Northwestern and Duke Face Off Again, I Guess

Football returned to Ryan Field in a fanfare of bands, pyrotechnics, parachutists, and the one red firework they shoot off when they get to the rocket's red glare part of the anthem that always looks like it's going to hit one of the parachutists in a grisly act of errant patriotism. Then the Northwestern Wildcats went out there heavily favored against Nevada and won a football game to a concerned, grim-faced crowd.

Northwestern fends off the Wolf Pack

Nevada frustrated the Wildcats all afternoon.  They took a lead into halftime and the game remained tense until Northwestern sniffed out the last remnants of a Nevada comeback by smothering the quarterback on a fourth-and-one.  The Wildcats won, but had issues up front on both sides and continued to hemorrhage defensive backs.  Marcus McShepard and Brian Bullock both left the game, and the team announced that Keith Watkins will miss the whole season again. Northwestern remained determined to stick with its vague, hockeyish injury reports in the tradition of coaches waging asymmetrical information wars.  Last week, for example, John Harbaugh and Jim McElwain engaged in a ridiculous, petty battle about naming the actual players on their football teams, with Harbaugh suggesting that he might send buses full of dummy players that have never played football before to stand around in terror in kickoff formation before the actual Michigan players who have been living in Arlington Stadium for months building a subterranean tunnel society would burst from the ground, dragging the Gators into a hollowed out cavern because Harbuagh believed his team had the advantage closer to the Earth's Core.

Harbaugh and McElwain continue their mind games, 
with McElwain refusing to look at Harbaugh and 
Harbaugh using a fake hand so that Florida can't use the 
contours of his palm print to divine any information about 
defensive formations

There is no such thing as a disappointing win at Northwestern.  The Committee will not be looking for style points, betting lines, or body clocks when they select the participants for the DoubleWide Extra Large Men's Pant Bowl.  Northwestern's preseason hopes did not instantaneously evaporate like last year in a slow motion football bouncing off a goalpost in a cacophony of FCS cackling.  Northwestern won.  In a sport where wins and losses often turn on a kick here, a pick there, or a quarterback attempting to run for a two-point conversion instead but then opting for a two-cheek conversion when he falls upon his butt, there is no reason not to hoard every win.  Let the pollsters and the committees and the BCS computers that are still in a basement threatening each other with modem noises worry about all of that.  The Northwestern Wildcats are undefeated.

THE BIG GAME DUKE VS. NORTHWESTERN

Duke is probably the closest thing to a non-conference rival the Wildcats can muster.  The teams have played eighteen times since  1985, with the woeful 1980s Northwestern teams supplying an easy W for Steve Spurrier and Northwestern grabbing crucial, Royal George Gout Balm Bowl-qualifying wins over a nominal power five opponent this century.  Despite the frequency of play and the schools similar enough to provoke the narcissism of small differences that fuels college football hatred, the teams have not really built up a decent amount of enmity.  Perhaps it is because the teams remain preoccupied by their own conference rivalries. Perhaps it is because both schools await the appearance of a heroic Beckman figure to inexplicably to come out of the mist with clocks and signs of the team's logo with a slash through it.  Most likely, it is because the entire sports energy of Duke University involves bracing themselves against the endless onslaught of people despising the basketball team more or less continuously for decades, for standing in ad-hoc tent cities to get tickets to an ACC game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, and for working on a serum to make sure Coach K's face does not freeze like that.

Northwestern and Duke football don't have much a rivalry because Duke fans don't seem to care much about their football team and Northwestern fans know deep down that the conditions are ripe for any lasting sports success to provoke to type of ire felt by Duke basketball.  Northwestern got a small taste of it last year; their foray into the NCAA tournament sparked in some quarters an almost immediate backlash, not least because of a homeopathic amount of Dukery in the basketball team.  

Duke will not inspire parade floats, memes, or shrieking mania at Wallace Wade stadium this Saturday.  What it will do, though, is determine the course Northwestern's season.  The Wildcats have ambitions to compete at the top of the Big Ten West this season.  A win at Duke and then in an inexplicable night game against Bowling Green will have them at 3-0 heading into games against Big Ten colossi Wisconsin and Penn State.  A win against either of those teams could set the Wildcats up for another run.  A loss at Duke probably means the 'Cats should settle in for another season heroically scrapping their way to bowl contention and clinging to the Hat, the glorious default position of twenty-first-century Northwestern football.

