(670 The Score) Nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
Not doing this right now. Not this year of all years, the way the team has started out. The Cubs are considering starting right-hander Tyler Chatwood in place of the injured left-hander Jon Lester at home against the Angels on Sunday, and I'm considering the proper response to that decision. I'm either going to throw up, relocate temporarily to Greenland or ask to be placed in a medically induced coma. Possibly all three simultaneously.
This team is leading all of baseball right now with a comical 6.05 walks issued per nine innings, almost a full walk clear of the next-worst Cardinals at 5.10. The Cubs have MLB's worst ERA at 6.70 (the White Sox are just behind them at 6.35), the worst WHIP at 1.90, the worst batting average against of .297 and even when they do manage to actually throw a ball over the plate, it's tending to get hammered, as they are surrendering a hard-contact rate of 46.9 percent that is -- you guessed it -- the highest such number going.
Manager Joe Maddon assessed the options in lieu of Lester during an interview on 670 The Score on Tuesday.
"We have to figure out how we're going to work it from there," Maddon said. "(Mike Montgomery) is on the DL right now, so you have to wait on him. I think Tyler Chatwood has been throwing the ball well. And again, I don't even know if the guys upstairs have other thoughts regarding this."
If "throwing the ball well" means a 7.20 ERA, 7.20 walks per nine innings, a 6.01 FIP, the same 1.80 WHIP as last season and a hard-contact rate of 46.7 percent, then yes. Yes, he is. Very well. Quite swimmingly, even.
And I'm not one of the guys upstairs, but I have other thoughts regarding this, perhaps extremely so.
Call somebody up from Triple-A Iowa who can throw four innings that won't make me want to set myself on fire.
Remember that time back in spring training when Chatwood was figuring out all the mechanical issues that caused him to be historically bad at pitching in 2018, as the new pitching infrastructure was using real-time data provided by all the fancy cameras and computers to streamline his wonky delivery? So, that was fun.
The Angels aren't dumb enough to suddenly think he's going to throw three strikes before he misses the zone four times.
Even thinking about watching it and the fact that the Cubs would consider it now has me close to as flustered as I would be while actually sitting through it, looking for a place to fling the remote that won't damage my property or injure a family member.
Please, no.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's Bernstein & McKnight Show in middays. You can follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein.
