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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Let’s get this out of the way first: Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels are pitching like Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz in their prime. They’re Spahn and Sain and a whole lot of pain.

They’re also not that far above, say, Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner. Yet the Phillies sit well above the Giants, and ahead of every other team in baseball, with a 61-36 record.

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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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If the Mariners have gotten a lot of ink this season, it’s for good reason. After finishing with the worst record in the AL, and the second worst record in the majors, last season, they’ve surprised some people by hovering around .500 for most of the season. Since the AL West lacks a standout team, they’ve also hung around the division lead. As long as their pitching keeps rolling the way it has in the first half of the season they might never find themselves out of the race.

It’s pretty clear to anyone, even an NL fan who doesn’t delve much into the junior circuit, that the Mariners’ offense has held the club back. This has been the case for the past three seasons, during which the Mariners have been the worst hitting team in baseball to the tune of roughly four wins. But with their pitching staff they don’t even need a good offense to excel in the AL West. All they need is a mediocre one. The team with the best pitching in the league serves as an example.

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Sandy Koufax is rightfully considered one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball. His run from 1963 to 1966 – before his career was cut short by injury – is one of the best four year stretches of pitching in the history of the game, and his dominance is why he was elected to the Hall Of Fame the first time he was eligible in 1972. He might not have had the career length of other all-time greats, but his peak was so good that it was impossible to come to any other conclusion than that he belonged in Cooperstown.

It’s time we say the same thing about Roy Halladay.

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After only throwing 37 pitches through two innings, Roy Oswalt left his start last night due to back soreness. This is definitely disappointing news for the Phillies’ starter, considering he’s already had one DL stint this year as a result of back pain, but I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this sort of a quote from him after the game:

Woh! Talk about retirement? Doesn’t that seem just a leetle bit extreme?

As it turns out, possibly not.

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Former Milwaukee, Colorado, Cleveland, St. Louis, Washington, and Los Angeles infielder Ronnie Belliard announced his retirement yesterday. This probably won’t garner too much attention. That is understandable, as Belliard was mostly an unspectacular player at a position that is perhaps the most frequently overlooked. This isn’t a “Belliard was a hidden superstar” post, but he was somewhat underrated, and he certainly had his moments.

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The following data is current through 5-30-2011.

If you, dear reader, are like me, then you agonize unnecessarily over every lineup on every team in every game. Aaron Rowand leading off?! Yargh! No! Carlos Gomez batting second for the Brewers?! WRONG. Aaron Miles batting anything?! Unforgivable.

Holding egos constant, inefficiency is the greatest enemy of success. With regards to lineups, however, teams can really only lose a handful of runs over the course of full season, but a handful of runs, in real terms, can mean the difference between the division or a boring October. So it’s a dicey proposition. A mismanaged lineup on the Royals team does not mean a whole lot because they will lose the division by several trillion runs. A few lost runs for the Rays, Yankees, or Red Sox, though, can mean the season.
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What a terrifying thought for the National League. Roy Halladay, a 34-year-old pitcher with a history of utter dominance, is beginning 2011 with the best numbers of his career, and by a wide margin. Forget the two Cy Young seasons. Forget the seven All-Star games. Roy Halladay has taken a massive leap forward in 2011, and the result is a trail of destruction blazed straight through the National League.

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I think I’m like most baseball fans in that when I think of a designated hitter, I think of home runs. The DH spot has usually been filled by power hitters since its inception in 1973, and that makes sense. If a player is playing a position with no defensive value, he needs to produce on offense. Home runs are the most valuable offensive event. The most valuable hitters in any given year usually have plenty of home runs and extra base hits. One often hears that a player who doesn’t hit for power doesn’t have the bat to play on the “easy end” of the defensive spectrum, and and even moreso in the case of a player who is primarily a DH. Billy Butler is a current example of a player who mostly fills the DH spot, but since he hasn’t hit for much power (yet), you will sometimes hear people say that he doesn’t fit the profile of a DH. Without focusing specifically on Butler, I’d like to write briefly about what it means to “hit well enough to be DH,” and then to see how often that actually happens with a relatively low amount of power.

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