BASEBALL CYBERCRIMES UPDATE

We all thought we could sleep safely at night from the malcontents that have now turned baseball from a bucolic national pastime into a terrifying den of cybercrimes ever since the Cardinals guy got caught for doing elite hacks like remembering that the password was Eckstein123.  But every day baseball's cybercriminals are jacking themselves into mainframes, banging on keyboards, and yelling I'M IN, which is exactly what all of the crusty old sports columnists who are wearing a men's hat in their photos taken in 1987 tried to warn us all about when they got really irate about spreadsheets.

This week, the New York Yankees accused the Boston Red Sox of stealing their signs by wearing a post-human cyber-watch device.  It remains unclear exactly how they processed the signals, but studies show that the most likely thing that happened is that Red Sox manager John Farrell immediately saw the entire field exactly like how we all assumed computers would see things in the 1980s, and he used the gridlines and blocky text to decode the Yankees' complex baseball stratagems.  The Red Sox  countered with allegations that the Yankees had developed nanobots capable of living within Red Sox players and coaches for the entire season, transmitting all of their biometric data to a supercomputer that could determine what pitch they would throw before they even threw it, before the pitcher and catcher and pitching coach had met on the mound and talked gravely into their mitts about Pitch Selection.  As we speak, every major league team has interns talking to sophisticated AI programs that can at any moment turn sentient and develop opinions on bat flips.

This is what baseball looks like now 

Baseball players have been cheating from time immemorial.  Baseball's cybercheating is easily the best kind because it riles up the sport's stodgerati who have spent more than a century imbuing a goofy spitting sport with all sorts of bogus moral frippery so hoary that they probably use the word "manful" and perpetuating the myth of fake baseball player "Mickey Mantle," who was originally drawn on a cocktail napkin by Bob Costas in 1987. Decades from now, our crusty baseball columnists will look back with nostalgia at how the Red Sox used a smart watch with the sort of rogueish élan that we associate with baseball teams that used binoculars or electric boxes or staged elaborate train robberies as a distraction to steal crucial early baseball information technology such as tobacco covered notebooks that said an opposing player probably had a wicked curved-ball based on the way his brow ridges demonstrated a most unsavory propensity towards deceit and guile and also we heard he has a mustache. 

QUARTERBACK CONTRUBISKY

There are a million articles now on the internet on the grim, foreboding death march of the NFL. It is difficult to tell how much of that is the columnist's solipsism or if the decline of the NFL also fits with larger trends in sports- and television-watching habits and has nothing to do with the league itself.  It is overwhelmingly tempting to point to issues with the NFL, though, because the NFL is the most insane sports league on the planet.  There’s a case to be made that all professional sports resemble a corporate retreats department accidentally showered with billions of dollars; the NFL is the only league that wants to subsume the entire sport into the corporation itself with its dress codes and constant injection of staid legalism and the way everyone involved with it speaks in an incomprehensible business-violence jargon. The league is controlled by 32 men who all demand to be referred to as “Mister” with all of them yelling at everyone at all times that they were sent here by Mitch and Murray.  The NFL is the only sports league in the world that is constantly investigating.

The NFL is rife with problems: the sobering reality of the damage the sport causes to players and the sickening way the league has tried to cover it up, the unending, replay-ridden games, the attacks on anything fun or expressive to the point where a league document has, without further explanation, specifically banned "incredible hulk," and alliance with the absolute dumbest shit imaginable at all times.  All of this has been the problem with the NFL forever.  The major issue now is that your team is almost certainly dogshit because there are like eight guys in the world capable of playing quarterback and without one of them the team you like descends into a stark exhibition of Bortleism.

A solemn Goodell steps to the podium, for another 
press conference about the latest NFL imbroglio. 
"You may not incredible hulk," he says.  "No questions." 

The Bears engineered a ridiculous quarterback controversy by spending a princely sum on shitty backup quarterback Mike Glennon and then, without informing him, traded up in the draft to select Mitch Trubisky as the Quarterback of the Future. Glennon already had a tough road in Chicago; Glennon is the apotheosis of shitty backup quarterbacking not only because he is stiff, inaccurate, and saddled with a remainder pile receiving corps but also because he looks like a gangly doofus. It is not Mike Glennon’s fault that he was put in this situation, paid an enormous and unfathomable sum of money and then more or less instantaneously replaced by someone who has not lurched around the NFL for several years ineffectively, nor is it his fault that he looks to me like the long-necked monster from the little-seen movie Big Man Japan about a guy whose duty it is to step into an enormous set of underpants and get shocked into turning into a giant superhero tasked with battling a bunch of grotesque monsters attacking Tokyo.

