It's all Jim Hendry's fault
Mark Anderson
history of Illinois named a street after him. That preceded this season
by months. Here's a piece by Jim Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune that
succinctly summed up my feelings. While the morons on sports talk radio
and other moron writers for the Tribune try and lay blame on Lou Piniella,
they fail to realize the real culprit is the cast of characters that make
up this pathetic team. Hendry took a 97 game winning team (of which he
deserved some credit) and turned it into a sub .500 team and a team most
likely to end up in the cellar as things spiral out of control. People do
forget that Hendry is also responsible for the douchebags that made up the
2004 team, the 2005 team, and the mighty 66 game winning 2006 team. When
Morrissey makes the case he failed to recognize the explosive Zambrano,
Morrissey fails to remember when Hendry stuck his head in the sand for two
seasons banking his starting rotation on Prior and Wood.
As a true Chicago tradition, when a team starts spiraling into the abyss,
it's time to name a scapegoat. I'm glad that someone aimed the guns of
blame at the one true scapegoat, Jim Hendry. Hope the new owners can his
ass ASAP and then that street or alley named after him will be kind of
funny.
And without further adieu,
From: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/chi-01-morrissey-
jul01,0,3182890.column
Fair or not, Chicago Cubs' failures are Jim Hendry's fault
Rick Morrissey | July 1, 2009
If you think Milton Bradley is having a rough year so far, how about Jim
Hendry?
The Cubs' general manager is responsible for signing the .238-hitting,
currently benched Bradley to a three-year, $30 million contract before the
season.
He is responsible for signing "leadoff" hitter Alfonso Soriano, who is in
the third year of an eight-year, $136 million contract. He's responsible
for giving Kosuke Fukudome a four-year, $48 million deal in December 2007.
Soriano and Fukudome have responded with batting averages of .232
and .260, respectively, this season.
Meanwhile, the manager Hendry hired is under fire for not having enough
fire, and his ace pitcher is under fire for having a raging fire that
threatens to engulf large portions of the North Side.
Hendry's team, with a $135 million payroll this season, is an
underperformer in the way a back-of-the-magazine aphrodisiac is an
underperformer.
Other than that, life's pretty good for the Cubs GM.
You can say it's not his fault Bradley can't hit. You can say it's not his
fault Soriano can't hit.
Ultimately, however, it is his fault.
Hendry is a stand-up guy, and he takes full responsibility for the way
things are going. But just because most of the signings looked good at the
time Hendry engineered them doesn't lessen his culpability. It's a general
manager's job to decide who will perform and who won't.
It's a general manager's job to predict whether a manager will be
effective long term. Lou Piniella, 65, is in Year 3 of his tenure.
It's a general manager's job to look into the future and see whether a
player with a history of anger issues will be able to perform under the
pressure cooker of one of baseball's most high-profile teams.
It's a general manager's job to look at a player from Japan and decide
whether his performance there will translate into success in America.
General managers do the hiring and firing, so it's no surprise they almost
always outlast players and managers. But if this team doesn't turn itself
around soon, Hendry could find himself out of a job at the end of the
season. New owners -- there will be new owners, right? -- tend to hire
their own people to fix expensive toys.
Know this: Crane Kenney, Cubs chairman pro tem or Cubs chairman pretend --
take your pick -- will not be making any decisions on his own regarding
Hendry's future.
For weeks, the refrain about the struggling Cubs has been the same:
"Despite it all, they're still only X games out of first place." That has
gotten very, very old. It says more about a weak NL Central than it does
about the Cubs. This is not the story of a scrappy team fighting to stay
in the race. This is the story of a bloated, underachieving team that
hasn't been able to right itself.
That the Cubs are not five games up in the division brings us back to
Hendry and his players.
He deserves lots of the credit building last season's 97-victory team. The
question is whether the heights of 2008 are greater than the depths of
2009. Given the way last season ended and the first three months of this
season have played out, you'd have to say no.
It's true there's a lot of baseball to be played, but it's also true a lot
of baseball has been played. To date, the season has been a huge
disappointment.
