Earlier this season, I re-introduced the two statistics Shutdowns and Meltdowns. In short, these two stats are an alternative way of evaluating relief pitchers, providing an alternative from the age-old standbys Saves and Blown Saves. If a pitcher enters a game and makes their team more likely to win, they get credit for a Shutdown; if they make their team more likely to lose, they get a Meltdown. It’s a simple enough concept, no?

Shutdowns and Meltdowns are a great way to look at which relievers are under- or overvalued based on their Saves total, and it can also be a useful tool for evaluating middle relievers. So which relievers have are being sneakily good or bad this year? Let’s take a look.

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Coming into today, I can’t say I had more than a surface-deep opinion on Jim Hendry. I don’t follow the Cubs as closely as I do other teams, and while  I knew that Cubs fans didn’t like him, I’d never done enough research to form an opinion more than, “Eh, he’s not the best.” And now that Hendry has been fired by the Cubs, I’ve done plenty of research and spent the day reading around…yet I still don’t know exactly what to think about him. Hendry is a tough knot to untangle.

I don’t think you’ll find any Cubs fans out there that criticize Hendry’s character. From all reports, he’s a stand-up guy that cared deeply about his players and the Cubs franchise. Heck, he stayed on for multiple weeks after he was fired, for the sole purpose of helping the Cubs sign their draft picks and transition smoothly. If that’s not dedication, I don’t know what is.

But the Cubs are currently adrift without any real focus or direction. They are on pace for their second straight fourth place finish in the NL Central, and they haven’t had a strong, competitive team since 2008. And yet, Hendry built this team as if he intended to compete this season, signing Carlos Pena and trading for Matt Garza. Did Hendry misevaluate the Cubs’ place on the win curve? What was his plan going forward? Did he necessarily have one? With all these questions swirling around him and the Cubs, it’s about time Hendry moved on.

So what exactly was Hendry? A good GM? Bad GM? As you’d expect, the answer is somewhere in between.

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Jim Hendry has been relieved of his duties as general manager of the Chicago Cubs. We’ll have plenty of time to look back on his place in GM history, but for now, let’s look forward. Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts gave us the checklist today, when he said that he was looking for a candidate who had analytical experience in a winning front office and who would focus on player development. Time to rank the potential replacements using those requirements.

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….or, the Return of the Contract Retrospective.

Jim Hendry is reportedly out as the general manager of the Cubs. I’ll leave a general summary of Hendry’s tenure to someone else. In the meantime, I thought that an appropriate tribute to Hendry’s time at the Cubs’ helm might be a retrospective look back at one of his signature moves: the eight-year, $136 million contract with Alfonso Soriano that began in 2007. The idea behind a contract retrospective is simple: it is easy enough to look at a contract and call it good or bad after the fact, but if we reconstruct what was known about the player at the time, did it make sense from that perspective? This one’s for you, Mr. Hendry.

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Carlos Zambrano is back in the news. Unfortunately, in the world of Carlos Zambrano, no news is good news. This time, Zambrano exploded after giving up five home runs to the Atlanta Braves on Friday: he threw up-and-in at Chipper Jones, was ejected, and then promptly emptied out his locker and left the Cubs clubhouse with rumors of his retirement abound. Of course, Zambrano realized some $25 million over the next year-and-a-half is too much to walk away from. Now, the Cubs have placed Zambrano on the disqualified list for the next 30 days, and we surely haven’t heard the end of this battle.

All too often, Zambrano has made it difficult to remember he also, you know, pitches every once in a while. As Fox Sports’s Jon Morosi reminds us:

So while Zambrano told the Associated Press that he had a “fresh mind” after signing the extension, it didn’t last. Yes, he threw a no-hitter in 2008, but that’s not what comes to mind when you hear his name. You think about him attacking the Gatorade machine with the baseball bat (on live television). You think about him pitching a fit at Derrek Lee in the dugout (again, on live television). You think about him declaring the anger management issues a thing of the past, when in fact they were not.