Glennon did not help his cause by entering the preseason and immediately performing a Medley of Historical Bears Quarterbacking while Trubisky looked great.  All season long, Glennon and dead-end coach John Fox will hear a nonstop nasal bray about playing that Trubinsky kid (Trubinsky is his Chicago Sports Talk Radio Caller Name, it's in his football contract) every time Glennon comes in and does the type of football fuckup that everyone expects from Mike Glennon.  No one is happier than Chicago's sports columnists, a cottage industry with a job description that is literally complaining about the Bears' quarterback; this has kept them employed long past the existence of newspapers.  At some point Trubisky will get his chance, whether from pressure or from Glennon accidentally wrapping himself around the field goal pole.  Who knows if Trubisky represents an actual Bears quarterback or if he will be, like the dozens of and dozens of men before him swept into the giant dustbin of Bears quarterbacks.  My prediction is that he will be great, amazing for one season before football is immediately and probably rightly banned and we all go around ashamed we ever watched it and him, that Trumbinskly Kid, maybe could have gone to the Super Bowl, if we all didn't immediately decide to stop watching a horrifying bacchanalia of violence designed to sell trucks.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL INTERNET POSTING HYPE VIDEO 2017

Finally, here is your college football internet posting hype video for 2017.

Football Flim-Flammery

College football is coming back and at some point some sorry team is going to be swindled, bamboozled, flim-flammed because their opponent is doing something they’re not supposed to and football is the most supposed to sport ever conceived.

There are few things more satisfying than watching your team pull off a trick play and leaving opposition hornswoggled to oblivion; the only thing better is watching an opponent dial up a failed trick play that snowballs into football disaster to the point where the only word to describe a coach's scheme is foiled.


Football's bloated maximalism means that it is not just a sport of people flinging themselves into each other with restless abandon, but flinging themselves at each other with reckless abandon within the strictures of an impenetrable and inscrutable set of ossified rules several of which remain vestiges on the books but unobserved, almost like religion.

Only the fanatics practice the Old Ways as seen in 
this mosaic of abandoned football practice

It is the only sport where the defining coach move is to defiantly rip off the headset because of course the coach is wearing a headset to talk to the coordinators in the booths above, why the sideline is swamped by laminated binders and Official Tablets of the National Football League and elaborate pictograms of Lee Corso and internet memes, why every single play starts with a brief meeting conducted in an insane and incomprehensible football argot codified into Domesday-thick playbooks, why every five minutes the referees gather under daguerreotype camera hoods to look at pixels and the beefiest among them attempts to explain whether something is a catch, the gravest epistemological question of our time.

Football's elaborate Court of the Sun King ruleset allows the slightest deviations to throw an entire game into giddy chaos: an unexpected guy is throwing the ball, a lineman has declared himself eligible (in the NFL, this requires a literal Declaration of Eligibility read over the PA system), a great big fat person handles the ball in any way.  Football coaches seethe and complain when they become victims of trickery-- rival coaches banned the A11 Offense that was entirely based on a high school loophole that allowed teams to ignore rigid rules on offensive line formation by lining up at all times in a punt return formation in a football version of fraudulent accounting; Mike Ditka got so angry about Bill Walsh using an offensive lineman as a fullback that he started giving the ball to William "The Refrigerator" Perry over and over, building an entire gimmick offense off of indignation about the unconventional use of fat men.

With so many moving parts, with roles so specialized that people are constantly running to and from the field of play because they need to install the Third Down Pass Rushing Package, it is possible for teams to dupe their opposition just by counting on them to lose track of all the people punching in and out.  The Ringer's Rodger Sherman had a fun article tracking how teams have had tiny backs hide behind behemoth lineman, unsportingly pretend to get subbed out, and camouflage themselves into the endzone only to pop out like the time Rambo disguised himself as an entire forest. 

Football has its moments of outright cheating as well.  Pop Warner used to hide the ball in secret compartments and sew patches onto jerseys that look like footballs and instantly transform their offense into a hall of mirrors where the defender tackles a guy who stands up empty handed while the rest of the offense taunts him with synchronized cackling. Contemporary football cheating, however, has become stilted and artless.  The most egregious recent case has been the Great Ball Deflation Media Event, a scandal so preposterously stupid that it involved the United States Supreme Court. Other sports have much better chicanery.  The best cheating in any sport right now is in cycling where some enterprising bicycle miscreants have set up hidden motors.  They call this "motodoping," easily the weirdest and most insane possible name for this practice, like robbing someone by threatening to hit them over the head with a 1990s computer monitor and calling it "Cybertheft 2020: Compucrime."

 College football represents the zenith of football chaos.  The staid NFL, with its strict rules on player numbering and overwhelming concern with illegal pants and sock combinations does its best to deliver a uniform product.  College teams, rife with gulfs in talent and resources, will resort to any strategy to gain an edge.  Recruiting is governed by absurd guidelines impossibly byzantine and ineffectual policed by an army of weirdo bureaucrats whose entire life revolves around sidling up to enormous college students and asking them how they paid for that tattoo and unhinged, self-deputized fans on maniacal social media detective sprees, desperate to prove that some player or coach has broken some inane NCAA rule even as every team breaks every rule while hurling accusations at their rivals.