All Hendry can do now is hope and pray. He can hope Bradley and Soriano
start to come around, and he can pray Geovany Soto starts to play like he
did last season. He can swallow his pride and tell Piniella to bench
Fukudome and play Reed Johnson in center field when he returns from the
disabled list.
While he's at it, he can admit hitting Soriano in the leadoff spot is a
mistake.
Trading Mark DeRosa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in
Bosnia and parts of Herzegovina, is the least of Hendry's sins. And
stepping in before the hated Cardinals swooped in and acquired DeRosa from
Cleveland over the weekend wouldn't have solved the team's current
problems. Cubs fans would like to think that, but it's not true.
Getting the big-money players to start performing will change everything.
Now how does a general manager do that? He doesn't. The players and
coaches do.
Until then, it's Hendry's fault. Unfair? No. It's like the kid who
accidentally breaks a window with a baseball. Of course he didn't mean to
do it, but he did it.
Michael Lanasa
m...@nospambrandylion.com says...
>
> You knew things were bad for Hendry when the most corrupt governor in the
> history of Illinois named a street after him. That preceded this season
> by months. Here's a piece by Jim Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune that
> succinctly summed up my feelings. While the morons on sports talk radio
> and other moron writers for the Tribune try and lay blame on Lou Piniella,
> they fail to realize the real culprit is the cast of characters that make
> up this pathetic team. Hendry took a 97 game winning team (of which he
> deserved some credit) and turned it into a sub .500 team and a team most
> likely to end up in the cellar as things spiral out of control.
If the season were over and the Cubs had failed, it would be the time to
figure out who was to blame. The Cubs are not out of it. They have their
best hitters mired in the worst slumps of their careers and one of their
best players has been hurt. I expect all of these players (Soriano,
Bradley, Ramirez, Soto) to have good 2nd halves.
I was critical of Hendry before the season started, because I felt he
had built a fragile team and backed it up with an inadequate bench, but
knowing that, I still expect the Cubs to win their division.
The G, no C
Morrissey's piece is a bunch of reactionary, short-term myopic thinking
that is pervasive with too many sports fans. He just focuses on only
the things that went wrong (or poorer than expected), and says "see, I
KNEW that would happen", while ignoring any contextual evidence.
Lanasa again says it nicer than I would have, but look at what has
happened to close to _every_ starter this year already. These are all
*major* starters, not Fontenot-type players (sorry Mike):
Soriano: injured.
Ramirez: injured. DL.
Bradley: injured.
Soto: injured.
Reed: injured. DL.
Zambrano: injured. DL.
Rich Harden: injured. DL.
(was Lee banged up a few days this year? I don't remember)
Others (i.e. who cares):
Angel Guzman: DL.
Aaron Miles: DL.
Chad Fox: DL.
Ryan Freel: DL.
Yes, all teams have injuries, and yes, they are supposed to fight
through them and find ways of winning. But it should be no real
surprise that a team full of historical slow-starters is
under-performing when you combine that with the injuries in the first
two months.
Am I disappointed so far? Without a doubt. And frustrated too. But is
the season a "huge disappointment" like Morrissey says? Hardly. Not
even close, really. Like Lanasa implies, the season is far, far from
over. Even as 'horrible' as the Cubs are right now, they are still in
the thick of it. how do you think this team (and its record) will look
once it starts clicking on all cylinders? This team is not very
different at all from last year, and 'aging' would not explain the
difference. Injuries and bad luck, however, would.
I am exceedingly confident the Cubs will win the division still. It
doesn't matter what your W/L is at the end of the season, as long as
you make it in. And then I look forward to seeing how the playoffs go.
Of course, I fully expect people like Morrissey to complain loudly if
Zambrano/Dempster/Lilly have bad outings in the playoffs, and say "Oh
any idiot, besides Hendry, would have know this was going to happen!
Why didn't he trade them when I thought (only to myself) he should
have, and signed the most expensive free agent out there??"
G (massively rolling his eyes)
--
_____________________
"A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension."
�� � - Oliver Wendell Holmes