Cubs Online Starter Kit

I got nothing much to say today except that I'm ready for a new series uninterrupted by scheduled days off, but there are plenty of people with lots of worthwhile things to read, so I thought at the outset of the season I'd point you to some of my favorite places to go online for Cubs-related material.

A League of Her Own (LOHO) Julie and the Gang make this a great place to go for laughs, biting commentary (and I mean there's both scathing criticism and insight into the biting community), and intriguing/intelligent/slightly insane discussion, especially during live game threads. It's a lot of fun.

Another Cubs Blog (ACB) This place is intellectual, but definitely not high brow. Their current slogan, "A thoughtless and vile corner of Cubdom," is only half true. The discussion isn't for everybody, but the content is actually more profound than profane. The series previews and game recaps are must reads, and this post from today's lineup is evidence of the wealth of insight into the Cub farm system you'll find over there. If you're open to actually learning about your team instead of just airing ill-informed opinions, ACB is a welcome place.

Cubscast I've made it no secret that this is my favorite Cubs podcast. Lou and Sheps have a handle on the right mix of information, humor, even-keel perspective, and emotional attachment. They take the team seriously, but not too much so. It's also an extremely well produced program, definitely worth a listen if you haven't yet. Nice posts on their blog, too, and great discussion in the message boards.

Tales from Aisle 424 Tim McGinnis is hilarious. He has an excellent mix of good Cubs information, merciless rebukes of imbecilic beat-reporter pseudojournalism, and everyman rants (if every man were, in fact, really, really funny). Seriously, it's very entertaining. Well, I'm being serious, the blog isn't always. But sometimes. That's not really the point. I digress . . .

There are many more good Cubs blogs around this guy's Intertestines. If you want to know, I mean really know, what a pitcher in or around the Cubs' system can do, Harry Pavlidis will fill you in on Cubs f/x. Matt Hardee has started up a pretty cool blog with his view from the Wrigley Rooftops. And all the blogs I link to in the sidebar are fine, upstanding citizens of blogsville. I need to update the list with more, I think, but this is the best way I know how to tell you where to start.

Oh, and go Cubs.

Cubs Win! Time to lapse into apathy

Cubs win. Let's celebrate with chilled champagne! Or just . . . chill.

I'm ecstatic the Cubs won. Tyler Colvin got his first homerun of his major league career. Marlon Byrd hit his second as a Cub. Randy Wells and the bullpen combined to shutout the high-powered-ish looking Atlanta Braves offense. I missed most of it. All of this is history now.

But now that we've established the Cubs won't go 0-162, it's time to complete the cycle of emotional futility. It goes like this:

Stage 1: Despondency of Defeat. After another year of not winning the World Series, Cub fans spend the tail end of the season longing for football season to start or (if we're lucky enough to postpone the demise of our hopes and dreams into October) we spend the end of the postseason pondering the perennial pain that is Cubbie failure. This is not a happy time.

Stage 2: The Winter of Our Discontent. Baseball is over, the hot stove isn't all that hot, and we long for the baseball season to help us recover from the dismal outcomes of the gridiron. Pain turns to numbness, regret turns to restlessness. And then talk turns to improving the team.

Stage 3: Hot Stove Cooking. This is the warmup time for our hoping mechanism. Maybe the Cubs will sign Albert Pujols. Maybe they'll trade John Grabow for Albert Pujols. Maybe we'll have a fire sale that results in the Cubs rebuilding with an entire team of Albert Pujols clones. There's plenty of time for griping about the deals that are made and bemoaning the rumors that never materialize, but it's the place where positivity gets its first major foothold of the offseason.

Stage 4: Groundhog Day. We know it's not spring yet, but Jim Hendry moseys out of his hole at Cubs Convention and tells everyone how much more suffering we'll have to endure. There might be more snowstorms and there might be more deals, but we're not all that hopeful or fearful of too many of either. We start premature imaginations of spring even thought it's 12 degrees outside. We buy game tickets and start looking at lawn furniture. Then we wait.

