HELL YEAH I'M GOING TO PANIC ABOUT THE CUBS WHY NOT

The Chicago Cubs, the Reigning Champions of Baseball, have returned this season and they are floundering.  They are under .500, in third place in baseball's most putrid division. They have just dropped six in a row; the last time that happened was in 2012 when they were literally trying to lose as many baseball games as possible so they could draft Kris Bryant, and their roster consisted of a bunch of Spinal Tap drummers.  That was the year they sent a possibly fictional baseball player to the All-Star game who then vanished from the face of the Earth like a reverse Roy Hobbs.

A new controversial theory suggest that Bryan LaHair eventually, over 
the course of millenia, evolved into modern birds

The Let Cooler Heads Prevail people are blogging away about their BABIPs and Regressions to the Mean, and the Cubs' placement in a division full of teams that appear to have just learned about baseball through Wikipedia entries illustrated solely with blurry pictures of Matt Stairs.  Yes, the Cubs will play more than 100 more games and have plenty of time to right the ship.  And yes, after last year's long-awaited championship ended a century-long drought, the Cubs could move to St. Louis, form a splinter group of ultra-Cardinalism that preaches a more stringent, boring, and righter way to play baseball, and slather themselves in ketchup while denouncing all of the weird condiment, sausage, and pizza preferences that have somehow become sacrosanct markers of civic identity and I wouldn't care for like five years.  The Cubs are shitty right now and it's time to strike while the iron is hot.

The Cubs destroyed the world last year and seemed to have enough young superstars, prospects, and briefcases full of Ricketts money that is currently being used to terraform the entirety of Lakeview into Wrigley Field to remain a juggernaut for years.  The Cubs would, by all accounts, continue to rampage through the NL Central and threaten in the playoffs.  Instead, the Cubs have stumbled and instead of having to write about how the Despised Cub Men are bludgeoning the National League with their Run Differential and Joe Maddon is now managing entire series as a new kooky character he invented called Vance Goatwright, we can settle into the comforting routine writing about how the Cubs are beefing it in the field, stranding enough players on the bases to require the mobilization of a baserunner helicopter rescue service, and altogether playing a flailing, inelegant, moron baseball that can only be described by years honed watching the Cubs try to play baseball.

The Cubs' main problem all season has been the starting pitching.  Their collection of Vintage Pitchers have begun to show their age.  John Lackey now exists only as a gleaming-toothed grimace tracing the path of a ball into the bleachers.  Kyle Hendricks accidentally erased the program on his graphing calculator that allowed him to strike guys out with 86 mile-per-hour fastballs.  Brett Anderson is on the Disabled List with standing on the mound emitting an unearthly howl as his skull exploded all over "Cowboy" Joe West.  Jake Arrieta's chest is swallowing up his arms and legs.  I read somewhere that this Jon Lester guy can't even throw to first.

Highly scientific diagram of the past two seasons of Arrieta pitching

The Cubs are balancing out their shaky pitching by swinging bats made of ashed cigarettes.  The most visible example of this is the struggling Kyle Schwarber but that might be because he is large enough to be visible from space.  Schwarber, who beefed his way into fans' hearts by waddling around and damaging Wrigley Field signage with his towering ding shots has been one of the worst hitters in baseball this season.  A man who made a miraculous recovery from a catastrophic knee injury to become a World Series hero against some of the best pitchers in baseball after a couple days of live pitching is now flailing against anonymous innings-eaters on tanking teams and relievers recently discharged from the Kevin Gregg Institute of Goggled Belly-Itching.  Schwarber is also a contributor to the Cubs' regression from a world-historical baseball defense to something resembling ordinary by doing things like belly-flopping so hard during a pouring game that the umpires immediately called for the tarp and a large piece of Schwarber-shaped turf.

Schwarber is not the only Cub struggling, though.  Only Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Ben Zobrist, and part-timers Miguel Montero and Jon Jay have a wRC+ over 100.  Addison Russell is hitting barely better than Schwarber, but still at least playing stellar defense.  The problem has been exacerbated by a road trip where the Cubs refused to knock in baserunners-- thousands of years from now, they will find the silhouettes of runners trapped forever in scoring position in Southern California.

Cubs advanced analytics tell us it is impossible to score from third 

base because of Zeno's Paradox

The sample sizes are small.  The division is bad.  The Cubs preceded their 0-6 slump with a 7-2 homestand, and they returned to Wrigley Field with a chance to get right back into it with a series against the Cardinals.  

But I'm going to take it in and savor it, this rare patch of Cubs Panic.  Last year, they came out of the gate as the best team in baseball, made it to the World Series, and won it in a game that exorcised all of the Cubs demons by essentially running through a truncated greatest hits compilation of choking before finally holding on in rain-delayed extra innings. Before last year, every hiccup was a stumble in a race against the destruction of another season in a losing streak so endless that the televised footage of their playoff games featured a large number of cemeteries.  They were a doomsday cult. Now, the Cubs are a mere underperforming baseball team.  This losing streak has been irritating and frustrating, and completely lacking in the existential despair that has accompanied every Cubs downturn in any year that they've actually been supposed to be good, but after a lifetime of pessimism and reflexive baseball doom-mongering, it's been strange to watch the Cubs flounder around, briefly worry, and then reach for the nearest piece of licensed championship memorabilia and go back to watching baseball like an approximation of a normal person.

WEEK 6: The Vandals of Homecoming

Last season, Iowa and Northwestern had tremendous seasons.  Then, they both got utterly demolished in bowl games-- Northwestern by a budding Tennessee power and Iowa by a Stanford team drawing on weeks of uninterrupted access to the source of its strength, Pacific Standard Time.  Both of their 2016 seasons have been disappointing and involved gruesome home losses to FCS teams.  Still, Iowa fans felt confident about their Homecoming showdown against the Northwestern after winning three in a row, the last two in hideous blowouts.

Northwestern plays so many Homecoming road games that they have started traveling to 
opponents in a parade float

Instead, Northwestern held on for a demoralizing 38-31 win over the Hawkeyes.  Ifeadi Odenigbo beat C.J. Beathard hard, sacking the Iowa quarterback four times, occasionally using a helpless lineman as a battering ram to more effectively knock him over.  Justin Jackson ran for 171 yards, including a 58-yard breakaway.  And Clayton Thorson had a tremendous game, running for one touchdown and finding emerging star receiver Austin Carr for three through the air.

Thorson downloads football data into his brain, not only preparing for Iowa but also for a 
lucrative career as a futuristic data courier able to match wits with the Yakuza Cyber Dolphin

This year's version of Iowa has played like a shadow of last year's undefeated Rose Bowl juggernaut.  At the same time, Northwestern managed to win its first road game, deploy a functioning offense, and sow uncertainty and disappointment in an Iowa fanbase inaugurating a new contract for Kirk Ferentz that will last until the end of his life and then allow him to remain on the Kinnick sidelines stuffed like a Jeremy Bentham autoicon for generations.