College football returns this Saturday in all its anarchic glory, and someone is going to fake a punt. Some overmatched coach will try a desperation flea flicker, order a wide receiver to throw a pass, line up in Wing T formation, set up a complex chain of events that ends with a 350 pound tackle either thundering triumphantly towards the endzone in a wake of defensive backs trucked beyond recognition or getting too excited, not having any idea what to do, losing the ball in sun flash from a waggling trombone and watching the pass bounce off his helmet and into infamy.  A coach will use two quarterbacks.  A coach will use no quarterbacks.  A coach will storm onto the field, red as a cartoon thermometer, laminated playcards streaming from his coaching pants, to protest the Eligibility of the Downfield Lineman because he has no other recourse, he's been had, it's technically in the rules for that fullback to throw that lateral, there's nothing he and the thousands of slack-jawed, incredulous fans can do about it, and it might have Playoff Implications.  

The NFL Draft Was Insane Enough and Then They Added Orangutans

Every 1980s future dystopia movie that takes place roughly now reveled in showing sports that have moved in parallel with the  government's inevitable slide into shoulder-padded, neon technofascism by transforming into an increasingly perverse spectacle of violence, consumerism, and some combination of motorcycles and jetpacks.  Yet even the most hysterical Damon Killian I'd buy that for a dollar money-shaking flamethrower thunderdome wrought from the most cocaine-addled, seagull-coiffed producer has yet to match the gloriously stupid spectacle of the NFL draft.

The NFL draft was silly enough when it involved a depressing hotel conference center filled with football and television personnel who had all simultaneously purchased the worst suit on the market.  Now, the National Football League has taken over entire cities, paralyzed roads, developed filmed skits, brandished as much military hardware as a minor Soviet civic holiday, and filled public squares with thousands of boo-thirsty spectators, all whom have traveled from their homes to hear a three-day list of potential football players, most of whom will be cut before a single game is played.

The overwhelming pomposity of the draft-- Roger Goodell's masterclass in unwarranted swaggering, the conflation of the NFL with a branch of the United States government, the collision between spittle-flecked football guys who want to amend the US Constitution to give them the authority to order hamburger drills on any citizen and Ted Talk-conditioned corporate brand managers, the development of a bizarre NFL draft argot that mixes adjectives that have never been used to describe a human being before with the way that the cops talk on the television show COPS-- these are things I discussed on this blog last year and have been noted more eloquently by competent writers capable of writing normal-length sentences.

The novelty of this year's NFL draft been to take all of the normal draft bullshit and add a bunch of insanely stupid nonsense to it.  It's not enough that the draft includes punishing hours of highlights, inane draft patter, slickly-produced human interest stories, and Mel Kiper's 1980s dystopian sportscaster haircut.  They've now interspersed skits involving stiff former players bravely battling teleprompters and mascots and contest-winners from globe-spanning satellite links. When you tune into the draft only to see Mark Brunell, acting with the natural flair of a man trapped for decades in a 19th century diving apparatus rusting at the bottom of an ocean, pretend to find the name of a fourth round pick on the bottom of a golf ball, it is mind-boggling.
 
A lucky NFL fan tries to find the Texans' sixth round pick in a mockup of a 
pus-oozing Brian Cushing nose
 
Anthony Walker, who fulfilled a dream to finally hear his name called at the NFL draft, had his name picked by a disconcertingly tech-savvy orangutan.

I know that this is probably the most You Maniacs sports blog on the blogspot.com platform 
if not the entire internet, but this is literally a Planet of the Apes inflection point so please do 
not take it lightly when I caption this GIF: YOU MANIACS 

The NFL draft serves, even more than the Super Bowl, which eventually has to shoehorn in a football game, as the apotheosis of the NFL experience.  The NFL's combination of spectacle, self-seriousness, and complete inability to register absurdity even as they introduce zoo animals to interrupt an analyst grimly explaining whether or not a football player is a football player who can play football in the national football league has become more compelling as it has gotten more ridiculous.  Why not have Goodell ride into the draft on top of a tank?  Why not have former players reveal picks only after going on a global scavenger hunt for clues-- imagine Rex Grossman, sent to reveal the Bears' fifth-round pick from an Egyptian tomb before surfacing weeks later in the Luxor, the victim of a gang of international baccarat hustlers?  It is only a matter of time, because idiots like me continue to watch the draft move further into Paul Verhoeven territory every year because the Bears might trade a bunch of picks to get that quarterback from North Carolina, are you kidding me?   

