Jake

Who would have guessed Lucas would both fix his first inning problems and keep his pattern of getting better each time through the order from last year

For the sake of our pitchers we really should be giving Engel the bulk of the starts in CF for the time being. As a RF, Palka is by far the worst player on this team

Eloy put some good wood on that hook

Jesus WGN can you please stop missing game action

Abreu baby

This guy's breaking ball is pretty damn tough on the lefties.

I try to counterbalance the rampant negativity in the game threads when I can

Time to get on the Giolito hype train folks

Leury shouldn't be batting leadoff but he's not some horrible player. On most days he's one of our best 9 and his flaws aren't the kick-in-the-nuts type.

When you put a really terrible defense out there, it's the one thing you can do to actively harm your young pitchers. I don't see a compelling enough reason to keep running Palka out there given how detrimental it is to the defense. I'm thinking and hoping Palka goes to AAA once Jay is back and we have to add Santana to the 25-man.

Yikes, he screwed him inside and then low

I see Tim as a glove-first 2 WAR type guy that you need a few of to be a consistent winner. As far as Eloy is concerned on D, what I see is a dumb error, him looking really slow, but also comfortable reading the ball in the air.

Got Abreu with the old straightball

You either ride with us or you get run over son!

Wow

FWIW, Statcast gives the Soler double an expected batting average of .230. Just placed it perfectly and didn't hit it super hard

Fry made one mistake and got punished for it but looked pretty nasty otherwise.

I don't see any reason to be down on Jace Fry this year vs the usual "you never know about relievers" kind of thing. He has good stuff and was nails last year.

Bullpen likely to be better than the rotation in that rotation is probably going to be very close to the worst while bullpen will be merely bottom half of the league, bottom third-ish

I'm not sure if Jones is going to be on the team by next week

Was just about to say you could do a lot worse things than walk Merrifield

I have zero faith in Jones

Burr looked a hell of a lot like Nate Jones there

Hamilton having a day

Alright folks, we're 1 swing away from optimism mode