February 27th - A Historic Day of sorts

Today the Cubs marked another date on there ever growing history. Today was the first official game at the beautiful new Cubs Park in Mesa, AZ. Though what can be interpreted as a small event, this day was a celebration of the work to ring this state-of-the-art facility to Mesa.

The game was your standard Spring Training game. When I look at a box score for a Spring Training game (ST), I always look at a few specific things. First, I look to see the performance of potential opening day roster players and the work of the starting pitcher.

Today we saw the return of Jeff Samardzija to the mound. After a rocky start, he turned in a pretty solid spring debut. Additionally, it was nice to see Starlin Castro hitting the ball well.

I want to take a moment to address a fun trend I noticed on twitter. Baseball is a beautiful game that is driven by an amazing concept: failure. This is a sport in which it is celebrated when a player fails to reach base around 70% of the time. This being said, its time for the talk. Just because certain players didn't have a great day 1, does NOT mean they are going to have a bad spring.

The Cubs have the Halos tomorrow with our first look at Chris Rusin on the mound. I am interested to see how he looks early in the spring. I think he has a great shot at the rotation after putting together a solid base of work at the tail end of 2013. Additionally, Mr. Baez is seeing his first start of the spring. I would like to see him against MLB pitching, and no better example than Jared Weaver.

-CC