Taking stock

It's a fairly quiet day, baseball-wise, so I thought I would point you in the direction of an old Baseball Desert favourite: Thomas Boswell, who likes the Red Sox and Cubs for 2004. Boswell has this to say about the Cubs:

Meanwhile, the Cubs are on a six-game winning streak, the longest in the majors. How is this possible? They won't even have Mark Prior back in the rotation until May. Yet their last six starting pitchers have all picked up wins with Matt Clement striking out 13 and taking a no-hitter into the seventh inning Sunday against the Mets. If the Red Sox can humiliate the Yankees without their best player, Nomar Garciaparra, why shouldn't the Cubbies be able to charge into first place without their ace? See, wasn't it a superb idea to get ex-Cub Greg Maddux as a rotation insurance policy?

Write this down so you can mock me later. By September, there will be serious discussions of whether the current Chicago rotation -- yes, the Cubs -- is the best five-man assemblage in history. At the top, Prior and Kerry Wood (3-1, 2.60) could be as dominant as almost any pair ever. But the famous tandems like Koufax and Drysdale or Johnson and Schilling didn't have three top arms behind them. Clement (3-1) and Carlos Zambrano (2-0, 1.29) would be fine No. 3 starters on most staffs. The key is Maddux, just 10 wins from 300. If his last sharp seven-inning start is a tip-off that he has one last true Mad Dog year left in him, then the Cubs are a truly special team.

I'm as enthusisastic as Boswell is about a season that's barely under way, and I hope that his April analysis still rings true come October:

With a start like this, it's going to be hard to prevent '04 from being one of baseball's most entertaining seasons.