Stage 5: Spring Training Twitterpation. Spring training baseball is here! Hooray! There is baseball! The snow is melted, the trade rumors are dead (except for those filthy piles of plowed snow and Heath Bell theories), and the soggy brown grass of last year's hopes begins to green with the promise of next year becoming now. Ultimate joy!

Stage 6: Spring Training Thaw & Corresponding High Pollen Count. Uh, yeah, after that first spring training game we all realize that practice baseball is really pretty tedious. A week or so in we're almost allergic to it. We swear it's a good idea to open our windows and go for long walks to breathe in the fresh baseball, but it aggravates our sinuses every single time. We need real baseball.

Stage 7: Opening Day. Baseball is back. Spring break is broken. We're all on Sao Padre Island, and none of us get sunburns. There is drinking and merriment and music galore. Maybe Steven Tyler and James Taylor show up somewhere, but it gets a little weird, and then we realize that maybe it would be nice to just sleep in our own beds with no strange people along for the ride.

Stage 8: Overwrought Optimism/Dread. Depending on the results of the first game or two (or 14), this is either the honeymoon or the hangover. The Cubs win their first game, it's the year. 162-0 until we finally lose one, prove me wrong. World Series. OR. The Cubs lose their first game(s). The season's over. Worst. Team. Ever. Jim Hendry is the reincarnated Billy Goat come to curse us forever, so help me De Rosa.

Stage 9: Back to Life, Back to Reality. Here we are now. The Cubs have lost. The Cubs have won. No game is the end of the world. No game is the solution to all our problems. There are just a lot of games, and they are enjoyable in their slow, loping pace. The breakneck race through baseball infatuation enters the "oh, yeah, I love you in a Lockhorns kind of way even though your meatloaf sucks" phase really quickly. I love it for what it is, and now I'm ready to take baseball for granted again.

Stage 10: Well, you know, it's just a long, circuitous orbit back to Stage 1.


Hey, I'm just glad we're in Stage 9 again. It really is my favorite stage. The losses still stink, but there's "plenty of baseball left" for several months. And the wins are still pretty fantastic. Not "break out the champagne" fantastic, but still a lot of fun.

Holey Rotten Starts: Cubs Must Avoid 0-14

Built in 2007, O-14 tower in Dubai commemorated a dubious 10-year anniversary.

Watching the Cubs start the season losing to a Braves team that looks really good has me all nostalgic for the bad old days. In 1997, the schedule makers decided to curse the Cubs in a much more palpable way than any goat-loving tavern owner could ever accomplish. They gave the Cubs ten straight games against the Marlins and Braves.

The starting pitchers the Cubs faced looked like this: Kevin Brown, Al Leiter, Alex Fernandez, Denny Neagle, John Smoltz, Greg Maddux,  Al Leiter, Alex Fernandez, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine. Looking back, the 0-10 start shouldn't have been too surprising, although I did expect more from the Cubs' freshly imported closer, Mel Rojas. Foolish me. By the time dust settled . . . well, the dust never really settled. The Cubs lost the first 14 games of the season and never reached .500.

Yeah, the 1997 team and this current 2010 squad share a similarity to the O-14 tower in Dubai in that all three have quite a lot of holes. But the Cubs schedule doesn't start nearly as brutally. After the Braves, the schedule lightens up considerably. Whether the Cubs can take advantage of that is another story. But it's not 1997.

Let's just get the rock out of Atlanta and see what happens next, shall we? Game on.

The L Flag Flies Again

Oh look, another El.

At some point, the Cubs will win a game. If they're the worst team in the league, they'll win 60 times.

At some point, the Cubs will lose again. If they're the best team in the league, they'll still lose 50 more times.

This is what happens when you watch baseball. Almost everything you see, you'll see a lot of it. Maybe the bullpen sucks. They (Grabow) gave up two runs. They will give up a lot more. Maybe the offense sucks. They scored only two runs. They'll score a lot more. There will be a lot of wins. There will be a lot of losses. 

There will be a lot of panic. I refuse to do so until after they win at least one game. I'm not going to get too riled up watching the plane crash before it leaves the runway.

Be Careful What You Wish for, Cubs Fans: You Just Got It

All winter long, we wanted Opening Day to come so we could enjoy Cubs baseball once again. "Oh please, let every day that stands between now and Opening Day go by in a blink, and let Opening Day last forever!" the hypothetical Cubs fans prayed. And yesterday, we got our wish.

