How You Can Tell McGwire is Back in Baseball

Another day, another Cubs loss. The Cubs are now 5-9.

The Cubs were shutout last night by the Cy Young candidate, Mike Pelfrey. His career 4.49 ERA is deceiving, as he is obviously one of the better pitchers to have ever toed the rubber. Just ask the Cubs. Zambrano continued the string of good starts by Cubs starters by giving up 2 runs over 6 innings and striking out 9. Though it took him about 150 pitches to do so. Congratulations are in order for Jeff Gray, who despite giving up a hit and a walk in his one inning of work managed to complete one of the rare scoreless innings by a Cubs bullpen member. He lowered his ERA to 6.75. Nicely done! John Grabow then showed up and puked all over the 8th inning by giving up a pinch hit two run home run to Fernando “I once hit 2 grand slams in one inning” Tatis.

The Cubs stuck to the recipe last night: Quality start from their pitcher, no offense, bad bullpen. I, for one, like to try new recipes.

Soriano, Fontenot, and Hill managed to get the lone 3 hits for the Cubs. Fontenot was able to ruin the only Cubs scoring opportunity by getting picked off at 2B when Zambrano acted like he was trying to bunt and missed.

Not much else to say about that game. 4 losses in a row now. And the Cubs really haven’t played anyone that great. The Braves (ehhh, average), Reds (vomit- lost 2 of 3), Brewers (won 2 of 3), Astros (lost 2 of 3- which happened to double the Astros win total coming into the series), and Mets (lost first 2 of series). This does not bode well for when the minor league schedule comes to an end.

On a side note, have you noticed how many home runs are being hit this year? I’m starting to wonder if there were more pitchers on the juice than we thought. When you think of steroids in baseball, you usually think of the hitters getting bigger and hitting home runs. I bet there were a healthy number of pitchers who were also using.

By the way- Volquez has been suspended for 50 games but is on the 60 day DL, so he can’t pitch anyway. So really, all this suspension is doing is taking his pay away for 50 games. I don’t see how this is fair. The article says it’s fair because the Reds didn’t do anything wrong and don’t deserved to be punished. But when every other player gets suspended, the team is getting punished as well. When a player throws a punch and is suspended 10 games, the team is punished. If that’s the rationale then they shouldn’t suspend players from games, they should just suspend the players pay while playing. I think Volquez should have to wait until he is activated and able to play to start serving his suspension.

What was I saying? Oh, right- home runs. I know some players can be streaky and hit home runs in bunches, but there are a lot of players that have started out with a lot of home runs. If the pace continued for the whole season, here is what the top 10 leader board for Home Runs would look like after 162 games:

Nelson Cruz- 87
Chase Utley- 81
Vernon Wells- 76
Ty Wiggington- 73
Matt Kemp- 68
Dustin Pedroia- 62
Albert Pujols- 62
Jose Guillen- 58
A bunch tied with 54

That's right, Ty Wiggington is on pace to end up on the cover of MLB 2011: The Show. Those are silly numbers. I didn’t bother to go further because there were too many players on pace to hit over 50 Home Runs. Obviously that won’t happen... right?

-John Mark