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Cubs fire GM Jim Hendry


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So the guy who gave average production over the course of 4 years at a cost of $48 million is a worse contract than the guy who gave very very slight above average production for 5 years at $78 million and who they still owe $54 million for three more years?

 

Like yeah, Fukudome was not very good. Soriano was slightly better at 3 times the cost. The Soriano contract is still far worse.

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Either way, a $30 million dollar mistake for Milton Bradley doesn't set you back for almost a decade; the Soriano deal did.

 

 

A contract like Soriano's is merely embarrassing towards Chicago, it hasn't prevented them from doing anything. After they picked up Soriano, they still had plenty of money to throw at both Fukudome and Milton Bradley.

 

So then there's not such thing as a bad contract for Chicago?

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Zambrano was bad too. Zambrano and Soriano are problably in the Bottom 10 current cotracts.

 

The difference is that every big team would have given Zambrano that contract.

 

Also, how ridiculous is it that he was allowed to stay on for another month after being fired? He must have said something like "Mr. Rickets, I understand you think I'm terrible at my job, but all the really really important things that a GM does during the season, which you think I am terrible at, needs to be done soon. Don't you want my unqualified self doing that?"

I don't think that the Zambrano contract is even that bad. This is the first year he's really fallen off of a cliff (first season he's had an ERA over 4.00) and has been pretty healthy for them. And he's only 30 years old.

 

It sucks he's on the books for that much money for 2012, though.

So far he has averaged 158 innings (*) with an ERA+ of 110. That performance is not worth $18 million a year. It's not worth even half of that. There's one year left in the contract and I doubt many people expect him to be as good as 158 innings @ 110 ERA+ next year.

 

(*) He may pitch a few more innings this year if he comes back from suspencion.

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Either way, a $30 million dollar mistake for Milton Bradley doesn't set you back for almost a decade; the Soriano deal did.

 

 

A contract like Soriano's is merely embarrassing towards Chicago, it hasn't prevented them from doing anything. After they picked up Soriano, they still had plenty of money to throw at both Fukudome and Milton Bradley.

 

So then there's not such thing as a bad contract for Chicago?

 

Chicago's financial resources have been pretty vast as of late. The Soriano deal wasn't crippling and the Soriano deal wasn't why they put out mediocre or worse teams the last three years. It was that Hendry made terrible decisions, years after the Soriano deal was made, in constructing his teams with what he already had. The Cubs made the playoffs twice with Soriano, heck, even once with Fukudome, which shows that neither contract crippled the team even if they weren't good contracts. The straw that broke the camel's back was Milton Bradley, and anyone who looks merely at his OPS the year before and says he was worth a big signing is as ignorant as Hendry was. No other team in the league was willing to give Bradley a long term deal because of his attitude, and there was reason to doubt his production.

 

Milton Bradley had played over 100 games in his career only 3 times in 8 or 9 seasons, with his career high being 141 while his second best year was 126 and his third only 101. Any GM to commit more than one year to a player who had been jettisoned by 5 different teams before hand was making a terrible mistake.

 

We can argue all day, the Soriano deal wasn't great, but it was far from the nail in Hendry's coffin. He still had resources at his disposal in the year's afterward, even with too much money going towards Soriano, and what he did with those resources was commit more money over more than one season to guys who were likely to not live up to their contract.

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Zambrano was bad too. Zambrano and Soriano are problably in the Bottom 10 current cotracts.

 

The difference is that every big team would have given Zambrano that contract.

 

Also, how ridiculous is it that he was allowed to stay on for another month after being fired? He must have said something like "Mr. Rickets, I understand you think I'm terrible at my job, but all the really really important things that a GM does during the season, which you think I am terrible at, needs to be done soon. Don't you want my unqualified self doing that?"

I don't think that the Zambrano contract is even that bad. This is the first year he's really fallen off of a cliff (first season he's had an ERA over 4.00) and has been pretty healthy for them. And he's only 30 years old.

 

It sucks he's on the books for that much money for 2012, though.

So far he has averaged 158 innings (*) with an ERA+ of 110. That performance is not worth $18 million a year. It's not worth even half of that. There's one year left in the contract and I doubt many people expect him to be as good as 158 innings @ 110 ERA+ next year.

 

(*) He may pitch a few more innings this year if he comes back from suspencion.

 

The biggest problem with Zambrano is that he has never been able to handle the pressure of being an ace. And there is added pressure in Chicago, where the fanbase has become as venomous towards its own players as anywhere in sports these days.

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There is no doubt that the Cubs have a lot of revenue, but they just can't absorb contracts (like Soriano's) without consequences. The Cubs went from the #3 team in payroll with $146 million in 2010 to the #6 team with $125 million in 2011. I wouldn't exactly call that "vast" despite being well above MLB average. It certainly seems like they are tightening up because Soriano, Zambrano, and Ramirez are getting expensive.

