When the idea was posed by the BP-Wrigleyville staff to break down the luck/skill quotient of each of the Cubs’ five members of the starting staff, I immediately volunteered for Kyle Hendricks. It seemed like a great idea at the time: after all, I’ve already written extensively about Hendricks this season, so it should have been a breeze… or so I […]
In the last 10 days, I’ve run a pair of Twitter polls. In the first, which I ran on May 22, I asked followers who they would rather have, Kris Bryant or Stephen Piscotty. My follower sample will totally skew the results, but: Who would you rather have? — Matthew Trueblood (@MATrueblood) May 22, 2016 […]
About a year ago, my wife became pregnant with our second child, and decided she wanted to start drinking only decaf coffee. So we bought one of those fancy Keurig machines to replace our plain old coffee pot. By this point I had fine tuned that cheap, plasticky pot to brew the perfect cup of […]
Editor’s Note: Usually, we try to stick to hard-hitting analysis of baseball here on the site. Given the incredible tedium of Spring Training, though, we’ve decided to shift gears slightly to some hard-hitting analysis of Google search results. We hope you enjoy. Here’s Carlos Portocarrero … Kyle Hendricks is having a great spring. All those rumblings […]
After a tumultuous and exciting offseason, the Cubs are in many ways different than they were in October of last year. They have a new right fielder and a new second baseman, each of whom is a clear improvement over last year’s team. The Cubs also have newfound starting pitching depth that we here at […]
2015 Stats 32 G, 180.0 IP, 3.95 ERA, 3.87 DRA, 22.6 K%, 5.8 BB% Year in Review “If broadcasters are right about the keys to pitching success—get ahead of hitters, change speeds, avoid walks—Hendricks is destined to be a booth favorite. The Dartmouth product doesn’t have great stuff but he commands it well, varying his […]
Kyle Hendricks was steaming. Sixty feet six inches away in the California sun, his catcher was shaking him off, calling for the changeup again and again in the face of Hendricks’ obvious frustration. Hendricks knew he couldn’t throw one, knew he didn’t have one. But the catcher was insistent, and the lanky right-hander finally rocked and […]
“I’ll take care of you, man.” Those are the first words on my recording, and the first words any major-league player ever spoke to me with the knowledge that they might be published one day. “I’ll take care of you, man.” The guy on the recording was Kyle Hendricks, who I’d met a few days earlier—on my […]
By now most Cubs fans are well aware that, after his start last Friday, Kyle Hendricks said his mechanics were all out of whack. That much was pretty clear to see for anyone who was watching the game, and the results just backed up what our eyes were telling us: Hendricks gave up five runs, eight […]
On Friday, August 14th, I found myself on Twitter. This happens a lot. It’s not localized to Fridays, honestly, or to Augusts, or to days which fall a fortnight into their respective months. It’s just something I do from time to time. And on this particular Friday, I spotted on my timeline the following tweet: I […]