starts before the LA debacle? 118 v. Houston, 88 v. SF, 101 v. Philly, 130 v. Florida, 129 v. Florida, 80 v. St. Louis, 126 v. the Southies.
Which is a good way for a manager to say, “I’m not really running my team.”
I can’t imagine Earl Weaver doing things that way. Oh sure, he’d ask the player how he felt. And he’d also talk to the pitching coach and whoever else he needed to talk to. But he’d make the decision himself, on the basis of how he thought it would affect the team.
Maybe Kerry Wood should have the sense to take himself out of the lineup, jar. It would be good judgment. But while it would be useful, judgment in that department isn’t part of the player’s job description; it’s part of the manager’s job description. So save your ire for Dusty.
Wood is injury-prone, but it’s not his fault the Cubs are out of it. The truth is that
They’re the Cubs. Like the Red Sox, they’re never going to win the World Series again no matter who plays for them, and you can’t blame Wood for that.
Wood is pitching just fine. He’s only 11-10 because the Cubs can’t score runs. He’s pitched quite well. Actually, the whole team has pitched quite well, but the hitting has been bad.
I don’t know why the Cubs have so much hype this year; they’re not a very good team and didn’t look very good to me going into the season.
Maybe Wood IS hurt - the sudden rise in home runs allowed combined with more walks is not a good sign - but even pitching hurt he’s having a fine year overall. The reason the Cubs are losing to St. Louis is really very simple; the Cardinals score way, way more runs. WAY more runs. They aren’t even close.
You wanna know who to blame? Alex Gonzalez. Ten years in the majors and he still stands four feet from the plate and looks confused when he can’t hit an outside pitch. He once said while playing in Toronto that he didn’t think he needed to work on his hitting because it wasn’t important for shrotstops to work on that. The day he was traded out of Toronto was one of the happiest days of my life. We got Felix Heredia for it and think the Cubs overpaid. I would have paid you to TAKE Alex Gonzalez. I’ve never seen someone so talented who learned so little.
You couldn’t be more right, Rick. Frankly, Houston should be running away with the division. Their Pythagorean record is something like .566, the Cards are about .543 and the Cubbies should be around .510.
The Cubs have been outplaying their expected record, while the Astros and Cards have been underplaying it. That couldn’t have been expected to last.
RickJay, Kerry’s past two outings have been his worst, and I don’t care how great your offense is, your pitching shouldn’t give up 5 runs in four innings. He’s SAID a million times that he has a bad back and it’s hurting him, saying it’s been a problem since he was a teenager and only now it’s getting worse, but he doesn’t want to let the team down. He also said last night he thought his pitching was ‘pretty good’, which, unless he’s a Faulknerian idiot is nothing but a lie. If the back injury is the case, he should get treatment for his back, and let the other pitchers (Zambrano and Prior are doing AWESOME) stop the bleeding until he can come back and get back to how he was pitching two months ago when he was striking out between 10 and 14 a game.
It’s a long season and one game doesn’t tell the story. The Cubs are not in first place because they can’t hit for shit. Wood has done more to help tham than hurt them, so far, and if he’s replaced by some mediocre pitcher the team isn’t going to be any better than it has been so far.
Besides, do the Cubs have any better options? You can’t have Prior take two turns in the rotation. I think Baker’s an idiot for overpitching Wood too, but I urge you, don’t fall victim to Gary Carter Syndrome, where you blame the team’s misfortune on its GOOD players. You must place blame where it is due… A-Gon, and his whiff-happy ilk.
