Piniella: Fontenot will get a bigger role in 2009
November 25, 2008 8 Comments
Gordon Wittenmyer in today’s Bright One reports that ‘Lil Babe Ruth’ Mike Fontenot will be part of the Cubs plans to get more left handed:
Piniella said he sees second baseman Mike Fontenot as part of the solution in achieving some of the left-right balance he seeks for the lineup. He plans to work Fontenot into the lineup more often to increase his at-bats from last season’s 243 — which produced a .305 average, a .514 slugging percentage and a .395 on-base percentage.
”You look at his contribution last year, it’s darn good,” Piniella said. ”We’re going to give him some playing time at shortstop — we’ll see in spring training if he can do that — and if not, depending on what we do or don’t do, we’ll give him some [more] playing time at second.”
They are dancing in the streets of Baton Rogue, LA! The LSU Tiger keystone combo could be a lock for Wrigley Fd. come spring and sumer of 2009. Looks like that idea might put the Teahen rumors to rest.
While we’re putting trade rumors to rest, Piniella scratches off the Jake Peavy rumor:
”No. Starting we don’t need. We’re set. We’ve got six good starters [including Sean Marshall], and they’re all experienced. Getting Dempster back was the key. We’re in good shape with our starting pitching. Bullpen-wise, [we're looking for] possibly one more experienced pitcher. We’ve got a lot of young kids out there.”
fontenot has to look at theriot and think, “i can’t believe i’m sitting while this guy plays.”
Hey Wrigleyville,
how have you been man? Happy Thanksgiving.
A couple of quick things on FonteNOT. First of all I love what he has done for this team as a reserve the past few seasons. I wonder if he is one of those players that is good getting 200-300 AB’s, but 450-500 would just be too many. Maybe we’ll find out. All he has done since coming to the big leagues is hit, so they might as well get his left handed bat in the lineup. (I can’t see him playing SS) So I guess that means he’s at 2B and DeRosa is elsewhere.
ccd — you’ll love this interview with zell. basically a big “oops” on buying the trib. expensive mistake!
wow gm, fucking wow.
what happens to rich guys like zell? do they just have so much success in business that they think they are bulletproof? you and i laughed when he cut the deal he did for tribune. the writing was not only on the wall it was everywhere. newspapers have been in trouble for a long, long time.
it is interesting where at the end he addresses the tv stations. amazing how much superstation wgn (now wgn america) underperforms compared to TBS. here’s what zell said:
Whenever you talk about TV as it relates to the Tribune you have to start with the superstation. We have one of two superstations. Our superstation earns $80 million a year. The other superstation earns $480 million a year. We hit 75 million homes. I think they hit 90. So, obviously, this is a dormant asset that needs desperately to be addressed, which is, frankly, the first place we went to work.
yeah, i’d say the ole superstation is underperforming. good god.
i don’t know if there is any businessman that could fix what ails tribune company. zell has been a maverick and all of that other stuff, but at the end of the day all he’s going to do is liquidate the tribune of it’s assets. selling them piece by piece. cub fans, be happy the cubs will be the first to go. the last pieces that go will be run down so far you won’t recognize them.
as you know gm, much of this is no fault of zell’s.
somewhere denis fitzsimmons and don grenesko sip scotch and smoke cigars laughing at what became of the tribune, while they count their dollars. those two boobs share huge chunks of the responsibility for running this company into the ground, and they don’t get the credit they deserve for doing so. instead both got golden parachutes. yeah, corporate america is really fucked up and the tribune is a great example of how fucked up it got (an can get).
part of me would like to see zell succeed in changing the newspaper business. if he doesn’t succeed, we may have seen the end of newspapers as we know them.
500 at-bats would probably be too many for Fontenot simply because he’d have to face left-handers and as a lefty, he’s going to fare much worse against them than he does against righties. Something I’m going to do over the next few days is work on a projection for Fontenot and Theriot against righties and lefties and since it appears the Cubs may be platooning the 2 next year, try to figure out what we could expect from that platoon.
Theriot has been really good against lefties though some regression will have to be done and the Fontenot has done really well against righties. Fontenot, I don’t think, won’t require as much regression as Theriot, but I’m not sure yet.
I’d guess we could expect a strict platoon of those 2 to post a combined OPS of .820 (probably around .900 for Fontenot and .780 for Theriot). That’s probably about 20-25 runs. Theriot is projected to be -7 on defense by Rally’s system and I believe -1 by CAIRO so we’ll say -4. Fontenot is projected to be +1 at 2nd base, which would be about -5-7 at SS.
At league minimum that could turn out to be a pretty good platoon worth about 2 wins. If you replace them with a competent fielding shortstop in the late innings you could probably increase the roughly 20 runs to about 22 or 23.
These are mostly just guesses at this point, but if the Cubs are serious about this platoon, it would be hard to justify spending the kind of money you’d have to in order to improve the position. Even Furcal is probably 3 wins at most so spending $12 million on him when you’ve got 2-2.5 would be senseless.
Watching these two platoon at ss is going to mean alot of groundballs that just get through. It’ll be frustrating…but on budget!
i don’t know if there is any businessman that could fix what ails tribune company.
once they chocked it full of debt, even though i thought it was demonstrably past the peak of the debt bubble, trib was finished. zell was really simply relying on the continuation of the debt bubble, which has not been a bad play over the last 20 years. but it didn’t work this time.