Cubs Baseball Returns to Make You Miserable

It is April and the Chicago Cubs will begin playing baseball in order to cause misery and despair to legions of beer-swilling mustachioed mustard monsters.  For several years, the Cubs have been irrelevant: the team has been stripped of competent baseball players in exchange for prospects and allowed to sink to appropriately Cub-like depths in a shameless tanking exercise. Ticket prices, of course, remained among the highest in baseball even as team president Theo Epstein all but announced OUR STRATEGY IS INTENTIONAL INEPT FLOUNDERING GIVE US YOUR MONEY.

It's equally exciting as a Cubs fan and infuriating as a fan of baseball teams trying to win baseball games and a person who has foolishly given money to a Ricketts that this plan appears to be working. The Return of the Cubs to Contention is a major baseball story this spring.  The team is a trendy pick to contend for a wildcard spot; enough maniacs have descended upon Las Vegas to give them absurdly low odds to win the World Series.
 
That is insane enough to be the plot of one of those 
bachelor parties gone bad movies but instead of 
inadvertently murdering a croupier or getting in 
too deep with an organized crime syndicate or falling 
victim to a crooked casino with complicated gambling 
games that are just made up on the spot but all called 
"baccarat" in order to fool unsophisticated rubes the 
protagonists decide to put actual hard-won dollars, 
AMERICAN dollars for the love of god, on the Cubs to 
win the championship of Major League Baseball

The optimism has come with the development of young players.  Anthony Rizzo had a breakout year by learning to hit left-handed pitching.  Starlin Castro returned to the All-Star game after a year as one of baseball's worst everyday players.  Jorge Soler came up to give major league pitching the battering he once threatened to unleash upon an entire dugout's worth of baseball players.  And Javier Baez, glorious Baez, joined Cubs in August.  Baez, a mercurial baseball maestro whose potential to alter the Earth's tide with his tater-mashing is held in check only by his complete inability to successfully hit a ball with his bat.  Consider this: Baez came to the plate 229 times last season.  Of those, he put the ball in play 36 times.  Nine of those 36 hits left the yard; that's a dinger percentage of 25% and if that isn't a real stat it should be.  He also struck out 95 times, more than 40% of his total plate appearances.  This sample size is so small that baseball stats people would regard it like Vigo the Carpathian regards ghostbusters, but still.
 
A thorough analysis of advanced batting statistics (click to enlarge)

 And, after a couple of weeks superprospect Kris Bryant will appear as soon as he has passed a bizarre and arbitrary deadline that will allow the Cubs to keep him on a rookie payscale for an additional season, which the Cubs have  justified by saying he needs to work on his fielding with the subtlety of a CBS sitcom character ordering a footlong hotdog in mixed company. The Cubs have a number of heralded prospect bats waiting in the wings, but Bryant has eclipsed them all by demolishing minor league pitching last year and going on a spring training rampage that left a trail of baseball carcasses in his wake.

The Cubs were not content to sit around with their exciting young team.  They made additional not fucking around moves.  First they signed America's Favorite Cool Grandpa Joe Maddon to manage the team.  Maddon unexpectedly became available when Tampa GM Andrew Friedman bolted for the sunny skies and infinite money piles of Los Angeles.  The Cubs fired first-year manager Rick Renteria and signed Maddon in a round of baseball skulduggery that has the Rays filing tampering charges and (presumably) Renteria plotting vengeance in smoky tents filled with medieval topographical maps.  The Ricketts brought to the Cubs a healthy dose of intrigue: Theo Epstein's Second Clandestine Voyage from Boston, the Wooing of Joe Maddon, the Betrayal of Renteria, and the War of the Spanish Succession.
 
This time, bereft of gorilla suits, Theo Epstein fled 
Boston in the disguise of Lenin disguised as a 
Guy Who Isn't Lenin

Then the Cubs signed Jon Lester, the first big-time free agent pitcher of the Epstein era (let's forget Edwin Jackson exists).  Lester was brought in as the ace who can one day anchor a champion pitching staff.  Not to be fatalistic, but given the success rate of big time ace pitcher free agent signings and the involvement of the Chicago Cubs, there has never been a larger Sword of Damocles hovering over a baseball pitcher; there is an Aircraft Carrier of Damocles regularly sending squadrons of Damocles bomber jets at Lester's shoulder and cruciate ligaments.  

For several seasons Cubs games were not only meaningless in the existential sense of all sporting events being a trifling distraction from societal problems and I don't even an own a TV, but meaningless even within baseball's limited universe. You could slate the Cubs into last place in April and find them comfortably resting there undisturbed in September.  The only mild pleasure from Cubs games came from the potential of watching Cubs ineptly run into each other.  Now, even if they don't make the playoffs, the Cubs are at last interesting and it is not just because they will be playing their games in a dilapidated hellhole.

