By Dan O’Shea

One of the laws of fantasy baseball is that stars who are slumping eventually will bounce back to their robust historical averages – you just have to wait, and make sure you have a player on a streak to plug into your lineup in the meantime.
Having said that, patience has its limits, and if your fantasy team is in postseason contention, the second half of the baseball season is no time to waste a roster spot on a slumping star.
I’m not talking about guys like Matt Kemp, OF, LAD; Jacoby Ellsbury, OF, BOS; or Evan Longoria, 3B, TAM; who have spent much of the first half injured and actually could rebound with a vengeance in the second half. I mean guys like Justin Upton, OF, ARI, who failed to get a hit in Wrigley Field last weekend.
Here’s my list of stars skating on thin ice (You’ll probably recognize a few of these names from my “Stars and Gripes” column a couple weeks ago):

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Posted on July 18, 2012

By Jim Coffman

Let’s be clear on something: the Cubs brass has a year (this year) to make major progress on the big fix (and I propose “The Big Fix” as the official name for the great Cubs rebuilding project of 2012 – we’re certainly going with it around here until further notice).
I was listening to sports radio silliness yesterday during which time it was posited that it doesn’t matter who the starting pitchers are for the Cubs next year because The Big Fix can’t just take one year, it must take several.
Puh-lease, although the Ricketts family would love for Cubs fans to buy into that notion. That way they can continue to slash the payroll and pile up the cheap prospects while raking in huge revenues during the next year plus.

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Posted on July 16, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

In true Cubs fashion, the team is about to sell off just about anybody they can short of Starlin Castro and Anthony Rizzo now that they’ve won 12 of their last 16 games. Does any franchise work in reverse as well as the Cubs?
It’s about to get a lot worse for this team, just as they are performing their best.
Cubs!

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Posted on July 16, 2012

By Roger Wallenstein

He may not have realized it at the time, but my brother John created the model for the Excel spreadsheet almost 30 years before Microsoft unveiled it. All because of the White Sox.
The season was 1959, and because “it just needed to be done,” Brother John began keeping day-to-day statistics – both hitting and pitching – for the eventual American League champions. For all 154 games, he began in the upper left hand corner of a clean sheet of notebook paper with Aparicio and Arias, ending with Torgeson and Wynn. IBM engineers may have begun experimenting with a copying machine, but it took them another ten years to market one. So John spent a part of each day re-creating his spreadsheet. Ask him today to recite the entire ’59 roster, especially after a couple glasses of wine, and he’ll give it to you in alphabetical order.

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Posted on July 16, 2012

By Thomas Chambers

Do you ever get the feeling they’re trying to take your sports away from you?
The very fabric of baseball is deeply woven with a monied laziness embodied by the pull-up, good-enough double or the touch-the-plate-very-slowly-with-your-tippy-toe (Oh, for a hidden ball here!) plays.
No less an authority than Phil Jackson calls the NBA hard to watch. NHL hockey has embraced such an absurdity of senseless violence that it’s top stars are almost literally getting their heads knocked off. After years of reactionary, situational NFL legislation enforced inconsistently, a guy in a funny shirt checks under the hood and then tells us we did not see what we just saw. Never mind wagering on it.

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Posted on July 13, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

A lot has been written already about A.J. Pierzynski’s childish (but justified in some sad quarters) reaction to not being named to the All-Star team, but I’m not sure the utter stupidity and wrongheadedness of A.J.’s oft-quoted statement about AL manager Ron Washington has really been made clear – especially here in Hawkeroo Homerville.
Let’s take a look.

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Posted on July 10, 2012

By Jim Coffman

I usually wouldn’t support trading Ryan Dempster. But in this case an exception must be made. Don’t screw it up Theo!
In general, I am skeptical of trades in which the team I care about ships out a major leaguer who has proven himself – especially in pressure situations – for prospects who have only proven that they have potential.

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Posted on July 9, 2012

By Marty Gangler

As we hit the All-Star break this week, it’s time to sit back and reflect. What do we have here?
We here at The Cub Factor think this season thus far can be summed up in the in the immortal words of Megadeth: So Far, So Good . . . So What!

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Posted on July 9, 2012

By Roger Wallenstein

What seemed improbable at best just three months ago appears at the very least doable today. As Jake Peavy said after beating Toronto on Friday night, “This thing is just getting going. We got a big two-and-a-half months left and I think we are all in this clubhouse looking forward to that.”
If history is a guide, there is good reason to look ahead with optimism.
Consider the last five times – 1983, 1993, 2000, 2005, and 2008 – that the White Sox won the Central Division to reach the playoffs; all those teams proved that their success prior to the All-Star game was no fluke.

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Posted on July 9, 2012

By Dan O’Shea

One thing I noticed when picking my own fantasy baseball All-Star team this year was that many of the players who are traditionally most highly regarded – the ones we called the top 10 position players and top 10 pitchers back on draft day – for the most part didn’t make the cut.
So many of those lead dogs have had disappointing seasons – or have been too waylaid by injuries to receive serious consideration. Rather than let those failures slip by without comment, I’ve included not only my All-Stars on this list, but also the big names who have flamed out:

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Posted on July 3, 2012