We are all witnesses to the childlike wonder of...Rick Sutcliffe?
For a guy who has spent his life in baseball, Rick is impressed by some pretty mundane stuff.



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There are two games left on the Cubs’ current six game west coast trip, and so far they are 3-1 and thisclose to being 4-0. But gang, I don’t think I’m going to make it.
No, it’s not that the games are too tight or filled with tension.
It can’t be healthy to have to listen to Rick Sutcliffe broadcast this many games in a row.
The whole thing is truly weird. Sutcliffe played 18 years in the big leagues. He won 171 games, a Cy Young (nearly two), was Rookie of the Year, pitched in a couple of NLCS’. He once famously destroyed Tommy Lasorda’s office when he was left off the Dodgers’ playoff roster in 1981.
But in the Cubs’ TV booth he seems impressed by the most routine baseball things.
His hyperbole was firing at full blast over the weekend in LA, but last night it reached new, strange, insipid levels in the Cubs’ win over a truly hapless Oakland A’s team.
These are just a few of the things he oozed and aahed over.
Patrick Wisdom homered for the fourth straight game, which is cool, but somehow Sut turned it into a monologue about how the Cubs and David Ross need to be praised for not giving up on Pee Whiz, when the Cardinals and Rangers did. First, the Cubs didn’t give up on Patrick because they didn’t have enough good players to give up on him. Even with his struggles last year Wisdom led the team in homers and had a 102 OPS+. It wasn’t spectacular, but it was better than most of what they had. Also, the Cardinals didn’t give up on Wisdom. They traded him to the Rangers for Drew Robinson in what was, at the time, a trade of two legit prospects. The Rangers did give up on him, and so did Seattke. And if Ross is such a Wisdom stan why does he keep trying to find reasons to play Nick Madrigal at third?
Madrigal “doubled” on a ball he hit off the end of the bat barely fair about 20 feet past first base, and he was almost thrown out at second. Sutcliffe and Boog got all gooey about Madrigal’s “bat to ball skills” and Sutcliffe said Nick has to be talented because he was the fourth pick in the draft a few years ago.
Oh? Is that how it works, Rick? Here are a few other fourth overall picks. Tony Sanchez, Brian Matusz, Daniel Moskos (one pick after Cubs’ immortal Josh Vitters), Brad Lincoln, Kohl Stewart (another former Cub), Dillon Tate and Riley Pint.
Hey, how can Nick miss? Oh, and then Nick was thrown out by a good 40 feet trying to score from second on a single.