Sometimes, you just get bored. Sometimes it happens when you’re forced, by dint of an iron-clad social convention and a pronounced lack of anything else to talk about, to ask about your co-workers’ Memorial Day plans for the umpteenth time, and sometimes it happens when you suddenly find that you’ve written the same piece for your Baseball Site one […]
Author: Rian Watt
Game 50 Recap: Dodgers 5 Cubs 0
Top Play (WPA): Jake Arrieta doesn’t exactly lose his cool with the bases loaded. In fact, coming into play tonight, he’d retired the last 13 batters he’d faced with the bases juiced. And after tonight’s action, you can make it 14. In the top of the seventh inning, with the score still tied at zero and his pitch […]
Game 44 Recap: Cubs 12 Cardinals 3
This was a fun one, huh? Perhaps the Cubs’ week-long fever has finally broken. Then again, perhaps it hasn’t. The world is a cruel and often deeply unpleasant place. Let’s proceed, just in case things are on the upswing. Top Play (WPA): The Cubs struck early in this one, getting to Michael Wacha in the first […]
Anthony Rizzo Is Going Through a Thing
Let’s start this by saying the important thing: this doesn’t matter. I know that’s not the best way to Draw The Reader Into The Story, but it is the truth. Whatever struggles Anthony Rizzo is going through—he’s hitting .040/.167/.040 since May 15th—he’ll eventually come out of. He’s too much of a professional hitter, and been […]
Kris Bryant: The Unluckiest Cub
I realize that it’s rather déclassé to refer to Kris Bryant as unlucky. The man is a millionaire, a model, a professional baseball player, and—this is, perhaps, the most infuriating part—by all accounts an extraordinarily humble and well-adjusted young man. In other words, he falls into the category of persons whom you’d least like to run […]
Game 26 Recap: Cubs 6 Pirates 2
Top Play (WPA): Sometimes, it’s the play you expect to see at the top that ends up there. Today was one of those days. Although he hasn’t exactly come out of the gate guns blazing, Ben Zobrist has been a steady presence in the Cubs’ lineup, and it was his three-run home run in the third inning (+0.297) that […]
That’s So Cub: April’s Top Contributors and Moments
April was a hell of a month for the Chicago Cubs. They lost Kyle Schwarber for the season, called Munenori Kawasaki up to the big leagues, lost him to Triple-A Iowa shortly thereafter, and tied a 109-year-old record for wins in the month (17). Let’s take a look back at the month’s top performers, and […]
BP Instant: Miguel Montero to the Disabled List, Tim Federowicz up from Iowa
On Thursday morning, a few hours before the Cubs took on the Milwaukee Brewers in the finale of a rain-shortened two-game set at Wrigley Field, the team announced that Miguel Montero would be placed on the 15-day disabled list, retroactive to Monday, and that Tim Federowicz had been called up from Triple-A Iowa to take […]
Arrieta, Transcendent
Jake Arrieta, speaking immediately after he no-hit a major-league team for the second time in less than eight months, said that he “felt a little off” the whole night. And you know what? He was absolutely right. He was off. Arrieta walked four Cincinnati Reds, threw far more pitches than his manager probably intended for […]
Game 11 Recap: Cubs 6 Rockies 2
Top Play (WPA): When you’re in a bad mood—say, after you’ve just lost a major-league baseball game, and your team has committed four errors in the process—it can help the soul to hit things. The harder the better. That’s probably what Anthony Rizzo had in mind when he came to plate in the fourth inning of a tie game […]