THE PLAY IS THE THING

Last week's post explored the possibility of an upset triggering cries of uncalled holding penalties that would resonate throughout Johnson County, and the game became weighted with referee controversy. The crowd became so angry at ludicrous refereeing decisions at one point that they hurled a chorus of abuse at the officials. A few miscreants pelted the field with refuse.  This situation is not new.  Last year, a series of sound decisions from learned referees that kept erasing Wisconsin touchdowns led to some rowdy Badgers to hastily assemble snowballs in a gruesome reenactment of the Godfather tollbooth scene against their own cheerleaders.

Their complaint stemmed from a sequence where Odenigbo appeared to grab Beathard's facemask on a sack and drew no penalty.  The Hawkeyes punted and, on the ensuing drive, an Iowa player got flagged for a facemask against Justin Jackson and then got an additional fifteen yards for reciting Rule 9 Article 8 of the Official NCAA Football Rules of the Game at the referee.  Ferentz was left with no recourse except to stage a play for the referees featuring egregious missed facemask penalties and hope that the ensuing guilt drives them to madness, allowing him to unmask their villainy to the world and maybe get a break on a pass interference penalty sometime.

PLAYER KING: Out, out, thou zebra, Fortune! All you refs,
In general synod 'take away his flags;
Break all the spokes and fellies from the facemask,
And bowl the round ball down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends!'
LORD DELANY: This is too long

I have no idea why Northwestern has benefited from postmodern touchdown catch rules or facemask indifference, but we can all assume it is part of a vast Big Ten conspiracy to promote Northwestern football at the expense of its larger and more well-known opponents because that possibility is incredibly funny to me.

THE CHICAGO CUBS ARE MY DOOMSDAY CULT

Well, it’s finally here. The Chicago Cubs lived up to their threat of dominating 162 games of regular season baseball, becoming the best Cubs team any of us will likely see in our lives, and entering the playoffs as World Series favorites. May whatever god you believe in have mercy on us all.

The baseball playoffs constrict the game's leisurely pace into a maddening, stressful crucible.  They are coin flips-- thrilling, exciting, unpredictable, incredible for a team that unexpectedly blunders into them, and seemingly designed to drive to madness the fans of the game's best team whose chance to end a century-straddling championship drought are roughly the same as ending up on the wrong side of Russian roulette.

Baseball, like all sports and entertainments, remains entirely ancillary to our life, but for me the times when the Chicago Cubs manage to scrape their way into the playoff grinder become stressful because they are the only sports team whose every success is shrouded in the morbid certainty of death.

The Cubs cannot make the playoffs without that grim reaper Joe Buck appearing on our televisions with his phalanx of satanic goat heads, reminding us that the Cubs have seen generations of fans stretching back to times before widespread motorcars back through two world wars and peak mustache ubiquity to their graves and they are coming for you.  This is not a surprise since Buck himself revealed that his own obsession with youth and aging led him to nearly losing his voice from repeated visits to the Monkey's Paw Hair Plug Clinic.

Autumn, when Joe Buck appears to remind you that you will die

I have often said after 2008, when another loaded Cubs team failed to win a single playoff game, that I had accepted that I will never see the Cubs win a World Series in my lifetime. But I clearly don't believe that fully, because if I did, I would not have spent this entire season dreading the playoffs which have a very good chance of once again dashing whatever faint hope I pretend not to have.  This is not a normal person sports relationship.  My relationship to the Cubs is less like sports fandom than fealty to a doomsday cult, whose certainty in the end of everything only reinforces the desire to see it happen. 

Maddon promises that, after the baseball demons come and reveal that playing the right way 
actually means that they devour continents and send them to their digestive systems, which 
are portals to far-away galaxies, the believers will travel the galaxies in this interstellar vehicle 
that only looks like a crappy airbrushed van right now, in these pre-demon times

None of us have any idea whether the Cubs can live up to the expectations they've stoked this season. Not even the irritating numerologists in San Francisco, whose faith in even-numbered years forms a bizarre counter to Cubs fan fatalism, can tell us the outcome. And the outcome is meaningless-- the only real-life difference between a Cubs win and loss this playoff season is probably a few million dollars of Wrigleyville property damage. The Cubs will play baseball whether I ignore them or spend the next several days in a flinch, waiting for whatever Mendoza-line castoff the Giants find on the scrapheap to hit multiple game-winning home runs.

It doesn't matter whether the Cubs win.  There is, as far as I know, no theology that promises some sort of afterlife reward for those of us who had talked ourselves into Ryan Theriot or own Rod Beck merchandise. The Cubs' championship drought has nothing to do with mysticism or curses or the incredible bad luck of a shell-shocked headphone guy who got to listen to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo do play-by-play of an insane, bloodthirsty mob that threaten to thrash him over baseball, but with the team's decades of incompetence. The sun rose on October 15, 1908 and it continued to rise after the Cubs' few and spectacular baseball-related fuckups throughout the ensuing century.  The season's ending in elation, despair, or relief from victimized baseball fans tired of hearing about the Cubs will quickly fade.      

But, if you were to ask me personally, I think it would be cool, if they won. 

The Chicago Cubs Will Not Win the World Series

UPDATED: THE CUBS HAVE WON THE WORLD SERIES

A storm cloud has appeared over major league baseball, as sure a mark of impending doom as the sport can muster: the Chicago Cubs are overwhelming favorites to win the 2016 World Series.  Fortified by lucrative tanking, using the Ricketts family's war chest to bring in free agents, and riding an improbable Cardinal-vanquishing playoff run to last year's National League Championship Series, this could be The Year.  And by invoking The Year and putting together one of baseball's best teams on paper, the Cubs have merely summoned the Four Goat-men of the Apocalypse: Ligament injuries, Player Regression, Cardinals Bullshit, and The Entire History of the Chicago Cubs Since The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.

Baseball has long overthrown the anti-intellectual chewing tobacco luddism of its past.  Now it is the purview of lawnmower men who sit in their reconstructed mother's basement front offices.  This is an advance.  It took decades to convince the Tim McCarvers of the world that players who make fewer outs are more valuable than players who knock the ball in play and reach safely discounting the times they walked to first base and ignoring sacrifice bunts and flies except in certain situations where they are not sacrificial enough as determined by a person who has seen the play once from a hole in the scoreboard which was good enough to beat the forces of the Kaiser, damn you.  Now, baseball executives become implicated in high-tech hacking scandals involving typing "Eckstein123" into a terminal, shouting "I'm in," and mining valuable baseball data to their own twisted ends.

