Kuzul

First of all, Jim Hendry is gone. That’s the good news. At least I think he is. We can never be too certain when it comes to the Cubs.

His last, horrifying words, to his interim successor, Randy Bush, reportedly were “Don’t forget to hug Albert Pujols for me” or something like that, meaning, I guess, that Bush should do his best to sign Albert to a behemoth contract that will saddle the team with debt for another 10 years, or that Big Jim has some kind of thing for… No, no, scratch that, scratch that.

The curious thing about this whole business, leaving aside that it should have happened last October at the latest, is that Ricketts fired him a month ago and didn’t tell anyone. It kind of reminds me of several Seinfeld episodes when George or Jerry try to break up with their girlfriends and they won’t accept it.

The world of Cubs officialdom, where any resemblance to a serious, professional organization has long ago disappeared, tends more to the surreal every day.

Imagine this, your boss calls you in and tells you you’re through, that he has lost all confidence in you. Then he either asks you to stay on and supervise one or two projects upon which the future of the organization depends, or you ask him to let you stay on and supervise two or three projects upon which the future of the organization depends.

I mean, where else on Earth can this happen and then be presented to the public as something you would even admit in your wildest drug- or alcohol-addled dreams to having done or even thought about?

But that’s what happened, at least that’s what we are told happened, and, truth to tell, you cannot make stuff like this up, can you?

In any case, Hendry proceeds to oversee a trade deadline scenario where teams make offers on half-a-dozen eminently available players whom Big Jim declares untouchable, household names like Reed Johnson, Jeff Baker, Marlon Byrd, etc., all of whom will undoubtedly have statues commissioned shortly in the Wrigley Field Walk of Fame.

The only trade he makes peddles Kosuke Fukudome to the Indians for a bag of balls so that Tyler Colvin can play every day or so that Mike Quade can immediately bench Colvin, declaring he has to earn his starts, presumably by getting base hits when he isn’t in the game.

For the record, here are a few honest suggestions for Mr. Ricketts to consider. Hire someone with baseball knowledge to supervise both the business and baseball aspects of the Cubs. The principal duty of this person will be to fire most of the current leaders of these departments, Crane Kenney, Randy Bush, Mike Quade, and so on and to persuade them to leave right now.

This person can then hire an actual baseball GM and let him find the necessary replacements or decide who among the current scouting and player development staff should be retained.

After that, Mr. Ricketts can purchase a private corporate jet if he doesn’t own one already. You can still get a good tax write-off on them. He should then spend the rest of his time flying from one Cubs minor league outpost to the next blackmailing the respective city fathers into paying for improvements to baseball facilities the Cubs operate in their domains.

Boise, Peoria, Daytona, etc. These places are the places where sophisticated operators like Tom Ricketts can shine. And, most of all, he should just shut up and pay the bills.

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Everyone else is plotting out the Cubs everyday lineup and batting order, so I suppose I should get into the act as well.

Based on spring training so far, this looks like Quade’s preferred batting order, at least against right-handers.

Fukudome, RF

Castro, SS

Byrd, CF

Ramirez, 3B

Pena, 1B

Soriano, LF

Soto, C

DeWitt, 2B

Pitcher

I have no problem with the first two slots.  Fukudome gets on base, Castro continues to impress.  The problems begin with the middle of the order.  I don’t care how hot Byrd is in spring training, he is not a No. 3 hitter.  He isn’t patient enough and he doesn’t hit for power.  Fans should remember that Milton Bradley batted .500 in spring training.  The same goes for Soriano.  Byrd also did not hit right-handers very well last season.

Pena should bat third.  He does not hit for average, but he is patient and he will get pitches to hit with men on base if Ramirez returns to form.  He also provides a nice left-right-left-right alternation at the top of the order.  Ramirez is the obvious choice for clean-up, but Soto should bat fifth.  Soto is patient and hits for average and power, and the Cubs need to bat him higher in the order to maximize his production.

Byrd, when he is in the lineup, should hit sixth and Soriano should hit seventh.  Quade’s lineup against righties is actually short a left-handed bat, which, as the team is currently configured, should be Colvin.  I’ve argued previously that Byrd and Soriano are platoon players at this stage of their careers.

The Cubs need to work out some sort of platoon system with Colvin to give him opportunities and to sit one or the other of the Soriano/Byrd combo on a regular basis, especially against the better right-handed pitchers.  In that case, I’d like to see Colvin bat sixth and whoever else is in the lineup seventh.  DeWitt is an obvious choice for eighth.