BOOK REVIEW: THE CUBS WAY

It took 108 years for the Cubs to win their last two World Series titles, which is the approximate amount of time it would take to produce the effluvia of Cubs merchandise that we've seen in the past several months using 1908 techniques.  The city of Chicago has been deluged by enough hats, shirts, commemorative DVDs, and books to dam up the Chicago river and once again reverse its flow into Lake Michigan to flood the water supply with festive holiday dyes and excrement from the Dave Matthews band tour bus.

Crews dye the Chicago River blue to celebrate the Cubs' victory.  They did 
not, as far as I know, dye it for the Sox win because it would have looked  
like a Cecil B. DeMille plague  

It is perhaps unfair to lump Tom Verducci's The Cubs Way with the various picture books and other cash-in products that have devoted thousands of words to asking the discerning reader hey do you remember the Cubs won the World Series.  Verducci, a long-time baseball writer for Sports Illustrated and part of Fox's television crew in charge of reminding Joe Buck that Jon Lester does not throw to first, has a far more important mission in mind, which is to ask hey do you know how the Cubs won the World Series.

There's been a tend since Michael Lewis's Moneyball for sportswriters to zero in on teams with cutting edge strategies.  This subgenre gets away from the anecdotes and personalities of the team; the star of these books is spreadsheets and the men who program them.  Verducci struck gold on the Cubs as the ultimate Process Book-- a historically moribund team bereft of talent and laden with a mystical aura of failure is seized by a spreadsheet savant, headed by a quirky manager, and finally wins a championship for the millions of desperate fans, many of whom will be ready to purchase this book.

Verducci focuses on Cubs President Theo Epstein, and he clearly intends The Cubs Way to read as a sequel to Moneyball.  Teams had caught on to Billy Beane's stunning revelation that baseball players should get on base and his acolytes, including Epstein himself, had proliferated throughout baseball unleashing a new order via slide rule.  Epstein, like all of the other analytically-minded baseball executives had been to the baseball monolith and found that all of the other apes now had bones of their own.  Verducci couches Epstein's attempt to drag the Cubs and Cubs fans out of their peasant superstitions and eschatological playoff watching techniques into the familiar quest understood by anyone who follows baseball post-Moneyball: the Search for the New Inefficiency.

Epstein has decided that one of the new inefficiencies is a player's personality and ability to mesh with his teammates.  The revelation came after the collapse of the 2011 Red Sox, which became mired in infighting and vendettas as the team swooned out of the playoffs.  Epstein, according to Verducci, vowed to move beyond the statistics to get players who would not only play well but play well together; Verducci never quite explains how that philosophy involved the eventual acquisition of Jon Lester and Jon Lackey, masterminds of the Red Sox' beer and chicken fiasco that became the emblem of the problems on that team.  

The fall of the Red Sox due to chicken, beer, and clubhouse gaming is one of the dumbest
baseball hysterias of recent vintage and I can't get over this CBS news graphic, it looks like
Lackey is about to take a Power Glove from a metal briefcase

The emphasis on player makeup did not evidently extend to Aroldis Chapman, who proved that Epstein's emphasis on character included exceptions for people who can throw 103 miles per hour. Verducci does discuss Chapman's ghoulish domestic violence arrest and suspension from baseball as well as the Cubs' bungled attempt to pretend they had soul-searching discussions with him to justify their trade. Here is how Verducci and Hoyer making up some bullshit how Chapman getting upset because he thought he had blown a World Series somehow redeemed him:

[Chapman] arrived as a flamethrowing mercenary, whose behavior in a domestic dispute compromised the buy-in for some fans of the joy teh Cubs gave them.  No longer did those fans face the potential conflict of watching Chapman secure the end to the biggest championship in sport.  By failing, and doing so to the point of physcial and emotional exhaustion, Chapman became more humanized to a fan base just getting to know him.
"When he comes back in 5, 10 years or so for some anniversary party," Hoyer said "he's viewed in a very different way-- in a very positive way.

The other star of The Cubs Way is Joe Maddon.  Maddon, the self-consciously quirky manager who took the microbudget Rays to the World Series, immediately bonded with Epstein over their desire to find new edges and invent homilies.  For example, the team adopted the slogan "that's Cub" to preach the proper way to do things throughout the organization and then decided to clumsily retrofit it into an acronym: "C stands for the courage 'to do the right thing,' even if it's scary or uncomfortable; U is for the urgency 'to do the right thing right now; and B is for the belief 'that we can do it.'"  That is a viscerally horrifying sentence.

