Cubs to Start Doug Davis Saturday? That Makes Me Happy, which Makes Me Sad.

Good news - the Cubs are putting an end to the James Russell experiment and are going to use an actual major league starting pitcher on Saturday against the Giants!

Bad news - that actual major league starting pitcher will be 35-year-old Doug Davis, who will be making his first big league start since off-season elbow surgery. Davis has a career WHIP of 1.50, which ranks 64th among the 65 active pitchers with at least 1000 IP (side note - our opening day starter is also very close to the bottom of that list). Davis does have a career ERA of 2.98 and career WHIP of 1.19 at Wrigley Field, and was the winning pitcher for Arizona in Game Two of the 2007 NLDS (a/k/a the "Ted Lilly spikes his glove" game), so you could file this one under "if you can't beat 'em, sign 'em" - that's how they got Derrek Lee, after all. On the other hand, if the Cubs signed every "Cub killer" in the major leagues they'd probably have about 400 players in their organization.

It's sad to know that a team with the second-highest payroll in the National League and a (supposedly) vastly improved farm system doesn't have any better options than bringing Doug Davis in as the 5th starter. It also doesn't answer the question of what the Cubs are going to do about their 4th starter Casey Coleman (he of the 1.95 WHIP and 18/20 K/BB Ratio) until Randy Wells and/or Andrew Cashner return from the DL (although it looks like Wells is finally going to start a rehab assignment). On the plus side, despite Russell and Coleman combining to go 1-7 with a 8.16 ERA in their 10 starts, the Cubs are ahead of Milwaukee in the standings, so I guess things could be worse (see - I can be positive!)

Cubs Lean on Russell for Emergency Start - Again, and Again, and Again....

Tough break for the Cubs, losing starting pitchers Randy Wells and Andrew Cashner to injuries so early in the season, so they'll have to rely on LOOGY James Russell to make an emergency start tonight against...wait a minute, didn't I write about this before? [Checks old blog posts] Yes, I did - two weeks ago; Russell is actually going to be making his third "emergency" start tonight, after allowing 8 earned runs over 5 2/3 innings in his other two "emergency" starts. You mean to tell me, Jim Hendry and Mike Quade, that you've had all this time to fix this hole in the rotation, and in the entire Cubs organization (to say nothing of the entire world of organized baseball) you can't come up with even one pitcher who can give your team a decent chance at a win?

If Hendry or Quade got a flat tire on their car, they would put on the spare tire and then continue driving hundreds of miles on it as if nothing had happened.