Cardinals executive Christopher Correa prepares to infiltrate the Astros' 
intricate computer network

Baseball analytics scoffs at the type of things you will read in this blog post because they are unscientific hokum based on recency bias, coincidence, and full-blown delusional pessimism.  Every season is a unique event; these Cubs have nothing in common with the century of failed Cub teams except their uniforms, Wrigley Field, and the same legions of demented drunken mustaches nasally honking about the traffic on the Dan Ryan.  At the same time, it seems like the most probable route to a Cubs victory would not involve heavy preseason expectations inspiring myriad panics during a 162-game season and one of the most fraught playoff systems in professional sports.  The Cubs gave us the most delightfully unexpected seasons last year; this season will play out like a Blimp of Damocles hovering over the stadium.

THE CUBS ARE INVETERATE BASEBALL MURDERERS

Theo Epstein dismantled the Cubs.  They lost bunches of games.  They flipped any remotely competent player for prospects and arcane spoils like international bonus slot money and sandwich picks.  This garbage team showed up in last place filled with a bunch of rail-hopping barnstormers one beard away from the House of David and this plan, to the detriment to all that is fun in professional sports, worked.  The fruits of the Cubs' drafts, trades, and forays into the Sydney Greenstreet world of international free agency came up last year and they can sock baseballs to Mars.

The Cubs arrived a year ahead of schedule.  Addison Russell, the slick-gloved shortstop, appeared to replace an injured Tommy LaStella.  Kris Bryant, the most ballyhooed Cubs prospect since Mark Prior, appeared amid a flourish of union grievances.  Kyle Schwarber debuted in June and took his place as the prototypical stump-shaped lefty slugger, awing spectators with his power to smash baseballs into the stratosphere and his endearingly bumbling attempts to do anything else related to baseball.  Javier Baez and Jorge Soler spent most of the season injured and ineffective only reappear in the postseason as the revolutionary vanguard against Cardinal hegemony.


The Cubs have nevertheless made some sweeping changes.  They traded the enigmatic Starlin Castro to the Yankees in exchange for reliever Adam Warren.  Castro spent his entire career as Cubs fans' alternating symbol of hope and scapegoat for despair.  During that time, Castro lost.  He lost as the only cornerstone player while the journeymen and organizational filler around him disintegrated into trades, designations for assignment, and far-flung baseball leagues around the world.  The capricious whims of BABIP guided his success: in the years when his balls found holes in the defense he was an All-Star; when they did not he ranked as one of the worst players in all of baseball.  He never acquitted himself well to short, accumulating a staggering array of ludicrous errors comparable to the beer league softball player who appears in jeans, immediately in over his head.

Kyle Hendricks's screams of "Starlin, Starlin STARLIN" while an oblivious Castro castigates
 himself for an error fall upon deaf ears.  It is too late

By the middle of the season, Castro found himself on the bench.  Then, Maddon moved him to second.  Something switched.  Castro became one of the Cubs' best hitters in September.  Beat writers filled column inches about the effect of his change of position and approach.  Cubs fans cheered him, bolstered by his walkup music.  Now, after years as the face of some of the shittiest teams in the Cubs' woebegone history, Castro is out.  He was never a Theo Epstein guy.  His mercurial bat did not fit with the Cubs' patience-strikeouts-and-dingers regimen.  He has a chance to start over with as a change-of-scenery castoff in the one media market less forgiving than Chicago.  This is how baseball works in the twenty-first century.

The Cubs replaced him with a bonafide World Series champion.  Maddon favorite Ben Zobrist plays nearly every position, switch hits, gets on base, has a little pop, and is basically pretty good at every facet of baseball.  He has two main drawbacks: at 34, those skills may begin to diminish and Chicago authorities remain concerned about an outbreak of Zobrism in North Side neighborhoods as Zobrists menace the city with their occult obsession with wispy beards and advanced fielding metrics.

The Cubs raided longtime nemesis St. Louis for key contributors.  Pitcher John Lackey, last seen screaming at a baseball after giving up a demoralizing NLDS hit to Jason Hammel, has vaulted over the Mississippi River.  Lackey, a grizzled 37 year-old, hopes to add stability to the Cubs' rotation after a surprisingly fine season for the Cards.  More importantly, the Cubs absconded with "Trader J" Jason Heyward.  Heyward came over to the Cardinals as a one-year rental from the Braves then rejected their offer to join the Cubs in one of the finest days in the history of sports internet.  Heyward initially projected as the Cubs' center fielder.  He would replace Dexter Fowler, who had left the Cubs as a free agent and agreed to sign with the Orioles.  Instead, Fowler spurned them and appeared out of nowhere in Cubs camp.  The Cubs' offseason was essentially an opera featuring the aria "Trader: The Homonym of Sports Perfidy."

THE CUBS WERE BETTER AT PITCHING THAN HITTING LAST YEAR

The Cubs brought in Jon Lester in for $155 million.  You can recite that number by heart because "they paid $155 million for a guy who can't throw to first?" became appended to his name, like an honorary title for a medieval king.  Lester is a fine pitcher and a comical disaster in everything else relating to baseball.  In his first appearance, a nationally-televised season-opening rivalry game, Lester's inability to throw to first base became as evident to fans as Wrigley Field's inability to accommodate their urine.  He cannot hit, his fielding remains suspect, and he demands the services of catcher David Ross, whose batting average is "he calls a good game out there."  Yet, by the end of the season, Lester scraped out a hit.  He laid down some competent bunts.  He hit a home run in spring training to a pitcher who may or may not have been a Cubs intern in disguise.

Lester may have been the big story in camp last year, but he quickly became overshadowed by Jake Arrieta's unworldly Cy Young season.  Arrieta, acquired in a scrap-heap deal with the repeatedly victimized Baltimore Orioles, turned himself into a better pitcher with the Cubs.  Then, in the second half of the season, he became Death Incarnate.  No one scored off Arrieta.  He gained the ability to control the ball with his mind.  He threw a no-hitter then changed into mustache-themed footie pajamas.  He sparked a donnybrook in the Wild Card playoff game when he hit two Pirates, took one in the buttocks, and started a bench-clearing that got out of control enough for Pirates' first baseman Sean Rodriguez to pummel a Gatorade cooler with a Zambranoan fury.  It was the greatest half a season since the deadball era. 

Rodriguez plans revenge in this year's Gatorade Kumite

The Cubs rode Lester, Arrieta, and a host of reclamation projects and junkballers to the third-best ERA in the majors.  The bullpen contributed; Justin Grimm, Pedro Strop, and Hector Rondon formed a dependable late-game trio, and the Cubs turned a conveyor belt of scrap-heap starters like Clayton Richard, Trevor Cahill, and archery mime Fernando Rodney into a shockingly effective unit.  They kept most of it together, adding extra arms like Adam Warren and Rex Brothers, the King of All Brothers.  There is, however, nothing more volatile than a major league pitching staff.  Arm injuries can claim anyone at any time, aces will turn to meatball artists with no warning, pitchers will move in and out of the lineup at seemingly-random intervals.  The Cubs' bullpen will look shockingly different by the end of the season.  Let us hope that Arrieta, Lester, and Lackey remain in place.