Maddon and Epstein's new techniques include mental skills training, using software to train players in pitch recognition.  These types of things will soon travel across baseball, where the St. Louis Cardinals will subject their endless supply of 5'1" guys named Squeaks to simulated reenactments of the farming machinery accidents that have claimed all of their relatives in order to turn them into onbase machines and master cybercriminals.

Cardinals infield prospect Sport Winkelous learns how to identify forkballs and to imprison 
rival front offices in their stadiums by turning a network of smart toasters and networked 
refrigerators into a remorseless cyber-army

There's very little in The Cubs Way that will surprise anyone who has followed the Cubs or even baseball generally. The floundering Cubs, bought by a wealthy family, hire Epstein and allow him to strip the team of anyone capable of playing major league baseball while the Cubs acquire prospects by trading anyone who plays even moderately well, draft sluggers with the high draft picks that they hoard as a reward for profoundly sucking, and hire Joe Maddon to coordinate pajama-themed road trip costumes-- this is a story that has become as integral to a Cubs television broadcast as footage of the Named Cubs Playoff Catastrophes and satanic goat imagery.   

The Cubs Way will not upend anyone's thinking about the Cubs or baseball or Anthony Rizzo's nude shadowboxing rituals.  It will not likely change anyone's opinion on Joe Maddon as his Joe Maddonness, complete with an annotated lineup card featuring "proprietary numbers," spills unchecked across the pages.  The Cubs Way is a fine and straightforward process book by an experienced and plugged-in baseball writer that I will probably re-read multiple times and then watch the World Series video until the authorities find me suffocated at the bottom of a pile of Cubs merchandise.

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.

This Post Was Hacked

The sports calendar has climaxed this week, with the NBA and NHL crowning new champions, American Hero Abby Wambach cowing foreigners with the Forehead of Freedom, and the Chicago Cubs contending for a playoff berth or as I call it, pre-disappointment.  The smoke from hockey fireworks still lingers over Chicago.  In Evanston, a confused and desolate community cries into the infinite night for its Hat.

TURNOVER

There are five major professional sports teams in Chicago and, at any given time, at least three are bound to be in turmoil.  The Chicago Bears are rebuilding after firing Marc Trestman.  Trestman, sought as an offensive guru after the Bears spent too many years relying on Devin Hester and the defense to score points, failed to qualify for the playoffs and was also the least football coachy-looking person who has ever coached football.  This shouldn't count for anything, but in the weird, quasi-authoritarian NFL, where coaches demand the same respect as a Kipling-esque military officer who has forged his own kingdom and death-cult on the fringes of some nineteenth-century empire, Trestman looked like a man perpetually realizing he was on the wrong train.  

Trestman was instructed to pose as if he just invented hands.  If you didn't want this dude to 
inexplicably become a juggernaut head coach in the face of  the square-jaw, man-bellow 
NFL, then I don't understand you

The Bears replaced Trestman with John Fox, who looks like a first-page google image search result for "professional football coach" and have started a process of dismantling the vestiges of the Lovie Smith era.  They will remain tethered to quarterback Jay Cutler, who is rapidly becoming as popular in Chicago as the guy with the nineteenth-century murder house. 

Across town, the Bulls have made move eerily similar to the Trestman hire two years ago.  They fired defensive mastermind Tom Thibodeau to bring in unconventional offensive guru Fred Hoiberg from Iowa State.  The Bulls and Thibodeau reached an impasse; Thibodeau, a basketball monomaniac who spent most games in a purple-faced reverie demanding that Jimmy Butler play more minutes, clashed with a front office that historically spends most of its time scheming against and occasionally punching its head coaches.

Thibodeau's departure was, in some ways, necessary.  It is no coincidence that his teams tended to wear down at the end of the season, and his offenses had grown stagnant.  At the same time, who doesn't want to root for a crazed basketball lunatic?  Thibodeau legendarily has no apparent interests other than basketball.  He spends his days screaming at basketball players, his evening screaming at televised basketball players, and he counts basketball players who don't box out in order to fall asleep, screaming.  He wears a black and white tracksuit every day.  He probably sleeps in a giant, hollowed out basketball chamber like Darth Vader's little Vader-dome.  He reluctantly squeezes into a suit on gamedays, which makes him look like an angry detective who is escorted out of an interrogation room with Carlos Boozer because he can't stand to look at his defense.