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A five home-run game has never happened for a hitter, but it has happened for pitchers plenty of times. It’s certainly less of a positive achievement there, but just as notable. Or more notable because it’s actually happened and I can note the times that it has. It happened another two times already tonight, as noted by Jeff Sullivan.

CC Sabathia surrendered five home runs to the Rays, all from different hitters, and Carlos Zambrano gave up five to the Braves, two coming from Dan Uggla and his now 32-game hitting streak. On their own, they are worth noting and then moving on. A pitching giving up five home runs is certainly unusual but it’s not incredibly rare. James Shields, Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey have allowed six in a game once and that’s only looking at the past decade. All in all, there have now been 34 instances of a five-homer game since 2000. For reference, over the same time period there have been a total of 39 triple plays turned. What I did notice however, is that Sabathia’s five home runs were all solo shots and that’s a much rarer event.

In the entire Retrosheet era, there are only 22 other cases of a pitcher giving up at least five solo home runs in a game. James Shields ruins a bit of the fun by having done it so recently as 7 August 2010 when five of the ultimately six home runs hit off him were solo dingers. More fascinating is that Tim Wakefield has actually done it twice. In the aforementioned six home run game in 2004, five of the home runs were solo shots in Detroit. The other was a two-run shot and Wakefield only allowed 2 non-HR hits over his five innings that game. Prior to that, in 1996 pitching at Fenway to the White Sox, Wakefield served up solo home runs to Frank Thomas (three times), Danny Tartabull and Robin Ventura. Similar to the other game, Wakefield only allowed a single hit that wasn’t a home run and completed six innings. Amazingly, the Red Sox won both those games.

Turning from the opposite of solo home runs, in case you needed another daily fun fact, the most amount of runs allowed by a pitcher via the long ball in one game is 11. Gio Gonzalez was responsible in July of 2009 by the Twins in Oakland of all places (and Oakland won despite being down 12-2 at one point) and Shawn Chacon was brutalized by the Angels in Colorado in 2001, which makes way more sense.

In a post earlier this week, I mentioned a Bill James quote: “If you could split [Henderson] in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” James was totally serious. Since James wrote those words, Wins Above Replacement (WAR) has become the Nerdosphere’s favorite total value stat. Does it support James’ contention? Let’s “split Rickey in two” and found out.

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Sometimes money can buy you happiness. For instance, I’m sure the Cubs would be happy to be rid of Alfonso Soriano and the remainder of the eight-year, $136 million contract he signed after the 2006 season. According to a recent report from Bruce Levine at ESPN Chicago, they might be aiming for just that. Levine’s source says that the Cubs “would be willing to absorb a high percentage” of the roughly $60 million remaining on his contract, which runs through 2014. That will certainly make him more palatable to other teams, but I still wonder if he’s worth a trade even at a steep discount.

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The Chicago Cubs general manager, Jim Hendry, has been described by many as a lame duck, but team owner Tom Ricketts may want to get out the hunting rifle now before the situation deteriorates any further.

Hendry took over the Cubs GM position midway through the 2002 season and has never quite assembled the impressive major league team comparable to the impressive farm system he built in the late 1990s. Once touted for assembling a farm system that included future stars like Corey Patterson, Mark Prior, Eric Patterson, Felix Pie, Rich Hill, and (hey, mildly positive ones!) Kerry Wood and Carlos Zambrano, Hendry is now widely considered a neither great nor terrible GM.

His on-the-field product reflects that dichotomy:

His great times (2008, 2004) have been great; his good times (2003, 2007, 2009) have been okay; and his bad times (2005, 2006, 2010, 2011) have been numerous.

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Whence we last examined yonder batting orders, we came away with several expected observations (Jose Bautista plays baseball like a video game, the Oakland Athletics do not care much for scoring runs, Rick Ankiel and Ian Desmond are not feared hitters, and so forth) as well as a number of curious findings (the Cubs lead-off combo was tops in the majors, the 7th hitters on AL teams were worse than the 9th hitters, NL managers effectively managed the bottoms of their lineups, and such).

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