We’ve all been worried about Jim Hendry’s well-being since he was relieved of his duties as General Manager of the Cubs last summer. Would he cry himself to sleep each night, lamenting the fact that he wouldn’t ever be able to trade for Brian Roberts? Would he try to have another angioplasty, just so he could relive the magic of signing Ted Lilly? Would he turn to donuts to ease the pain? Well, we don’t have to worry any more. Jim is heading to New York to work with Brian Cashman.

According to reports Tuesday night, the former Cubs general manager has been hired to be the special assistant to Yankees GM Brain Cashman.

That’s no real surprise, considering how Cashman was talking about Hendry during the winter meetings in Dallas in early December.

‘‘I thought Jim Hendry did a good job in Chicago with the Cubs,’’ Cashman said. ‘‘I mean, he might go about climbing that same mountain differently than [new Cubs president Theo Epstein] because they’re not the same, but I think Jim Hendry did a hell of a job when he was with the Cubs, and I think Theo Epstein’s going to do a hell of a job, too. I really do. They’re just going to do it differently.’’

Theo’s going to do it with young players, Jim tried to do it with a team entirely comprised of second basemen. It’s just a different approach.

» Continue reading “Cubs Thursday Headlines: Hendry To Big Apple”

If you’re like me, you were worried that Jim Hendry and Mike Quade might lose touch after both were fired by the Cubs. There’s naught to fear, as they’re still texting each other.

“Mike texted me within an hour after Theo talked to him before it was announced,” Hendry told ESPN 1000′s “Talkin’ Baseball” on Saturday. “We’ve missed each other a couple times. Basically just been exchanging texts. I’m sure he’s out fishing and clearing his head a little bit. I would think sometime within the next couple days we’ll have a chat. He is a good baseball man. He will land on his feet. He’s been a good coach for a long, long time. I think he handled it well, as well did Theo in the exit for both of them. It’s certainly understandable from Theo’s side. It certainly was a classy way I think that Mike handled it too, knowing that and appreciating the way Theo went down and saw him.”

And don’t worry about good old Jim, he’s not bitter. In fact, he and Theo are good friends, too!

“Like Theo talked about in his press conference and Andy MacPhail used to tell me, there’s a (shelf-life) for these jobs and sometimes you can stay too long and it doesn’t end the way you want it to. I was treated terrifically there. I’m so happy that it’s somebody coming after me that I have such a great deal of respect for and is a good friend. I know people don’t want to believe that, but it’s true.”

» Continue reading “Chicago Cubs Sunday Headlines: Hendry And Quade Still Besties”

Even when winning doesn’t matter, it still feels great to beat the Cards. Tyler Colvin’s 10th inning single won the game on a day when all the Cubs were super sad about Jim Hendry’s dismissal. Also part of the win was Randy Wells, who managed to go 7 innings despite giving up four runs. He felt super duper yesterday.

“I felt good — I think it’s the best I’ve felt all year,” Wells said. “It was a big game for me, obviously with everything that’s gone on, and I’d like to say I’d like the outcome to be different but all I care about is the team winning and I can honestly say that as long as we win as a team I don’t care how I perform. But I felt I threw the ball well and made a couple of mistakes and was able to battle through and work into the seventh and get through the seventh.”

He felt great until last night, when he tweeted this:

All you hatred slash bloggers go to bed. Jim Hendry is a great man! That’s all he should be judged on!

I didn’t reply to him, but I wanted to tell him that being a great man doesn’t matter a whole lot in baseball if you’re no good at your job.  As for Mr. Hendry, he was only disappointed in himself.

“Seventeen years, a variety of jobs, great place to work, great fans, greatest ballpark in the world,” said Hendry, who joined the Cubs in November 1994 as director of player development. “Obviously, I’ve been very fortunate to be with the people I’ve been with. At the end of the day, I’m not leaving here with any problems. Tom Ricketts is a good man. We just didn’t win enough ballgames. That’s the bottom line. It’s professional baseball. You don’t win enough games over a couple of years, you can’t fight change.”