The Cubs have more options against left-handers, simply because they are still a predominantly right-handed hitting team and their three most consistent all-around hitters (Ramirez, Castro and Soto) are right-handed.  It looks like they are thinking of a platoon of Baker and DeWitt at second base, with Baker batting leadoff.

I’m not a big fan of this idea.  I must confess I am not a big fan of Baker or his type of player in general, but maybe that is just a prejudice on my part.  The Cubs may be reading a little more into last year’s numbers than they merit. 

Granted he was terrific against lefties, but to a certain extent, these numbers look great because he was so awful against righties.  His career numbers against lefties are good, but not that good.  Plus, the guy doesn’t walk much and he strikes out a lot.

Cubs management and Cubs fans historically have not set much store on building a balanced lineup that scores runs, but it makes a big difference.  They tend to look at and acquire players in isolation, separate from their impact on the lineup and the team as a whole. 

What seems to be the preferred lineup this season will score runs against left-handers, but it has serious flaws against righties that could sink their chances unless they are flexible enough to make the necessary changes right away.

Even the early days of spring training support my thesis.  The Cubs are not scoring runs and when they have had an outburst from the regulars, it has been against left-handed pitching.

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Another way of asking this question is have the moves Jim Hendry made in the offseason improved the team and have the moves their division rivals made improved those teams more?

On the latter score, though the Brewers have improved their pitching, they have done so at the expense of their rather suspect defense. On balance, they remain a very flawed team. Let’s remember they had CC Sabathia for the better part of a year and they lost.

The same can be said of the Cardinals, whose major move has been adding an aging Lance Berkman as their everyday left-fielder, in the process weakening an already weak outfield defense. Adding Theriot as their regular shortstop doesn’t help them offensively or defensively, as the Cubs and Dodgers can readily attest. 

Aside from locking up Joey Votto, the Reds have made incremental moves suitable to a small market team. Their performance last year was a surprise, and with Dusty Baker managing their young pitchers, one would not be amiss in thinking their achievements might turn out to be a flash in the pan.

The truth is that all these teams, the Cubs included, are in that range of mediocrity where they are likely to win between 80 and 89 games no matter what and where a little bit of luck or someone having a breakout year or acquiring a difference-maker at the trade deadline will put them over the top. 

All that is predicated on the fact they play in a mediocre division. If they played in the AL East, they’d all be bringing up the rear and each GM pretty much knows it. 

In fact, that is one of my major gripes with Jim Hendry, that he is intent on building a competitive team in a weak division, not on building a really good team that will go to the World Series and win it. I’ve made this comparison before, both in my blog and in these pages. Look at the history of the Phillies in this decade, starting from pretty much the same place and having about the same budget, and you will see what I mean.

Getting back to the main question, though, you can argue that the Cubs were and always have been legitimate contenders in the NL Central, that so long as they replaced Derrek Lee with a decent first baseman, based on their performance after they dumped Piniella, they had as good a shot as any of their serious rivals.

Hendry is surely of this mindset. He thinks the Cubs lost last year because they underachieved as a team; that because Ramirez was hurt and Lee had a bad year, their offense was lacking; that the middle of the bullpen was just bad and they lacked a reliable right-handed setup man most of the season.

So Hendry announced that the Cubs needed just a little tweaking to be back in business, a first baseman, a veteran starter and a right-handed setup man. He got all of these, and on the cheap as well if you discount future considerations.

Pena will hit home runs and he’ll probably bat at least .250. He cannot be any worse than Lee was, especially on defense, and he bats left-handed. So that’s a plus even though they probably should have gone all-out for Gonzalez if they were willing to mortgage the farm for the likes of Garza.

Kerry Wood fell into their lap. If he had not, the Cubs were unlikely to have solidified their bullpen with a decent free agent and freed up any of their prospects to potentially fill out the back end of the rotation. But Wood is a plus nonetheless if they use him properly.  He’s not an everyday guy anymore, and the Cubs are fortunate to have Marshall as a left-handed alternative for eighth inning duty.

Trading for Matt Garza was the other big move. The more you look at his stats, the more you think he is by no means the pitcher the Cubs or at least Jim Hendry think he is.

He will eat innings though, and notwithstanding some of the comparisons Sabermetricians are making to Tom Gorzelanny (sometimes statistics can be misleading), he is an upgrade and he does stabilize the rotation, even though the Cubs seem to have paid a Cliff Lee or Zack Greinke price for a pitcher who is at best a Ryan Dempster.

