I hate you, Santana is definitly a poor trade (sarcasm)

he might get another shot at the rotation soon when Ted Lilly goes on the DL with a severe case of double digit ERA.

How did Hendry just jump out to that lead? Did 30 Met fans just show up to vote?

how many times they’ve signed neifi perez

We all stuffed the ballot box for Littlefield in this contest last year, and he won in a landslide. If you don’t like the poll, dissing our old GM isn’t going to do anything, since we all already know that he sucks (and say so frequently, and at length). If anything, our experience with crappy GMs makes us better at noticing stupid tendencies in other people’s GMs, since we’ve gotten so much practice at picking nits.

Like they say in the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future success. That goes double with old players like Delgado and Pedro. Anybody can tell who was a good player in the past. A good GM can tell who’s going to emerge as a good player, or continue to be one in the future.

And its in Queens too.

I guess you see more of him than we do, but I’m not convinced that one passes the smell test. Fella can sure hit, though.

the Cubs have never had a payroll as high as 117, it was mid-90’s in ‘06. Also, the Cubs, if I’m not mistaken, currently have the 8th highest payroll in MLB. I don’t know how far back you’d have to go for them to crack the top 5, but I think they just cracked $100 million in ‘08 for the first time.

Hendry is no wizard, but people seem to forget unloading Hundley for Karros and Grudzelanek (wrong spelling, I know). The Pierre trade wasn’t very good, but it’s not like any of those 3 guys are doing anything special now. Getting Traschel last year made sense. He wasn’t replacing Marhsall straight up, but the Cubs were in the middle of 21 games in 20 days, and needed the extra starter. Also, I hardly consider Rocky Cherry and Scott Moore to be ‘legit prospects’. They are, at best, mid-level prospects. I’m not saying it was a brilliant move, but in the long run it’s not that big of a deal.

He overpaid for Soriano, but anyone was going to have to hand out at LEAST $100 for 6 years, and more likely $120 for 7. It’s sad but true that Hendry made a fair market value purchase. DeRosa has turned out to be a very solid signing, Lilly turned out to be a very solid signing (although I hope he gets back on track soon), Ward was a good signing, Fukudome was a good signing (and cheaper than what he was offered elsewhere). Marquis was overpaid for, that one there is no denying. Howry and Eyre were great signings though.

Lee and Ramirez / Lofton are still big ones to look at. Granted it’s easier when the other team helps make a poor choice, but at least some credit has to go to Hendry for these trades. What about the Nomar trade? At the time it looked like an absolute steal, it’s just unfortunate that it turned out the way that it did.

In my opinion, the worst thing that Hendry did, was not to rein in Baker sooner. Neifi was not a bad bench player. But he kept getting starts when those ABs could have been better spent elsewhere. It’s hard to blame Hendry for what happened with Prior and Wood, it’s not his fault they got hurt (even if it’s, by extension, his fault via Baker, it’s still hard to blame Hendry entirely). The biggest fault there was that he didn’t rebuild the rotation, and instead kept making plans for the future based on them being healthy. At the same time, people seem to think that Hendry has this bottomless well of cash at his disposal, he hasn’t in the past. The Tribune Co. has always put only as much money into the Cubs to keep the franchise popular, and to make sure that they keep reaping profits. Winning was never a priority to the owners, which makes it that much more difficult for the GM to build a winning team.

Hendry good (off the top of my head):
Lee trade
Ramirez / Lofton trade
Karros / Grudz trade
Lilly signing
DeRosa signing
Fukudome signing
Ward signing
Howry signing
Eyre signing
Lee extension
Ramirez extension
Zambrano extension
Todd Walker trade (Jose Ceda is a real pitching prospect)
Michael Barrett trade (some scouts say Kyler Burke might still come through, former 1st rounder)
Neifi trade
Reed Johnson signing (so far)
John Lieber signing (so far)

Bad:
Marquis (not a bad player to sign, but too much $)
Pierre trade
Traschel trade
Jacque Jones signing
Maddux for Izturis trade
Sosa trade (waited too long)
Patterson trade (waited too long)

Mediocre moves (perhaps unfortunate)
Soriano signing (probably too much $ for what he is, but not an unrealistic value for the market)
Nomar trade
Wade Miller signing (good gamble at $1mil, but nothing happened)
Aardsma for Cotts (both of em are doing pretty poorly)

Both a strength and a weakness of Hendry’s is that he listens to his manager. Neifi, Tony Womack et all, were brought in because those are the kind of guys that Dusty wanted. Lou wanted to get Barret out of town (which was right to do) and Hendry obliged. He might be better if he knew what was right regardless of what his manager was telling him, but he’s also done a pretty good job of getting the manager what he feels that he needs.

I feel that his good moves far out-weigh his bad ones. I don’t think he’s a brilliant GM, but I think he’s a FAR cry from bad. Just my opinon.