From the Windup: Piniella's Impatience No Virtue

Late Wednesday afternoon, seemingly senile Cubs manager Lou Piniella announced he was moving the team's Opening Day starter to the bullpen -- after four starts.

The lazy thing to do is to look at Carlos Zambrano's 1-2 record and 7.45 ERA and proclaim it was the correct move; a demotion, of course. Big Z is a pretty polarizing guy anyway, so all the haters were basking in their glory upon hearing the news of the demotion.

The problem is that anyone who really believes Zambrano was as bad as his numbers say does not actually watch the games. He was dreadful on Opening Day and definitely shouldn't have walked the leadoff man after being spotted a 3-0 lead, but he coughed up four straight hits on bloopers (three of them) or seeing-eye grounders (once) before the already legendary Jason Heyward bomb ruined the game. Zambrano has since had two solid starts and a five-inning, three-earned run outing which was basically in a wind tunnel. There were five home runs in that game -- two of which (Marlon Byrd for the Cubs and Ryan Braun for the Brewers) would have left the yard in normal circumstances and three of which were wind-aided.

So, on the surface, this appears to be a ridiculous move by Piniella -- one where he's trying to play some sort of mad scientist to fix his team's ills after just 14 games (at the time of the announcement) of a 162-game jaunt.

Regular readers of From the Windup know that I'm an avid Cubs fan and make no secret about it. Thus, I'm cursed with being an optimist and, yes, it does seep into all areas of my life (just ask my wife). In that vein, I'm going attempt to sell you (and myself) on the move.

• As our own Ed Price pointed out, Piniella desperately needs to shore up the Cubs setup relief. The Cubs have a 6.60 ERA in the seventh inning and a horrifying 10.80 ERA in the eighth frame. If you toss out Zambrano's first outing, the Cubs have gotten incredible starting pitching and Carlos Marmol is a fine anchor. With a current 6-9 record, you could flip it around to 9-6 if the eighth inning guys hadn't blown three leads thus far in the season. So it was obvious something drastic had to be done, even if Piniella didn't think this was a drastic move.

• Ryan Dempster, Randy Wells and Ted Lilly are a formidable trio atop the rotation and none of the three should even be considered for removal from the rotation. In fact, had Zambrano remained in the rotation, I'd have argued quite easily he was the Cubs' fourth-best starting pitcher.

• Carlos Silva, after another gem Wednesday night, is 2-0 with a 0.95 ERA and 0.63 WHIP in three starts. If he keeps pitching this well, you can't take him out of the rotation.

• Tom Gorzelanny has a 1.93 ERA through two starts -- though he left the second one with a minor injury. He's fully recovered and will continue with his turn in the rotation Thursday night. If he continues to pitch like he has, the Cubs will have a very solid 1-5 rotation without Zambrano.

• Gorzalanny's also left-handed, and the Cubs already have Sean Marshall and John Grabow in the bullpen. Actually, James Russell gives them three lefties in the 'pen. If you move Gorzelanny to the bullpen, Russell probably gets demoted, but it still seems like they need a right-hander to be productive in front of Marmol. Jeff Samardzija is awful and Justin Berg and Jeff Gray don't quite seem ready to handle the high-pressure situations. So Zambrano fits.

• Zambrano can be a power pitcher, as long as he's not trying to be efficient. He's also a maximum effort pitcher, kind of like Joba Chamberlain. If he knows he's only needed for one inning, he can stop worrying about using a multitude of pitches and just stick to his sinker and fastball. In pitching one inning at at a time, Zambrano can probably pump his fastball up there in the high-90s (he's been mid-90s all season as a starter, even into the seventh inning).

• If Zambrano does transition well to the role and Marmol pitches to his potential, the Cubs will have gone from having a shaky bullpen to basically only playing a seven inning game. The duo at the end could be as lights out as any 8th-9th inning team in the majors.

So, is all of the above enough to justify moving Big Z to the 'pen? I have to confess, the optimist in me started to get aboard, but the remaining remnants of realism in my brain finally intervened.

How many things need to happen to best-case scenario in the above bullet-points? C'mon. Is that really all going to happen?

I'm pretty sure I would have moved Gorzelanny to the bullpen as the long relief guy and stuck with Marshall and Grabow in the eighth until the Cubs were able to make a trade for a proven setup guy (like a Jason Frasor). Instead, when Silva and Gorzelanny come back to Earth, Piniella will have taken the strength of his team -- really the only one to this point in the season -- and made it weaker. Where's the sense in that?

Not to mention how Zambrano sometimes gets himself so amped up for big games it takes him several innings to settle in. In the eighth inning of a one-run game, he won't have that luxury. He'll have already lost the game.

Of course, I'm not surprised. Piniella's been managing the team like a fantasy baseball team so far this year. He overreacts to things one game at a time. Ryan Theriot was demoted to eighth in the lineup just three games after going 4-for-5 and one game after ending an 8-game hitting streak. He was benched the following night, but went 3-for-5 upon his return to the top of the order Wednesday night. Marlon Byrd batted cleanup two days after hitting leadoff. There's no semblance to the rotation of the other four outfielders. Aramis Ramirez has been demoted to fifth in the order while he endures one of the worst slumps of his career.

People often complain about the money the players make and talk about how they should be able to be thrust into any role and still perform. I can see that. I also think those same people would suffer in their own jobs if they had no idea what to expect in going to work on any given day. Remember, the players aren't complaining about these changes, they just aren't playing as well as they have in the past (for the most part). They are still human beings -- not robots -- and humans are creatures of habit who need to have a defined role in the workplace. Maybe these players just need to be left alone and allowed to play for a few games?

Or, instead, maybe Joe Girardi should have benched Mark Teixeira -- or at least moved him down in the order? The same goes for Brad Mills with Carlos Lee. Prince Fielder finally hit his first home run of the season Thursday afternoon, so why wasn't Ken Macha bouncing him around the order and trying desperately to find that "winning combination." If that sounds silly, it's basically what Piniella has been doing so far in the 2010 campaign. He's knee-jerk reacting to every game with the following day's lineup by moving parts around like it's a video game and the season is slipping away. Sadly, he may end up being a self-fulfilling prophet and ruining the team with all his adjustments.

It's funny, I'm always preaching to fantasy baseball owners about patience and telling them to remember how long the season is. Overreacting to a few games is a huge mistake, I'll say, and patience is a virtue. Baseball is a marathon, not a sprint.

And yet we have one of the winningest managers in baseball history going at an absolute dead sprint, 15 games in. He'll be ready to keel over by June -- along with his team.

Kind of makes you question his senility, doesn't it?