Carlos Zambrano will make his long awaited return to the starting rotation tonight against the Houston Astros. Big Z has pitched better recently out of the bullpen, and tonight’s start will test just how far he has come. His last start was on April 20 against the Mets, where he gave up three runs in six innings while striking out nine. He is 1-2 with a 7.45 ERA as a starter this season.
After winning series against the Dodgers and Rangers last week, there appeared be a glimmer of hope. They finally came through with some clutch hits and won close games, something that they had done very,very little of up to that point. However, they have quickly reverted back to their old ways in the most recent series against the Cardinals and Pirates. The offense has once again completely bogged down, and this team has proven that they simply will not win low scoring games. The Cubs are 3-22 when scoring three or fewer runs this season. Most teams are going to have sub-.500 records in these types of games, but this is a rather shocking statistic. You must be able to pull some of these games out, and the Cubs have not shown that ability. Needless to say that is far too many games in which the Cubs could not get past the three run barrier, but I won’t go any further into that right now as we have already discussed the problems with the offense ad nauseum.
Moving onto a different topic, this week’s not-so-perfect, perfect game thrown by Armando Galarraga has once again brought the discussion of instant replay back into the forefront. Watching him lose that perfect game on blown call was heartbreaking, but it still does not change my stance on instant replay in baseball. The ability to use replay on questionable home run calls is as far as they should go with it. There are far too many close calls in each game that it would be hard to figure out where to draw the line on what exactly is reviewable. Also,the human factor is one of many aspects of the game that makes baseball what it is. However, that is the part that is causing the most controversy right now. There is a growing segment of people that want to eliminate as much of the human element from the game as possible. To that I say the games are long enough as is, do you really want to make them even longer? Also, how satisfying would it have been if on that last out if they had to pause the game for ten minutes to decide whether the batter was out or not? In my mind it would not be the same, and baseball should stay away from instant replay as much as possible.
