Exclusive footage of the reaction of the Official Mike Quade Fan Club hearing the news that he would be named interim manager of the Cubs.

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So Lou Piniella called it a career yesterday.  After 48 years as a player, general manager and manager, he took off his uniform for the last time and headed home to Tampa to take care of his mother.  I’m sure a lot of people don’t believe that’s why he’s leaving.  They probably think it’s because his team has packed it in, and has lost 15 of their last 20 games.  The Cubs sent Lou off in typical fashion.  Randy Wells gave up a homer to Omar Infante to lead off the game, and it all went downhill from there.  And we all got to read a load of crap today from the talentless Chicago sports columnist set about how Lou deserved better.

Fact is, you know Lou doesn’t believe that.  Lou knows you get what you deserve.  He had a lousy baseball team to manage this year, and they ended up lousy.  That’s how it works.  Lou also knows his legacy as a manager won’t be defined by what happened on one random August day when he had to write “Darwin Barney” on top of his lineup card.  Lou won more than 1,800 baseball games in his managerial career.  He won a World Series.  He managed a team that won 116 games in a season.  These Cubs could play non-stop until next December and not get to that number.

Lou wasn’t crying at home plate with Bobby Cox, and then after the game because his bullpen sucked.  He was crying because something he’s done for almost a half century is over.  He’ll still draw a paycheck in baseball after this.  He’ll be a Yankee consultant, and get paid to watch games and give his opinion on players.  Over the next ten years they’ll probably mail him two or three more World Series rings to add to his collection (he has three altogether.)

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A month after professing his undying love for the Cubs and refusing to forsake them for a team with a chance at the pennant, Derrek Lee agreed to be traded to the Atlanta Braves.  Presumably he had to sign the agreement while lying face down on a massage table, probably holding the pen with his mouth as someone stuck the piece of paper up to the face hole.

Lee’s going to the Braves is surprising, because a) he’s sucked this year, b) his back is so fucked up he hasn’t played since Sunday and c) the Braves normally don’t do stupid shit like this.

But, these are the same Braves who thought trading for Rick Ankiel and The Farns at the trading deadline was a good idea.  They’re obviously all on crack down there in the ATL.

Our good friend Paul Sullivan has all of the juicy details, so let’s just rip off his story, shall we?

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Now that Ryan Theriot is mercifully on somebody else’s team, we can take a moment to remember a time when he wasn’t a terrible fielding, addle-brained baserunning, wiffle bat carrying douchebag.

We can take a minute to remember when he bailed out the 2007 Cubs by replacing a terrible Cesar Izturis and playing a passable shortstop.  We can remember that when the Cubs foolishly didn’t upgrade that position in 2008, and he posted a now-unbelievable .387 on base average.

That Ryan Theriot was a scrappy overachiever, filling a spot that he wasn’t talented enough to play, but making it work through sheer effort.

But it was mostly a mirage, and we all ignored the things that he couldn’t do until they piled up so high we couldn’t see around them anymore.

For a guy who made it to the big leagues by doing all of the little things, he had an embarrassingly poor understanding of the game and his own abilities.

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The worst kept secret in baseball (I mean other than tHom Brennaman’s toupee) was let out of the bag today when the Cubs announced that Lou Piniella was going to pack it in at the end of this horrendous season.

Lou’s agent let the news out today, which made Lou mad because he hadn’t told the team yet, which led to this awkward exchange in the clubhouse.

Starlin Castro: Mister Lou, I hear you are leaving.
Lou Piniella: Ah, ah, ah, let me tell you Sterling, don’t believe everything you read in the papers.
Starlin: How come you get to leave now, and I have to wait six years to get out of here?
Lou Piniella: Because life ain’t fair, kid.

I’m on the record, over and over and over again with my professed manly love for Lou.  He’s the best manager the team had had in 70 years (not that the bar is really high to clear, there), but I knew when they hired him after the awful 2006 season that it was four years (hell, it might have only been three) and out.

Lou made a splash early in his first season.  He changed the lineup every day because the team was losing and he basically tried anything to see what would work.  And before it was too late, the team took off and ended up winning a very lousy NL Central.

The next year they won 97 games before choking away the playoffs in three games.

Last year, he somehow steered a lousy team into first place on August 2 before they careened out of the race.