Then reality hit us, not unlike the jolt received by Joel Miller in the following clip:



He was so excited that the moment he had been waiting for was finally upon him . . . and all he had hoped for knocked him clear off his happy horse.

For me, Opening Day hit me like that fire hose, more because of the migraine that began (and pretty much finished) the day than because of the game itself. This is all I can post because it won't go away. I will say I saw this coming. Not the Cubs loss or the blowout nature of it all, but I knew that the day after Opening Day brings with it the realization that we've got to sit through 161 more of these pesky little ballgames. So we have until Wednesday to prepare for the next drink.

2010 Cubs Predictions: They're NOT Gonna Happen

More optimistic than psychic, all hope and no sense, these predictions are guaranteed never to come true. But if even one does, I will brag about it for the rest of my life. Tribune photo by Zbigniew Bzdak (Also posted at LOHO)

This is the last worthless weekend that we'll have to spend. All introductory east-coast-biased Sunday Night Baseball aside (that's right, Yankees and Red Sox, we don't care what happens between the two of you, no matter how much Joe Morgan insists that we must), Monday marks the dawn of the 2010 baseball season. So we're running out of time to make bold  educated  sabermetrically generated half-baked predictions for what the Cubs will be able to accomplish this year.

If the LOHO NCAA Pick 'Em Challenge has taught us anything, it's that my annual tradition of picking Kansas to win it all is guaranteed to go dreadfully wrong every year (except in the occasional instance when I break from tradition and allow them to succeed . . . sorry, Jayhawks). And if it has taught us two things, it's that I suck at predicting things. So here is a list of things I'm utterly confident will not happen, which is precisely why I am prognosticating that they will:

Alfonso Soriano will hit 40 homers. Do you remember last April? Soriano started the season hotter than a Gatorade-machine-bashing tantrum. And then he decided to test his knee reflex on the left-field wall. I'm hoping it was the injury that caused the precipitous production decline and not a failure to renew some Faustian deal with the devil. If I'm wrong (and I usually am) we'll be seeing more of Tyler Colvin in left than anyone is really hoping to get. (Tyler Colvin's mom excluded, of course.) If I'm right, Wrigley could be hosting its fair share of October baseball.

The 163 mph Hoax Turns 25

One barefoot, boot-clad hurler put one by us in unforgettable fashion.

I'll never forget the cool April evening when my dad came to dinner carrying an issue of Sports Illustrated. That was enough right there, you understand. It really didn't matter what came next from his lips. My jaw hit the table when I saw that strange concoction of contradictions before me: my dad, an open issue of SI in his hand, and a look of transported glee on his face. This. Did not. Compute.

Two things you have to understand about my dad: 1) He hates sports. He likes to listen to Ron Santo and Pat Hughes on the radio because he loves radio and the hilarious interplay that unfolds between the pitches. He used to like to go to baseball games in Cleveland (near where my mom's family lived) and hockey games in Detroit (where he grew up) because he enjoyed strolling the arenas and watching fights break out in the stands. He even liked coming to watch me play baseball or even bringing me and my siblings to Wrigley, because he loves me. But make no mistake—my dad hates sports. 2) He's a professional reader. He is to oral interpretation what Vin Scully is to baseball play-by-play. For almost my whole life he's been the host of the internationally syndicated Music thru the Night, which (if my numbers aren't lying to me) is the top-rated late-night radio program in Chicago. My point is, the man can read a story. And when he finds a story he likes, you can be pretty sure that he will read it to you until you like it even more.

It was this second trait that so obviously won out that night, and my curiosity was piqued as to why a sports journal would, for once, trigger my father's passion for storytelling. He sat down, donned his reading glasses, quieted the room with his eyes (no small feat with six kids huddled around the table), and said in his deep yet gleefully quivering radio voice: "Listen . . . to . . . thissssss."

He began with the headline and subhead: "The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch. He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball."

Okay. My dad was reading me a story about baseball. Or Yogi Bear. I wasn't sure, but either way, he had my attention.