So based on all this, the Cubs are bound to be better and comparing them to their principal rivals, they are likely to contend. With a couple of breaks, they have a good shot at the playoffs where they will get killed by the Phillies if they get that far along. This is the best case scenario, and as a Cubs fan I hope it happens and anyway it will give us all something to watch this summer.

In Part II, I will look at the 2011 Cubs in an alternative and ultimately less optimistic fashion, taking the view that although the Cubs’ offseason moves make some sense if you think becoming a contender in a weak division makes a difference, they make less sense if you think building a genuinely good team, a championship team, should be the only goal. 

I have to warn you, though, I will still conclude they could win the division with a little luck.

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When the Cubs ownership changed hands, some friends of mine with maybe more insight and inside dope than me, suggested that we would long for the days of the Tribune’s corporate ownership sooner than we ever imagined.

Well, maybe not the current batch of bankrupt blockheads who managed to sell off the only really profitable division of their empire, but it makes you wonder in a way about the crisis of American capitalism in a nutshell.

Anyway, needless to say everybody is weighing in on the great plan, and so far the verdict is not so good for the Ricketts team. You wonder, for one thing, who is doing their PR and whether they ought to think about, at a minimum, hiring competent hucksters for a change. The Tribune guys at least paid their own way even though they used their brand ownership and muscle to push around everyone who got in their way. Here is a good selection of articles and opinion, pro, objective, and con. Mostly con. There is even a rather sensible tongue in cheek suggestion from Ed Sherman at Crain’s Chicago Business that they might seek state aid in financing the remainder of Alfonso Soriano’s contract, about $72 million.

To be brief, this is the deal: The Cubs get to welch on their original agreement to develop the triangle of land between Waveland, Clark, and the stadium, in return for the City letting them expand the bleachers.

In a novel legal argument, they claim that that agreement was negotiated by the previous ownership and even though they have continued to exist as a corporate entity, well, hey, that was the other guy’s business, not theirs. This kind of ploy usually doesn’t sit well even with politicians. Even a shill like Tom Tunney seems to have his doubts.

The Ricketts proposal amounts to a kind of confusing financial shell game. In essence, though, it a pretty much a scam, though a somewhat more inventive one than, say, the White Sox play for a new stadium where they just threatened to move to Florida. The Cubs want public financing to make all the necessary renovations to the Wrigley Field’s infrastructure, new clubhouses, kitchens, batting cages, weight rooms, whatever structural interventions are necessary.

Now all this stuff is stuff that should be done, but the problem is that as far as Wrigley Field itself goes, the structure has run up against a situation of diminishing returns. All the deferred maintenance mentioned above doesn’t add much to the bottom line unless you double ticket prices or something like that, because attendance, the basis of the Cubs cash machine, has maxed out. So no doubt the fans experience and the players experience is enhanced, but there’s nothing in it for the owners, is there?

So their first thought, of course, is to have somebody else pay for it. Or, better yet, in a flurry of mumbo-jumbo economics that would put Milo Minderbinder from Catch 22 to shame, nobody pays for it really, because we just use the tax that would be paid anyway when it increases over twenty years, and just the part the Cubs ticket buyers would pay anyway would probably be used for useless junk like schools or stoplights or something.

See, we get a new Wrigley Field that will last for generations until some mutant ivy eats away the bricks in the outfield wall.

Meanwhile, the Ricketts can use their own money or money they raise privately to develop the new Wrigleyville. This part is a little vague. It seems to consist of the famous Triangle Building and some sort of mall that runs along Clifton Avenue west of the fire station that is populated by happy, suburban, white families munching hot dogs and buying lots of Cubs paraphernalia.

It looks a lot like Wrigleyville West, which the Cubs have managed to con the citizens of Mesa, Arizona into building in order to keep their spring training facilities there. Or, kind of like The Glen, all ersatz gimmickery that is supposed to give you the genuine Wrigleyville experience without the concomitant urban grit.

I’ve lived within a mile or so of Wrigley Field in various rentals and condos for most of my adult life. I’ve seen the environs develop from seedy, to gritty, to gentrified, to the current state of something like fratified if that can be a word. But the thing is that that growth and development, though it is centered around the ballpark, has been organic and basically real whether you like it or not. Or, whether you feel comfortable there or not.

You’re in a city, a big city, and cities are messy places. You don’t have to live here and you don’t have to visit. Neither do you have to have those environs developed at a considerable public subsidy to make money for people who are already rich enough to pay for it on their own.