WRIGLEY RENOVATIONS

The Cubs' renovations of Wrigley Field are behind schedule.  This makes sense because the Cubs are philosophically behind schedule.  The outfield bleachers will spend this season as pits, barren baseball wastelands filled with dirt, more than a century of stale beer, and, by the end of the season, I assume roaming bands of abandoned prospects attempting to build a civilization out of sunflower seeds and fungo bats.

Theo Epstein, wearing a crown fashioned out of forbidden Old Style cans and Jed Hoyer, wearing pinstriped epaulettes, will begin to use the pits as part of hardline contract negotiations.  Edwin Jackson will be the first to be DFP'd-- designated for pits, forced to rely on his wits, charm, and ineffective fastball to negotiate his way through the numerous pit civilizations.  He will team with a man once known as Brian LaHair but now goes by his pit name Gargantuous The Hair who knows the ways of the pit but may have his own agenda.  But the greatest horror in the Pit does not come from the warring factions of pit dwellers or the pit pits or the festering bites of vienna hotdogs mutated into sentience by decades of proximity to urinal trough organisms.  No, it is the Toweled One, a mysterious man who stalks silently at night.  He wears ragged pants, a tattered jersey with only the letters "ior" visible and a cap pulled low over his face.  Severed elbow ligaments dangle from his belt.  Only one man has escaped and he has been driven mad; he screams about Tommy John surgery and teeth before becoming transfixed with fear and the only words he'll mutter are "in Dusty we trusty."
 
The Cubs' new Special Adviser to the General Manager on Pits, 
Thunderdomes, and Mutant Outlands

The Cubs are also installing a videoboard this year.

SEASON OUTLOOK

The Cubs will be improved this year.  This is because they have decided to use actual major league baseball players.  In addition to the ballyhooed prospects, the Cubs brought in on-base specialist Dexter Fowler, and Miguel Montero, a solid defensive catcher and maker of intense yell-faces.  Montero is also adept at pitch-framing, an art of openly deceiving umpires that is an acceptable part of baseball unlike attempting to steal signs, which is punishable by having a baseball thrown at your face because baseball is a violent murder sport invented in the nineteenth century by train robbery gangs. 
 
Early baseball action: a strikeout

Yet, while it's exciting to have a baseball team that aims for more than a top draft pick, it's probably a bit premature to assume they will make the playoffs.  For one, they play in the same division as the dangerous Pirates and the grimly inevitable St. Louis Cardinals.  Other awful teams, like the Padres and the Marlins will also contend for the Wild Card.  Fortunately, I can't imagine either of those teams ever causing  misery to Cubs fans.

Secondly, the Cubs' prospects, as good has they have been, are still prospects.  Soler probably won't continue his blistering pace.  Baez may never learn to hit major league pitching.  Kris Bryant has played exactly as many big league games as you or me, assuming that Carlos Zambrano did not just google himself for 1,000 pages.  Pitchers Jake Arrieta and Justin Hammel may not replicate last season's breakouts.  Joe Maddon's honeymoon will end under the thunderous echo of 10,000 guys with mustaches and a Chicago sports press manned by lumbering men writing the words "wins=winning games=winners yes?" in their notebooks next to sketches of sausage products.

And yes, the Cubs are still the Cubs.  Stewards of a century-plus World Series drought, compilers of losing seasons, standard-bearers of sporting ineptitude.  Perhaps, the Cubs will win one year, but it is equally possible they continue to lose until baseball transforms into another sport entirely after Wrigley Field is taken over by the pit people and baseball quickly transforms into an inevitable future death sport involving bullpen cars and pitching machines.  The Cubs have gouged fans and reached for taxpayers' wallets.  They have sent forth armies of stonegloved fielders, strikeout mongers, belly itchers, and Junior Lake against professional baseballers, they have intentionally made a mockery of team whose name and everything it stands for is already a mockery and in 2015 they have attacked us with the absolute worst thing with which to afflict a Cubs fan: hope.  You maniacs.

Notre-Dame: This is Northwestern Football

Turn up the Coolio, put up your Jud Buechler posters, and hang with Mr. Cooper.  Northwestern has gone back into South Bend and improbably beaten the Notre Dame Fighting Irish nineteen years after their last trip to Notre Dame Stadium convinced America that Northwestern football existed.  And they did so with a game only marginally more ridiculous than Northwestern's losses in the past two seasons, a game that unfolded like a diabolical Rube Goldberg machine designed to ruin Notre Dame football.  Look, I know anyone who has gone far enough down the Northwestern football rabbit hole to actually be reading this blog has probably watched the game and read all the articles and produced a 1920s silent film reel about it, but I can't think of anything more pleasurable than reviewing the stupefying chain of events that led to Northwestern victory.
 
