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Man, why me?

There were a MILLION idiots at the Jewel buying chips and salsa and beer for the Superbowl, and they were all in line in front of me. Why?  Well apparently I was one of those idiots too.

Which NL franchises did the Cubs have the best and worst records against from 2000-2009? Click on the links or check after the jump.

Best: .590% - Cubs lose the season series just twice in 2000 and 2006.

Worst: .403% - Cubs win the season series just twice in 2003 and 2008.

Complete list and other decade trivia after the jump.

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The Cubs will avoid an arbitration hearing with Carlos Marmol, as the two sides agreed on a deal for $2.125M...exactly the midpoint of their two submitted figures of $1.75M and $2.5M.

- Kevin Millar was on XM Radio this morning excited about signing with the Cubs. Apparently he lives in the Mesa area and wanted to go to camp with a team nearby so he could spend time with his 2 kids and a third on the way in June. He says he knows that if he as any chance to make the team, he'll have to re-learn third base and try to play some outfield. That should be fun to watch.

In the same radio interview, the hosts referenced an interview with Reed Johnson yesterday where Reed talked about the confines of the clubhouse at Wrigley. Reed seemed to suggest that the lack of space made it difficult on the team last year to escape some of the drama with Milton Bradley and so forth.

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I don't have any thoughts on a post today, but I was playing around with adding an easier way to embed videos on the site. Here's Starlin Castro during the Arizona Fall League.

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As spring training approaches, the Cubs are pulling out the heavy weapons to fill out their roster. Jerry Crasnick tweets that the Cubs will sign Kevin Millar to a minor league deal with an invite to spring training.

I was suppose to post this Friday night, but life got in the way the rest of the weekend...

- Arizona Phil does what only he can do...an amazing retrospective on how the 1969 Cubs were built and his memories of the season.

- Ryan Theriot is losing fans in the Cubs organization apparently by sticking to his $3.4M demands. Bruce Miles on the radio and Bruce Levine both saying that an arbitration hearing looks inevitable. It would be the first arbitration hearing in 17 years between the Cubs and a player (Mark Grace).

- Orlando Cabrera signs with the Reds on a 3 million deal for one year with a $1M buyout on a $3M mutual option in 2011.  They then acquired Aaron Miles from the A's for Wily Taveras and Adam Rosales. As long as they don't land Johny Damon...

(Interesting twist to this story, A's DFA Taveras immediately. Also, the A's are sending a PTBNL to the Reds as part of the deal).

- Reed Johnson was offered $800K by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

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The latest projections use the Diamon Mind simulator and run 100 seasons using CAIRO projections (which I never heard of until today, but apparently have been the most accurate of the projection systems of late).

They have the Cubs doing a bit better than PECOTA with 83-84 wins and a 17% chance of winning the division, although like PECOTA they'll run the projections again as the season approaches and playing time is a little more certain. As Neyer notes in one of the links above and others have, there's pretty much a 6-game margin of error no matter what  projection stats you use, so we're talking 76-89 win range at the moment. That being said, the Cubs are pretty clearly looking up at the Cardinals at this point and apparently the Reds.

Here are the weighted means from BP's PECOTA projection system in a few categories for the Cubs. PECOTA does try to project playing time, so cumulative stats like VORP and WARP are based off of that.

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The Hall of Fame made the right move, albeit the unpopular one, by announcing that Andre Dawson will be inducted as a Montreal Expo. Real Neal did the legwork for me using BP's WARP3 numbers:

Montreal: 43.7 Wins

Chicago: 18.1 Wins

Others: -2.2 Wins

Dawson may have been a more popular player in baseball thanks to his Cubs days, but he was clearly a better player as an Expo. Even if you divide his wins per season, it's 3.97 as an Expo and 3.01 as a Cub, so there's just no reasonable argument for Dawson as a Cub other than a popularity contest. Dawson did prefer the Cubs for what it's worth and says he may don a Cubs hat during his speech to acknowledge the Cubs fans.

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A busy day for Jim Hendry as he's now inked Chad Tracy to a minor league deal. He'll get a chance to compete for a bench spot in spring training.

Tracy hasn't played a full season since 2006 due to a number of maladies,  including microfracture surgery on right knee in 2007. He's also had oblique, groin and back problems. You wonder if he can even play third base or the corner outfield positions anymore.

His OPS+ and wOBA numbers since 2004:

Nothing too exciting here, but it's a minor league deal and Tracy may be more than willing to go to Iowa if he doesn't make the team out of spring training to try and jumpstart his career back to life.