This FanPost titled "Fred McGriff to the Cubs?" from a few days ago, in which digitalbenjamin asked everyone to post what they thought were the Cubs' worst acquisitions, inspired me to open the Can of Worms about Fred McGriff himself -- a player who put up significant numbers, yet in some ways it seemed he was never even here.

In 2001, the Cubs decided to cut ties with Mark Grace after, supposedly, Grace refused to take a lesser role and mentor Hee Seop Choi, the organization's top first base prospect at the time. Choi clearly had talent, but at the end of the 2000 season was only 21 years old and had played only 36 games above A ball -- probably at least a year, maybe two, from being major league ready. He had only 13 spring training at-bats before being reassigned back to the minor league camp.

To hedge their bets, the Cubs acquired Matt Stairs and Ron Coomer in the 2000-2001 offseason, and both saw time at first base during the first half of the 2001 season, along with Julio Zuleta, whose biggest contribution was lightening up the atmosphere in the clubhouse. After a 4-0 loss to Arizona on May 18, Zuleta decided to take a page from the movie "Major League":

"It worked," Zuleta said. "I put the bat bone (rubbed on bats to smoothen them) in the middle of a plate and put a banana and apple and orange around it. Then I got some Flexall from the trainers and ... some newspaper and burned it. I made it up as I went along. The bats got hot and everyone started hitting."

Whatever the reason, the Cubs won 12 in a row after Zuleta's "ritual" -- their longest winning streak since 1945. And Zuleta's own bat went cold, resulting in him being sent back to the minors -- for good -- on June 26.

Still, even though they were in first place all of June and into July, GM Andy MacPhail insisted they needed to upgrade at 1B. Stairs and Coomer were doing a good job, but Good Ol' Andy set his sights on Fred McGriff, then playing for his hometown team in Tampa.

The deal took more than three weeks to finish. McGriff had a no-trade clause and let it be known that he didn't want to leave his family in Tampa, thus giving rise to a nickname among some of us in the bleachers: "The Family Man". Then we heard he didn't want to play in all the day games at Wrigley Field... new nickname: "The Prince of Darkness".

Finally, on July 27 the deal was done (maybe this was a precursor of how hard MacPhail would be to trade with once he became Baltimore's GM). The Cubs sent Manny Aybar and a PTBNL (who turned out to be Jason Smith) to the then-Devil Rays for McGriff, whose first Cub game was a nationally-televised ESPN game on Sunday night, July 29. He took the field to a huge ovation and walked, singled and scored a run in 7-5 Cub win.

And... the team fell right into the tank. Standing 60-43, 3.5 games in first place when The Family Man took the field for the first time, the Cubs went 28-31 the rest of the way and finished third, even though McGriff's numbers with the Cubs were almost identical to what he had put up in Tampa (lower BA, but higher SLG).

The next year, McGriff again hit reasonably well, but the Cubs were awful, losing 95 games and finishing last, and rather than put Choi, who had been recalled in September, in the lineup every day to see what he could do, interim manager Bruce Kimm left The Prince of Darkness in the lineup. Why? To give him a shot at his 10th 30-homer season. After Fred finally hit this milestone blast (in a 5-4 loss at Pittsburgh on September 22, nine days after hitting his 29th and a full month after his 28th), he made only one token PH appearance the rest of the year, closing a sorry chapter in Cubs history. The Cubs were 95-126 with McGriff on the roster.

Oh, and The Family Man? Where did he go after leaving the Cubs via free agency after the 2002 season?

Los Angeles, more than 2,500 miles from home. He left the Cubs with 478 career homers, at age 38. But he slumped in LA, was benched and finished 2003 with 13 HR. Going home again to Tampa, where he hoped to reach 500 HR with his hometown team, he hit .181 with 2 homers in 27 games and was released on July 28, 2004, seven homers short of 500 and probably forever short of the Hall of Fame induction he thought he would clinch with that milestone homer that never happened.

Good, I say. McGriff's lackadaisical attitude with the Cubs makes most of us wish he had never been one. He did play in five postseasons and has a ring from the 1995 Braves, and put up good postseason numbers (.303/.385/.532 with 10 homers in 188 AB) -- but I'd be hard-pressed if you asked me to remember any one of them..