The Ivy Covered Burial Ground

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If you want to classify the tenure of Jim Hendry as a Cubs executive, well, he definitely joins the ranks of nothing special or worse.

When we stop to think about the Hendry era, we sometimes don’t realize how far back it goes—all the way back to 1995 when he headed up the farm system, and to 2002 when he officially took over as GM. That’s a long time with very little tangible achievement. Sure, they won three division titles, but they have not built a perennial contender.

If I had to sum things up in a single thought, it would be, “OK at small-scale incremental changes, bad at big trades, big changes, worse at overall strategy and building a winning team.”

In other words, this guy is a tolerable small market leader and a failure at big market moves. To the extent the Cubs are a major market team—and you have to say that with their payroll and profitability, they cannot be considered anything else—Hendry is the wrong guy for the job.

Hendry was the major player in the minor league and scouting areas from 1995 until he became GM. So, as far as first round picks go, you’ve got Kerry Wood in ’95, Jon Garland in ’97, Corey Patterson in ’98, Mark Prior in ’01 and pretty much dreck until you get to Tyler Colvin in ’06.

Colvin is the first product of the Oneri Flieta/Tim Wilken era anyway, where player development efforts seem to have picked up. Garland was traded away for garbage. Throw in Dontrelle Willis, also traded away basically for the journeyman Matt Clement, and Carlos Zambrano and that’s pretty much it for the Hendry era. Maybe throw in Ricky Nolasco who was drafted in ’01 as well and similarly traded away for nothing.

Outside of the pitchers, there’s nothing much to write home about, and half of them were discarded. The system’s inability to produce position players with any consistency has been a notable failure. Lately, the Cubs have been able to promote a major league catcher in Soto and a good shortstop in Starlin Castro, but their much heralded prospects, guys like Felix Pie, for example, have fizzled.

I suppose on the strength of this performance, Hendry was promoted to GM in the middle of 2002, having pretty much served in that capacity for a little while before the formal announcement. The first move he made was to fire Don Baylor, a good move. He promptly hired the first of two celebrity managers, Dusty Baker in ’03 followed by Lou Piniella in ’07, both of whom enjoyed initial success and both of whom were run out of town at the end of their generous contracts.

Hendry made his best moves at the start of his GM career and has lost the magic as time passed.

He has always been pretty good at dumping toxic contracts, and one of his first moves was to somehow convince the Dodgers to take Todd Hundley off his hands in return for Mark Grudzielanek and Eric Karros, both of whom were on the downside of their careers, but both of whom played well for the Cubs in 2003 and helped a lot in what was, arguably, their best run in modern times.

Most of the rest of the ’03 team was in place when Hendry took the reins, i.e. Alou, Patterson and Sosa in the outfield, etc. The arrival of Prior and Zambrano as dominant starting pitchers carried the Cubs into early contention.

Hendry then pulled off the most spectacular trade of his life, and actually probably the only major trade he ever made that worked to the teams benefit, when he managed to pick up Aramis Ramirez, Kenny Lofton and Randall Simon from the Pirates more or less for nothing.

The following year, he picked up Derrick Lee in the offseason, also pretty much for nothing, probably his second best trade. He also let Lofton walk after the season, counting on Patterson returning to the level of play he displayed before his injury in 2003. This was a big mistake.

After that, I think it is fair to suggest that Hendry had seen his best days as GM recede behind him. The blockbuster deal at the 2004 trade deadline for Nomar Garciaparra was a bust. Nomar was hurt, and his career had already hit the skids.

After the Cubs fell apart at the end of 2004 and after the injuries to Wood and Prior, the remainder of Baker’s tenure as manager was a death march and Hendry was unable to do anything significant to stop it, other than holding on to Baker for the remainder of his contract even though it was obviously time to pull the plug.

Things changed radically beginning in 2007, when the Cubs dipped heavily into the high-end free agent market, mostly in a fairly successful attempt to inflate the resale value of the franchise while diminishing its value on the field. They picked up Ted Lilly and Jason Marquis to bolster their pitching, the Lilly signing being, overall, the only beneficial one.

Anyway, the real puzzler was signing Alfonso Soriano, a guy who really has no idea how to play baseball and never has, to an eight-year deal. There are still four years left on this deal at about $18 million per year. This alone would be cause for any respectable team to just fire their GM on the spot.