 

You say that the Soriano deal wasn't crippling and that it did not prevent the Cubs from making moves. Well, if that's true, please list me some big multi-year signings that the club has made over the last four years. Milton Bradley (whose deal wasn't even that large) and who else?

 

One would expect that a team with resources so vast that it's not inhibited by the Soriano and Zambrano contracts would have been able to land guys like Cliff Lee, Adrian Gonzalez, and Carl Crawford, let alone some names of lesser caliber. Why have the Cubs been more or less fielding the same team over the past couple of seasons?

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So...

 

The problem is not the gigantic contract to the middling player, it's that he gave out other smaller contracts to other middling players?

 

I do not understand...

 

Those types of arguments are why I often ask myself why I continue to post here. The nonsense here is starting to get out of control.

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So...

 

The problem is not the gigantic contract to the middling player, it's that he gave out other smaller contracts to other middling players?

 

I do not understand...

 

 

You don't understand because you are only thinking of contracts and value. I'm talking about the Cubs as a baseball team. Let's state a fact- Soriano, Bradley, and Fukudome were all expensive. Soriano's deal was done and several years past by the time the Bradley and Fukudome signings were made. Both were expensive signings which were designed to solidify the middle of the order. They both were expected to the number 5 hitter (or better) and provide consistency & run production. Both guys provided neither, and for reasons that were at least as easy, if not easier, to predict as predicting Soriano would decline.

 

The idea here is that Hendry compounded what was already a mistake (Soriano) with another mistake (Fukudome) and then, when that didn't work, made an even worse mistake in Bradley.

 

Between the last two, that was 20-25 million dollars a year that he added after Soriano that was less productive than the first. That's the bigger mistake to me, because as I said before, you can still build a winner with Soriano's contract on the books and him providing 25 homers +, but how Hendry spent those resources was money down the drain.

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You say that the Soriano deal wasn't crippling and that it did not prevent the Cubs from making moves. Well, if that's true, please list me some big multi-year signings that the club has made over the last four years.

 

 

 

Isn't that what I have been doing? Milton Bradley & Kosuke Fukudome. It just wasn't money well spend. And please keep in mind, Bradley was brought in to essentially start OVER Fukudome. That's two players, combining for 1 position, taking up 20-25 million dollars. That's enough money to buy any player in the league.

 

Please keep in mind though, even with these two players still on the books, they did not lack the money to sign Marlon Byrd, a fairly average to good player who Cubs fans knew the moment he was signed wasn't going to make them all that much better. In fact, the year after he came in, they slipped to 5th place. Even still, the Cubs had no inability to trade for Matt Garza and pick up an extra 6 million in salary.

 

What you don't get is I would love it if the Cubs saved some of the money from signing second-tier free agents, who are merely going to continue them being average, and spend the money they use to buy 2-3 average free agents and get one star caliber player in return.

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I wouldn't necessarily call those "big" deals in the context of the other teams fielding payrolls in the range that the Cubs do. They are actually quite small in context.

 

 

I would LOVE IT if the Cubs made big deals. Instead, they choose to make multiple small ones that don't make them good, and actually makes them worse than the other teams fielding comparative payrolls.

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But the one contract alone is $18 million and longer and has a no trade clause...

 

 

You are still stuck on Alfonso Soriano's contract, that wasn't why Hendry was fired, he was fired because the Cubs are a bad baseball team, and there's more money going to worse players than Soriano right now (several of whom the Cubs have had to pay other teams to take) than there is going to Soriano.

 

75-87 in 2010.

55-70 in 2011

 

As I said before, you can talk about Soriano's contract lasting for five more years, but it all comes down to performance on the field with the payroll of theirs, and Soriano's contract didn't prevent them from winning in 2010 and 2011 as much as committing another 25-30 million to Milton Bradley and Fukudome. In 87 games, Fukudome contributed 13 RBI. You don't think him getting paid around 14-15 million to do that is a problem? Kosuke has added 7 since going to Cleveland, that's 20 on the year in over 100 games, that means Kosuke is probably gonna get around 30 for the year while his total salary (on a Hendry contract) was at least 14 million.

 

That means Fukudome, a guy signed to be a middle of the order guy, is getting paid roughly 500,000 dollars per RBI. Sorry, but that is epically bad.

 

Milton Bradley had 40 RBI in the first year when he was making 7 million, but his contract escalated after that year and the Cubs had to pay the Mariners even more to take him off their hands. Face it, Bradley and Fukudome hardly even deserve the label mediocre, because they were 100 percent unable to fit the role that Hendry paid them to do.

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