TORONTO -- Whoever this guy is inhabiting Jason Marquis' body and uniform, don't let him give it back to the real Jason Marquis (the one we've been so frustrated with over the last year and a half).

This Jason Marquis was outstanding for the second straight start, allowing only one hit through seven innings, and though faltering in the 8th, the only run he allowed was through a rare Carlos Marmol loss-of-command moment, when Marmol walked the patient Matt Stairs with the bases loaded.

Between Marquis and former Blue Jay Reed Johnson, who smacked a three-run homer off Roy Halladay, the Cubs dispatched the Blue Jays easily 6-2 this afternoon. Marquis lowered his ERA to 4.24, nearly a run lower than it was before his start in Los Angeles last Sunday.

For all the Marquis naysayers, maybe it's too early to say this, but it looks to me as if Marquis has "figured something out", because the last two starts he's looked, I think, better than he's looked at any time since he came to the Cubs a year and a half ago. I'll reserve judgment until he does this for three or four more starts, but if he can keep up this kind of performance, the Cubs' starting pitching inconsistencies may be solved.

Marquis had, apparently, allowed a hit in the 2nd inning when Jim Edmonds dropped a Rod Barajas fly ball that he had in his glove, but it was later ruled an error (correctly, I think). That was it till Lyle Overbay led off the 5th with a line single to center, and then the three hits leading off the 8th which got Marmol in the game. The third of those hits was a line drive off Mark DeRosa's glove that was almost caught; that could have been a double play. Instead, Marmol got out of it, but not until he walked Stairs to force in a run.

Reed Johnson got the start in LF today against the RHP Halladay -- as it turned out, a savvy move by Lou, because Johnson came up after Ronny Cedeno's little bleeder of a ground ball had not quite been stopped by David Eckstein -- hometown scoring made it an error, making that run and the three that scored on Reed's laser of a HR after that all unearned. The Cubs hit Roy Halladay all over the yard, winding up with seven hits and a walk, and six runs -- only two earned, though I thought Cedeno should have had a hit on that ball, because Eckstein made "more than ordinary" effort to even knock it down. Johnson got another ovation when announced, and when he had his first AB, from the Jays fans who remember him fondly; but after the HR, when he came up in the 4th, that turned to booing -- after all, he's now the visiting enemy!

The error didn't really matter, because runs are runs and we'll take them any way we can get them, right? The Cubs, as well as they did today, could have blown out the Jays earlier, as they stranded ten runners, and then Bob Howry decided to make it interesting by allowing a triple to Kevin Mench that Jim Edmonds didn't play very well off the CF wall, and then a sac fly, and then a ringing double by Brad Wilkerson, before striking out Eckstein to end it. (I'm still worried about Howry.)

Before the game I took in the Hockey Hall of Fame, which is located in an old bank building that has been sort of merged into an atrium-type mall, right next to an outlet of that very Canadian company, Starbucks (I have been very surprised to see, unlike my last visit to Toronto five years ago, how many US chain stores are now here). And let me tell you, the hockey people save everything -- there are pucks from 1901, "sweaters" (what they call jerseys, and some of them really ARE sweaters) from the 1920's and 1930's, and relics from every era of the sport, organized by era, by team and player, and also a large exhibit of world hockey teams, including shirts from teams from Israel, Mexico and Turkey, countries you'd never expect to have hockey teams. The Stanley Cup is prominently exhibited, along with the metal bands of previous winners that have now been retired from the actual Cup. The one you see being held up by the winners is now on tour, and it's not even the original, although that is also on display, in an old bank vault.

Very cool tour, and there were quite a few other Cub fans going through the exhibits in the morning before heading off to the game, and the requisite souvenir T-shirt was purchased, at the unheard-of museum price of only $10.

Ran into my friends Tom & Ginger from the bleachers, and will be joining them for dinner later tonight, and their friends Joe and his girlfriend, and also former Cubs Vine Line editor Jim McArdle, who is working on a book about this season; we all had a few postgame drinks at Wayne Gretzky's restaurant near the stadium. They were among the large minority of Cub fans in the crowd of 34,048 today -- probably 7,000-10,000 Cub fans taking over Toronto. Now, let's take this series tomorrow, with ex-Jay Ted Lilly on the mound.