The team played pretty well, though, in 2007, and Piniella managed to cobble together a pretty decent run, dumping several useless cogs that Hendry had accumulated like Cesar Izturis and half-a-dozen second basemen in favor of home grown talents like Ryan Theriot. The signing of Mark De Rosa, a relatively minor acquisition at the time, helped immensely.

The following season, the Cubs went out and got Kosuke Fukudome for big bucks. I’ve never been one to fault Hendry for this signing. Everybody wanted Fukudome and projected him as a solid player. The Cubs are paying him too much money, but he is, at least in my view, rather an undervalued performer considered just on the basis of his skills and their value to a team that is consistently weak defensively and in terms of fundamentals.

The real plus moves that pushed the Cubs into contention, though, were once again small, and arguably lucky, choices, mainly the signing of Jim Edmonds and Reed Johnson, who turned out to be a surprisingly potent tandem in center field. That, and a career year for De Rosa, helped a lot.

During this same stretch, the Cubs gave lucrative extensions to Carlos Zambrano, Ryan Dempster, Derrick Lee and Aramis Ramirez. In all honesty, it is hard to argue with these decisions, however much in retrospect they may seem excessively generous. I’d probably have made the same moves under the same circumstances.

The really stupid signing came in ’09, when Hendry went out to get Milton Bradley as a left-handed bat even though he was always better as a right-handed hitter and he was a known nutcase. Everybody knows that story, but again Hendry did demonstrate a remarkable ability to exchange bad contracts and come up with something in return when he dealt Bradley to the Mariners for Carlos Silva.

What emerges from all this is the portrait of a GM who really does not have solid judgment most of the time and who seems to spend money foolishly and to no set purpose. The Cubs don’t really seem to have a plan in mind on the kind of team they want to create, nor any idea how good, consistent teams are built.

Just for comparison, look at the Phillies development through this same period when they had about the same or even slightly lower budgets and competed for pretty much the same pool of talent, especially in the free agent market.

The Phillies were more fortunate or more skillful in developing home-grown position players, bringing up Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley through their own farm system and trading for young players like Jason Werth and Shawn Victorino. Their biggest weaknesses were 3B, LF and starting pitching.

They managed to cycle through free agents in LF and 3B and get the kind of production they needed. A good case in point was LF, when the Phils gave up on Pat Burrell and decided they needed a left-handed bat there. They signed Raul Ibanez. The Cubs, in the same position signed the abominable Milton Bradley, even though Ibanez was available at the time.

The Phillies decided to construct a balanced power-hitting team built around their ballpark. They also knew they would need exceptional pitching to overcome the inherent problems of playing in a stadium where cheap home runs were the norm, so they concentrated their efforts on acquiring really, really good pitchers, guys like Lee, Halladay and Oswalt, even if it meant giving up prospects to get them.

Now, contrast that same era with the Cubs, who seem to have had no obvious plan, who cannot seem to build a lineup that is balanced and makes sense, starting with the leadoff man, who do not seem to understand the strengths of their team or minor league system or the kind of team they need to build.

There are strong arguments for change at the top, which, of course, is not forthcoming. One may only hope, but without much confidence, that some lessons have been learned. Maybe Hendry can pull off a hat trick and dump Soriano in the same way he unloaded Hundley and Bradley. (Incidentally, I would take the rumored Soriano for Zito trade in a minute).

Maybe Hendry will look at the Giants as a model for rebuilding, which would not be a bad start.

Maybe pigs can fly.

Well, whatever. There is always next year.

The Ivy Covered Burial Ground

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Larry Rothschild has exercised his option to remain as the Cubs pitching coach for another season. Apparently this means that if it is OK with the new manager, he gets to stay. One of the odd things about Jim Hendry’s tenure as GM is the number of no-trade contracts and player’s and coach’s options he has handed out.

Generally speaking, I would suppose that these are not a good thing, especially with respect to coaches. One would suppose that team management would not want to tie the field manager’s hands by saddling him with holdover coaches, but Rothschild has just completed his ninth season with the Cubs and, if retained, will be working on his fourth manager in 2011. So it goes in Cubland.

It is always difficult to evaluate a coach’s influence. There are so many variables and so much of pitching is dependent on factors outside the coach’s control, as well as the material he has to work with. Still, nine years is a long time, and I think we can reach some conclusions, or at least some intuitions.

I would argue that there are two key factors to consider in evaluating any pitching coach, and these are the potential of the players he has to work with and whether they improve or regress under his tutelage.

