Fixing Rich's Mistakes

Cubs don’t have the luxury of having Rich Hill work out his problems in the pen. We need fresh arms and innings out of the pen, not someone who can’t get his curveball over the plate and has an extremely hittable fastball as his arsenal. The best thing to do is send Hill to the minors and let him hopefully get back on track.

I disagree because in AAA you have a ton of “hackers”. Guys come to the plate swinging away. I can’t see how the Cubs want him getting rocked in AAA.

That’s actually a really good idea. I had never considered 15 days of “rehab”.

is that we don’t know what’s wrong with him. He pitched a lot of innings last year and he may have a nagging injury, even if he denies it. It may be mental. The solution to Rich Hill would be wildly different depending on what the problem is.

I don’t fault you for making a diary on the subject. It’s just my perspective that on Hill, we don’t have enough perspective.

I do wonder if we could trade Hill to a team that’s not planning on contending and get a good pitcher back. Would the Giants be willing to swap us Matt Cain for Hill if we took on another of their bad contracts (not the Zito contract, of course)? I like Hill in their ballpark and leftys in the NL West are valuable. As for the bad contract – I’d take Ray Durham and call him an improvement on Fontenot. Also, swapping Rich for a righty allows Marshall into the rotation and I like a Zambrano-Cain-Lilly-Dempster-Marshall rotation a lot better than the one we have now.

give him another start or two and see what happens. After all, if left in last night, he may just have gotten out of the inning and settled down and pitched a good game. Who knows, stranger things have happened. IMO, Lou did the wrong thing by taking him out so early.

He’s just not a good pitcher and not only that, but he has no BALLS when he is on the mound, like i’ve been saying for….ohhh quite some time. He has a GREAT curve but nothing else. That only last’s so many times around in this league if you only have 2 pitches….just ask brry zito. (who actually has 3 pitches).

He was completely lost out there. Believe me, the last thing Lou wanted to do was go to our bullpen in the first inning but letting Hill face another hitter would have been almost sadistic.

I agree that it’s difficult for any of us to figure out what should be done when we don’t know exactly what the problem is. Assuming that it’s mental, sending him down to AAA and giving him a chance to relax and rebuild his confidence is probably the only thing they can do at this point.

but I still think Lou helped destroy his confidence. How much worse would it have been
if they just let him stay in the rotation instead of throwing him out against the Cardinals
after 9 days off. I don’t care if his numbers were better against the Cards than the Brewers.
We all know Hill is fragile and stubborn but I also think he has great stuff but needs a little
of the coddling Sori is getting. Clearly his confidence is destroyed and while I know he is the problem Lou did not help any. The scrappy guys get a pass despite limited range and problems making contact in key situations but Hill and Murton just end up on the shit list
in Iowa. Soriano is so bad now that Murton would actually be a defensive IMPROVEMENT
which is saying A LOT. Lou should not be letting Soriano call the shots and he might have a little more patience with players not named Soriano.