Alfonso Soriano reports to camp still "hurt"

I think you’ll see Ramirez end up there

the thought of Soriano in the infield again, even at first frightens me. His bat is a corner infield bat, but his glove is terrible. I’ve been a pretty big Lee basher over the years (as you well know) but his glove saves us a tremendous amount of runs per season, Soriano wouldn’t give us anywhere near that level of defense. I do not think Lee will be back after this year but, I guess you never know. I think the transition from 3rd to 1st for Ramirez would be much easier and if Vitters is ready for the bigs next season, do it.
As for Soriano, keep him in left, and hope that the NL adopts the DH or hope he remembers how to hit again and find somebody crazy enough to trade for him.

as far as it goes. The Cubs were slow to realize that an injury had occurred, but this happens all the time with torn meniscus injuries. I really don’t think this is a situation that warrants the assignment of blame. It is really hard to describe or understand if you haven’t experienced it. I played football a whole year with a torn meniscus. I thought I had sprained my knee and when it felt fine the next day, I just figured it was a minor sprain. When I kept spraining it, it took me (and my Dr.) a long time before we realized there was something else going on. There is a knee stability test that Dr’s can do to help them determine if there is structural damage, but that isn’t 100%. It is more useful for diagnosing ligament damage than meniscus tears.

if it feels fine, why does it still effect his ability to play?

…so that’s a little different. I would use Jon Lieber in ‘08 as to what will probably happen to Silva. He’ll get a couple early season starts, throw some mop-up and, agreed, wind up on the DL.

means to you, but my point is that whatever the scenario is that would result in the Cubs losing 90 games in 2010, it is not only not unprecedented, but it is almost a sure bet to happen to SOME team this year that noboby expected it to happen to.

Nobody on here thought the Cubs would be essentially a .500 ballclub last year, but that’s what they were.

I mean, there’s a decent chance that Soto and Soriano are going to be offensive black holes again. It’s not guaranteed, and it’s likely that they’ll be better than they were in 2009, but it’s by no means a certainty.

And we all know what Fukudome is by this point – he’s going to give you a good month at some point, and then he’s going to give you 2 or three months in which he is beyond useless and looks as bad as any player you have ever seen.

We are also hoping for a rebound from Fontenot, and/or for Baker to become an MLB starter for, really, the first time. And we’re hoping that Theriot can bounce back from a lousy 2009.

Put simply, there’s a decent chance that the Cubs could be below average offensively at left, center, right, short, second, and catcher – in some cases, dramatically below average. There’s certainly a ton of precedent for each of those players stinking up the joint for extended stretches.

Also, we’re replacing Rich Harden in the rotation (a guy who was arguably the best pitcher in the NL in the 2nd half of 2008), with someone TBD off the Gorzo-Silva-Marshall minor leaguer pu pu platter.

We have no idea what kind of hitter Soto really is. Is he the guy he was in his rookie year, or something closer to last season. Granted he lost a ton of weight, but is that going to translate into better numbers? Maybe, maybe not. We haven’t seen enough of him to know. Soriano has been injury prone since coming to Chicago. Either last year was the beginning of Soriano’s decline or just on off year. We don’t know yet.

The pitching staff is full of question marks, including Randy Wells and who the hell is going to be our fifth starter? in my opinion, a lot has to go RIGHT for us to avoid a bad season. All we have to do is play like last year for a longer period of time to lose 90 games.

I think that at age 34 and coming off an injury, it’s almost a certainty that he’s going to regress somewhat from that 145 ERA+. Even if he was in the best possible health, he’s likely to regress to a certain extent.

I mean, he was like 20% better than he’d ever been in a decade in MLB. You have to expect some regression.

Sure, Z and Dempster could be even better. But they were both relatively healthy, above-league-average performers. Even if they’re improved from 2009, they aren’t likely to be THAT improved.

The Cubs got 850 innings of pretty awesome pitching from their top 5 starters last year. I am not seeing where those 850 innings are going to come from this year, especially if Gorzo/Silva are prominently involved.

And Guzman is injured. And Grabow is…. not great. Losing Gregg and Heilman is awesome, as I’m sure that the Cubs have 2 guys in their system who can outperform them for the minimum salary.

That said, even hearing the name “Heilman” is like a stomach punch. Can you believe Hendry traded Pie in order to get that guy, and then traded him a year later for absolutely nothing, while scrambling to find a player capable of playing CF?

His second half was better than his first half, but you can’t say that 200 innings of 3.64 ERA baseball is anything other than “good”.

Right now, 20% of the Cubs’ 2010 starts are unaccounted for. And that’s leaving Lilly’s injury out of the discussion.