The home opener was snowed out, but the Cubs got off to a hot start. They were 7-5 when I saw them play their first home night game two Mondays ago, and though they lost that game badly they followed it with five straight wins, all of them impressive, to seize first place in the National League’s Central Division. They were crunching the ball on offense and playing well enough to get by on defense, while the pitching excelled, even when the wind blew out at Wrigley Field. Was this the same team that lost almost 100 games last year?
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Baker teams typically play alert, confident baseball, and that’s exactly what the Cubs have shown in the early going–the same qualities they lacked under Don Baylor when they underperformed so badly last year. Baker brought in a reputation for preferring veterans to young players, a bias that threatened to sidetrack the team’s arriving young talent, yet he went two for three before the season began in picking youth over experience. When the Cubs dumped catcher Todd Hundley on the Los Angeles Dodgers, the cost was taking on two high-priced potential stiffs in return, first baseman Eric Karros and second baseman Mark Grudzielanek. These two played the same positions as the Cubs’ top hitting prospects: Hee Seop Choi and Bobby Hill. When Hill played himself back
But with all that said about the team’s rising stars, Grudzie was the Cubs’ most valuable player in the first weeks of the season. A 32-year-old veteran who used to steal bases and hit for average when he broke in with the Montreal Expos, he’d seen both talents fall off in recent years with the Dodgers. His lifetime .282 batting average coming into the season looked OK, but his .324 on-base percentage–Grudzie has never drawn 50 walks in a year at any level–was insufficient for a leadoff man. But after beating out Hill for the second-base job, Grudzie opened the year peppering the ball. He entered this week hitting .352, which compensated for his paltry three walks to give him a more-than-respectable on-base percentage of .387. (For an idea of how important walks are, consider that Bellhorn, hitting .231, still had a better OBP at .391.) When Grudzie singled in front of a Sammy Sosa homer to start Sunday’s game, the Cubs had scored 26 first-inning runs in 20 games. The early leads allowed the starters to be more aggressive–and flamethrowers Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, Matt Clement, and Carlos Zambrano need little excuse to be that. Grudzie on base also means better pitches for shortstop Alex Gonzalez, who hits ahead of Sosa. Last year Gonzalez struggled with strikeouts at the bottom of the order, but moved up to the two slot he became an offensive force, hitting .342 going into this week. The change mirrored a shift Baker made in San Francisco, where he moved shortstop Rich Aurilia up in the order ahead of Bonds and Kent and watched him become a 30-homer slugger.