LOOK UPON THIS MIGHTY TEAM AND DESPAIR

There are several rational reasons why the Cubs will not win the World Series.  For one, the baseball season is endless and unpredictable.  Players get hurt, players come out of nowhere, great players play like absolute dogshit, relief pitching is essentially determined by oracle bones, players change teams, BABIP commands the game like a vengeful god, the banishment of a thirteen-year-old bat boy causes widespread locker room revolt, the playoffs are a completely random confluence of baseball events.  Yet, this is not the place for rational thoughts.  This is a place for exalted Cubs miserablism unbound by the physical laws of the universe.

The Cubs are not cursed by a disgruntled goat-owner or vengeful baseball spirits.  They are, however, confounded by very real pressure fueled by a century of futility, where winning a dumb baseball trophy has acquired life-and-death stakes as their title drought has seen generations of fans to the grave.  The Cubs' identity is wrapped up in futility; every playoff run drags with it the combined weight of previous failure amplified by media into a cacophony.  A hypothetical Cubs World Series appearance would require a three-hour special to get in the full litany of Cubs' ineptitude.

BUCK: YOU'RE WATCHING THE WORLD SERIES ON FOX. I'M JOE BARTMAN, 
                 WITH MY CO-HOST WILLIAM GOATS
GOAT: EHHH
BUCK: 1908

The Cubs at least seem aware of this.  Joe Maddon's slogan for the season is "Embrace the Target," which sounds either like a stealthy conduit for branded content or an extremely Dolph Lundgren direct-to-VHS movie from the mid-90s.  Maddon has attempted to ameliorate the pressure on the Cubs by turning Spring Training into a literal circus involving clowns, mimes, a shredding guitar player accompanying the sound system, and tiny baby cubs.

And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears in Cubs Spring .
Training, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only 
the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as 
a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored 
interest in food

The Cubs still play in a thunderdome division against the Pirates and the Cardinals. You may think the Cubs have weakened the Cardinals by stealing two of their best players from last season, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Cardinals work. There is no Cardinals team more dangerous than one that has increased access to scrappy call-ups that you've never heard of. As we speak, Cardinals scientists have altered Eckstein DNA to make a ballplayer smaller, weaker, and more gritty in a reverse Captain America process to create a feeble toddler whose sole MLB hit will be a walkoff against the Cubs. 

 And there is no way to dabble in baseball mysticism without mentioning the San Francisco Giants. Since 2010, they alternated World Series victories with playoff absences. By their third championship in 2014, the Giants' Even Year Bullshit has been canonized in baseball lore. The Giants signed star pitcher Johnny Cueto. But, in a move of greater concern for the Cubs, they have also signed former Cub Jeff Samardzija. Samardzija's value remains unknown; he followed an All-Star half-season for the Cubs with a dismal season for the White Sox. Regardless of how Samardzija pitches, he is destined for a high-leverage start against the Cubs late in the season or the playoffs where he shuts them down as written in the Scrolls of Hypothetical Baseball Misery. 

 Baseball's playoffs are lightning rods for fluky horseshit. The Royals won the World Series partly by turning themselves into an engine of chaos, slapping the ball all over the field and daring the Mets not to do the single dumbest thing possible at any given time, and the strategy worked. Should the Cubs make the playoffs, they could avoid insane pratfalls. Or they could well fall victim to a gaffe currently outside of the realm of baseball possibility by running the bases backwards or having a ball ricochet off another ball in the bullpen causing havoc as multiple balls appear on the field or somehow allowing every fielder to simultaneously collide, their I got it cries lost to a howling October wind. It is entirely possible that this is The Year. I hope it is. But there is nothing more Cubs than squandering this loaded, young squad into another century of heartbreak and despair. 

 Rejoice! Baseball is back.

Week 8: It is a Sad Day, When Your Sports Team Loses the Game

Sports fandom is inherently silly.  Watching people you do not know chase balls up and down fields or courts or regulation handball galleons is pointless.  Touchdowns? Meaningless.  Slam dunks? Wastes of time.  Butt bumps? Sophomoric, airborne, gluteal showoffery.  Bullpen cars? Only three have ever understood the point of bullpen cars-- Chief Wahoo, who is dead and problematic-- Tommy Lasorda, who has gone mad-- and I, who have forgotten all about it.

The baseball helmet-shaped car taps into the primal fear of hitters, 
reminding them that all that stands between them and a baseball to the 
cranium is a thin, plastic helmet, but look there is a larger helmet, and its 
cruel master is the relief pitcher and he probably has a mustache

Spectator sports are a pointless diversion. Instead of spending free time screaming at neckless people slam dunking on each other and then making fart faces, we should probably learn how to harvest legumes, fend off attackers with nunchuks, and successfully build operational nunchuks.  Or maybe read a goddamn book or something.

Emotional involvement in sports is ridiculous; some guy runs to the other end of a field with a ball and a bunch of people throw their arms up in triumph like we just walked on the goddamn moon and other people watching the same thing are visibly exacerbated, only slightly less devastated than discovering that it was Earth all along you maniacs.  For a ball!  It's madness.


And yet, here we are.  If you are reading this blog you probably like sports to a level of derangement that involves locating a blospot.com blog about Northwestern football that is only less ludicrous than actually writing several thousand words about Northwestern football and nineteenth-century mustaches and reviews of books about botanical piracy that are read by fewer people than attendees at a Lincoln Chaffee rally, he wrote, chuckling then pausing to adjust his blogging gloves at that topical political reference.

Of course, the reason why it is fun to get all wrapped up in sports is because there are no real consequences.  There's three hours of yelling and cheering and incredulously making gestures at the referee and feeling elation or dejection at something that we have no control over and has no bearing on the rest of our complicated lives.  There's a simple line: there's our team and the other team and our ONE WEEK DAILY FANTASY SPORTS TEAM IT'S SO EASY JUST SELECT YOUR PLAYERS AND GIVE YOUR CREDIT CARD INFORMATION AND YOU TOO CAN MAKE MILLIONS JUST LIKE THIS MONOTONE IN A WES WELKER JERSEY WHO LOOKS LIKE THE WORD ACTUALLY BROUGHT TO LIFE WHEN A BOLT OF LIGHTNING HIT A PACKET OF COMBOS.

Or maybe this is all just a long justification for why it is kind of a bummer when all of your sports teams lose badly in a single week in the Anthology of Sports Horror.

CHAPTER ONE

Northwestern has been mercilessly clobbered in its last two football games.  Have the Wildcats just run into two very good teams?  Are they still good at football?  Have they entered some sort of ranked football Logan's Run scenario where whenever they hit a certain AP Rank they are then hunted down by Big Ten teams and run over by fullbacks?  No one has any idea.

