Reasons The Cubs Can Make The 2006 Playoffs

I went for a run late yesterday morning, and it was the kind of morning when one cannot help but feel optimistic. About anything: work, women, life, and baseball, among anything else. The drizzle cleared out somewhere after 3 AM and by the morning there was not a cloud in sight, the kind of morning when it feels much hotter than 65 in the sun and much cooler than 65 in the shade, and where the air smells as though it has been scrubbed entirely clean.

Amidst that buoyancy, as I ran I tried to think of all the reasons I will not be surprised when the Cubs make the playoffs this season. It’s that time of year when everyone begins making predictions. I am not inclined to do this because like anyone else I do not like to be wrong, but unlike some of the forecasters, I am not one to just blow it off or pretend I wasn’t wrong when I was. Better off staying out of the prediction game, then, even if – especially if – it means you don’t get to say I told you so when you’re right. I always laugh when Gregg Easterbrook (Tuesday Morning Quarterback) points out how the professional commentators end up worse with their game by game predictions than one would do by simply picking the home team every NFL game, and so on. For the most part, any fan, critic or analyst who happens to prognosticate correctly is as lucky as they are insightful.

That might be why early into Gene Wojciechowski’s book Cubs Nation one of my favorite parts was his account of Eric Karabell’s predictions for the 2004 Cubs, Karabell being ESPN.com’s fantasy league expert. He called Lee overrated, Ramirez durable, and said Alou was too old to get to 30HR & 100 RBI again. (39 & 106, actually.) He said on Patterson and his big upside, “I bet he gets close to 30 homers this season,” and “At some point he’ll learn how to take a walk and exercise patience” albeit with the caveat that “it might not be this year.” He said Sosa could be an MVP candidate, called Barrett underwhelming, and said Borowski was “probably a borderline top-10 reliever.”

I’m not ripping on Karabell so much as ripping on the business of predicting. At the time, those all seemed like reasonable positions, even if many of us disagreed with some of them, or agreed with him and turned out to be equally off. It’s just that while looking at historical trends and working statistical projections are the best means to guess correctly, it’s hardly a perfect science, and when you add in the instinct and intuition of even the experts it doesn’t get much more reliable.

With all that said, I think the Cubs have a good chance of making the playoffs this year for a lot of reasons, many of which I haven’t heard people bring up very often. There are a lot of reasons to believe that this season will not be like the last two. So here are a few, take ‘em or leave ‘em.

• Between the 8 of them -- Zambrano, Maddux, Prior, Wood, Rusch, Williams, Hill and Guzman – the Cubs ought to get 7 good starts out of 10. Even if we disagree about who is going to do well, and when, when you look at it from the larger perspective, the Cubs have pretty good starting pitching in the aggregate.



• Dusty Baker cannot mismanage (either by over-managing or under-managing) this team as often. He has less options: he has a bullpen with clearer roles, a lineup with more rigidity, and so on. As I’ve said before, there is no reason to excuse Baker for not getting the most out of what he had to work with last season, but regardless of that it seems like this will be a team better tailored to his style of managing. There is much less ambiguity about the best move to make in nearly every area of the team.



• People are afraid that Baker won’t give the rookies a fair chance, but even if Dusty doesn’t like to play unproven kids, Murton and Cedeno are hardly unproven callups anymore. Even if Dusty hasn't changed, the rookies have: they're starting to become seasoned. When was the last time the Cubs had two rookies in the lineup about which we can be excited? And shouldn’t this mean more enthusiasm and less complacency, a major problem of last season? Plus there’s the fundamental soundness of these two in particular, another reason to believe that the tenor of the team might improve. Between Murton, Cedeno and Pierre, I expect many fewer baserunning gaffes.



• Aramis Ramirez is healthy. One thing about the Cubs giving him that big contract extension was that there was no way in the world they weren’t going to make entirely certain that he was in as healthy of shape as he could possibly be when he arrived in Arizona this year. A big investment means proper protection. With Lee already fixed in the #3 spot, and Ramirez healthy and playing every day in the #4 spot, I like that slugging output.



• The Cubs have a decent bench. No, really. Between whichever two of the four – Hairston, Neifi, Walker and Cedeno – aren’t playing, plus John Mabry and possibly Marquis Grissom, that’s not bad. They certainly can’t do worse than Hollandsworth and Macias and the outpatient brigade from the training room of battered and bruised guys last season.



• Pierre is a great leadoff hitter. This matters to every team, but to some teams more than others, and a team like the 2006 Cubs are among the sort who desperately need this. A guy at the top who gets on base, steals bases and all the rest is invaluable to a team who would otherwise leave so many men on first base before they ever get a chance to become a scoring threat.



• The bullpen is significantly improved. One of the worst aspects of last season were all the bullpen walks, and if those drop this season, it will mean more wins. It cannot get any more straightforward.



• Freedom from Sosa’s contract means Hendry will be even more able to make a blockbuster in-season trade. Obviously you can’t predict a specific trade or project how it will help, but the Cubs are in a position revenue and expenditure wise such that I figure the odds of Hendry making some sort of significant mid-season move are better than 50/50.

For the most part, these improvements are geared towards winning close games. Bullpen walks, bad Dusty decisions, poor bench production, and awful production from leadoff all cost the Cubs wins in close games. I think there will be less of each problem, and so there will be more wins in close games. At least, that’s how I have it figured.

And that doesn’t even bring up the injuries. Part of me wants to say that the Cubs are long overdue for a nearly injury-free season, but as any gambler can tell you, just because the coin lands tails 9 times in a row doesn’t mean it’s due to land heads any better than 50/50. It’s all in our heads. But if there is such a thing as baseball gods or karma or yang for yin, the Cubs should be healthier. Even rationally, it’s almost unthinkable that they could be as injured as they were the last couple of seasons.

So a few more wins in close games, a better attitude, a good start in April, and all of a sudden there’s a new vibe on the North Side. And when that vibe becomes momentum, and that momentum compounds itself, we might be in for some fun again. At least, that’s one way it can go, and if it does, I won’t be surprised.