Everybody's hurt

It's a good thing the Cubs are super deep at bad baseball player

The Cubs rash of injuries includes at least two guys on the Covid list, (Marcus Stroman and David Robertson), guys with puffy ankles (Seiya Suzuki and Nico Hoerner) who aren’t yet on the injured list, and two guys who showed impressive hustle in somehow getting hurt without actually playing (Michael Hermosillo and Sean Newcomb).

It was pretty lucky timing (wink, wink) for Hermosillo and Newcomb, considering that both of them would have been waived if they hadn’t gotten hurt. Huh. Funny how that works.

Hoerner was injured yesterday running into an umpire, while trying to make himself available to serve as a cutoff man on a ball that Jason Heyward comically misjudged and played into a triple. Hoerner writhed in pain but then got up and stayed in the game, before eventually needing to come out. We’ve seen this before with Nico. We should expect him back by, oh, around September or so.

Ildemaro Vargas came in to replace him and, well, see guys, Ildemaro is bad. The Cubs are bad and so when most of the guys who are playing everyday get hurt it means even worse players have to come in to replace them. Ildemaro managed to play about four balls into hits that could have been outs, and Rick Sutcliffe, filling in for Jim Deshaies—who apparently needs a break from all of this crap (don’t we all?)—kept losing his mind. I honestly thought Rick was going to leave the booth and the next we’d see is him running onto the field to strangle Ildemaro.

Sutcliffe is going to do all of the Marquee games on this trip. It’s way too much. Rick’s fine for like a two or three inning cameo. Over nine innings he’s a little much and over five games (the Friday night game in Arizona is on Apple TV+) we’re all going to want to mix in hemlock with our Old Style.

Oh, and this Tweet reminded me of Taylor’s contribution to this whole thing.

Cassandra ⭐⭐ @liberalclass

@desipiodotcom He should have done it, it might have distracted people from the fact that Taylor told them to go pick up jellyfish

She had quite a day. First, during the grandpa segment of the game (there was one, a long one) Sutcliffe showed footage of his grandson hitting in the cage at Petco Park (it could have been Nick Madrigal), and then Taylor told us a story about how Alfonso Rivas was born on the side of the highway between Tijuana and San Diego. She gave no specifics, just that he plopped out on the shoulder of the road. You’ll not be shocked to know that this has been covered, a lot over the years. But why would Taylor ever give credit to anyone else, ever? You can’t just gloss over the fact that Alfonso Rivas was a side of the road plop baby. That deserves an explanation. Another example of why Marquee sucks.