Last week I tweeted that the quality of the questions Carrie Muskat had to answer in her Cubs.com “Inbox” feature were the worst ever.

She replied that “you should see the ones that don’t make it.”  So I told her if she’d send the really bad ones to me, I’d answer them for her.

Lo and behold, today I was sent two questions so dumb and so pointless that they were rejected by the Muskbox.

Let’s take a look.

Do you think the Cubs will go after Ichiro? He would be a great replacement for Soriano & defense is way better.

Should the Cubs, a team in full rebuilding mode spend millions of dollars on a 38 year old outfielder?  If you figure the Cubs are two years away from being competitive and probably four years away from the possibility of making a serious playoff run…then sure!  Ichiro would only be 42!  How could you possibly pass on that?

Also, he could replace Alfonso Soriano even before Alfonso is gone!  Now that is the kind of innovative thinking the Cubs have been lacking for decades.  Got an aging, overpaid outfielder with two years left on his contract?  Sign another one to “replace him” even when he’s still there!

But mainly, you do it for the defense.  Yes, leftfield defense is so important that every NL team plays a shitty defensive player there.  Well, all but the Rockies, but they had to play Carlos Gonzalez there because the leftfield in Coors is roughly a hectare.  So play Ichiro out there and that will fix everything.

Other than the fact Ichiro is old, punchless, and with the exception of his two month career death rattle after his trade to the Yankees–on the decline, he’s perfect!  Sign him up.

ALTERNATE ANSWER: Why, is, Tuffy Rhodes unavailable?

With the Astros moving to the AL, what do the Cubs need to do to stay out of the NL Central basement?

I love this question.  I picture the author of it exhausted, what little hair he (or she) still has left in one big greasy clump after hours of anxiously tugging it straight up.  Their only thought has been, “With the Astros gone, who’s going to save the Cubs from being the worst team in the division?”  “How can I live with myself if they finish last?”  “They haven’t done that since…2006!”  “What do they need to do!?!”

They need to get better.  But they aren’t going to.  Not next year, anyway.  Well, unless they can sign Ichrio, then, look out.  Finishing last sucks.  It’s embarrassing   It’s hard to watch.  It’s no fun.  But you know what’s worse?  Finishing fourth.  Fourth place is all the same crap as fifth, but with a worse draft pick.  If you’re not finishing first or second, and you’re not a team on the rise (trust me, they aren’t), you’re better off bottoming out.

Look how good the Nationals are.  You know how they got that way?  They sucked for seven years.  They lost more than 100 games in back to back years.  And you know what they got from that?  Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, Ryan Zimmerman, Drew Storen (let’s pretend game five never happened, OK, Drew), Jordan Zimmermann, etc.

Now, I don’t advocate the seven year awfulness, but even if all they had done was bottom out in 2008 and 2009, it was worth it to get Harper and Strasburg.

So the question is not “what do the Cubs need to do to stay out of the NL Central basement” next year.  It’s “What do they have to do to get into that basement, and suck so hard that they actually crash through a subfloor and go even lower?”

Someday in the not so distant future, the Cubs will be good again (again?), and we’ll look back on these couple of years and laugh.  And we’ll remember it as that time of innocence when Josh Vitters, Brett Jackson, Anthony Rizzo and Starlin Castro hadn’t quite busted out yet, and the rest of the league was still trying to deny what a force of nature Luis Valbuena was.

Oh, it will be glorious.

(It will probably also never happen.)