View of the Skydome/Rogers Centre with the roof open on Saturday

The Jumbotron with tons of stats and information

Henry Blanco and Ronny Cedeno on base, where they would eventually score on...

... Reed Johnson's three-run homer.

The star of the day, Jason Marquis, delivers a pitch with Mark DeRosa ready at 3B

TORONTO -- Sean Gallagher threw a pretty nice game last night.

But the Cubs lost to the Blue Jays 3-2, snapping a four-game winning streak, you're saying. What is Al talking about? The road finally get to him?

No, it didn't, though I was almost literally driving door-to-door from Wrigley Field, where I left Thursday's game, stopped at home to pick up my stuff, hit rush-hour traffic, stopped in Lansing, Michigan, overnight, and arrived in Toronto just in time to say "Hi" to my very nice bed-&-breakfast hosts, then leave for the game.

Gallagher DID throw well -- that is, except when he lost focus in the third inning and allowed back-to-back HR by two men we are very familiar with. First, it was ex-Cub Matt Stairs (who the Cubs should never have let go -- he could have been a valuable part-time player the last six years), who followed Alex Rios' leadoff double; next, former Cardinal nemesis Scott Rolen followed Stairs' lead by homering just inside the LF foul pole, and that was all the Jays' six pitchers needed. Among those six was yet another ex-Cub, Scott Downs, who has turned from a young starter who couldn't get the ball over the plate for the 2000 Cubs into a premier setup man. Some friends of mine from my Colgate University class, who live here in Toronto and were at the game, told me that Downs writes the names of his kids in the dirt on the mound before his first pitch of every appearance.

Digression? Sure, because do you really want to hear me talk about all the squandered opportunities? The Cubs left 11 last night, including an awful inning where they had the bases loaded with nobody out, A. J. Burnett (who had stymied the Cubs for the first five) on the ropes, and scored only once, on an Eric Patterson single with one out. They had appeared to score two batters earlier, when Jim Edmonds singled with runners on first and second; Kosuke Fukudome, the runner on second, rounded third and scored easily. Time was called and he was sent back to third; this was never explained at the park, and if you missed it, here it is:

The shot from Edmonds had hit the arm of the second-base umpire and was ruled a dead-ball single. Had the ball not hit the umpire, Fukudome would have scored from second, but he was instead called back to third, after the umpires realized what had happened.

Lou came out and briefly argued, but this makes sense. The Cubs still had a good shot at taking the game back that inning, but Ryan Theriot hit into a double play. That seemed to suck all the life out of the Cubs; they managed only three harmless singles the rest of the way. The bullpen did a good job of keeping the game close, at least, and in the 9th, the Cubs did get a runner on base (Derrek Lee, who walked) with two out -- this after ex-Blue Jay Reed Johnson got a rousing ovation from the Jays (and Cubs) fans before pinch-hitting for Micah Hoffpauir.

They kept the roof closed last night because of a forecast of rain, and that was a good thing, because in the late innings, audible thunder rumbled overhead and by the time the game ended, there was a pretty good downpour outside. My friends graciously offered a ride back for me, but that required a walk through the rain, which is the reason this recap is being written now rather than last night. While waiting for the rain to let up, I ran into Len Kasper and Bob Brenly also outside, saying they needed to find a cab back to their hotel -- I assume they eventually found one, because they disappeared into the wet night. (Thanks again, guys, for the interviews earlier this year.) The now corporately-named Rogers Centre has been vastly improved since I was last here in 2003; the concourses, once dark and forbidding, have been painted in lighter colors. They're still a bit dark, but better, and the food selection seems much more varied, and lines move fairly fast. The Jumbotron, also new, shows detailed stats on every player in the lineup, though at one point it said Derrek Lee had "grouned" to short in the 7th.

The Cubs have won so often in this so-far terrific season that it feels really strange when they lose. However, we must remember the silly old phrase, "You can't win 'em all", and know that is literally true. Toronto's got a pretty decent team that has struggled in part because their closer, B. J. Ryan, has blown two saves in the last two weeks. It won't get any easier today with Roy Halladay going, although Halladay, like Tim Hudson on Thursday (similar numbers) isn't unbeatable (five losses). I'll have a game thread up in a few hours.