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Coincidence? I think not! OK, well here is my uneducated theory on a hitting coach. Veterans like Soriano, Bradley and even Fukudome and Theriot, should not need this much help from a hitting coach. But when you have Theriot swinging like he is Manny, and Soriano constantly being fooled on the same pitch over and over and over again, you have to shake something up, I suppose. I do not expect Von Joshua to suddenly make Fukudome stop that stupid spinning thing or teach Soriano what a breaking ball is. These guys are getting on the back nine of their professional careers. If they don't have an idea how to correct themselves, then there are bigger issues. With that said, I guess a change needed to be made, and you aren't going to eat hundreds of millions of dollars in player salary. Von Joshua is best known for his days as a White Sox hitting coach on teams that included Frank Thomas, Albert Belle, Magglio Ordonez, Carlos Lee and even Jose Canseco. He is also known as the guy that helped Theriot find his "power" stroke- so he already has one strike on him (HITTING PUN) in my book. Meanwhile, the Cubs continued to struggle for runs. Lee and Soto looked good, and even Kosuke had a couple of drives that went for warning-track outs. However for all those, you had Bradley about as patient as a Chicago taxi driver. You had Aaron Miles continue to make me almost yearn for the days of Neifi (almost). You also had Soriano with another 0-fer. Interesting note on Soriano is that he has not had a multi-hit game since May 17th. His hit columns since then have read like a binary sequence. Good stuff from our $18 million man. A couple of notes to suplement my OPS+ stuff yesterday. The Cubs going into today as a team were at 86, which is the lowest since 2006, when they also had an OPS+ of 86 behind the big bats of Juan Pierre, Ronny Cedeno and Phil Nevin. This lineup has a lot more talent and a lot more money put into it. It should not be on par with that team. Also, since I began yesterday's post trumpeting some of the other choices the Cubs could have had for right field, I figure I will use OPS+ once more in evaluating the 4 choices. Bradley, Ibanez, Dunn and Abreu had OPS+'s of 163, 124, 127 and 120 in 2008. So, yes, Bradley looks good. But factor in games played, and career numbers of 116, 116, 131 and 132, you can see maaaaybe Bradley had a good year on a contract year. Someone really needs to teach Jim Hendry about looking at a player's career numbers. Also of note is Aaron Miles had an OPS+ of 99 last year, his only year close to average. Every other year of his career he was not even close. A quick glimpse at his career numbers would have shown you that. Apparently 29 other GMs saw it, too. I'm starting to get more and more angry typing this. I need to stop doing research on these players, because the more I research, the more it becomes apparent Hendry did no research. Or at the very least not the right kind of research. So the crosstown series is renewed Tuesday, and the White Sox have their own offensive problems going on. Knowing baseball, this series will be dominated by offense, Von Joshua will be a hero and Gerald Perry will be crying in his beer. Oh, but Randy Wells still will not get a win. Posted in: Gerald Perry, Von Joshua, OPS+ | ||