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I’m going to begin a series of end-of-season “I told you so” posts by recalling how almost every writer and sports-talk radio host in town kept insisting this spring that the Cubs couldn’t win with Alfonso Soriano as leadoff man. (Give you one guess who I’m making the poster boy for that knee-jerk attitude.) You don’t hear that talk much anymore, do you? Even though it makes perfect baseball sense according to the new logistical book put forth by statheads who declare that a team needs a player with good on-base skills to bat leadoff. That most definitely is not Soriano, even though his barely respectable 41 walks (11 of them forced upon him as intentional, it should be noted) in 102 games have helped produce an equally respectable .352 on-base percentage on top of his .289 batting average. Yet manager Lou Piniella, an astute baseball man, has gone against the statheads and simply left Soriano in the leadoff role, and it’s worked. Why?
