I wanna see is a lighter bat! That thing is so heavy he has to start his swing early.

and don’t take his word for it. He is a hard worker and I expect a little extra off season work would be useful.

that they team values him enough to sit him down and lay out this information, especially comparing him with Sosa (for the nice ego boost), and that he has the mental toughness as well as determination to understand the benefit of changing.

Fonzie won’t ever be able to live up to his contract, but I have the faith he will come back and have a good season next year. He’ll work at it, and as long as he is healthy, he’ll do whatever he thinks he needs to do to be a success. I have no idea how big of an ego he has, but… I am sure his stats this year are not satisfactory to him.

He’ll never go 40-40 again, but I won’t be surprised if next season, he puts up his best season he’ll have with the Cubs. After that though, he’ll be going downhill…

And what exactly makes anyone believe nobody has mentioned these things to Sori before? As he’s gone through extended slumps in the past, you don’t think any hitting coach has ever said “hey, why don’t you try to laying off breaking pitches that are never strikes at any point in their flight?”

One alt. might be to send him to the hitting coach ben zobrist went to that over hauled his swing (which is part of the problem), another is to have Lou sit one on one with him and go over his PA’s, where he swings at breaking pitch in the dirt again and again until he has (sorry for repeated Rays references) a Crawford like breakthrough where he realizes how much better he could be if he took a walk here and there, and a relatively piss poor season like this could break his ego enough to make him realize this . Also while he has been for the most part a plus in left he is on a steady decline to a negative attribute in LF, a move to 1b will have to be done when DLee’s contract is up, or the very least a year after that. These are all just suggestions to improve a player who has a lot of flaws, but has tremendous upside and a contract that forces the Cubs to stick with him and do everything they can to correct his flaws because they are stuck with him.

I also want a batter who is a kind of threat behind him. If there is any merit to the “protection” theory of batting orders, Soriano is one guy who would benefit from having a decent hitter behind him to force pitchers to keep the ball over the plate rather than break stuff away.

Other than this, the only changes he can make as a cub are from away greys to batting practice to blue jerseys to batting practice to pin stripes.

IIRC, this is something Lou has mentioned publicly at least a couple of times this year. And, yeah, a lighter bat would probably help.

I haven’t completely given up on Alfonso. In fact, I swear I read a comparison somewhere of Soriano to Vlad Guerrero – a guy who, as his speed drops, will maintain his power.

I’m really hoping the knee surgery will help Alfonso regain his focus. My general impression of him has been that he’s not lazy or selfish, as many have tried to argue, but that he’s simply very easily distracted. He’s a guy who simply struggles with his focus – and the nagging knee injury may have really exacerbated this unfortunate trait.

"I don’t know how bright he is." I think the answer is, “not very,” at least as far as baseball is concerned. He can’t even be considered an idiot savant, because whatever success he’s had has been the result of sheer physical ability. He appears to have only the most rudimentary idea of how baseball is supposed to be played.

with Soriano himself, he’s got to do this. I hope he realizes that he must change, if not we will be talking about this next September.

.. when every blasted pitcher in the NL gets in their groove and figures out how he’ll flail away at anything coming close to his zone where he’ll cut loose.

What I just don’t get is what’s gone on with the Cubs zeroing in on his plate discipline a whole heck of a lot more then they have. Yes, yes, yes .. he’s the consummate slugger and he is who we thought he was and all of that, but man, why in the world can’t he just sit and think through AB’s just a bit more?? If he’s going to be making the kind of money he’s going to make the next few years, I would hope that whatever emphasis Lou and staff obviously must be making with him can’t be a bit more emphatic ..