BOOZER: And I'll tell you what Coach, when I didn't hustle back on defense, I liked it.
THIBS: (Restrained by five other detectives)

Hoiberg may be a fine coach.  It's not fair to dismiss him only because he is yet another Iowa State guy replacing a successful Bulls coach who feuded with the mercurial front-office cabal.  It's not fair to have a lingering distrust of him because he played for the terrible post-Jordan Bulls teams and may also have tricked us all by using the name "Rusty LaRue."  But what about this clean-cut guy who looks like he could be on a 1940s-era war bonds poster could possibly be more fun than a coach who lives like a basketball monk who took a vow of yelling?

THE ST. LOUIS CARDINALS CYBERCRIME OF THE CENTURY

I remember when kids looked up to baseball executives.  They'd go to the ballpark, take in its immensity, the sights, the sounds, Billy Crystal's descriptions of a fictional baseball player called "Mickey Mantle," and the larger-than-life, home run-crushing titans and immediately ask their parents who negotiated the salaries and entered into arbitration with their heroes.

And now, in St. Louis, instead of telling them about finance majors and computer programmers who handled the implications of the luxury tax the right way, parents must look away ashamed.  Because they will have to look their sons and daughters in their innocent eyes and tell them the truth.  That the St. Louis Cardinals weren't a collection of scouts and data analysts and math whizzes, but a vast and ruthless organization of cybercriminals who built their Red Empire on stolen data, mendacity, betrayal, and probably a grisly string of heretorfore undiscovered cybermurders.

St. Louis cyberhacker supercriminals in action

The Cardinals' hacking story is one of the greatest dumb baseball chicanery stories in recent memory.  Charlie Pierce argued that use of computers to steal data has robbed baseball thievery of an earthy, pre-digital romance:

Time was, if you wanted to steal some scouting reports, you had to drag your sorry ass to Salinas or Visalia somewhere, and get the busted-knuckle old scout sockless in some local dive so you could steal his spittle-soaked notebook out of his shirt pocket. It was maybe 98 degrees in Visalia and the ceiling fan in the joint didn’t work and, if you had an open wound on your hand, and something from the cover of the notebook somehow got into your bloodstream, you could lose three fingers to an infection the old scout had picked up under questionably legal circumstances in Boise the year before. A baseball thief had to work for a living back then.

But it is precisely the computerized nature of this scandal that makes it so goddamn hilarious.  While cybercrime as a crime is scary and serious, the word "cybercrime" is ludicrous-- to me, it seems like a criminal should have been able to perpetrate a cybercrime only between the years 1995 and 2002.  Cybercrime sounds like the name of a direct-to-video Dolph Lundgren vehicle where a brilliant hacker has to stop an evil computerman from launching nuclear missilesby typing furiously into a computer before the script devolves into 25 minutes of kickboxing.

Jack Quarry was a CIA computer expert who left the agency when he 
accidentally typed too hard, blowing up his partner. But when an evil 
computer mastermind begins overriding American security systems, 
stealing Abraham Lincoln artifacts, and hacking into stadium Jumbotrons 
and regaling terrified sports fans by brandishing computers armed with 
malicious nuclear weapons software, Quarry is reluctantly called into action.  
Cybercrime: how do you stop an enemy who can be anyone with a computer 
anywhere until the last 25 minutes when he is inexplicably within kicking 
range?   

And, of course, the allegations are sweeter because they affect the St. Louis Cardinals, a team with a small but irritatingly vocal subsection of fans who act as High Baseball Moralists who have nonetheless rallied around baseball's second-roidiest slugger and a front office dedicated to cutting edge crookedness.  Then again, it is always dangerous to enjoy a scandal engulfing a rival team because it is only a matter of time before the dogged baseball Joe Fridays of the world end up on your team's door.  And the Cardinals remain unreachably entrenched into first place in the National League Central, prepared to close ranks and barrel into the World Series fueled by the adversity of having some nerdy front-office guy load up some floppies with batting averages.  Baseball is America's game.

KHRUSHCHEV ARRIVES

Nikita Khrushchev famously told the West that the Soviets would bury them.  He boasted of ICBMs and submarines destroying American cities.  He taunted Eisenhower with models of successful Soviet satellites while American versions detonated before leaving the atmosphere.  And he angrily demanded to go to Disneyland.

Peter Carlson's K Blows Top: A Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist, follows the madcap adventures of Khrushchev's whirlwind tour of the United States in 1959.  Carlson, a journalist who writes that he became obsessed with Khrushchev's visit during down time while working as a copy editor at People magazine, has assembled a history of the visit .  He tells the story through press clippings and interviews with key players including Khrushchev's son Sergei.  Carlson is interested in the absurdity of Khrushchev's visit playing off against American anti-Communist hysteria and in the ludicrous media attention, which he views as a seminal modern media event.

