Remember the old saying? That a team is never as bad as they look when they're losing?
I'm reconsidering that. Maybe this team really is this bad.
This game was dreadful. On second thought, that's an insult to dreadful things. Let's examine that further. From thesaurus.com, here are some synonyms for "dreadful":
abominable, alarming, appalling, atrocious, awful, bad, beastly, creepy, dire, disheartening, dismaying, distressing, fearful, formidable, frightful, frozen, ghastly, godawful, grievous, grim, grody, gross, harrowing, hideous, horrendous, horrible, horrid, horrific, icky, lousy, mean, monstrous, rotten, shameful, shocking, shuddersome, spooky, terrible, terrific, terrifying, the end, tragic, tremendous, unnerving, wicked
You ought to be able to find a suitable word in there to describe today's massacre, which was over after the game's fourth pitch, which Howie Kendrick deposited into the RF basket, thanks to a brisk wind blowing from the west on an otherwise gorgeous Saturday afternoon.
Via tweet from Carrie, we find these postgame words of wisdom from Lou:
"We've done everything that I can humanly do to get this thing turned around. That's all I can do."
Well, if that's all, Lou, then it's time for you to go home. Not that it would make that much difference with this group, but at least there'd be a breath of fresh air into this franchise, which has gone stale with the "Look, what do you want me to do?" comments constantly made by you. It may not change the results, but at this point -- come on, Jim Hendry, do something.
"Something", in the next few weeks, may include the Cubs trying to jettison contracts; I'll write something about this soon, not today, but a question: who's tradeable? Ted Lilly might have seemed dealable, until he was pounded early and often and also made an unbelievable throwing error. Jered Weaver hit a comebacker to Lilly; Brandon Wood, on base, hadn't taken two steps toward second. It was a no-brainer double play; Ted had all the time in the world, and yet he rushed a throw, hurling it way over both Starlin Castro and Mike Fontenot, helping lead to a pair of unearned runs.
I like Ted; we all do. But that was horrendous. Maybe Lilly can be traded. Otherwise, the Cubs are saddled with large undealable contracts. It's a stark fact that cannot be ignored.
As I said, more later on this. Castro also made an error in the ninth, making two of the three runs allowed by Bob Howry unearned. The Cubs have now made 11 errors in their last five games, giving them 54 in 68 games. Errors, obviously, aren't the sole measure of bad defense, but the Cubs are a bad defensive team, and when they make errors, the other teams have taken advantage of them to score 44 unearned runs, by far the most in the National League.
Apologies for the lengthy service outages this morning and early afternoon; all of SB Nation was affected, but the tech team worked diligently to get things up and running again. I was unable to finish the game preview that I started last night, and you missed commenting for the first half hour or so of this game. Or, maybe you didn't really miss a thing, given how (see list of synonyms for "dreadful" above) this game was.
Anyway, after raising a few flickers of hope by taking two of three from the A's, the Cubs have looked worse than awful the last two days. It would be nice to win one game in this series. We'll see if they have that in them tomorrow.