The long winter is (kind of) over and baseball is back, Cubs fans. 2011 should be a real interesting season for the Cubs. We’re happy to be cheering for the Cubs with you for another season. This season should answer a lot of questions for us.

* Is Starlin Castro going to continue to develop into the franchise player the Cubs are hoping he becomes?
* Is Carlos Zambrano going to get through a season without melting down?
* Will the Cubs be tempted to bring Aramis Ramirez back next year?
* Can Andrew Cashner become a solid starter?
* Can Fukudome get off to a hot start and the Cubs find another team interested in him?
* Was Tyler Colvin’s rookie season a fluke and/or can he be the 1st baseman of the future?
* Will Soriano EVER be worth even half of his contract?
* Will Mike Quade be able to take this team and mesh the highly paid veterans with the new young players?

I’m looking forward to finding out the answers to these questions.

We have some new things for you this season. We launched our Game-Chat at the beginning of Spring Training. If you’re watching a Cubs game and want to talk with some other fans, head over to our site and click on “Game Chat” underneath the header. It was a little slow in there during Spring Training, so if you checked it out and it was dead, understand that most people don’t care too much about pre-season baseball.

We aim to bring you more coverage of the Cubs’ minor league system in 2011.  The Cubs have some talented young players in the system and we’ll keep you up to date with their progress. We have started doing a weekly photo caption contest on our Facebook page and it’s also become a pretty good place for conversation about the Cubs.

We will continue our monthly game-watches at Twenty Sports Grille in Moline. Our first is tomorrow, Saturday April 2nd. Our May game-watch will be May 2nd. It’s a late west-coast game, but at 7pm, we’ll be showing “We Believe”, a documentary about the Cubs and Cubs fans. We are also well into the 3rd season of podcasting about the Cubs. The podcast will continue to come to you weekly and we’re looking at including more interviews in 2011.

Enjoy the baseball this weekend.  If you’re in the Quad Cities, come on down to Twenty on Saturday, and…. GO CUBS!

Since it’s Opening Day, I’ll leave you with this:

Filed under: Events, Ivy Envy, The Cubs, Uncategorized