Cubs' Kids!!

... could play SS if necessary.

Fontenot's not this good, but they've got to ride this hot streak as long as it lasts.

He wasn't exactly a kid, and his career ended two years later, but there isn't a Cub fan around who cannot forget the 1979 phantom menace ol Stevie was that year. Who can forget it?

For about 8 weeks that summer, he had a Feenom-inal ride, and was one of the hottest hitters in the NL. That dude just seemed to zero in on everything that got thrown at him. Between him, Buckner and Kingman, we almost got fooled into thinking we had a snowball's chance that year (but after 1977, I had no illusions ..)

I hope we enjoy Fonty's work longer than Stevie's. The streak ended by September ..  

...seems to have been the victim of regression to the mean, or in this case his underlying talent level. (His current batting line on the season is eerily similar to his PECOTA weighted-mean projection.) That said, I don't forsee him dropping much further than he has, and he could even bounce back a bit. His line drive percentage would indicate a higher batting average than what we're seeing, so it seems like he's being robbed of a few hits here and there. (Luck COULD even out, but then again it could not.)

That said, right now Ryan Theriot right now is essentially right at the league average in AVG and OBP, and a shade below in slugging. That's not all that bad, and still more valuable than Cesar Izturis's production by quite a bit. That said, DeRosa's higher slugging and OBP means he should probably see most of the playing time at the keystone when Ramirez returns.

With Mike Fontenot... if you just ignore the results, and look at what he's doing at the dish (strikeouts, walks, batted balls -- line drives vs. fly balls vs. ground balls), you start coming to the conclusion that he's just a much luckier version of Koyie Hill offensively. He's going to have to start backing up his awesome production here soon, or I would forcast a severe regression for him here soon.

If I had to choose, I'd say Theriot is the one of the pair more likely to have long-term success in the majors at this point. But a year ago I'm sure I would have written both of them off completely.

[For those curious, you can look at the Hardball Times' Projected OPS page, which shows you how much guys are over/underperforming their perhipials. (Helpfully filtered out to show you only Cubs.) It's possible to overanalyze this a bit -- guys who stick in the majors for a while have a tendency to outperform their perhiphials over the course of their careers, so don't start freaking out and thinking that Derrek Lee is due to lose 115 points of OPS any day now. But just take a gander at the entries for Fontenot versus Cedeno for a little while.]