David Bote will never really leave
Petecrow and Amaya are about to catch an overpaid veteran, Ronny Cedeño would never, Ryan Dempster sucks and "no error on the infielder, because he wasn't there"
I would understand if you were still hung over from the wild partying you did on Saturday night to celebrate the Cubs official return to mediocrity when they won the second game of the weekend series with the Marlins to get to 65-65. What you may have missed while you were dry heaving on Sunday was the Cubs losing 7-2 to the Marlins to go back under .500.
Hey gang, I’m starting to think this Cubs team might not be all that good.
And, I get it. It has to be tough on the guys when they keep losing all of their biggest superstars. It’s just been one gut punch after another since about April 27 when Cubs president of “Hey Crane, are the games still on Comcast?” Jed Hoyer foolishly sold Garrett Cooper to the Red Sox. The Sox got a veteran, stud, middle of the order bat for some pocket change. Cooper has put up MVP type numbers for them.
Wait, what’s that? Cooper hit .171/.227/.229 in 24 games and was released in June?
Whatever. After Cooper’s veteran presence was foolishly jettisoned, the Cubs All-Star catcher1 Yan Gomes, just because he was “struggling” at .154/.179/.242. A lot of smart teams fought over Gomes, knowing what a terrible decision that was by the Cubs and he signed with…let me see here, I think I wrote it down…maybe on the back of this Taco Bell bag…nobody. He signed with nobody. Huh.
As if losing Cooper and Gomes wasn’t bad enough at the same time they DFA’d hard throwing, sidearm slinger Jose Cuas. Cuas had given up 16 hits and six walks in 13 innings, but there was no way his 7.43 ERA was reflective of his talent. The Blue Jays knew that, too and they claimed him and he proved h wasn’t really a 7.03 pitcher by putting up an ERA of 9.00 in four games with Toronto.
In early June, Jed decided to give National League pitchers a break from getting their shit crushed by Nick Madrigal. Jed sent Nick to Iowa for a few days to boost the I-Cubs flagging attendance, and that humanitarian mission had tragic consequences. In his first game for Iowa, Madrigal was hit by a pitch by Toledo Mud Hens’ pitcher Trey Wingenter and you probably already know that there are 27 tiny little bones in your hand, and Wingenter, likely paid off by the Cardinals, Brewers, Dodgers or Barves, hit Nick in the hand on purpose and broke one of the tiny little bones in Nick’s tiny little hand. His season was ended that warm, buzzy evening in Des Moines, and with it, the Cubs World Series chances took a real beating. How do you replace Madrigal’s .221/.280/.256 magnificence at the plate, much less his incredible defense and 11 hop throws to first? You don’t. You just don’t.
But the Cubs, despite the emotional toil that Madrigal’s injury must have caused, soldiered on.
Until things went bad again at the trade deadline when Jed waved the white flag and traded Reverse Split Gawd Mark Leiter Jr. to the Yankees. Smart fans like you know that Leiter’s dominance was belied by his numbers. Yes, his ERA was 4.21 for the Cubs this year, but his Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) told the real story. It was just 2.13. I mean, we can all agree that’s the truly important number.
With the Yankees, Leiter’s ERA is once again deceptive. Yeah, it looks bad at 5.91 in 12 games, but his FIP tells the tale. It’s 6.08. Oops.
Anyway, the Cubs had shrugged off all of those foolish transactions and then on Friday they got news that I don’t think any of them could be expected to recover from. The Cubs DFA’d David Bote. Again.
What? Bote? The glue holding what was left of this team together? Why, his OPS+ is higher than Nico Hoerner and Dansby Swanson! DFA one of them!
But, don’t worry. The Cubs can right this wrong. Bote’s availability on the waiver wire was somehow ignored by every other MLB team. I think it was because nobody could believe it.
“Hey, did you see this? David Bote is on waivers!”
”Bote? No way. Why would Cubs waive their best player? It has to be some other David Bote.”
”Right. It has to be. We’re not falling for that.”
”But man, could you imagine if it was the David Bote? That would be a pennant changing move.”
I’m sure it’s not because Bote is owed just under a million bucks for the final fifth of the season. Nah. He’s a bargain at ten times that price, right, Theo?
Bote has accepted his assignment to Iowa, not because he doesn’t think that he couldn’t find a contender to pay him more than the money he’s owed for the rest of the year plus the $1 million buyout the Cubs will owe him after the season. No. It’s loyalty. Bote’s a Cub through and through. He knows Jed will realize what a horrible mistake he made and get him back on the team for the playoff push.
Besides, who’s to the say the Cubs won’t pick up Bote’s option for next year? I mean, it’s only $7 million. A bargain! And then they can do it again after next season and have him for just $7.6 million in 2026.
What’s the downside?
The Cubs record in one-run games is 19-26, is that bad? That seems bad.
Turns out the Cubs 26 one run losses are tied for the most in all of baseball, with the Pirates.
