Will You Never Learn?

Damnation is a Way of [L]ife too

The nice thing about being friends with Cubs fans is that they never learn. They're like Wile E. Coyote. The World Series is their Road Runner. They keep thinking they're going to catch that damn bird, and it's pretty funny to watch them die a hundred gruesome deaths.

Every year I make a bet with Adam that the Sox will win more games than the Cubs. Last year, he won and I had to wear a Cubs hat to work. This year, he's conceded* and let me repay the indignity by posting on his Cubs blog. I already feel dirty being here, so I'll make this short and sweet before taking three consecutive showers and then watching the Sox dismantle the Tigers for their eighth consecutive win.

Reserve Your Cubs World Series Tickets Now!

This is the year! Seriously. Kind of.

Major League Baseball has a brand new innovation this year that makes it possible for even us lowly Cubs fans to reserve our place in line for World Series tickets . . . in 2010! I wish I was kidding. Well, I wish I wasn't being sarcastic about not kidding.

For the low, low price of $20 ($10 for NLDS and $15 for NLCS) any fan can reserve the opportunity to buy World Series tickets at the home ballpark of his or her choosing (plus a $1 per order transaction fee, because it wouldn't be MLB if they didn't charge you for the convenience of buying the right to buy something).  So you can go right now and be assured that if the Cubs make the World Series, you'll have a chance to buy a ticket at face value. No strings attached. No chance in hell attached, either, but that's your gamble.

Also a Way of Life: [L]amebrained Planning

Mattress on the roof > Zambrano to the bullpen. Photo by e0nn

Why I Still Love the Cubs

As much as I want to hate this team, I'm still all warm and hugsy for them inside.

Who can say why I ever started loving the Chicago Cubs? The identifying factors are plain enough. They were on free TV. My mom liked them. I grew up near Chicago. I also tend to dive headfirst into emotional obsessions, so I guess it's no great mystery I fell for the first team that would have me.

Be it loyalty or pure, masochistic addiction, I have stuck with this team for almost 30 years. Along the way, I've developed enough reasons (very few of them win-related) to feel okay about this baseball relationship. My first baseball game was at Wrigley with my mom. My dad took me to games despite his disinterest in baseball. I've watched games with my best friends. I've had terrible days redeemed by Cubs wins. I've had otherwise pleasant days ruined by Cub losses. I got engaged after (not at) a Cubs game. I've skipped school and work to watch Cubs games. I've watched my two sons begin to cheer for them two, may DeRosa forgive me.

None of that makes the Cubs the right team to cheer for, but all of it together permanently binds this team to a lot of my fondest memories. I don't think being a Cubs fan is a way of life, but it's definitely part of my life, and not a part I'm willing to give up. I love this team.

But all along the way, I've never loved the front office. I didn't fall in love with the way the players got along off the field. As a kid, I didn't pay one cent of regard to the expectations of the media. I never based my Cubbie affections on Leon Durham's disposition after a tough loss. When Lee Elia cursed the entire city, I didn't care. As much as I'd like to see the off-field stuff go well and the front office to make excellent decisions, I'm not bailing on the team on account of non-baseball shenanigans.

In fact, there's a lot to love about the shenanigans. When Andre Dawson tried to kill Eric Show, I thought it was awesome. When Don Zimmer argued like a buffoon until I thought his left eye was going to pop out, I laughed. I loved it when Sandberg circled the bases stone-faced and I loved it when Sammy Sosa hopped and blew kisses to the camera. The behavior of the players and managers was something to enjoy, not emulate. I understood that as a little kid, and I don't know why I should lose sight of it now. It's great drama. Everybody has their opinions on who's to blame or who to side with, but I see no reason why the Cubs' rendition of Melrose Place should interfere with my enjoyment of losing baseball.

I never demanded the Cubs to be great people. I obviously don't base my allegiance on their knack for winning. I love the Cubs, not because it's the smart thing to do, but because . . . it's something to do. Somewhere along the way from the advent of sports talk radio to Cubs chat rooms to Twitter to this dumb blog, I seem to have let the extraneous topics that are sometimes fun to talk about distract me from the main thing I actually care about: baseball.

It is nice to watch a game. There are some fun players on this team, and I hope I'll be watching them for awhile. Having been a Bulls fan in the '90s, I know what it's like to cheer for the best team in the world. There's still something strangely satisfying about cheering for my team, the Cubs, the first team in any sport I ever cared about. The Cubs are bad, some of their best players are jerks, and they're organization is run by idiots. But they are my bad, jerky idiots. I love 'em.

Curse of Cubs Fans pt. 4: We're Morans

Whoever made this picture should have explained what upside-down-U means.

I'll try to keep this simple for all of us who are as dumb as I am. My paragraphs will be short.

I have already made it perfectly clear that Cubs baseball makes me stupid. I wish I was kidding. Or I wish I were kidding. I don't know, whatever. Watching the Cubs makes me dumb, and I think it attracts dumb people or people who wish to be as dumb as me. Or I. My head hurts.

The point is, the Cubs stink because it is the destiny of people dumb enough to cheer for them to never be rewarded for our foolishness. Stick your fingers under a running lawnmower, and you'll never in a hundred years be glad you did. Same goes for being a Cubs fan. 

There probably are some smart people who like the Cubs, but I think they're just put in place by Yankee fans to keep us from endangering the rest of the population. Without proper supervision, we might just go around rooting for car wrecks or proving we can fly off of buildings. Sure, we could prove Darwin right, but we might take out some intelligent bystanders along with us, and that just isn't fair.