This year, well this year has been awful.  Like in 2007, Lou’s tried everything.  He’s batted guys all over the place, he’s shuffled the lineup.  He even banished Carlos Zambrano to the bullpen in a move that we all thought was asinine.  Simple fact is, as mediocre as Tom Gorzelanny is, he’s a better pitcher than Zambrano is now.  That’s sad.  But the bad move wasn’t moving Zambrano to the bullpen, it was taking him back out of it.

But give Lou credit.  He saved the 2007 season by playing Ryan Theriot at short because the team didn’t have anybody better, and he tried to save the 2010 season by kicking the little bastard off shortstop as soon as the Cubs called up a guy who is markedly better.

Lou tried lots of stuff.  Some of it was brilliant.  Some of it was boneheaded.  Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t.  But working didn’t it make it brilliant any more than not working made it boneheaded.

For once the Cubs had a real manager who came up with ideas and put them to practice.  In four years he had three bad teams and one really good one, and the sad fact is that the one really good one–in the end–didn’t do a goddamned thing.  He held his players accountable, but didn’t throw them under the bus to the media, and that must made the meatheads among us think that he didn’t really care.

I wish nothing but the best for those of you who think Lou didn’t care.  By the best, I mean that I hope somebody hits you in the face with a big bag of syphilis.

His tenure with the Cubs will be judged a failure, because the Cubs didn’t go to a World Series, and that’s fair.  That’s what we’re all watching this shit for anyway, the off-chance that at some point it will all pay off for us.

But you can’t say it wasn’t interesting (more interesting than most of the 62 seasons before he arrived), you can’t say it wasn’t entertaining (more entertaining than those same 62 seasons), and you’re all about to find out something the hard way.

Those of you, and there are many, who are glad he’s leaving.

You’re going to miss him.  Because they aren’t going to find somebody better to replace him.

The new guy will just be different.

Maybe it will be milquetoast Ryne Sandberg, the golden boy Cub player who did all the right things in prepping to be a manager.  I hope this works out, but I’ll be honest with you, it won’t.

Maybe it will be Bob Brenly, a far better analyst than he ever was a manager, and a guy who won a World Series in 2001 as a skipper, despite a string of in-game decisions that set World Series baseball back a generation.  You get lucky like that maybe once in a 1,000,000 years, so the sun will have imploded and the Earth will be an icy rock before Bob’s turn rolls around again.  And he’ll probably have BK Kim up in the bullpen just in case.

It won’t be Joe Girardi, because nobody leaves the Yankees for the Cubs unless it’s a trade, and when that happens they cry a lot.

Or maybe it will be somebody else.

So enjoy your moment.  Say and write your mean things about Lou.  Go on ponderous rants about how he didn’t have the fire anymore or how he should have thrown bases around or wiped his ass with his hat and shoved it in the umpire’s face.  Let it out.  Let it all out.

And get ready to watch subsequent Cubs teams that won’t be as well managed as the ones we’ve seen for four seasons.  And then think about what kind of suck that’s going to look and sound like.

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Join us at 7 pm Central over at Fisted Foul for an All-Star Game GameCast.

What’s that?  It’s a bunch of guys making fun of the All-Star Game, mocking Joe Buck, pointing out all of the dumb things that Tim McCarver says and rooting like hell for the National League to win the game so that games 1, 2, 6 and 7 of the World Series this year will be played at Wrigley Field…

…huh?  OK, I guess the last part doesn’t matter.

http://www.fistedfoul.com

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I have one of those lame Cubs fact a day calendars on my desk and every morning, I tear off another day, I read the fact or the trivia question and then I unsuccessfully try to slit my wrists with the little piece of paper I’ve torn off.  Today, the trivia answer was Claude Passeau, and the question, apparently was “Who pitched the last time the Cubs didn’t suck?”

It’s July 12.  The Cubs are in fourth place.  There is a little hope they might finish third (not that it matters) and no hope, at all, that they’ll finish first or even second.  This, despite the fact that the teams currently in first and second both suck.  That’s how bad things are.

But, the Cubs, for the first time since the waning days of the Claude Passeau era, look poised to try to dump some of these losers onto other teams so that they can bring in a whole new crop of losers to take their place.  In the land of the Cubs, this is considered progress.

So let’s look at who should be traded, where they might go, and who the Cubs can replace them with.

Hey, nobody said this would be fun.

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