"And With Me is Steve Stone -- Hey Stoney, When're You Getting Married?"

So, how do we feel about the Cubbies now that a deal for Soriano is supposedly done?

The obvious objection, I think, is that if they were willing to pay $17 million a year to Soriano this year they ought to have paid $15 million two years ago to Carlos Beltran, especially since there's the risk of Soriano actually getting assigned to play CF--at least, Gammons wrote that he could end up in CF yesterday in an article that didn't have the Insider tag on it for a couple of hours before someone in the ESPN junta realized their mistake.

But I digress. Let's look at the provisional roster right now:

C: Michael Barrett
1B: D-Lee
2B: Mark de Rosa
SS: Cesar Izturis
3B: Aramis Ramirez
RF: Jacque Jones
CF: Alfonso Soriano
LF: Matt Murton
IF: Theriot, Cedeno
OF: Bynum, Pagan
SPs: Zambrano, Prior and some combination of Rusch, Marmol (unlikely), Marshall, Hill (very unlikely), Miller
RPs: Wood, Cotts, Wuertz, Novoa, Eyre
CP: Dempster

I fucking hate Izturis (covered earlier on this very site), but this is pretty good except for--drumroll, please?--starting pitching. They need two arms, and I hope to Jebus one of them isn't Barry Zito. He got hit hard enough in stretches last year, and moving from the yawning cavern of Oakland Colisseum to the Friendly Confines does not augur well to me, personally.