Have The Cubs Given Up?
It’s pretty apparent Lou Piniella and Jim Hendry have given up on the season. The Cubs are 4.5 games out in the division and 5 games out in the Wild Card. That’s not really cause for giving up on the season at this point - their odds are slim, but not insurmountable, and if they can keep close they still have a series with the Cardinals left. But obviously, when they made the decision to start Jeff Samardzija the other day, Lou and Jim were giving up on the season.
Philadelphia is a very good team, especially offensively. Jeff Samardzija is not a very good pitcher. The big problem is that his stuff just isn’t very deceptive, it seems. The average major-league pitcher gets batters to swing 25.0 percent of the time out of the zone. Samardzija only draws a swing 22.5 percent of the time when he’s pitching out of the zone. That’s not a huge difference. But when batters do swing at pitches out of the zone, on average they only make contact 62.3 percent of the time. For Samardzija, they make contact with 76 percent of his pitches out of the zone this season.
What that tells me, I think, is that nobody’s fooled. He’s worse than average at getting batters to bite at pitches out of the zone, and then when they do swing they know exactly where to put the bat. I’m not sure if that’s because he’s pitching closer to the zone than most pitchers or just that everyone is seeing the ball very well. Regardless, the results are telling: five home runs in 27.2 innings, 39 hits, 17 strikeouts to 12 walks and more fly balls than ground balls. The only good thing to be said about Samardzija is that he’s not giving up a lot of line drives, so it’s possible that he’s not getting squared up too much - but people are obviously hitting him pretty hard.
The thing about this is, even though these numbers are inflated by the start against the Phillies, Lou and Jim knew these things. This is information that’s available to them. Samardzija wasn’t pitching well in the majors before, and his numbers in AAA were pretty mediocre - he had a decent ERA but everything else wasn’t very good. And the Philadelphia Phillies are just slightly better than the Albuquerque Isotopes. It wasn’t even slightly surprising that Samardzija got shelled, and the Cubs simply threw away a game they couldn’t afford to concede. I don’t know if it’s the money the team has invested in Samardzija or just that they felt like they didn’t have any other options. Either way it was an indefensible decision and I’m left to assume that Hendry and Piniella just felt they were no longer competing for the division.
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Lou HAD to abuse Marshall beyond what was wise after Samardzija came out because he couldn't go through the whole bullpen in a lost cause. If Marshall had been starting and effective, he would have been sat down and then Samardzija would have proceeded to blow any potential lead the Cubs might have had.
Their best chance of winning that game was hoping Samardzija managed to take it up a notch for a few innings and then turning it over to Marshall to take it home. Didn't work, but that is the only scenario that I see the Cubs even having a chance.
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