Squandered electrons

There has been no shortage of Cubs’ discussion the past day or so.  Phil Rogers believes Baker still has time to show he can turn things around, supporting his argument with nonsense like “Baker has to find a way to get this lineup scoring runs—four or five, at least—on a regular basis. He’s still the best guy for the job.” Paul Sullivan says higher management still trusts in Dusty and then goes on to waste bandwidth with his always unfunny “Q&A” session.  Jim Hendry had his own unfunny Q&A session with the media and managed to say nothing of interest or surprise.  And the always dependably brain-numbing Carrie Muskat answers her mailbag with vigor, providing insightful discussions of the history of the ground-rule double and Juan Pierre’s chaussettes.

Two things are striking about this series of prose stylings. The first is the insistent attempt to compare the Cubs’ woeful start of this season to the Astros’ woeful start in 2005.  Even Hendry stoops to employing this comparison, as if he’s taking solace in the remarkable recovery from rabies of a completely unrelated person, while his own raccoon bite swells and festers.  No context is explored, no effort to analyze why the Astros of 2005 were much more likely to turn things around than the current detritus taking the field in Chicago (see Oswalt, Roy, Clemens, Roger, and Pettitte, Andy).  Who cares?  A facile comparison with some small relationship to reality will always make the medicine taste better.

Secondly, the debate is conducted in the kind of broad strokes that ultimately end up obfuscating the real issues on the table.  Perfunctory references to “scoring more runs” and “going deeper into games”, either by management, beat writers, or the fans themselves (and here I hazard to guess that a significant minority of fan questions submitted to Muskat’s “mailbag” and Sullivan’s “Q&A” which do raise cogent points are discarded), are buried in even duller discussions of “leadership”, “team meetings”, and “trade rumors”.  No one asks Hendry about the structure of the team he consistently fields.  There are no questions about OBP, the lack of a platoon partner for Jones, or the utterly pathetic excuse for a bench.  There are no inquiries about the wisdom of spending so much on players with obviously declining skills like Jones, Pierre and Mabry, or the overemphasis on “tools” in his minor league gameplan.  How about asking whether his concerted efforts to build an offense (which Baker also favors) that makes contact has sapped it of power and led to some unintended consequences like an inordinately high GIDP rate (the Cubs are second in the majors in that illustrious number).  Where are the hard questions about Rothschild’s approach with the staff - questions about the consistent failure of pitchers who are promoted to throw strikes (Aardsma, Guzman, Hill, etc.)? 

It isn’t very hard to smile and shrug off, with bland bromides, growing unhappiness with one’s work, when that unhappiness is framed in such diffuse and, to be honest, lazily shallow terms.  There is every indication that a siege mentality is developing within Cubs’ management in response to the growing criticism and, paradoxically, this mentality is making Baker’s position more secure and bold changes in organizational philosophy even less likely.  Until Hendry and company are faced with compelling, pointed criticisms of their approach, they will be content to huddle together with an armory of warmed-over excuses that work well enough against the current barrage of generic complaints.