Cubs BCB After Dark: Can Ben Brown stay in the rotation?
· Yahoo Sports
It’s another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest spot for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We’re so glad you decided to stop by. There’s no cover charge. We still have a few tables available. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
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BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you what you thought of the Cubs signing former top reliever Liam Hendriks to a minor league deal. Unsurprisingly for a minor league deal, 59 percent of you thought it was a big “meh.” But 29 percent of you liked the deal.
Here’s the part with the jazz and the movies. You’re free to skip that if you’d like.
So we are a little over a week away from the 100th anniversary of the birth of Miles Davis. So through next week, I’m going to feature music that honors jazz’s “Prince of Darkness” who revolutionized jazz several times over.
Tonight we have a performance that is just over a week old from the SFJazz concert honoring Miles. Perhaps no one knew Miles better in his final years than bassist Marcus Miller, who collaborated with him several times over his final decade. This is a tune written by Miller and included on Davis’ 1989 album Amandla called “Hannibal.” Miller joined the SFJazz Collective earlier this month for this performance. Terence Blanchard and Keyon Harrold are on trumpet, Tia Fuller on alto sax, Isaiah Sharkey on guitar, Warren Wolf on vibraphone, Edward Simon plays keyboards, and Kendrick Scott is the drummer.
Director Sidney Lumet had a fifty-year career in Hollywood. He was nominated for an Oscar for the first film he directed back in 1957, Twelve Angry Men. He would be nominated for Best Director three more times for three flat-out classics: Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The Verdict. He was also nominated for Best Screenplay for Prince of the City. He never won a competitive Academy Award, although he was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2004.
His final film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead came out in 2007 and while he wasn’t nominated for a directing Oscar for it, he probably should have been. (Although that might have been cruel as he would certainly have lost again as he would have been up against both the winning Coen Brothers for No Country for Old Men and Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood.) But Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is an intricate and engrossing crime story with an all-star cast that manages to tell a story in a nonlinear fashion without letting the audience get lost.
I missed Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead when it first came out (cut me some slack, my wife was about to give birth at any moment in late 2007) and I never got around to catching it until now. If you’re in the same boat as me, it’s definitely worth watching. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as two brothers. At first glance, Hoffman’s Andy seems like the respectable one. He has a good corporate job and is married to Marisa Tomei (“Gina” in the film). They have a good life. They have sex while vacationing in Brazil. Meanwhile, Hawke’s Hank is divorced from Amy Ryan, can’t keep a job and is several months behind in child support payments.
However, looks are deceiving. OK, Hank is a screwup, but Andy is actually a drug addict and has been embezzling money from his company, presumably to pay for his habit. Some if it likely went to fund his and Gina’s wealthy lifestyle as well. Hank also has a lot of family issues. As the oldest child, he feels neglected from their parents (played by Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) and feels like the youngest Hank got all of their love. Gina’s also cheating on him as he’s emotionally distant.
To raise the money that he needs to cover the money he’s been embezzling, Andy decides to knock off a jewelry store. Not any jewelry store, but the one owned by their parents. The brothers know the layout of the store and how much merchandise is there. They know the whole place is insured. They also know their parents’ schedule and they’ll rob the place when their elderly employee (who can’t recognize them) is the only one in the store. Andy insists that it’s an easy, victimless crime.
Needless to say, things go wrong, as they always do in a film like this. Covering up the first crime leads to more crime and a family being torn apart. I don’t want to spoil it beyond that, but the story unfolds non-linearly. The same events are told again and again from different points of view, starting at different times. Despite this, Lumet and screenwriter Kelly Masterson keep everything moving along smoothly and understandably. What unfurls is a delightful dance of crime and betrayal.
Hoffman is the main character here and the whole plot revolves around his personal and financial issues. I don’t know when Hoffman turned in a bad performance (I haven’t seen everything he was in so it’s possible he did) but he’s definitely at the top of his game here as Andy. I don’t think Hawke has quite the range as Hoffman had, but he’s very, very good at playing characters in his range and the screwup little brother Hank is definitely in his wheelhouse. Finney’s performance as the patriarch Charles is a controlled force of nature. He becomes obsessed with unravelling the mystery of the robbery which, considering that Andy and Hank are behind it, is going to become an issue.
This was Lumet’s final film and he went out on a high note. The combination of crime and family dysfunction hits all the right notes. Having a cast this good helps a lot too. Beyond the names mentioned, Michael Shannon has a small part as a tough guy who attempts to blackmail Andy.
Here’s the trailer for Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is on Prime and Criterion with a subscription, Kanopy and Hoopla with a library card (if your library subscribes), Tubi, Pluto and the Roku Channel with ads. It’s also on several other streaming services, so you should be able to see it.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the jazz and movies.
I don’t need to tell you about the injury issues with the Cubs’ starting rotation. Cade Horton is out for the season, Justin Steele is out until who knows when and Matthew Boyd is likely out for another 5 or 6 weeks. Shōta Imanaga has been great (I write this before his start tonight), but while Edward Cabrera hasn’t been terrible, he also hasn’t lived up to what we hoped he would be. The less said about Jameson Taillon the better.
Recently, manager Craig Counsell has turned to Ben Brown to fill a hole in the rotation. Brown had been a starter for the Cubs last year and frankly, he was bad with a 6.30 ERA as a starter. He particularly struggled with left-handed hitters, who had a .540 slugging percentage against him.
Last year, Brown relied mostly on his fastball, supplementing it with a knuckle curve and a change. But this year, Brown has developed a sinker and a new changeup. You can read more about Brown’s new pitches in this article from last week from Sara Sanchez, but the skinny is that he is throwing his 96-97 mile per hour fastball a lot less (from 56 percent down to 36) and his new sinker about 21 percent of the time. This third pitch to right-handers has been a game-changer. Not only is it an effective weapon, but it keeps hitters from sitting on the fastball or the knuckle curve. The sinker has made all of his pitches more effective and that shows up in Brown’s stat line. This season, his strikeout percentage is actually down a bit and his walk rate remains about the same. But the ground ball rate is up dramatically and the home run numbers have dropped precipitously as well. That has led to Brown’s ERA dropping from 5.92 to 1.60.
That 1.60 ERA is probably unnaturally low, but there’s no doubt that Brown is much better than last year. And since Counsell moved him to the starting rotation, Brown has been terrific. He’s made two starts and went four scoreless innings both times. He allowed one hit in one start and no hits in the other one. He walked one batter in each start. Brown struck out three in the first start against Texas and seven in his second start in Atlanta.
So the good news is that Brown has been dominating in two starts. The bad news is that he’s only thrown four innings in each start. He threw 46 pitches in the first start and 65 in the second. It’s hard to stay in the starting rotation when you’re asking the bullpen to cover five innings or more every time you start.
So tonight I’m asking you if you think that Ben Brown has the stuff to stay in the rotation all year. It would certainly be a huge boon to the team if Brown could slot into the rotation behind Imanaga and Cabrera. The Cubs are going to need to add at least one more starting pitcher at the trade deadline—having Brown in the rotation would mean that they might not need to add two.
So do you think that Ben Brown can stay in the starting rotation all year? Or at least enough of the year where the large majority of his innings will be as a starter the rest of the season?
Thanks for stopping by tonight. We’ve enjoyed hosting you. Please get home safely. Call a ride if you need to. Recycle any cans and bottles. Don’t forget any personal items. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow evening for more BCB After Dark.