Excerpt from silent film The Hiphooraysman.
The gif comes from @NUHighlights's spectacular collection of Fitzgifs, including one where 
Fitz temporarily vanishes from the Coaches' Review graphic box because he is reacting like a muppet

1. A botched hold on an extra points allows Nick VanHoose to return the ball some 98 yards for a two-point conversion.  You are not allowed to do this in the National Football League because only the kicking team can score National Football Points on a point-after attempt as mandated by the NFL's Committee of Guys With Folded Arms Slowly Shaking Their Heads.

2. A football bounces off an iconic Notre Dame Golden Helmet into the waiting arms of Anthony Walker for a rare Domeception.

3. The 2014 Northwestern Wildcats score multiple touchdowns in the same game.

3.Up 40-29, Notre Dame Head Coach Brian Kelly decides to go for two, even though a PAT would force the Wildcats to score two touchdowns instead of a touchdown, two-point conversion, and field goal because it's called playing the percentages and it's what smart managers do to win ballgames.
 
"More points! More points!" screams Kelly, demanding the Irish go for two in the 
manner of a reprobate Roman Emperor

4. Northwestern scores a touchdown and converts for its 37th point. 

5.With 96 seconds remaining in the game and Northwestern out of timeouts the Fighting Irish have the ball.  Virtually any football action here such as running, passing, falling down, performing an elaborately choreographed Busby Berkeley dance number, snapping the ball and yelling I DECLARE A FOOTBALL, would have virtually ended the game.  Instead, the running back fumbled the ball right back to Trevor Siemian and the Wildcat offense.

6. Northwestern drives down the damn field.

7. Kicker Jack Mitchell (MITCHELL!), who did not hit a field goal longer than 29 yards all season, straight up stone colds a 41-yarder to send it to OT.  Then, after a Notre Dame miss in overtime, he blasts a 45-yarder to just end Notre Dame.

After enduring a two-year supply of fourth-quarter meltdowns, Fourth and Shorts, Ron Kelloggings, kicker-slidings, overtime debacles, Husky tauntings, two point conversion slips, and the entire case history of Universe v. Northwestern Football, it culminated in a game where everything short of the Red Sea parted for the Wildcats.  And they did it to Notre Dame in South Bend on the Notre Dame Television Station in front of thousands of Notre Dame fans and in front of you and me and America.

THIS IS NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL

Northwestern football has been kind of bumming fans out lately.  No one expects the Wildcats to be a football juggernaut-- in fact Northwestern football had been defined by its decades-long stretch as a reverse-juggernaut that was better than any other team in this nation at getting trampled upon.  But the improbable way the Wildcats have lost football games has given fans the same kind of dour combination of disbelief and resignation that John McClane has in the first 25 minutes of any Die Hard movie when he learns he's at the center of another plot concocted by an as-yet undiscovered Gruber Brother. 

The advent of the playoff system (and its inevitable future expansion) and the Embrace Debate culture that permeates college football's nonsensical championship raises questions about the relevance of the rest of the teams.  What do you root for when your team is irrelevant to the playoff picture?  Why does the Big Ten bother to play football?
 
"Because it's there." George Mallory and this guy

Wildcat football is not likely to figure in the playoff most years.  They are not likely to contend for conference championships, although it's far from impossible in the Big Ten West: Division of Dreams.  But Northwestern, like 100 other teams in the FBS can have successful seasons.  There's the eternal quest for six wins and a golden ticket to one of dozens of Pizza City Bowls.  There's the Hat, the symbol of victory in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry.  And there is the possibility to just absolutely brutalize some other team's hopes and dreams.

This is the essence of Northwestern football.  If you cannot be a football powerhouse forever stressing about strength of schedule, transitive properties, shadowy playoff committees, and all of the other nonsense that goes into disguising the essentially arbitrary process that determines the national championship, you might as well be a team that infuriates other teams by beating them. 

Northwestern will beat a ranked team.   That team's fans will respond with apoplectic calls to fire their coach, their athletic director, their mascot, their band director, their chair in zoology.  They will write angry things on the internet about how the situation is unacceptable, despite the fact that the word unacceptable should only be by used be people like international observers monitoring elections in that fictional country ruled by Dr. Doom.  They will fail to acknowledge the existence of Northwestern except as a force to expose their team's flaws, like the Wildcats are an unexplained blight or pestilence.  No one ever gives credit to the sun for being really clutch at melting Icarus's wings.