Carlson remains fascinated by Khrushchev, whom he describes as a consummate politician with a tendency towards purple-faced apoplexy.  The book naturally opens with the famous "kitchen debates" between Khrushchev and his rival Richard Nixon.  The two sparred during Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union, as the American government reluctantly remembered that they were essentially dropping a crate armed with a sweaty, suit-wearing biological weapon against dealing gracefully with communism into Moscow. 

Eisenhower: This is a delicate diplomatic mission, one that needs someone 
who can go into the Soviet Union and stand up for the United States without 
turning it into a jowly, anti-communist bark-off. 
Dulles: But Nixon's already on the plane
Nixon: Jesus Christ

The State Department intended to leverage an invitation to the United States into Soviet concessions to ease off on his demands that the Western powers leave Berlin.  Khrushcehv knew that Berlin was a sensitive subject. "Berlin is the testicles of the West," Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, "whenever I give them a yank, they holler."  But, characteristically, Khrushchev ignored the diplomatic demands and decided to accept the invitation.  He gathered in entourage and boarded the TU-144, the world's tallest airplane, and set course for Washington.

As Carlson relates, the visit inspired varied reactions, from small towns urging him  to visit (Moscow Idaho, for example, trumpeted the town as the "largest dry pea shipping center in the United States"-- I feel like the good people of Moscow probably could have found another angle) to opportunities for Congressional grandstanding.  The opposition to Khrushchev's visit was not all knee-jerk anti-communism.  Khrushchev, as he frequently reminded Eisenhower and other officials, was capable of unleashing nuclear destruction upon American cities.  He had brutally repressed the Hungarian Revolution just three years earlier.  And, while Carlson clearly relishes the absurdities of Khrushchev's trek across America (for example, a struggle with a national dentist's organization for a New York hotel ballroom becomes a farcically patriotic battle), he does not completely gloss over the horrifying stakes of the Cold War.

According to Carloson, the American media crush completely destroyed 
a supermarket that Khruschchev visited as photographers leapt onto 
checkout counters and stood in deli meat cases to get important shots such 
as this one of him staring at a can of pickles while surrounded by hundreds 
of grim-faced suit-wearers

K Blows Top, though maintains a light tone, focusing on the unthinkably bizarre result of having America's greatest enemy arrive at the doorstep, and having that enemy be Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev charmed his hosts, but also pugnaciously defended any perceived slight to the national dignity of the USSR.  This included bludgeoning banquet crowds with stacks of dubious Soviet statistics, slyly alluding to missiles, and publicly bristling over a refusal to take him to Disneyland because American authorities told him they could not guarantee his security.

"What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there?  Have gangsters taken hold of the place?" ...  Khrushchev was starting to look more angry than amused.  His fist punched the air above his red face.

The New York Post's Harry Salisbury described the Premier's temper while simultaneously throwing in a pithy review of Dostoevsky's works:

This trip is like one of those tea parties in Dostoevsky when everyone meets in apparent comity and then, after three of four minutes, Nikolai Nikolaevich for no discernible reason overturns the boiling samovar on the head of Alexander Alexandrovich...It is a Russian party elevated only by the possibility that the guest of honor may blow his stack.  It is both awesome and deplorable how suddenly Nikita Khrushchev can blow his stack.

Khruschev's visit, though bumpy, did actually appear to foster some goodwill.  He invited Eisenhower to visit him in the Soviet Union.  It appeared that the trip had made some intangible progress to bring some greater amount of understanding between the American people and the Soviet Premier.  Seven months later, an American U2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace. Khrushchev was furious.  He scuttled a Four Power conference in Paris and returned to New York to harangue the United Nations.  Khrushchev's trip had little value as a turning point for US-Soviet relations, but, as Carlson points out, it has immense value as a bizarre press spectacle.

THROUGH SUMMER

The City of Chicago had a much less bizarre media blitz for the Stanley Cup Champion Chicago Blackhawks.  The Hawks won their third championship in six years as sports writers quibbled about whether they qualify as a dynasty and, if they did, whether or not it was an elite dynasty or a sub-elite oligarchy, or whatever the hell other kinds of mumbo jumbo that sports radio people come up with to stop themselves from staring into the void for four hours a day.  The Hawks have improbably rallied from one of the worst-run sports teams in the country to the class of the city.  It remains to be seen whether the Bulls can overcome their space-emperor ownership, the Bears can overcome their incompetent, mustachioed, third-generation football-meddlers, or whether the Cubs can one day transcend being the Chicago Cubs.  

The Hawks used Soldier Field as the site for their championship rally amongst thousands of fans.  But Soldier Field will soon bear witness to a far greater glory.  Beck Man is coming.  Soldier Field will not only be the site of championship celebrations and Chicago Bears perversions of football, but the site of the Great Hat Reckoning.