Sweet win yesterday. I caught the beginning and the end, leaving the TV with the Cubs down 1-3 and returning when it was 3-3. While I did see Zambrano give up a couple runs, he certainly didn't look bad to me -- he just wasn't getting as many grounders as usual. How did he look towards the end of the outing? He hadn't thrown all that many pitches when he left after the seventh, so I'm fairly surprised he didn't continue pitching into the eighth.

Moises Alou smacked a high change into the left-field stands to give the Cubs the victory in the bottom of the tenth. The coverage of the game has generally spun the story into a "Prodigal Son Returns to Defeat Father", with Moises beating the team his daddy manages. This obscures what is one of the most interesting stories of the Cubs offense in the early going, a story which goes, "Prodigal Son Returns... to being Productive".

Almost any way you shake it, Alou has been a bit of a disappointment with the Cubs. His 2002 was downright bad, and his 2003 was successful mostly because he was surprisingly durable -- he wasn't one of the league's better left fielders, ranking only ninth in VORP at his position in the NL. This wasn't the same hitter we'd seen in Houston, and park effects don't even begin to account for the huge difference in value between Alou's 1998-2001 and his 2002-2003. Some decline with age was to be expected, but I don't think the Cubs were hoping for Piles of Average when they signed him to a three-year contract.

This year, however, is different. Alou's stats after the first month and a half of the season bear a nice resemblance to the younger, more productive Moises.

      G   AB  H   2b  HR BB/PA  AVG  OBP  SLG
 2000 Hou  126 454 161 28  30 .101  .355 .416 .623 
 2001 Hou  136 513 170 31  27 .098  .331 .396 .554 
 2002 ChC  132 484 133 23  15 .088  .275 .337 .419 
 2003 ChC  151 565 158 35  22 .099  .280 .357 .462 
 2004 ChC  36  150 22  10  10 .056  .313 .350 .593 
(2004-proj 150 623 195 42  42 .056  .313 .350 .593)

The other thing? Power. Alou hasn't shown this much power in several years -- and his isolated slugging percentage (SLG - AVG, a good measure of power) is currently higher than it's ever been throughout his career. Will this continue? I doubt it, but even if Alou only held onto a modest bit of his newly-recovered power, he would be giving the Cubs offense a huge boost.

Day game today, with a classic Maddux-Hermanson matchup. Okay, so maybe only one-half of that matchup can really be described as classic...