Iowa takes a commanding 33-10 lead at Ryan Field

The vaunted Wildcat defense has succumbed to a rash of injuries and tired as an unceasing succession of punts and turnovers has kept them onto the field.  The offense over the past two games has resembled a hungry dog spotting a raw stake on a counter but unable to devise a plan to get it because it is a dog.  Northwestern's struggles to move the ball are nothing new; the 'Cats have relied on defense, turnovers, and special teams all season and remained content to use Justin Jackson as a battering ram against lesser defenses. Now, against tougher Big Ten defenses that have had seven games to scout the Wildcats' leather helmet offensive playbook, the offense needs to find ways to stay on the field and score points or Mick McCall needs to reveal that college football's new inefficiency is punt muffs, and Northwestern will revolutionize the sport by giving opponents as many opportunities to drop punts as possible.

Northwestern has had a baffling season.  Few fans started the year with high expectations as the 'Cats had to break in a freshman quarterback and faced two tough non-conference opponents.  Then, Northwestern surged to 5-0, inspiring dreams of a run for the West.  After two brutal blowout losses, Northwestern seems lost.  Two years ago, when Northwestern's last dream season fell off the rails, the 'Cats suffered a series of ridiculous close losses.  This season, they have been completely outclassed, unlikely to be favored in a Big Ten game again except home against Purdue and maybe against Illinois in Hatpocalypse: Soldier Field.  It is still possible, even likely that Northwestern grabs a bowl bid, which would be a vast improvement over the past two miserable bowl-less years.  But six or maybe seven wins and a bowl, which would have delighted fans over the summer, now feels hollow.  A win over a reeling Nebraska team could give the 'Cats an opportunity to turn the faltering season around.  Another miserable blowout could put in the meager bowl dreams in question and allow Northwestern's lawyers to file an injunction against the Associated Press from ever ranking them again. 

CHAPTER TWO

The NFL season is not even halfway finished, but there was already no point to a Bears-Lions game. The Bears had come off two consecutive thrilling comeback victories and the Lions had yet to win a single game all season, but everyone had seen enough to know that these two teams specialize in futility.  After 60 minutes of uninspired nincompoopery, the teams proved themselves equally bad and, for some reason, the National Football League allowed the game to continue into overtime. After some 11 minutes of helpless flailing, the Detroit Lions managed to scrape a field goal, win the game, and begin a season of jockeying for position against the Bears in order to determine who will draft a guy who will instantaneously shed all of his ligaments like a molting caterpillar, completely forget how to tackle people, or disappear of the face of the earth only to return a decade later with an eyepatch and a team consisting of 52 helmeted brooms to apply for an expansion franchise.  

Detroit's overtime win prevented the team from sinking into the ignominy 
of the Matt Millen era, who has slunk back to television as a professional 
ignominy

The game was marred by a questionable call on an apparent interception in the endzone by a Bears linebacker that was ruled a touchdown.  The Lions are no strangers to bizarre catch calls.  Calvin Johnson was famously victimized by catch ambiguity in a 2010 game-- now the so-called "Calvin Johnson" rule is invoked whenever a wide receiver makes a spectacular catch in the endzone that, after 25 minutes of review and a pixel-by-pixel analysis and Troy Aikman saying "Joe, I don't think that's a catch. Joe" a dozen times, the the catch is inexplicably ruled an incompletion.  At this point, the NFL no longer needs an instant replay booth-- it needs to send questionable catches to a conference of French postmodern philosophers who, after two years of peer review, will determine that a catch is shaped by systems of language and state-imposed power structures while a desperate crew of NFL broadcasters grow haggard in their booths, surrounded by copies of Representations. 

AIKMAN: Joe, if you take a look at that discourse there, I mean that's just
a philosopher's thesis right there, just the type of argument you want at the
philosophy position.
BUCK: Joe.

Regardless of the call, the Bears had no business winning the game. It featured a patented Jay Cutler endzone interception, which he tosses out at this point like a catchphrase from a washed-up sitcom actor at a mall appearance before wearily collecting his check. The Bears have actually had exciting games; the maligned Cutler seems to have found his niche heroically leading comebacks against other terrible teams as every other phase of the team falls apart around him. Meanwhile, the Bears have fallen into traditional Bear dysfunction. The Bears released Jeremiah Ratliff after the police removed him from Halas Hall because he reportedly got into a screaming altercation with the General Manager.  Maybe it would help to change the name of the Bears' facility because Halas Hall sounds like the name of an English estate where languid aristocrats pass the summer months scheming against each other and enlisting footmen their intrigues. 

A Midnight Modern Conversation at Halas Hall 

The Bears' loss featured not only a bizarre call, but also a Detroit comeback allowed by John Fox's punt 'em all and let God sort 'em out philosophy while clinging to a lead with less than three minutes left. But it's not a particularly painful loss, since the Bears are abysmal and Fox's conservative gameplans will not affect anything that matters. Fox remains a breath of fresh air after replacing Marc Trestman, who seemed to relate to his players by having his face suddenly appear in their windows when lightning flashes. 

CHAPTER THREE 

The 2015 season was the most fun summer of Cubs baseball I've ever experienced. The desperation emanating from a 107-year title drought dragging the corpses of generations of disappointed Cubs fans in its wake tried to ruin it. The future of the Cubs, with their heralded group of dinger zealots is bright. The future of the Cubs today and until the moment they either hoist a World Series trophy or baseball is outlawed by an Evil Future Government as described in every science fiction movie for the past 30 years remains bleak. 

BASEBALL IS CANCELED, AMERICA, YOUR ONLY SPORT IS GROWING MUSTACHES 
AND GRABBING 

There should be no heartbreak in Wrigleyville. The Cubs relied on five rookies this season. They started Kyle Hendricks and Jason Hammel in key spots. Hammel never recovered from an injury and gradually transformed from an effective starter into a batting practice pitching machine. Hendricks throws dipping, darting sinkers and changeups and looks like he spends the days he is not pitching maintaining the Clark the Cub twitter account. It goes without saying that he is one of my favorite Cubs, but he is also not the most comforting sight on the mound in a do-or-die playoff game. The team, laden with cheap rookie contracts and the deep pockets of the Ricketts family, will attempt to bolster the rotation with high-profile arms. 

 The Cubs got completely walloped in the series. The Mets' equally exciting young pitchers completely shut the Cubs down. Lester and Arrieta could not respond in kind. Nothing, though, was more dispiriting than the transformation of Daniel Murphy, Anonymous Middle Infielder, into the best baseball player on the face of the Earth. Murphy has hit half as many home runs in nine playoff games as he did over the course of a 162 game season. He has hit them off Zach Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, and Jake Arrieta, all vying for the National League Cy Young Award. It is as if the universe had allowed the Cubs to enjoy too much success and sent a scourge to the Earth in the form of a guy with a career .755 OPS. His run would be delightful and absurd except when it is your team that is being viciously murphied out of existence in front of an increasingly horrified crowd. 