Jim Hendry has finally commented on the Zambrano affair and placing him on the disqualified list.

“This was the most stringent penalty that our club could inflict without a release,” Hendry told reporters before Saturday’s game. “There’s not much worse than running out on your teammates in the middle of a ballgame, unpacking your locker, announcing your retirement.”

“He’s been doing a lot of things, not once or twice — he’s got to think a little bit more,” Alfonso Soriano told reporters Saturday. “He’s a big man, but mentally he’s weak.

“It’s 50/50 (on Zambrano’s return),” Soriano later added. “If he comes back and changes his attitude, he’s more than welcome.”

Ryan Dempster said he “guessed” Zambrano would never pitch again for the Cubs.

“I think he made his stance pretty clear of what he wanted to do,” Dempster told reporters Saturday. “Maybe it will be best for both sides.”

Sorry, early risers, but my sleepiness overcame the alarm today, so you’re getting a late-morning edition of headlines today. I hope you can all forgive me. The Cubs managed a face-saving win in St. Louis last night, but I’m more interested in what Jim Hendry said about his inactivity at the trade deadline.

“Obviously, what we needed to do for sure was to trade Fuke,” Hendry said, referring to Kosuke Fukudome. “That was important because you have somebody behind him that we needed to play in Colvin. We tried to stay on top of some things today, maybe try to trade some people that might not be back next year for sure. Those things didn’t work out.”

They probably didn’t work out because he was trying to trade only the players no other would want, Jim. I’m thinking John Grabow here. As it turns out, Jim wasn’t expecting anything big to happen, so at least he didn’t disappoint himself.

“I wasn’t expecting, like I told you the other day, a high percentage or likelihood of something significant being done. So you do the best you can. A lot of things can still happen. Last year, I think we made two trades in August, (Mike) Fontenot and Derrek Lee, one the 11th, one was the 18th and got some certainly respectable prospects back. I think the days are gone where it has to be done by the deadline or everybody gets all…if you didn’t do something by 3 o’clock, this is a disaster or that’s a disaster. I don’t put much stock in that. The guys we kept are for the most part guys that still have a chance to be involved next year. If we do make a trade or two in August, that’s still no more or less significant that if we made them today.”

Oh good. So you can still unload Grabow and Koyie Hill in August. That makes me feel better. Finally, Jim gives us the real reason he didn’t trade Carlos Pena.

“There’s not somebody waiting to take his place for next year in-house like Tyler is hopeful to do that in the outfield in moving Fuke,” Hendry said. You have to look at it that way, too.

“The other factor, if you get a second-tier or two prospect back and you already have people better than that in your own system, then you really haven’t done anything to help the organization, and then you’re also put in the spot where if you add minor-league players today, that means somebody’s going to be sent backwards in our system or eliminated. That’s just the way I looked at it.”

It turns out the mediocre prospects being offered for Pena aren’t any better than the mediocre prospects we already have. I get it.

» Continue reading “Cubs Monday Headlines, Late Edition”

Knowing that Doug Davis had just been released, Ryan Dempster may have gone into last night’s game afraid for his baseball existence. If so, it provided good motivation as Dempster outpitched Tim Lincecum to lead the Cubs to victory.

“I think maybe sometimes I make it a little bit harder on myself than I need to as far as trying to be too perfect or trying to make a better pitch than I have to make,” Dempster said. “I was able to just attack and make good pitches and get good results.”

Since his awful start to the season, Dempster had delivered a solid 3.11 ERA in 11 starts. Dempster has allowed more than three earned runs only twice since April and he’s hoping that he’s finally gotten into the swing of things.

“Yeah, that’d be cool, I’ll take a groove for a while,” Dempster said. “I was far from it early on in the season, seem to be throwing the ball better. Hopefully I just keep going and groovin’ it up.”