Judged on these criteria, one would have to put Rothschild somewhere in the middle of the pack, nothing special and certainly not incompetent, but not an invariably positive influence either. In other words, not a game changer by any means.

On the talent level, you would have to say that throughout Rothschild’s tenure, Cubs pitching has been above average, sometimes dominant, sometimes just pretty good, but even in off years, such as the last two, not at all bad and probably not the reason the team disappointed.

So what has Rothschild been able to do with these guys? In 2002 the Cubs had a pretty bad team. Their top starters were Kerry Wood and Matt Clement. Mark Prior was a rookie, as was Carlos Zambrano. Nobody had a standout year, but whoever was responsible for moving Zambrano into the rotation deserves some credit here.

The following season, 2003, the Cubs had one of the best rotations in all of baseball in Wood, Prior, Zambrano and Clement. Over the course of the next few years, Wood and Prior broke down, Wood for the second time and Clement returned to mediocrity before being dumped off to the Red Sox before he too broke down.

Zambrano was the only one of the four to perform consistently well over the entire span and his performance, though tolerable even at its lowest points, declined each year under Rothschild until his dramatic upswing at the end of this season.

Cubs pitching after 2004 was pretty much indifferent for the next few years with the exception of Zambrano. The big news focused on the struggles of Wood and Prior to regain their health.

The Cubs farm system produced little of note. Nothing to brag about here, though eventually the Cubs were able to revive Wood’s career for a second time. They also managed to turn Dempster back into a starting pitcher, so some credit is due on that score.

In 2007, the Cubs went out into the free agent market and acquired Jason Marquis and Ted Lilly, neither of whom were coming off career years. Lilly had several good seasons. Marquis was mediocre to pretty awful. Beginning around the time Piniella was hired, the farm system started to produce some prospects, nothing of the caliber of the early 2000s when they brought up Prior and Zambrano, but some decent kids.

So what is Rothschild’s record with this material? Fair to middling. Sean Marshall came up in 2006. The Cubs never seemed to be able to figure out what to do with him, trying him first as a starter on a fairly limited basis. He has finally realized his potential as a setup man in 2010. Rich Hill showed up in 2005 and had a breakout year in 2007 when he won 11 games. After that, he lost his command. Maybe not Rothschild’s fault, but not a feather in his cap either.

Carlos Marmol broke in in 2006 as a starter, but moving him to the bullpen where he has been a dominant force since 2007 has to be a plus for Cubs management. Jeff Samardzija was rushed up in 2008, rather as Andrew Cashner was this season. He has been awful ever since and probably has no future.

The Cubs cycled through a number of middling prospects during the Piniella era, among them Sean Gallagher and Kevin Hart. They also brought in Rich Harden as a free agent, and his career was mediocre as well.

I’m not saying that all these guys had more in them than they showed on the field, just that it is at least more probable than not that a really great coach would have achieved better results, especially with the veterans, that you would expect more from a guy to whom you had committed nine years.

As for the current crop of youth, the jury is still out on Coleman and Cashner. They have potential, and Coleman in particular could blossom into a back of the rotation starter. The discovery of Wells was a big plus, though he suffered through a sophomore season that does not argue in Rothschild’s favor.

The relief pitchers were a major disappointment in 2010 after showing promise in the minors and the previous year. Caridad, like Guzman, was hurt. Berg, Russell, and a host of others regressed.

Gorzelanny, I would argue, stayed about the same, a middling fifth starter. People forget that he won 14 games for the Pirates several years ago. The one real credit on Rothschild’s blotter in recent years has to be the revival of Carlos Silva’s career, something no one expected.

According to Paul Sullivan, Rothschild has some sort of special bond with Carlos Zambrano. You sure would not know it to look at the results, and if he had anything to do with demoting him to the bullpen, well, with friends like that, you don’t need any enemies, do you?

Also, I thought his remarks in the Sullivan article about Zambrano were ungracious, especially for a guy who has an allegedly special relationship. Maybe he has seen these streaks before, but mentoring is all about instilling confidence. You can think it, but you don’t say it.

Rothschild has spent most of the past two seasons serving as an ancient-looking bookend to the worn-out Lou Piniella. He’s only in his fifties, but he looks like he is a hundred. Nine years is a long time with this organization, especially if you have little to show for it and lots of regrets.

You cannot say the Cubs will be worse-off if the new manager keeps Larry around, but, like most fans, I would really like to see a new face and new ideas. Dumping him would not be the end of the world and might signal a change of tone.

The Ivy Covered Burial Ground

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