I want you to imagine it - it's the day before opening day, 2008. I – mystically, I guess, from the future - tell you that, halfway through the season:

1. Alfonso Soriano is on the DL for a second time, this time with a fracture in the hand.
2. Carlos Zambrano is on the DL too, with shoulder problems.
3. Oh, and Daryle Ward is on the DL as well.
4. Rich Hill comes down with Steve Blass Disease, and is finally shipped to Mesa to try and find himself again as a pitcher.
5. Ted Lilly tacks on almost a whole run to his ERA.
6. The Cubs abandon the Pie experiment, and replace him after they pick up Jim Edmonds, released by the Padres for hitting .178.
7. The Cubs have been horrible on the road, going 16-20.
8. Meanwhile, the Cardinals come from nowhere and put up a 44-33 record, second-best in the NL.

How would you react?

I’m not trying to harsh anyone’s mellow here or anything. But I just want everyone to reflect on the fact that the Cubs haven’t coasted to get to this point, despite what other fanbases may say. I think this is a stronger team than a lot of people give them credit for.

Carlos Marmol is getting a mechanical tune-up. Please tell me this doesn't involve an oil change.

Meanwhile, Reed Johnson looks primed to join the team’s expanding disabled list when Marshall is officially called up to take Zambrano’s start tomorrow. Johnson claims to be feeling better, although the final decision is up to the team’s medical staff. That would save Murton, Hoffpauir and Patterson from a return to Iowa until at least Friday, when one of them is expected to be sent down to make room for Daryle Ward. I can only hope that the plan is not to carry around two backup first basemen who both hit left handed.

Meanwhile, Patterson seems to be providing the sort of top-of-the-order presence Lou has been searching for. And I’ll just pass this on without comment:

Theriot is hitting .310 with 28 multiple-hit games. But he's also third in the league in ground balls hit and has grounded into nine double plays despite having decent speed. Piniella prefers speed at the top of his lineup, and obviously Patterson trumps Theriot, who leads the team in steals with 13 but has been thrown out eight times.

It’s probably a bit early to coronate Patterson, and it’s hard to see him displacing Mark DeRosa from second base, his natural position. Phil Rodgers sees him as trade bait. And speaking of trade bait:

Micah Hoffpauir's left-handed bat is a valuable asset with Daryle Ward out, but, like Ward, the rookie is not good enough defensively to play left or right field on a regular basis. Hoffpauir looked tentative on a few balls that landed in front of him on the artificial turf at Tropicana Field, and he didn't start over the weekend against the Sox.

… Since Derrek Lee is set at first, Hoffpauir's main value may be as trade bait to an American League team looking for a first baseman/DH. If the Cubs make a move for Oakland's Rich Harden, Hoffpauir might be included in the package.

I consider that… unlikely.

Speaking of trades, more news is coming out about the Brian Roberts Hostage Crisis. Purportedly Hendry offered Veal, Cedeno and Gallagher. Thankfully nothing came of it – can you figure where the Cubs would be right now without Gallagher?

Well, here it is. Hoffpauir and Patterson are up. Kevin Hart is shipped out. And Patterson is playing left and leading off today. You could push me over with a feather after hearing that last one.

I’ll hopefully update this post in a little while, but in the meantime, here’s a table showing our options at second base, should DeRosa see playing time in left:

Patterson can run the bases, no question. Projections for defense: DeRosa +4, Cedeno +2, Fontenot -3. DeRosa's played worse than that so far this season, while Cedeno and Fontenot have played better. I don't have projections for Patterson. I’ll leave Patterson at a zero, then, and I’ll leave the other numbers unadjusted for now.

This isn't giving Patterson any credit for his baserunning, which is a plus. And I’m not entirely behind those defensive estimates. Cedeno looks like the best option of the three, although I think Murton is probably a better left fielder than any of them are second basemen. (These, unlike my full WAR numbers, are not adjusted by position.)

From Jump Street, let me state that I do not think losing Soriano is a good thing at all.  Colin whips out the numbers that clearly state that there will be a short term dropoff while Soriano heals.  Obviously Murton/Hoffpower don't produce what he does on an annual basis - if they did, then it would be they making thee eight-figure salaries!  What really sucks is that he just got his legs back.  And Kurt ventures that in the long run, Cubs players of late have not had much luck recovering their power from broken hands, particularly from Soriano, whose main gift from God is his wrists, and this particular fracture metacarpal is closely adjacent to said Wrists of God.

I knew, sitting here watching my guys, Our Cubs, run off the best record in baseball, that it was too good to be true.  Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, Sammy Sosa...all too good to be true.  Several times I thought and mentioned that the only thing that could stop us in 2008 is injuries.  When you saw Pujols get hurt and Yovanni Gallardo get hurt, as a hypersensitive, oversuperstitious Cubs fan, you had to wonder...Where's Ours?

Hopefully, this is it.

I honestly think, though, that it could be worse.  I have stated on here time after time that I think Alfonso Soriano is nothing more than a backup generator - a failover system that occassionally - nay, frequently - can carry a team for weeks at a time while everyone else struggles.  There is NO 2007 Division Crown without his September.  And yes, when taken on an annual basis as Colin has, the man produces abundantly.

Thing is, though, is that his contributions are not consistent.  He differs from, say, Ramirez, who pretty much produces at the same rate every day.  You know that, if you write him in the lineup for a week, that he will give you hits three times out of ten, probably a homer, about four RBIs, and he'll walk a few times.  Managers and teams tend to LEAN on people like Ramirez, they count on him, and when players like him lose time, the loss is quantifiable.

