He’s gone after this year.

If we can find someone better via a trade then I would say dump him but till then he’s just meh.

The amount of scholarship, passion and stuff you can argue over is truly a great pastime.

he’s either gonna strike out – looking bad doing so – or hit a 450’ shot. Just before that shot, it seemed like Howry badly missed the spot. With 2 strikes on that guy, and this is an old story, it’s up and in. He can’t extend his arms and he’s not good staying in. Howry of all Cubs relievers should know that and I can’t imagine he “missed his spot”. What a way to blow Lilly’s chance for a “W”; glad the big-W came anyway.

As for the plots, nice job Joe. Note the “tightness” of ERA to WHIP on that last scatterplot.

Most of your reasons relate to past performance. Yes, he was a very solid contributor last year, stepping in as closer when Dempster was out and providing a reliable late-inning arm.

But, this year he’s been terrible. While he seems to have regained the velocity that was AWOL at the start of the season, he’s had a tendency to give up extra base hits. He’s given up more HRs (10) so far this year than he has in any but one of his previous seasons. Opposing hitters are OPSing .876 against him (including 1.481 in the last 14 days).

I don’t know if DFAing him is the answer, but at the very least he cannot be used in high or medium leverage situations until he figures it out.

oh how things change…

with a 1 run lead yesterday? Doesn’t Lou understand he does this almost 1/2 the time if not more? Gives up too many hits, often runs, and just plain stinks up the joint.

My biggest hope with Howry was that his #s would be good enough to get us a compensation draft pick; if the Cubs think he can right his ERA by season’s end, you don’t want to DFA him for that reason. That said, Howry isn’t giving many reasons to think he can right the ship.

But he has to find his way back to normal Bob Howry in a blowout game, not in the most important series of the year so far with a one run lead!!!!!!!

don’t you WORk for Bob Howry?

Looking at the pitch tracker from last night, Howry was grouping his pitches well. If you look at the strikeout of Cameron, all his strikes came on pitches on the outer half, though the final strike, a swinging strike, seemed to catch too much of the plate.

Howry’s velocity is still there, he was hitting 91-93 on his fastballs, so that is not the problem. His pitches seem relatively straight, not a lot of late movement, but I don’t recall him ever having a lot of late movement.

What is kind of worrisome is that Howry threw 19 pitches, only three of which were not fastballs (all sliders). Of those three sliders (or changeups, or whatever they were), two were balls, one was fouled off. It looks as if the opponents can see he is having a hard time with his non-fastballs and are just sitting back waiting for the juice.

Howry is at a place where is failures are amplified and his accomplishments minimized. Yes, he made a mistake to Branyan – the first four pitches were all at or above the belt, the home run pitch just above the knees on the outer half – but that is what Branyan is paid to do. He succeeded on that pitch. Still, Howry threw nothing but fastballs. One would think that at 2-2, a breaking ball of some sort would have had Branyan flailing away.

Once issue that I haven’t heard anyone mention the possibility of is that he could be tipping his pitches. I gotta think they are looking into that.

Weeks’ AB

Kendall’s AB