Seemingly Unlikely Catalyst DeFrosts Chilly Post All-Star Cub Bats

In the week and a half both preceding and following the All-Star game, a Cubs team, which sent a total of eight players to the Midsummer Classic, is receiving all star performance out of their pitching staff, while their bats are frozen over like Lake Shore Drive in mid December. The Cubs, who had been the highest scoring team in baseball, struggled to score even one run in the first ten games back from the All-Star break. Do the Astros, Diamondbacks, and Marlins really have such lights out pitching staffs that they can easily decimate what is arguably the single best lineup in baseball this season? Maybe the Diamondbacks do now with the Big Unit's Eephus pitch, but not one Cubbie saw that pitch, and even had they known it was coming, I doubt they could have bunted it, much less hit it anywhere out of the infield or a player's glove.

And this wasn't just any Cubs team. This was a Cubs team who had been taking pitchers into the deepest counts of anyone in baseball This was a Cubs team who were drawing one of the highest percentages of walks in the majors. Not to mention that surprisingly, they weren't striking out. Since the late days of Sammy Sosa, Cubs fans have been subjected to hitter after hitter striking out due to chasing pitches out of the zone or just not focusing and seeing the ball. Yet, with the addition of Mr. Patience-Fukudome, the Cubs were taking pitches, even strikes sometimes, in pursuit of better pitches to hit, and fouling off the ones they knew they couldn't hit with authority. And then the MLB plague hit them and hitters up and down the Cubs' lineup started noticing the golden rule of modern baseball in the twenty-first century: home runs look even better in HD.

The Central Division champs of a year ago weren't hitting dingers all over. What they did was realize the truly important stat, RBIs. What happened to the days where the RBI column on the stat sheet reigned supreme? In the end, shouldn't that be what matters? You have to score runs to win games, more importantly you have to score more runs than the teams you face to win games. Someone has to drive those runs in, don't they? Home runs are great when you can get them, but the problem in today's baseball is that timely hitting and hitting for average are being sacrificed for the long ball. The issue is that players who are trying to hit home runs tend to widen their strike zones, chase bad pitches, and fly out or ground out far too often in an attempt to just hit the ball out of the ballpark. If batters are making outs instead of getting hits, they can't score runs or be scored by other batters, and the team isn't scoring runs and therefore not winning ballgames. During the Cubs' long inter-league play stint, the home run bug bit, and hard. Up and down the lineup batters were widening their strike zones and striking out more and more.

Right about now is when the Cubs fans start saying, “now wait a minute...Soriano was out of the lineup during that time span.” However, for about three weeks after Soriano went on the DL, the Cubs were still hitting, and were focusing on timely hits over big home runs.

Eventually when a team is struggling, especially in the North Siders' case, it only takes one guy to stand up and say that enough is enough, and time and time again the Chicago Cubs rely on one man to fill that role. Not Derrek Lee or Aramis Ramirez or even Alfonso Soriano. I am talking of Mark DeRosa.

DeRosa has come up with key RBI hits against the Brewers in the past three games, and the others have followed suit. Derrek Lee hits a game winning RBI double on Monday, the Cubs earned seven straight hits to start the sixth inning on Tuesday, and poured on the offense in a 7-2 win on Wednesday with DeRosa in the thick of it all. Wednesday night's game winning run almost belonged to DeRo, until Neal Cotts served up a solo home run to Prince Fielder in the bottom of the ninth to plate the last run of the game. Even Soriano had a solo home run on Monday while still quite fresh of the DL, and Fukudome is hitting his stride again.

Think back to this time last year, when the Cubs needed it, who was Mr. Clutch, the one guy who could bring them up from their slumps and bring them back up to their winning ways? Who never expected anything but the best from himself and did it while not being one of the high paid stars? Here's to you DeRo for DeFrosting the bats of your teammates time and time again, just when they need it.

-- Robert I is a freelance fiction writer, sports analyst, poet, and political cynic. His Blog can be found through his facebook LiveBlog or at Our Lives In Retrospect. His sports writing can be found at Bleacher Report.