Picture of Chris Clarke by Todd Johnson

The Iowa Cubs have been playing for three days already and the big league club debuted yesterday. Tonight, the rest of the Cubs’ full season affiliates get underway all at 6 p.m. Everyone here at North Side Bound is very excited to have all four teams playing. The Smokies will be playing at home against Chattanooga. South Bend will be home against the Quad Cities while Myrtle Beach will be at Charleston.

At South Bend, Chris Clarke will get the start to open the season. We will hopefully find out who is starting for the Smokies and Pelicans this morning.

With last year’s infusion of talent in the draft, the trade deadline, and international free agency, there are a lot of new faces who will be playing their first full season as Cubs. From Jordan Wicks to James Triantos to Caleb Kilian to Pete Crow-Armstrong and many more, it is going to be fun watching them play. Some, like Cristian Hernandez and Moises Ballesteros, will be playing in Extended Spring Training. 

As for what will happen today, I am going to be expecting the unexpected today.

There’s going to be a prospect that surprises us today with their performance. It could be a reliever, it could be a guy that’s not on any top prospect list. I’m actually going to expect that to happen. Usually it does.

As for the big-named players, I don’t have any expectations in terms of performance. 140+ games is a long season and they are going to have good games and bad games. I just know it’s going to be fun watching tonight’s starting pitchers take the mound but I don’t expect them to go more than three or four innings at most. These guys are still trying to build their arms back up whoever they may be.

When it comes to our affiliate roster predictions, we were off by just one player – Luis Vazquez at Tennessee. That’s some pretty good calculating!

Just to review, here are the previews for each affiliate that we put out this week.

IOWA
TENNESSEE
SOUTH BEND
MYRTLE BEACH

There were however 3 cuts this week. Austin Krzeminski, Tyler Suellentrop, and Benjamin Rodriguez were all let go this week. Good luck to all three in following their dreams.

I will be back tonight at 6 PM to do some live blogging. I’ll have some video and some tweets about the games and hopefully I can get action as soon as it happens! It’s been a long six months since we last had minor league baseball where all four affiliates were playing on the same day. It’s going to be very exciting!

See you at 6!

We also did a Video Roundtable that came out yesterday.