There's already been a bevy of articles on Bleacher Report talking about all the Pujols rumors, but most of these are just "it would be so great for the Cubs to get Pujols" rah-rah pieces.
I thought it might be interesting to break down the Cubs current 2012 salary commitments and what that means for how much money they'll have to spend to try and bring Pujols, Prince Fielder or any of the other big free agents out there.
A few caveats:
No. 1 I'm assuming the 2012 payroll will stay pretty close to 2011 - around $130 million
No. 2 I'm assuming the Cubs ...
The Cubs managed to get Carlos Pena for only $5 mil this year ($5 mil deferred until 2012) and stole Kerry Wood for $1.5 mil. Factoring in arbitration raises though, they only have a few mil left to work with, so what are the rest of the possibilities for the Cubs offseason? In this article I’ll look at free agent possibilities and later will look at trade possibilities:
The position players all look set and will probably break down to 13 people:
Starting lineup: Castro, Colvin, Byrd, Ramirez, Pena, Soriano, Soto, Dewitt
Bench: Fukudome, Baker, Barney, Hill
As always, no great leadoff options and ...
Thinking about how much of a bad streak Hendry has been on recently (the Bradley signing, the 2-year deal for John Grabow, not offering Rich Harden arbitration, etc.) I feel bad for Jim, and wanted to see what I can do to help him......Right now the Cubs bullpen looks like this:
CL -- Carlos Marmol
SU -- Angel Guzman, John Grabow
LR -- Sean Marshall
MR -- Justin Berg, Esmailin Caridad, Jeff Samardzija or Jon Gaub or Jeff Stevens
While I feel comfortable about the front 4 (even though Hendry waaaay overpaid Grabow and doesn't seem to pay any attention to a pitcher's WHIP), I'm ...
I've written about this elsewhere, but I really don't think a Fontenot/Baker platoon would be the worst thing in the world. Fontenot has hit righties well, except for last year, which Goat Riders of the Apocalypse has shown to be a fluke:
"To demonstrate, look at the league average in BABIP for the past three years, compared to Fontenot's BABIP. I'll drop his OPS in, too.
2007: League - .306, Mike - .330, Mike's OPS - .738 2008: League - .303, Mike - .355 (!), Mike's OPS - .909 2009: League - .302, Mike - .281 (...), Mike's OPS - .677
One other ...
With things so quiet on the trade front, you have to assume that the winter meetings will start the momentum of the offseason going—someone will overpay for a reliever that had a career year or a position player that was great two years ago but has been injured since. The question for us is, what will Jim Hendry do?
Yes, getting rid of Heilman was a good move and saved $2 million, but once again Hendry overpaid for a middle-of-the-road reliever: $3.75 million a year for John Grabow is another bad bullpen move. This is like Danys Baez, or Ron Mahay, or ...