You know what is fair? The Cubs never winning. We deserve it. We're dumb. Actually, the Cubs could probably win the World Series this year, and we just may be too stupid to realize what's going on. We're that dumb. I think we are. I don't know. 

All I do know is that being too stupid is the criticism usually levied against management and players when they don't succeed, so it's only fair for to subject ourselves to the same argument. I only know that because I tattooed it on my arm during an off day. 

I don't know what it means, though. If any fans of other teams would like to explain it to me, I'd really appreciate it.

Zambrano to the Bullpen: Please Tell Me We've Been Punk'd

Z-Ro. This move has no chance of working.

I feel like I'm insulting your intelligence by explaining that moving Carlos Zambrano to the bullpen is a bad idea, but I've heard enough support for the decision to warrant an official dissent. So hear it is:

This is stupid.

To reduntify what I've already said on Twitter, I'd love to play golf with Lou Piniella (and Jim Hendry and Tom Ricketts and whoever else thinks this is a good idea) just so I can observe that moment when he walks on to the green, eyes up the slope on a 15-foot putt, and busts out his driver in full swing. That is what putting one of your best starters (if not definitively the best) into the bullpen. Lou putting Zambrano in the bullpen is the equivalent of Maverick saying, "I'm too close for guns, I'm switching to missiles." Yes, I'm just blogging my tweets now, deal with it.

I don't care if he becomes the closer (he won't). I don't care if he's the 7th/8th-inning setup man. I don't care how many lefties are in the pen or how many of them are capable of getting outs on a semi-regular basis. Carlos Zambrano is most definitely one of the Cubs' three best starting pitchers, and putting him in the bullpen is a waste.

Let's look at the best probable outcome of this move. Zambrano becomes the 8th-inning setup guy for Marmol and pitches brilliantly. Zambrano records 35 holds for the Cubbies in 2010 (and yes, that's a lot, the most you'll ever see from any reliever). Zambrano pitches 80 innings from the bullpen. 80 freaking innings. He gets about 10 at bats. He's great because you remember all of his appearances in all those late-inning, high-pressure situations. But he's doing a job that's not that valuable. Yes, it's a job you want done, but it doesn't take a pitcher of Z's caliber to do it.

And you know what else you'll remember? All of those mountains of innings racked up in the first 2/3 of games by pitchers inferior to Zambrano. What, you don't think you'll notice when Tom Gorzelanny and Carlos Silva and (yeah, I love him to death, but it's true) Randy Wells rack up sample sizes large enough to reflect the pitchers they really are? Trust me, you will. At that point, the fraction of innings Zambrano will have compiled will tell you very little about his value as a relief pitcher other than the fact that relief pitchers aren't very valuable! 

This is having your CEO fold the laundry. This is buying a Slurpee with a $100 bill. This is playing your highest trump card to beat a deuce. It's paying a lot for this muffler. It's using a sledge hammer on a penny nail. It's putting on your tux before you enter a chat room.

If Carlos Zambrano pitches as well as is humanly possible out of the bullpen, it still won't amount to half the value of his contribution as a starter if he had a poor season. And if Silva and Gorzelanny will have to seriously outperform their projections to come anywhere close to a mediocre season for Zambrano. If those guys pitch well as starters and Z pitches well in relief, it will still prove that this move was stupid. It will show that either one of those guys would have almost certainly done well in relief and that the Cubs willingly shelved 75% of Zambrano's value.

The only sliver of slack I'll give Lou is the possibility that this is an extremely short term arrangement as Hendry tries to acquire another right-handed reliever who isn't good enough to start but is good enough to excel in the bullpen. It won't make this move any less stupid, but it will make it less damaging.

In the meantime, I really hope Ashton Kutcher has just Punk'd us, because this seems too overtly awkward and obscenely shocking to be true.

Mad about . . . you know

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore.

I can't say the people's names. I don't want to give them the satisfaction of the publicity. I don't even want to discuss the stupid topics they've decided to raise. You know who they are. You know what they're talking about. We all know how stupid it all is.

And yet, there it is, all over the news. All over the sports section. All along the interwebs. Saturating sports talk radio. Taking over Twitter.

So this is me not talking about it. This is me not reading it. This is me not touching the accused publications with a ten foot pole. I don't own a ten foot pole. But if I did, I wouldn't use it to touch those people. Actually, maybe I would. Never mind. I'm not talking about it.

Cubs Baseball Makes Me Stupid

This morning it hit me. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. And the promise of Cubs baseball was in the air. But for whatever reason, it took me about three hours before I was capable of composing a lucid thought. And it just took me another hour to think of the word lucid. I'm not even sure I used it right.

You see, on paper, I'm not an idiot. I got a 770 on the math section of my SAT. It doesn't make me Doogie Howser, but it's better than most cavemen. And just a few days ago I was feeling productive, clear-headed, and . . . I don't know, I can't think of the word for the third part in that series, but I'm pretty sure there was something else I was feeling that related to my brain functioning properly.

But as today approached, things started getting fuzzier. Words like butt and fart started getting funnier. And a third thing that would complete the comedic rule of 3's. Suddenly I realized that the problem is baseball. I'm pretty sure it's Cubs baseball, but the idiocy is really sinking in.

Cubs baseball is to me what sex is to George Costanza. Without it, the part of my brain that is normally obsessed with baseball is freed up to think about other things.


The offseason might actually make me understand baseball better.


But once that first spring training game starts,


I'm all "Take me to your leader!"

I couldn't find a way to embed that last video, and there's no way I'm figuring it out today. I should probably wrap up with some kind of witty conclusion. Uh . . . Cubs!!!