The Cubs were not supposed to be here. But that is cold comfort. The Cubs certainly seem to be set up for a period of contention, but nothing is guaranteed and even making the playoffs each year is an arduous task unless you root for the grimly inevitable St. Louis Cardinals. Next season will bring an inordinate amount of pressure on a young team from Cubs fans who expect a championship. The one positive is that we have all been liberated from ever having to hear about Back to the Future again and the next person who brings up Back to the Future should be flung head first into a pile of manure that is bought specifically to ram Back to the Future people's heads in. 

WE GET IT 

There is no curse. For most of the past century, the Cubs have been inept at baseball, and they have rarely even had a chance to completely implode in the playoffs. The Cubs could one day make it back to the World Series since the invention and fall of the Iron Curtain. Until they make it, every playoff pitch carries the weight of crushing inevitability, of the possibility of never seeing them win a championship, of the punishment of an infinite series of Murphys that will only end with the Cubs eliminating their ridiculous drought and finally taking their rightful place as one of the most reviled teams in baseball that no one ever wants to see ever win anything again. 

EPILOGUE 

Sports misery is absurd. We can all turn off our televisions, turn in our tickets, and go about our lives without it making an iota of difference. Northwestern can be ranked 120 or 1. The Bears can continue to play like they have all season forever. The Cubs can miss the World Series for the rest of our lives and all of the lives of our descendants. It does not matter. But it's fun that for a few hours a week, it sort of does. 

Northwestern's performance this Saturday against a down-on-its-luck Nebraska team means nothing in the larger context of our lives. It means very little even in the world of college football, with two Big Ten West also-rans slugging away at each other for bowl positioning. But I'll be tuned in on Saturday, riveted as ever. Because what is at stake should they win this game or any other is the relative prestige of hypothetical fly-by-nite bowl game operations and that injustice demands reckoning.

Week 5: UNDER THE LIGHTS

The sun dipped behind the press box, the lights shone on the field, and, with the eyes of the nation upon Northwestern in Big Ten Network Regional Action and with a fearsome two-tarp crowd, the Wildcats narrowly defeated Ball State to a deafening chorus. Northwestern is 4-0 and the Associated Press has declared them #16 in the country as they prepare for the perfunctory Big Ten play as a warm-up to an all-but-inevitable national championship.

Northwestern opened the game with a touching tribute to Classic Northwestern Football. The offense stagnated and turned the ball over, and the defense looked solid but more vulnerable than the top-ranked tackle wall that consumed its first three opponents. Ball State's freshman quarterback Riley Neal extended drives. More importantly, he continually hucked the ball in the direction of Jordan Williams, an eight-foot colossus with net hands who continually out-leaped Wildcat defenders for ridiculous catches.

Jordan Williams, artist's rendition

In the third quarter, though, the offense switched on. Clayton Thorson looked like a different quarterback, spreading the ball around, and letting Dan Vitale terrorize Ball State defenders and confuse Ball State coaches who presumably spent a week scouring arcane tomes of football lore to figure out what a superback was before deciding it was a myth and then found out only too late that it is a slightly different word to use for a tight-endish player. This is a successful tactic, and the Wildcats should come up with unnecessarily weird-sounding names for all of their positions, such as renaming guards to Man-Walls and the quarterback to the Unholy Shaman of the Ninth Eye.

IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THE UNHOLY SHAMAN OF THE NINTH EYE
POSITION YOU NEED TO MAKE QUICK DECISIONS AND GET THE 
BALL OUT TO YOUR PODMEN AND YOUR KRAKUS GROUP IF YOU 
WANT TO WIN GAMES IN (SEARCHES DESPERATELY FOR FALLEN 
CUE CARD HOLDER WHILE HE PAUSES LIKE A DEER IN HEADLIGHTS 
BEFORE AN INTERN RACES TO HOLD UP THE CARD) THE NATIONAL 
FOOTBALL LEAGUE 

Ball State came back to pull within five, but the game never seemed in doubt. The 'Cats did suffer some injuries. Standout tackle Geoff Mogus left on a stretcher. Safeties Godwin Igwebuike and Kyle Queiro also left the game. Pat Fitzgerald has remained characteristically tight-lipped about his injured players, although at press time BYCTOM has been able to secure a confirmation from him that some of his players may be made of molecules.

It was a harrowing win, but let us remember that we are talking about Northwestern football. Let the football gluttons sit around in their tuxedos grousing about not winning by enough points and intriguing about playoff committees. Northwestern has started undefeated for the third time in nearly two decades and has yet to lose a game through a spectacular series of football misfortunes.

Over the course of following Northwestern, I thought I had experienced 
every single heartbreaking way to lose a football game. In the past two weeks, 
the Texas Longhorns saw a spirited comeback end when their kicker was 
 temporarily possessed by the Spirit of John Carney and then the next week 
were done in by a hideously mishandled routine punt. If the Longorns, the 
Habsburgs of college football, have experienced decades of football gluttony, 
this is their period of football gout 

BIG TEN RECKONING

Northwestern has beaten two good teams already, but the real season begins on Saturday with Big Ten play. The Big Ten West is hardly considered a crucible; instead, it is more often portrayed as a sad relic of Midwest, where the football factory has closed and rusted and now only manufactures fullbacks on back order since 1996 and rusted knock-off spread offenses that falter when weak shouldered quarterbacks, originally designed to dive heedlessly into an interwar leather-helmet ruck, now heave the ball in the direction of nowhere.

 The Northwestern-Minnesota game features two excellent defenses with suspect passing games. Conventional wisdom says that we should be in for another exciting game of field possession, dive plays, and punting. Hunter Niswander already attempted 10 punts in the Duke game. Any more double-digit punt games and he should be allowed to ride out onto Ryan Field on a custom-built punt-based motorcycle, his punting cape billowing behind him majestically while the marching band blares his majestic punt anthem.

Northwestern/Minnesota probably will not reach the heights of the 1939 Texas Tech/
Centenary College game, which featured 77 combined punts, including 36 by Tech punter 
Charlie Calhoun. The amount of punting is mind-boggling in a game that happened after the 
Spanish-American War. Were the teams handing off to a punter in the backfield who surveyed 
the defense and immediately punted? Was there a rule that any person involved in the game, 
including spectators and faculty members, were invited to stop play at any time to punt? Was 
Shreveport, Louisiana temporarily engulfed by a disruption in the space-time continuum 
that trapped a community in a maelstrom of endless punting and they could have been in 
there for years and have no way of knowing? It is also important to note that the Centenary 
College's team was known as the "College Gents" which is the puntingest football team name 
possible. 

The game also featured 14 fumbles 

I don't anticipate a nonsensical paelolithic Big Ten puntfest because I have walked this Earth and I know that Minnesota/Northwestern games are a cauldron of insanity. These games have ended with hail marys, walk-off interception returns, 100-yard kickoff returns, and more improbable reversals of fortune than the last five minutes of a movie where a villain thinks he has successfully killed Arnold Schwarzenegger. I expect this game will end with the discovery of a heretofore-unknown NCAA rule that football games do not end until a team has successfully telegraphed the NCAA Head Office in the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago even though it no longer exists, prompting donors to attempt to build the hotel first. The game will be completed in several dozen years after the lawsuits are finalized.

