Lou Piniella preached this all year in 2008 -- "win series". If a team could somehow win every three-game series for an entire season, that'd be 108 wins. Of course, that's very difficult to do, but winning tonight would make the Cubs' journey to Houston a success (not to mention, put them ahead of last year when they lost two of three in the opening series with Milwaukee, and also get them off to a better start in road games).
Gordon Wittenmyer writes about Milton Bradley and how Bradley's association with MLB disciplinarian Bob Watson may help him settle down:
Sounds good to me.Watson doesn't sugarcoat Bradley's moody nature or temper problems that he once told Bradley might cost him his career.
"But what's happened is he's a little older, and he's matured," Watson said. "I want to say hopefully the anger-management classes are kicking in. Plus the other thing is he's a lot more financially set. And the Boys and Girls Club might take a hit because he doesn't get fined so much."
As well as Watson knows Bradley, he knows Piniella and Perry better -- as former teammates who also have spent time with Watson in his official capacity in recent years.
Watson, who had health problems that kept him from making the rounds in spring training, said he planned to talk to Piniella about his mercurial new cleanup hitter.
"I expect [Bradley] to do very well with a guy like Lou," said Watson, who sees not only some of the same personality traits in the two, but also some of the same effort to change. "Both guys are trying to control their anger and play under control."
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Brian Moehler is old. (Well, 38 is old in baseball terms.) What is it about the Astros that they like putting together old pitching staffs? Four of their 12 pitchers are 35 or older, and Tim Byrdak will be 35 in October. Moehler has been around so long that one of his teammates during his September callup year for the Tigers in 1996 was... Cubs bench coach Alan Trammell. Last year, the Cubs beat him twice in four starts, the last one being on September 15 vs. the Astros in Milwaukee. Derrek Lee homered off Moehler that day, and Lilly was the starter; he allowed the Astros only one hit the day after Z threw his no-hitter.
Ted was 2-0, 1.40 overall vs. the Astros last year; he handles most of the Astros pretty well. Ivan Rodriguez, new to Houston, has homered twice off Ted, but overall is only 4-for-18 against him.
Here is today's Mediacenter link. It shows WGN radio as being available, but I know some of you have had problems getting it -- per comments made in dfrancon's FanPost on this topic, WGN should be available on cubs.com's main page once the game starts:... it was a line of links at the bottom of the top left-hand box regarding the current game—there were links for watching on MLB.TV, listening on WGN radio and linking to Gameday.
Speaking of Gameday, here's today's Gameday link.
As last night: first pitch thread up (front page only, not in the sidebar box) at 7 pm CT. Overflow threads at 8 pm, 9 pm, and 9:45 pm CT.
Discuss amongst yourselves.