The Zambrano Fallout
Before Saturday's Cubs-Sox game at US Cellular, both Lou Piniella and Cubs' assistant general manager Randy Bush talked to the media about the situation with Carlos Zambrano. Piniella called a team meeting at 3:45 pm and used it as an open forum for players to air their concerns with just about anything--Piniella said the main focus was the Zambrano issue. "This was a time that I felt we needed to talk about some things," Piniella said of the meeting. "We had very open discussion where players got involved. ... One of the things that we [talked about] was the fallout from yesterday."
While Piniella wouldn't go into much detail about what was said in the meeting, he did say that if and when Big Z returns to the team, he won't have a spot in the rotation. Instead, Tom Gorzelanny will be moved into a starting role. Neither Piniella nor Bush were pleased with the fact that Zambrano chose to go out to dinner with White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen after Friday's ballgame. Both mentioned they would have liked to have seen Carlos take the incident more seriously than "yukking it up," as Bush put it.
Bush was still waiting on work from the MLB as to the clubs' options for Zambrano but did say that Zambrano had not, as far as he knew, reached out to anyone in the organization since the incident. "It's impossible for a team to function with the things that were said," Piniella said. "Winning and losing are important, but they're not that important. Things that were said were not apropos."
Piniella did not think, however, that Zambrano has thrown his last pitch for the Cubs. He said he "would think at some point," Zambrano could return and Bush mentioned the Cubs have had no talks about trading Zambrano at this point.
