Don’t spend your time waiting for extreme highs and lows from Lou Piniella. You’ll miss the theme of the season thus far, which is the tedium that has set in with his club.
Pay close attention to the long, muted in-betweens from the Cubs manager, the great maw of what might be taken as indifference.
You can hear it in his painful pauses during press conferences and see it in his raised palms and shrugged shoulders. It’s the blank face of the franchise. It’s not a pretty picture.
But there was a spark of hope Wednesday in the middle of all these blahs. Piniella didn’t blow up after his team’s 4-1 act of nonresistance against the White Sox, but he did threaten to make changes. It spoke louder than any bug-eyed rant from the skipper. Nothing frightens a position player more than the thought of having his at-bats taken away.
“It’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to start making some tough decisions and get other people in the lineup,” Piniella said calmly. “I’ve been real patient with it, I’ll tell you.”
If Piniella is looking to jump-start his team, the best thing he can do is move Alfonso Soriano — both offensively and defensively. His .291 on-base percentage is not helping the Cubs in the leadoff spot. Move him to sixth in the order and bat Ryan Theriot first. Put Jake Fox in left field, knowing you’re going to sacrifice some defense (though not much) to get Fox’s bat in the lineup, and send Soriano to second base.
Give Reed Johnson a real shot in center field. Let Kosuke Fukudome platoon with Johnson and Fox.
It’s probably not something the organization would like to do. Soriano makes $17 million this year and Fukudome $12.5 million. But forget about contracts and any hurt feelings. Think about what’s best for this lifeless club. Shake this team out of its doldrums.
Soriano said he would accept a move in the lineup.
“If [Piniella] thinks he could make the team better, I’m fine,” he said.
Wednesday was a cold reminder of how desperately reliant the Cubs are on their starting pitching. When it’s not there — forget it. Ryan Dempster was wild, walking six batters and throwing just 51 strikes in 104 pitches. When the Sox went ahead 2-0 after two innings, it felt like the slaughter-rule threshold had been reached.
John Danks was very good on the mound for the Sox, but the question of whether a five-hit, seven-plus-inning effort against this Cubs team counts as a real five-hit, seven-plus-inning effort is a valid one. No one on the Cubs has more than 28 runs batted in. No Cub worked the count Wednesday to get a walk.
“This game is not fun how we play it now,” Soriano said.
It’s deathly to watch.
To add insult to insult, the Cubs got out-National League-ed by an American League team, with the Sox using a tough chop to the pitcher by Danks and a squeeze bunt by Scott Podsednik to get a run across the plate in the seventh.
The Cubs are left to wait for the return of injured third baseman Aramis Ramirez. Ramirez thinks he could be back as early as two weeks from now, and you can bet the Cubs are pondering a communal laying-on of hands to help the healing process.
But unless Ramirez can come back 100 percent and further take every at-bat for the rest of the Cubs’ hitters, it’s hard to see how his return is going to change everything. In fact, Ramirez’s abilities have taken on mythical proportions since he went on the disabled list with a separated shoulder and the Cubs’ offense continued to sputter.
You’ve been hearing for weeks that the bats eventually would come to life, that there are too many good hitters on the team for this slump to last. You heard it from me. But the poor hitting has been so prolonged that it’s easy to wonder if it ever will come around.
After the game, Dempster stood behind his light-hitting teammates, saying they were working hard and that eventually something good would come out of it. But the Cubs are 30-31, with two singles from the struggling Milton Bradley on Wednesday standing in for hope.
The only real hope is in how the manager reacts to this exercise in monotony. It’s time for Piniella to get busy.
“Sooner or later, you have to start hitting,” he said. “If not, you have to give somebody else a chance.”
Forget the big fireworks. Any old spark will do.
——–
rmorrissey@tribune.com
