Lou Piniella seems to be getting a little frustrated lately, both with the way some of his players are playing and with some of the questions he is being asked.
It is understandable why he got frustrated a week or two ago when he was asked why Mike Fontenot had not bunted in a particular situation. But Lou's comments on Sunday, after being asked why Tyler Colvin hasn’t been playing, seemed like those of a frustrated man:
"‘He needs to play? What we need to do is win. We keep talking about at-bats for people. We've talked about people needing to play. We talk about everything but winning baseball games. That's what the hell I want to talk about, is winning baseball games, period. I think that's what's really important. OK? Outside of that, I'd like to see people get hot and stay hot and win games. And everything will take care of itself. I wouldn't be getting asked these questions day in and day out, OK? And having to make excuses and everything else, OK, and having to make excuses and everyting else, OK?
If we start doing the things that we're capable of doing, I won't have to answer these questions all the time. Everybody’s fine. Nobody’s going through the motions. It’s just a question of being more consistent with what we’re doing. And once we do that, we’ll win more baseball games, and everybody will be happy. The media will be happy. The manager will be happy. The players will be happy. The fans will be happy. Everybody will be happy.
That’s as simple as I can put it. And if not, we’ll continue to be unhappy.’"
I understand Lou's frustration, but the fact of the matter is Tyler Colvin should not be riding the bench in Chicago. If he is not going to start at least occasionally (and before Monday’s game, he had only started one game in the month of May), then he needs to be in Iowa, playing regularly. That’s what Lou said before the season started; if he couldn’t get Colvin a couple of starts a week, then he shouldn’t be on the team.
Well, that hasn’t happened. I understand it is hard to get Colvin into the lineup when the other guys are playing well. Nobody is saying that a hot player should be taken out just to get Colvin a start. If the other guys are doing well, they should stay in the lineup. But that doesn’t mean that Colvin should stay in the majors.
Colvin needs to develop, and he can’t develop unless he plays. If he isn’t going to play in Chicago, then he needs to play in Iowa.
I know Lou is frustrated. He wants to win now. Jim Hendry has said the same thing. Cubs fans have waited so long, Hendry says, that he wants to win now, not sometime in the future. Lou’s contract runs out this year. He will be 67 soon. This could be his last year, so he wants to win now. Hendry’s contract doesn’t run out this year, but if the Cubs don’t do good, it could be his last year, too.
I am beginning to wonder whether this means Tyler Colvin will be staying in the majors this year, regardless of what it does to his future (and the Cubs’ future). In other words, 2010 or bust.
But that is the wrong way to go about things. I realize it has been along time since the Cubs have won a National League pennant. (As Steve Goodman said, it was "the year we dropped the bomb on Japan.") But that doesn’t mean we have to approach 2010 as "now or never".
I know we have had plans before, and people are getting tired of them because they never seem to work. But in some of the cases, it wasn’t the fault of the plan. It was the fault of the people trying to implement the plan. Andy MacPhail understood that the way to win is by building from inside. The problem was that the people he hired didn’t implement the plan right.
But here is the problem we have now: The big weakness the Cubs had going into the season was the bullpen. So why didn’t we try to fix it? The answer is easy. We had spent so much money on other players there wasn’t any left for the bullpen. Some fans thought the Ricketts family should have let Jim Hendry spend more money. But the Cubs already have the highest payroll in the National League.
The problem is that Hendry’s idea of developing a team seems to be to sign free agents and to trade prospects for people who are just about ready to go free agent. It is useful to do that occasionally, but Hendry does it too much. So we have big salaries to Soriano, Fukedome, Byrd (small to start, but big to finish), Lee, Ramirez, Lilly. And Dempster and Zambrano, too. As well as Carlos Silva/Milton Bradley.
That is too many big contracts. You can have some of them, but you need to fill in with your own talent. But to be able to fill in with your own talent, you have to properly develop it. Keeping Tyler Colvin on the bench might help a smidgen this year, but it won’t help overall. If we don’t properly develop our own prospects, we’ll have to pay big bucks for somebody else’s talent in the future. We've tried that, and it hasn’t worked because we don’t have enough money.
At the Cubs Convention in January, Tom Ricketts said, in response to a question, that when they are looking at moves the Cubs might make, whether free agent signings or other things, they will be looking at things for the long haul. They would be balancing the needs of the present and the needs of the future.
That is the right way to do things. And that means, if Tyler Colvin can’t get enough playing time in the majors, then he needs to go to Iowa so he can have the playing time that he needs to get – and that the Cubs' future needs him to get.
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