You don’t usually expect a game started by Jake Arrieta and Madison Bumgarner to end with you staring slack jawed into the abyss like Krusty the Clown witnessing the antics of Eastern Europe’s favorite cat and mouse team Worker & Parasite for the first time. Generally, if one of those pitchers beats you, you can […]
Category: Articles
Game 134 Recap: Cubs 2 Giants 1
Top Play (WPA): Jon Lester might have been the star of this sunny Chicago Friday afternoon, but his batterymate provided the fateful batting blow to fell the Giants. Every half inning featured five hitters or fewer, save the Cubs’ half of the third, in which the streaking Cubs plated both of their runs. Javier Baez, […]
Bijan Rademacher: Talented Enough To Choose
A regular topic of chatter on the website of Collectively Guided Intellectual Peoples—also known as Twitter—is that of position switching: as in, could a given position player pitch effectively, or can a pitcher handle the bat well enough to be a regular position player? We were stunned by the majestic nature of a Jake Arrieta […]
Jorge Soler and the Virtue of Patience
With the birth of statistics in baseball giving us a more accurate gauge of player talent, the eye test (note: this is not the same as scouting, which is still vitally important) has become a thing of the past, a relic for which we only use to pique our interest before looking to statistics to provide […]
Young Cubs: Call Me (Up) Maybe
With only one week (!) of games remaining, the minor league regular season is suddenly winding down. For the Cubs, it’s been a season of mixed results in the upper minors. Iowa has struggled record-wise, but has continually produced productive players at the major league level. Players like Willson Contreras, Albert Almora, Rob Zastryzny, Carl Edwards […]
Game 133 Recap: Cubs 5 Giants 4
If it was an action movie, I can’t tell you it was a very good one. Some face-off and car chase in the first 15 minutes, but settled for the following 85 minutes. Then, in the final 10 minutes, after you consumed several bags of popcorn and all of your fingers got sticky, there’s finally some […]
Series Preview, Cubs vs. Giants: September 1-4
Heading into the All-Star break, it was the San Francisco Giants, not the Chicago Cubs, who held the best record in baseball. On the surface, that alone would make this four-game series at Wrigley a pretty intriguing set. But since the break, the Giants have been a bottom-of-the-league 15-27, including an 11-16 August, their worst month’s […]
The 2016 Starting Rotation is Historically Good
When the Cubs picked up John Lackey during the offseason, the starting rotation finally felt like that of a team vying for a championship. The top two were never a question—Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester were always going to be the 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation. But following those two up with […]
Game 132 Recap: Cubs 6 Pirates 5
Hey, a tight game against a division foe in the midst of a pennant race is one thing, but that catch is another thing altogether: Addison Russell reportedly covered 107 feet, reaching top speeds of 19.3 miles per hour. Had the ball dropped, the tying run might have very well scored (Len’s words, if you […]
Zastryzny, Already Defying Expectations, Looking for More
Rob Zastryzny, or ‘Rob Z’ as he’s called by Joe Maddon, made some Cubs history when he was called up to the big league club in mid-August. He’s the first of the pitchers drafted under the Theo Epstein regime to make it to the major leagues, and second only to left-hander Gerardo Concepcion when you […]