George Carlin was fond of asking why things would go "down the tubes"?

"What tubes?" he'd ask. "Have you seen any tubes? Where are these tubes? And where do they go? And how come there's more than one tube?"

If he'd ever seen Rich Hill, he'd have known.

Hill is headed for Arizona. Not as part of a trade, unfortunately. It was only about 8 months ago when people were still trying to cobble together statistics to defend Rich Hill. Today, the Cubs' brass is trying to cobble together a remediation plan.

As Hill goes down, Jeff Samardzija has been promoted into Hill's slot at Iowa. This sounds like a plan to get Jeff some more visibility to setup trades that clearly need to be made. With Eric Patterson, Micah Hoffpauir, and Matt Murton all contributing and the Cubs needing at least one more starter, these guys and at least one of the Sean's (Marshall and Gallagher) will be the principals in any such dealings.

What looked to be a thin minor league system may just have enough guys performing well at the right time to allow the Cubs to add the one more piece they need to lock down a pennant.