The Chicago Drama Queens

by: pageian

Yep, they've done it again.  The Chicago Cubs are mired in a drama filled quagmire the likes of which few other teams could conjure up.  The Yankees?  Maybe.  The Red Sox?  Perhaps in the depths of their neurosis, maybe.  The Dodgers?  Not a chance.  Leave it to the Cubs to pull off something so strange, so unnecessary, so counter intuitive, so Cub like that there is no mistaking who did it.  They've taken the 5th highest paid pitcher in baseball, their best starter and the workhorse of their rotation and put him in the bullpen.  They now have the highest paid reliever of all time.  Mariano Rivera's got nothing on Carlos Zambrano, apparently.

So why all the fuss?  Why the hand wringing?  Why are Cub fans renouncing their fandom?  Oh so many reasons, where to begin?  For one thing, and perhaps the most important, something that any front office baseball man should intuitively know without having to be told, you DO NOT waste your best starter in the bullpen where he's likely to throw 70 innings on the year instead of having him start and throw 200 innings.  Better pitcher, more innings.  You simply don't sacrifice 130+ innings on a lesser pitcher in order to get 70 good innings from a better pitcher, unless you want to lose games.  In explaining the reasoning for the move though Papa Lou didn't mention to lost innings.  So what did he mention?

It's no secret that the Cubs bullpen has been their Achilles heal so far this season (that and the erratic, anemic offense).  Their closer Carlos Marmol has been pretty good, which is nice if you can get a lead to him in the ninth inning.  That hasn't happened often though with the like of John Grabow, Jeff Gray, Justin Berg, James Russell, Jeff Samardzija and Esmailin Caridad alternately taking turns coughing up leads.  No one has stepped up to pitch the eight inning competently, no one has done well enough to be the setup man for Marmol.  Enter Zambrano.  According to Lou, Zambrano is perfect for the role.  With Ted Lilly coming of the disabled list Saturday someone had to be moved out of the rotation and into the pen.  Instead of choosing Tom Gorzelanny and adding another left hander to the pen or choosing Carlos Silva and allowing him to continue resurrecting his career as a reliever Lou choose to take the number one starter and effectively limit his role with the team.

Any lifelong Cub fan will know that one of the main problems they've had with their bullpen has usually been control.  Every year it's the same thing, a reliever comes in and immediately starts walking hitters.  Unfortunately Carlos Zambrano walks a lot of hitters himself.  The better choice would have been Carlos Silva.  He spent years in the Twins organization learning the finer points of control and not walking hitters.  Wouldn't that have been nice coming out of the pen, someone you could count on to not give up a free pass when it counted?  Silva also has experience coming out of the pen, he spent his first two years in the bigs relieving for the Phillies.  Zambrano also pitched in relief when he came up but not nearly as much.  He's always been a starter except for that brief time when he broke into the majors. 

There are other considerations as well.  Zambrano is a fiery personality, somewhat immature, combustible.  One little bloop hit or misplayed ball can cause a meltdown with him.  That may or may not be a big deal for a starter because a meltdown in the third inning can be recovered from while a meltdown in the eight limits your opportunities to recover.  Zambrano's personality is also going to mean that this move to the pen is going to be remembered all season, it's not going to be let go, it's going to be second guessed every time it fails.  That's drama that is unneeded, unwanted and self inflicted.  It pretty much guarantees that every time things go sour this year there will be complaining by the media, fans, blogosphere and everyone else ad nauseam.  It's going to be one big distraction for a team that absolutely doesn't need distractions.

So how is all this going to play out?  Frankly I see two ways this comes to an end.  It will either be short lived and Zambrano will be back in the rotation inside of a month or it will eventually bring about the end of Zambrano's career as a Cub.  I'm guessing that Jim Hendry acquires a power arm for the bullpen, either by trade, signing or through the minor league system, or another starter gets injured or struggles enough that Zambrano replaces them in the rotation.  If that doesn't happen and this experiment drags on throughout the summer I see Zambrano getting more and more ancy to return to starting and intentionally makes himself the center of attention, makes himself a distraction and butts heads with Piniella.  That's not going to endear himself with the fans, the front office or the new owners and at some point the decision is going to be made to tell him to go home, a la Milton Bradley, and ends up with him being dealt in the offseason at pennies on the dollar. 

I hope I'm wrong.  Since it's happening, I hope Zambrano wasn't just saying the right things, I hope he's really bought into going to the pen for the time being.  I hope he does well and I hope he and Lou communicate with each other and not through the media.  I hope the experiment works in the near term and that Zambrano ends up back in the rotation in the long run, before his patience runs out.  I think it was a bad decision for so many reasons but fortunately it can be undone really easily.  Hopefully Lou Piniella and Jim Hendry come to their senses and end it before it all blows up in their faces.  And let's face it, it's the Cubs, it is going to blow up in their faces.  It's only a matter of time.