THE CUBS ARE GOING TO WHAT IS TECHNICALLY THE PLAYOFFS

I am a Cubs pessimist. I am a Cubs miserablist. I am a Cubs doom-sayer wandering around Wrigleyville in a sandwich board prophesying millennia of non-championship baseball, tormenting fans with occasional heart-breaking misery until they embrace the sweet release of death or become Yankees fans. 

 Now, the Cubs face a do-or-die Wildcard quasi-playoff invented by the champagne and goggle industry to have the honor of facing slaughter by the mirthless St. Louis juggernaut that trains by stomping on hearts. They will, barring a miraculous showing against the Pirates from a Reds team that ended its season two weeks ago and is now fielding their social media interns, travel to a raucous PNC Park to face an excellent Pirates team. The consensus is that the Cubs have the upper hand; they will send out Jake Arrieta, who has ascended to some Olympian plane of pitching transcendence that has made him nearly impossible to hit for months at the cost of only his facial expressions (Arrieta is scheduled to start Friday night; there is still time for him to suffer the entire litany of Springfield softball ringer tragedies before the playoff game on October 7). This is precisely the point where the impending Cub calamity is so glaringly obvious that Euripedes has already dismissed it as "on the nose" in a snarky blog post. 

 On the other hand, who cares? 

This Cubs season has been far too much of a joy to ruin with worry of an impending collapse. The Cubs have spent the past several years in an intentional death-spiral, slowly siphoning the fun out of the team like a python constricting the life out of a drunk, swamp-curious Floridian. The unfortunate reality of American sports teams, which favor bottoming out with no consequences, especially when you play in a tourist attraction guaranteed to draw during the summer despite sending an army of Darwin Barneys and Junior Lakes to helplessly flail at baseballs, nearly demands it. 

 The turnaround was not supposed to happen this fast. Kris Bryant, the probable Rookie of the Year, has been a star since he was brought up from Iowa awaiting the end of Theo Epstein's corn prison service time imbroglio. Addison Russell has been a revelation with the glove at short. Javier Baez and Jorge Soler have missed time with injuries, but both have returned towards the end of the season to clobber things. And Kyle Schwarber is a moon-faced stump person who has constantly entertained fans by finding new and more exciting ways to fall down and also smash baseballs into uncharted galaxies.

The team has been led by wacky old Joe Maddon who marries unconventional baseball tactics with whimsical entertainments for six-year-old birthday parties including dress-up days, zoo animals, and a magician. Anthony Rizzo could be making a case for an MVP-type season if Bryce Harper did not exist.

Harper (r) fights off Jonathan Papelbon's literal attempt to strangle him 
 according to baseball's unwritten rules of monster-violence. "Noose" 
 Papelbon plans to start a radio show with his twin brothers Garrotte and 
Throttle called Choke Talk where everyday Americans call in with problems 
and, after uproarious banter, one of them asks "have you tried choking 
 someone?" and then the brothers gently rib each other about the times 
 they've strangled and head-butted ineffectively 

The most curious part of the season has been Starlin Castro's transformation from the worst everyday player in baseball to a genuine force with the bat, hitting .403/.429./.708 in September. Castro was pulled as the everyday shortstop in August and his resurgence has been difficult to explain. But these wild fluctuations make up the Starlin Castro experience. Castro doesn't walk and, until recently, had shown sporadic power. His entire worth is based on fluctuations in batted-ball placement. He is a no true outcomes player. Starlin Castro performs as a baseball casino, letting the capricious whims of fate guide his game whether hitting slap singles or flipping a coin as a ball barrels towards him in the infield to decide if he makes an impressive play or attempts to fling it to the cutoff man in a sixteen-inch softball game happening at the lakefront park. 

 As much fun as the Cubs have been this season, the ultimate goal of a World Series seems unlikely this year, even if they get past the Pirates. Jake Arrieta is only one man and he cannot not pitch every day. Jon Lester has had a fine season of his own, but remains hampered by a bizarre inability to throw to first base, his feeble batting, and his use of David Ross as a personal catcher. Ross, a grizzled gray-beard who looks like a warrant officer on British frigate torn between his loyalty to a captain going insane on the high seas and the men fomenting mutiny to return the ship to combat, is one of my favorite players, but he swings the bat like a crusty Napoleonic naval officer who has never heard of baseball.

Sailing Master David Ross ponders a plot to lock the skipper in the brig
after the captain has disregarded RN orders in order to pursue the Captain's
sworn enemy Louis-Antoine-Cyprien Infernet across the seas

The rotation after Lester and Arrieta remains suspect. Jason Hammel, who pitched a strong first half, has imploded. Before the All-Star break, he sported a 2.86 ERA. After, his ERA ballooned to 5.10, he has pitched only 67 innings, and opponents have mashed a robust .856 OPS against him. That is an entire team of Kris Bryants. Kyle Hendricks has been better, but his 95 ERA+ (just slightly below an MLB-average 100) inspires little fear. The Cubs have cobbled games out of an armada of former starters in the bullpen, including Travis Wood and mid-season pickups Clayton Richard and Trevor Cahill. In order for the Cubs to win, they will need Lester and Arrieta to be essentially perfect for every start. 

 And should the Cubs reverse every single defining feature of their team for the past ten decades and defeat the Pirates, they will be forced to play the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals have had an incredible season. They lost numerous key players to injury for all or part of the season including superstar pitcher Adam Wainwright, but have steamrolled to baseball's top record. Talismanic catcher Yadier Molina is out with a thumb injury sustained when Anthony Rizzo slid into him. Starter Carlos Martinez will not pitch in the postseason. This will not stop them. The Cardinals are essentially a Terminator factory of anonymous boring dudes sent to mirthlessly destroy baseballs. Their season has been a commendable testament to resilience and organizational depth. To fans of other Central teams leveled by the Cardinals juggernaut over the past decade, it is also a depressing paean to their inevitability. Facing the Cardinals in the playoffs is like receiving a tax audit, an impending bureaucratic nightmare that cannot avoided or triumphed against.

Unsurprisingly, Wainwright has returned months ahead of schedule to join the 
Cardinals' playoff bullpen. I suspect that the Cardinals have cloned all of their 
players and have only been waiting for the first opportunity to unleash this version 
of Waino Mk. II in order to defray suspicion instead of replacing him immediately 
and while this may seem impossible, far-fetched, and taken from the opening 
segment of the crappy latter-day Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Sixth Day, 
may I remind you that the Cardinals' cheating scandal from earlier this season involved 
computers, case closed

Meaningful baseball has returned to the North Side for the first time in seven years. It does not matter that the Cubs will be playing in a truncated, bastardized play-in game seemingly designed by a malevolent baseball deity for Cubbish heartbreak. The season has been too enjoyable to be undone by a single disappointing loss. The Cubs, with their young bats, piles of free agent money, and bats still lurking in the minors seem poised to remain relevant for years to come; it is only then, with sky-high expectations, can Cub fans be properly and traditionally broken.