(The White Sox are 9-25, which is bad, a .265 winning percentage. And yet, somehow that’s better than their overall winning percentage of .237.)
What’s impressive about the Pirates total is that they have done it without Dansby Swanson. Dansby is the Cubs’ secret weapon when it comes to almost winning games. The secret is to get within one or two runs late in a game and then have Dansby come up. His Late and Close2 stats are incredibly clutch. For the opposing team. He’s hitting .197/.321/.273 in those spots with 18 total bases in 78 plate appearances.
Dansby is not a one-trick pony, though. In high leverage situations3 Dansby strikes fear in the hearts of opposing teams to the tune of .198/.274/.291.
If it has felt like Dansby has batted and failed in every big spot over the last couple of months, well, he has. OK, that’s not true, he hasn’t been up in all of them. But he has a lot. And, it’s almost never good for the Cubs.
It’s a good thing that the Cubs aren’t paying Dansby to hit.
The Cubs recent “surge” to mediocrity has been fueled by Seiya Suzuki getting hot again, and the impressive play of the two young guys hitting just behind Dansby.
Petecrow Armstrong is hitting .317/.340/.604 over his last 15 games (48 at bats) with four homers and eight RBI. And Miguel Amaya who wouldn’t have hit water if he fell out of Crane Kenney’s yacht for the first four months of the season has hit .326/.370/.558 with five homers and 16 RBI over his last 30 games (86 at bats.)
Finally getting production out of the bottom of the lineup has helped the Cubs’ offense.
Given their recent surges, both Petecrow (.646) and Amaya (.645) are going to pass Dansby in OPS (.651) early this week.
Keep up the good work, guys. Well, not you, Dansby.
We’ve seen a lot of baseball you and me, and it’s not often that we see something that we’ve never seen before, but we did yesterday. It was gloriously dumb and for once, the Cubs weren’t the team perpetrating the dumbness.
In the eighth inning of what was still just a two run game at the time, Craig Counsell ordered an intentional walk with runners on second and third and one out. The great Jerry Merryweather was in the game busily pouring lighter fluid all over. Intentionally loading the bases with him on the mound is always risky, but this is when something extraordinary happened.
The batter, Jesus Sanchez started to lope down to first and he heard from the Marlins’ dugout that Christian Pache was coming in to run for him, and to improve the Marlins outfield defense for the ninth.
You looked up and Pache was standing on first and Counsell was on the field talking to the umpires. Then he was talking to Jerry and, though neither Pat Hughes or Ryan Dempster4 were paying attention, Counsell was clearly telling Jerry to step off the rubber and throw to first.
When Jerry finally did, the first base umpire belatedly called somebody out. Hughes and Dempster first thought maybe Jake Burger had missed first base on his double before Sanchez came up. That made no sense because it would be too late to appeal that once you’d walked Sanchez.
Then we saw a replay. Sanchez never made it to first base on his intentional walk. He got about 80 feet down the line and then he stopped and Pache ran past him and stood on the bag. Counsell noticed, appealed it and Pache was out.
Not Sanchez. The official box score has Sanchez walking though he never got to the bag, and Pache being out at first even though he wasn’t supposed to be there.
The Cubs capitalized on the epic Marlins failure by…never mind, Merryweather gave up a sac fly, three hits and four runs before he could get out of the inning. The Cubs lost 7-2, which we knew they would after scoring 14 runs on Saturday.
Somewhere, Ronny Cedeño is laughing, saying, “Well, I never did that.”
During the broadcast, Hughes and Dempster talked about how some dipshit paid $24 million for the jersey Babe Ruth wore during the never-happened called shot homer off Charlie Root in the 1932 World Series. Pat pointed out that Root insists that if Ruth had really pointed at center that he’d have hit him right in his fat ass with the next pitch, and the little video that has emerged over the decades sure doesn’t look like Ruth pointed at center.
But Pat was too nice to Dempster. Dempster said, “Wow, $24 million. I wish I’d have saved more jerseys from my career.”
That’s when Pat should have chuckled and said in his folksy, polite manner, “Now Ryan, who would pay for one of your old jerseys?” And then Zach could have laughed from two booths over.
But that wouldn’t have been completely true. Because I’m sure there are some Dodger fans who would pay a few bucks to buy the jersey he wore when he walked seven guys in the first game of the 2008 NLDS. Or maybe a few bucks for the pants he shit through that night.
Fifty-seven strikes on 109 pitches. JFC.
And, I’d like to thank the pitcher for the Chinese Taipei team in the Little League World Series for allowing me to use one of my favorite clips from the original (and only) Bad News Bears.
Six years ago.
Late and Close is defined by Baseball Reference as plate appearances in the seventh inning or later when the batting team is tied, ahead by one run or the tying run is at least on deck.
Defined as a “high pressure situation” when the outcome of the situation is more likely to reflect the outcome of the game.
What the fuck is he even doing there?