It's not just that Hawkins has blown two saves in the last two weeks; he's blown seven out of eleven saves when he inherited a one-run game.

Therefore, yes, I think he gets the majority of the blame. At this point, even if Hawkins only had a 50% save success record (a horrible stat), the Cubs would be well ahead in the wild card.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, such finger pointing can be infinite...."what if Sammy hit 30 points higher", "what if Prior's ERA was a point lower", etc, but the Hawkins disaster sticks out like a sore thumb. Of course, I am one that *does* blame last year's series loss party on Bartman, so there you go.... (when it comes to baseball in general and the Cubs in particular, I'm very superstitious, and the Bartman incident, to me, obviously portended a loss in the series. Thus using magical thinking it was his fault. QED).

Surprisingly, I'm not that upset that they lost the way they did last night, and that they thus (IMO) will not reach the playoffs, for any team that loses like that (and does so down the stretch when the stakes are so high) doesn't deserve to be in the playoffs in the first place. QED.

Now maybe, just MAYBE the Cubs organization will listen to me and get some relief pitching for last year, a request I've been making since the middle of last year. Instead, they go out and get more and more offensive tools (Nomar this year, Randall Simon last year, etc)when, clearly, offense is not the problem. PDQ

Hank "why say in a sentance what you can say in several paragraphs" Vaughn

Didn't know about the one-run thing. Ouch.

I think it's a matter of the front office thinking they actually *have* relief pitching. Misplaced faith in guys like Farnsworth, Wellemeyer and Leicester, who I knew was going to give it up as soon as I saw he was in in the twelfth. At the very least, I think they thought they could hold the fort while guys like Dempster and Borowski recovered, although I don't know when it became apparent that the latter wasn't ever going to happen this season. They wound up having to rely almost entirely on Hawkins as their closer instead of a leftie/rightie combo. At least Mercker has looked consistently pretty good.

I actually liked the Simon signing last year, and considering how little they gave up for Nomar, I don't have a problem with that, either. Especially if we can get Mia out to some Fire games.

Of course, we could have kept Alfonseca (shudder)...