Wednesday night, I sit down to catch a few innings of the Cubs vs. Padres on mlb.tv with my wife. All seems to be going just fine. The Cubs are up 1-0 with Sean Marshall on the bump twirling a beaute. First problem was the top of the 7th inning. Ramirez grounded out to start the inning, then Barrett, and Murton both drew walks from David Wells. Mark DeRosa dropped a bloop hit over Marcus Giles’ head to load the bases. If you’re Lou Pinella and you have Cesar Izturis coming up you can do one of 2 things. Pinch hit, or give Izturis strict instructions to look for a walk (with Wells’ sudden propensity to give a free pass), or hit a sacrifice fly. Izturis worked the count to 3-1. Perfect, you take the next pitch and you try and get a cheap insurance run, right? Wrong. If you’re Cesar Izturis, you ground weakly to the second baseman to start a 4-6-3 double play to end the inning. Infuriating.

Then in the next inning when Josh Bard singled, you have to take out Marshall. In fact, Lou came out to visit the young lad, only to keep him in the game. I’m sure that he (Marshall) wanted to stay in, and get the next guy. Unfortunately, the next guy, Kevin Kouzmanoff, got him and homered deep to left to give the Padres a 2-1 lead that they wouldn’t relinquish.

Lou, you need to earn you keep. We’re about a quarter of the way into the season. I know Lou knows baseball. He just needs to show it now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Baseball, Chicago Cubs, MLB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.