» Continue reading “Cubs Thursday Headlines: Dempster Beats Lincecum?”

If it wasn’t enough that the Cubs are 157 games out of first place and have 95 people on the DL, and have an owner who thinks the only problem this team has is injuries, we learned this morning that the Cubs are in violation of MLB’s debt-ratio rules:

The Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets are widely known to be in financial hot water.

But seven other major league teams, including the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs andTexas Rangers, are out of compliance with MLB rules regarding debt, the Los Angeles Times has reported, citing three anonymous sources familiar with a confidential briefing presented at last month’s owners meetings.

The report casts a wider shadow over the financial footing of some of baseball’s biggest teams even as the league rakes in a combined $7 billion annually, a revenue stream that has doubled in eight years according to the report.

And with so much money rolling in, in an era commissioner Bud Selig has often referred to as a “golden age,” it also calls into question how much of baseball’s luster has been overleveraged.

“I can’t say I haven’t heard people in baseball talk about that,” Chicago-based sports business consultant Marc Ganis told the Los Angeles Times. “But there is a lot of deferral to Bud on this one.”

The violations in question concern debt-service rules intended to limit a club’s debt to 10 times its annual revenue, according to the Times. Other teams named in the briefing to owners were the Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers,Florida Marlins and Washington Nationals.

While it’s become increasingly clear to me over the course of the last 18 months that Tom Ricketts knows very little about baseball, I thought he AT LEAST knew about finance.

So to recap, not only are the Cubs bad at baseball and carrying a bunch of terrible contracts, they also owe more than 10 times their annual revenue.

Happy Friday!

» Continue reading “Cubs Friday Headlines: Ruh Roh”

After limping back from Boston and placing Matt Garza on the DL, we had every right to imagine a horrific 11-1 game last night. The thing we couldn’t have know is that the Cubs would be winning it.

“It was just nice for us,” Dempster said. “We scored a bunch of runs and we took advantage of a big error there. I think we scored four runs after that. It was a good victory for us.”

But even before last night’s game, Jim Hendry wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. He knows better than any of us just how good this team is.

“We don’t feel anything we’ve had here has been devastating enough to hang your head and throw in the towel and feel sorry for yourselves,” general manager Jim Hendry said. “We’ve got a very important homestand here where we have to make some hay here. We’re going to go on a very rough road trip after that. We’ve only played well in spurts but played well enough to realize we’re capable of doing better.”

It’s time for a little understatement: Ryan Dempster has been bad this year. How bad? Bruce Miles has the complete story:

Today is Ryan Dempster’s 34th birthday, and he gets the start against the Dodgers’ Chad Billingsley. It’s been a miserable start for Dempster, the opening-day starter. He’s 1-3 with a 9.58 ERA. The WHIP is 1.87. Opposing batters are hitting .313 against him, and the BABIP is .344.

The real eye-opener among the stats is that Dempster’s HR/FB percentage is a whopping 23.7. It was 11.3 last year. The BB/9 innings also is up, from 3.59 last year to 4.65 so far this season. The 9 home runs allowed by Dempster rank fourth worst in the major leagues.

Yeah, that’s bad. But it is his birthday today, so maybe he’ll go out there and show us that there is life left in that right arm. Jim Hendry seems to think there is.

“There’s nothing wrong with him physically,” Hendry said. “He just had a bad month after a great spring. You have to think the human-being factor will get him squared away.

“I think all he needs to do is go out and spin one good one, and he’ll get back on track. You factor that with the two guys who went down, [and] we’ve had to overcome some early adversity.”

Oh good. Nothing to worry about. Maybe the human-being factor will get him squared away tonight, as Dempster faces the Dodgers and Chad Billingsley (2-1, 4.46).

» Continue reading “Cubs Live Game Thread: Dempster Attempts to Resuscitate Career”

It broke Soriano’s bat to see Kevin Hart go.

» Continue reading “Chicago Cubs Headlines for Friday, July 31″