GOPHER INVASION 

The Gophers started the season with high expectations of Big Ten West contention. They opened with an encouraging loss against championship contender TCU, but have struggled against Colorado State, Kent State, and Ohio, defeating each by only a field goal. Minnesota's fearsome defense has also suffered attrition, more than Northwestern's. A win against a ranked Northwestern team would instantaneously restore Minnesota's status as a team to be reckoned with in the division while giving Northwestern fans flashbacks to the squandered 2013 season. A Northwestern win, though, will set the Wildcats up for a showdown with angry football muppet Jim Harbaugh's frisky Michigan team at the Big House for bowl eligibility.

 It is October, Northwestern is undefeated, and the Chicago Cubs are riding high into the postseason. Perhaps the most dangerous thing is not the tough Minnesota defense or presumed Pirates playoff starter Gerritt Cole. The most dangerous thing is the possibility of a comet striking the Earth.

Hope is Snake Oil: The 2014 Chicago Cubs

Spring training is winding to a close.  The baseball season started last weekend as the Dodgers and Diamondbacks opened play to a crowd of dozens of puzzled Australians who were not told that baseball is about throwing things at people's heads and delivering Shakespearean vengeance soliloquies about swimming pools.  

But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What swims he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Gibson the King, McGwire and Mattingly,
Puig and Kershaw, Montero and Trammel-
Be in their flowing pools freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;

The rest of baseballdom continues in its lolling Spring Training doldrums as prospects in high digit uniforms anonymously plug away against pitchers that have not yet destroyed their arm ligaments.  This includes the 2014 Chicago Cubs, where anonymous players and futility will continue over the course of 162 meaningless games, most of them losses, by design.

The 2014 Cubs are a postapocalyptic shanty town of a baseball team.  There are few players that we can expect to see contribute to the Hypothetical Future Cubs that wins more than 80 games, and any that show any semblance of value will be shipped out and sold for scraps: younger players referred to as "lottery tickets" by baseball bloggers, players to be named later, and the fan favorite Cash Considerations.  Only Anthony Rizzo, Welington Castillo, and (for some reason) Starlin Castro will be on the oil tanker when the Cubs ditch the rest of the team and are pursued by the motorcycle-riding, mohawked chap enthusiasts that make up the rest of NL Central in this overwrought Mad Max: The Road Warrior analogy.


I'm one Road Warrior shy of having each dude be a representative of an NL Central opponent, but
we can all agree that the jovial fat guy with the jaunty cap is a murderous Bernie Brewer

The Cubs will continue to lose, and fans are all aware that this is part of the master plan devised by the Cubs Brains Trust.  We're all waiting for Albert Almora, Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, and Jorge Soler to be ready for the majors, and, in the meantime, the Cubs are going to play terrible baseball to allow them to draft the next Kris Bryants and Albert Almoras.  Nothing the Cubs do this season matters.  Ownership has magnanimously deigned to increase ticket prices, which according to some estimates are the third highest in baseball.  And you can't even drown your sorrows in Old Style anymore, which will no longer be sold in the ballpark for absurd prices.  This makes no sense because paying north of seven dollars for an Old Style is the exact beer equivalent of paying actual American currency to watch whatever it is Starlin Castro does when he flails futilely at baseballs or throws them at cracker jack vendors he has temporarily confused with Anthony Rizzo because they are both wearing hats.

The Cubs are selling hope and that is all well and good.  Major League baseball rewards managers approaching their teams the way the Russian army approached the advancing forces of Napoleon.  Free agents are harder to come by, draft slot money is enforced draconically, and the lawless dollar showers in the international market have been limited to the benefit of parsimonious owners.  But it's a false hope.  There is no guarantee that Bryant, Almora, Soler, and Baez will anchor the Hypothetical Future Winning Cubs-- the analytics movement has been clamping down on nonsense hokum like curses and clutch hitting and "Mickey Mantle" (a fictional baseball player invented in 1987 by Billy Crystal and Bob Costas), but I have no doubt that we can count on Four Separate Misfortunes to prevent any of them from being useful players as the Cubs will remain mired in purgatory for the rest of our short, miserable lives.
 
Felix Pie found himself in the Wrigleyville Mystery Spot, also known as Baltimore

It is tough to root for the Cubs this season.  College sports, for all the hypocrisy, exploitation, money-grubbing, and general sanctimonious bullshit they nourish, at least do not have a framework that rewards losing.  At the depths of Northwestern's futility, when it seemed unlikely for them to win a Big Ten game unless they convinced a team to forfeit by constructing a counterfeit Dyche Stadium dozens of miles away surrounded by a Potemkin Evanston, at least they'd give it their all.  The Cubs are intentionally terrible, and their awfulness will likely not lead to a World Series.  Yet, me and thousands of other dupes will continue to watch because baseball is as good of a waste of time as mankind has invented, and the Cubs have really sharp uniforms.  Here are some reasons why we can manage to suck it up and deal with Cubs baseball this year:

-Someone named "Rick Renteria" has been named the new manager, and I'm sure he will do all sorts of exciting managery things like point to his left arm and scowl.  The one hit I got for a google search for "rick renteria ejected" leads to an mlb.com article about how he got tossed as Padres first base coach for "engaging in a discussion" with an umpire.  This is pretty uninspired, and I'd prefer that any manager is at the very least a 7-Piniella Scale lunatic who is willing to use his bulbous belly as an umpire-seeking missile (in case you were wondering, Dale Sveum was a 4-Piniella manager for having neck veins that flared up like a Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus.  Mike Quade's Piniella reading is unavailable-- umpires could not figure out how angry he was because he has no eyebrows).

-Carlos Villanueva is still on the team and last year he had a spectacular curl mustache.  Maybe this year, he'll grow some nineteenth century presidential muttonchops.

-Jeff Samardzija still looks like a musketeer, and will probably blame his poor outings on the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu.  My prediction is that the Cubs will trade him before the deadline and then he ends up pitching a crucial playoff game against the Hypothetical Future Cubs, only this time he has gotten a sensible haircut and shave just when it would have had finally made sense for him to be sporting Early Modern Vengeance Facial Hair specifically to confound me.  

-There are 162 games in a baseball season and regular players will earn north of 500 plate appearances.  At some point, it is probable that Starlin Castro will earn a walk or Darwin Barney will hit a baseball with his bat.  No guarantees, though, fans.

-Len Casper will attempt to pretend that a shitty Cubs player is turning things around, while in his heart, he knows the sample size is small, the statistic is misleading, and a Ricketts is holding a binder full of spreadsheets hostage at Cubs headquarters.

-Why the watch the goddamn Cubs any year?

-Fuck it dude, let's go bowling.  

 
Cubs fans, we're stuck rooting for this team until the Terror Squirrel takes us to hell