With Soriano, on the other hand, you just don't know.  He HAS been giving us more consistent production the past couple of weeks, yes.  But you honestly don't know what we're going to miss out on the next six weeks.  Might he hit 12 bombs and drive in 30?  Or might he hit .150 and chase every pitch thrown at him?  He isn't going to be there, probably the rest of the year, to pick us up when we need it...that's the great loss with Soriano.  Our Plan B is gone for 2008.  However, it isn't the end of the world if Murton plays there the next six weeks.  We could still play winning ball, if...

...we don't forget about the pitching!  Sure, Dempster whipped out his big brass nutts last night and went the distance, and for the moment, you have to feel confident that Wood and Marmol are rested enough.  For now. 

Lemme ax u a question - consider Z's last two starts, do YOU feel confident that he is going to go out there today and mow them down? Do you feel confident that the offense is going to keep bailing Lilly out from under his early-inning catastrophes?  July is only three weeks away, do YOU know where your Marquis de Suck is?  Still with US, that's where he is.

They're talking up Sean Marshall as the next  callup, saying that he has made the most progress in Iowa.  His last start?  Five runs in six innings.  But hey, he only walked one.

We can't lose sight of the fact that we still need a solid middle-of-the-rotation guy, to minimize the amount of time we have to see Wuertz and Lieber and Hart and yeah, even Marmol and Wood.   

Soriano is going to to the DL for six weeks with a broken hand.

The return of Micah Hoffpauir a day early won’t be the end of the roster moves:

Infielder-outfielder Micah Hoffpauir will come up today from Class AAA Iowa to take Soriano's place on the roster. The Cubs need another hitter for the American League parks coming up.

It's possible they could recall either outfielder Matt Murton or infielder-outfielder Eric Patterson from Iowa by Friday. Currently, the Cubs are carrying 13 pitchers.

Mark DeRosa moved from second base to left field Wednesday. Expect DeRosa to see significant time in left during Soriano's absence, which will be about six weeks or even longer.

So, I’m operating under the assumption that two of Patterson, Hoffpauir and Murton will be called up. Hoffpauir has the least baseball talent of the group, so of course he’s the only one that’s guaranteed a callup.

What I’ve done is taken a player’s minor league numbers and figured out their Major League Equivalency – essentially an estimate of how they would have performed in the majors. Then, I combined those numbers with their MLB numbers. All of those numbers were then fed into the ZiPS projection tool, which uses those figures (in combination with their career numbers) to come up with a projection. (I also did a projection on Soriano for the rest of the season, based upon his numbers to date. Here’s an explanation of how projection systems work.) Here’s the table:

All three of them represent a sizable falloff. Hoffpauir is the one most capable of replacing Soriano’s power in the lineup, but that’s really damning with faint praise here. Murton is probably the best hitter of the group, given his superior on-base percentage. (Although his projected advantage over Hoffpauir is mighty slim.)

Of course they still have to play defense. So let’s look at some defensive projections, measured in runs saved/allowed versus the positional average. Murton projects as a +3 corner outfielder over the course of a season, Patterson as a +8. (Soriano projects as a +6; the projections don’t know about his leg injuries this year.)

Hoffpauir’s defense is an absolute cypher. We can look at minor league defensive numbers – Hoffpauir played 13 games in the outfield last season at AAA and was just off the charts bad. But he only played in 13 equivalent games in the outfield, hardly enough to pass judgement on.

What we do know is this. Hoffpauir has been a first baseman pretty much since his days in college. That tells me that, up until Lou Piniella saw him hitting this spring, nobody involved in talent evaluation saw much of a future for him in the outfield. Based on a charitable set of assumptions – that he’s an average defensive first baseman, and that he has the tools necessary to play the outfield – you’re looking at a –5 fielder. Again, that’s the charitable view.

Let’s assume that Soriano misses 36 games, and let’s assume that whoever fills in for him will average 3.1 plate appearances per game. That’s 112 plate appearances. We can figure out runs above average on offense and defense over that period in time. So, put it together and what have you got?

Again: I'm making some charitable assumptions on defense for Hoffpauir. Even still, he lags significantly behind Murton, even while they're basically tied as hitters. The problem is that a lot of Murton’s value is wrapped up in his walks, while Hoffpauir’s value comes more from his low-wattage power.

That’s assuming that any of them were to be filling in for him in left field. There are two other players on the Cubs who could be filling in in left: Reed Johnson and Mark DeRosa. That requires a bit more chaining to figure out, because then you have to also look at who’s playing center or second while those two are playing fill-in. I’ll take a look at that later.

Reportedly a minimally displaced fracture in the fourth metacarpal in the left hand.

From the Trib:

Alfonso Soriano will be in a splint for three weeks with a broken bone in his left hand, and is expected to miss approximately six weeks of action.

X-rays of the hand taken at Northwestern Memorial hospital revealed a minimally displaced fracture of the left fourth metacarpal, located just under the fourth finger on his left hand.

Soriano was hit in the left hand by a pitch from Braves starter Jeff Bennett and was removed from the game for a pinch-runner in the second inning..

The Cubs will call up outfielder Micah Hoffpauir from Triple-A Iowa on Thursday to take Soriano’s place on the roster. 

More updates later.