When you get around to talking about the Hot Stove for the Cubs, consider a deal for Ichiro leveraging either Soriano or Lee. This move works on the following levels:

- Seattle’s players hate Ichiro.
- Seattle won’t want to lose their marquee player without getting a marquee-level player in return.
- Seattle is in flux and would be interested in making a deal.
- Their contracts are similar: Ichiro’s is 09:$17M, 10:$17M, 11:$17M, 12:$17M and Soriano’s is 09:$16M, 10-14:$18M. This is where the Cubs might have to add value to a deal since Ichiro is cheaper, albeit older by 2 years, than Soriano. Throw in Guzman or Samardzija. Neither projects to more than relief or 4th/5th starter roles.
- Cubs would get their lead-off hitter (career .377 OBP)
- Cubs would break-up the Soriano-Ramirez-Lee righty tri-fecta which has two years of post-season stank on them.
- Hoffpauir could play LF and platoon with DeRosa & Fontenot (cycling DeRosa back and forth from 2B to LF).
- Fukudome would have a countryman to play with in the OF. He seemed overwhelmed and lost in the second half and getting a fellow Japanese player could do wonders for his play in ‘09.

Or…trade Lee instead of Soriano…you still get all the same benefits and Seattle might even like this more as Lee is more of a team guy and costs less than Soriano. Talk this up…I think this is a realistic move that could actually give Cub fans hope in 2009.

Here’s my quick take on what to do with the Cubs roster. There’s not much to do unless we can make a deal or score a high OBP lefty free-agent CF:

Cotts - contract up - re-sign
Fox - contract up - let go
Gaudin - contract up - re-sign
Guzman - contract up - re-sign
Howry - contract up - let go
Lieber - contract up - let go
Marmol - contract up - re-sign
Marshall - no data available - re-sign … take Harden’s spot in rotation
Samardzija - 5y/10m til 2011
Wood - contract up - re-sign
Dempster - contract up - re-sign
Harden - contract up - 2009 option @ 7m - decline
Lilly - 4y/40m til 2010
Marquis - 3y/21m through 2009
Weurtz - contract up
Zambrano - 5y/91.5m til 2012

Blanco - 2009 option @ 3m - accept
K.Hill - contract up - let go
Soto - contract up - re-sign

Cedeno - contract up - re-sign
DeRosa - 3y/13m through 2009
Fontenot - contract up - re-sign
Hoffpauir - contract up - re-sign
Lee - 5y/65m til 2010
Ramirez - 5y/75m til 2011
Theriot - contract up - re-sign

Edmonds - contract up … replace with FA or Pie … keep if can’t find good lefty replacement
Fukudome - 4yr/48m til 2011
Johnson - contract up - re-sign
Pie - contract up - re-sign
Soriano - 8y/136m til 2014
Ward - contract is up … replace with Hoffpauir

Contract data courtesy of Cot’s Contracts.

Sometimes an oversight can lead to interesting results. We were testing a servlet-based application and in our test scripts, we had a hitch where if the script encountered an error, the re-try cycle didn’t have think time included. Which means anytime the script encountered an application error, it would then send re-try requests at a sub-second (inhuman) rate.

This increased our load from 10 pages per second to over 100 … our first indicator that something was wrong. We saw a corresponding spike in CPU from 8% to over 90% as the single JVM system tried to handle this new load. The application seized and thread dumps uncovered an interesting side effect. (more…)