College football has organized and commodified a process of demolishing expectations and crushing hope.  We know that all too well-- both seasons since 2000 that Northwestern entered with a preseason rankings ended as four- and five-win debacles.  I don't know how fans of powerhouse teams do that every year.  It does not seem fun to consider nine-win seasons and bowl victories as catastrophes or get genuinely upset when the team does not win by enough points.  It's great when Northwestern can rack up victories and contend for Big Ten Championships.  I sincerely believe the 'Cats will make it back to Pasadena at some point even as I've made peace with the fact that I will die without seeing the Cubs play in a World Series and all of their young talent is an elaborate cosmic taunt.  But, in those leaner years, Northwestern will remain an agent of chaos, spreading football discord and trampling upon the hopes of other fans, and chaos wins in college football more than anything. 

HAVING SAID THAT, LET'S HAVE UNREASONABLE BOWL EXPECTATIONS

The Notre Dame victory did more than satisfyingly infuriate Notre Dame people.  It also kept bowl hopes alive for Northwestern.  Should the Wildcats win out against Purdue and Illinois, they are going to Detroit or Dallas or the back room of a chicken slaughtering facility.  Neither team opponent is a world-beater, and Northwestern may well be favored in both.

The Wildcats are coming off their best offensive performance of the season.  The 40 points they scored in regulation is the exact number of points they scored in their last three games. Trevor Siemian threw for 284 yards, but could have had more if receivers could have come down with some few well-thrown bombs that bounced off their hands. He also ran for 32 yards and a touchdown, although he probably could have moonwalked into the endzone.  Justin Jackson has already rushed for 910 yards despite not beginning the season as a starter.  Jackson's not overwhelmingly big or blindingly fast-- instead, he has an innate sense that allows him to find cracks in the line and an apparent disdain for opposing tacklers that are forced to leave messages for him about tackling because he is too busy running the ball.
 
A late tackle attempt

The biggest story of the Notre Dame game was Jack Mitchell.  HEY DID YOU KNOW JACK MITCHELL IS A BASEBALL PLAYER?  IT IS TRUE, HE LITERALLY PLAYS TWO SPORTS.  THAT'S MORE THAN ONE SPORT, DOUG. I don't know what it is about multi-sport athletes that makes announcers lose their fucking minds with dumb, unfunny references to batting averages and walk-offs and wRC+, but we all lived through the Greg Paulus Imbroglio and as happy as I am for Mitchell and the rest of the 'Cats, I would not wish that on any fan base, even Notre Dame.

I don't know anything about Purdue football.  They have three wins this season and the worst record in the Big Ten (powerhouse Northwestern boasts four wins).  Darrell Hazell, who took over from Danny Hope last year, inherited a program that had fallen far from its heights as a reliable generator of NFL quarterbacks including Drew Brees, The Pride of Buffalo Kyle Orton, and Curtis Painter.  The Boilermakers' quarterback is a person named Austin Appleby.  It's been a grim year in West Lafeyette and probably all other Lafeyettes.
 
Hazell may be forced to take extreme action to rally his 
Boilermakers

Purdue is the worst team in the Big Ten this season.  But there's no point in assuming anything with this Northwestern team.  Purdue will see the 'Cats as a potential win, the Wildcats are coming off an emotional victory over yet another ranked opponent, and I bet Austin Appleby is really scrappy.  Perhaps the Notre Dame victory has managed to reverse the demonic curse that has befallen Northwestern since the Ohio State game last year.  Perhaps Northwestern players will build on the win.  Perhaps nothing has changed at all and this game will end with Purdue temporarily winning a court injunction to suspend the out of bounds rules on the final play and will lateral the ball around the stadium and parking lots and on hastily constructed Mad Max dune buggies that will allow them to lose the Northwestern defense somewhere around the Tippecanoe battle site and then wind their way back down to score a secret touchdown in the dead of night.

But the even larger implications surround the Apocalyptic Northwestern-Illinois Showdown looming in Evanston on November 29.  I'm turning my back on the Greatest Rivalry in the History of American Quasi-Amateur Sports this weekend to root full bore for the Beck Men to beat Penn State.  Both NU and Illinois have four wins.  If Northwestern manages to win against Purdue and the Illini beat Penn State, the teams will be playing for more than a Hat.  The last, shittiest, Big Ten bowl berth will be at stake.

The Battle for the Sixth Win would be the greatest Illinois-Northwestern game of all time.  The two teams have only played once with bowl status on the line as far as I can tell: in 2008, the Wildcats knocked Ron Zook's Illini out of bowl eligibility.  This could be potentially the first knockdown bowl berth death bowl ever played, and the fact that it would be for a forgotten place in some far-flung nonsense bowl makes it the greatest possible game between these two hallowed squads.  Plus, the winner gets the damn Hat and the undisputed crown as the second-best football team in the state of Illinois.

WILDCAT FOOTBALL

Notre Dame football looms over Chicago like the ominous shadow of a rubber monster suit over a scale model of Tokyo.  It is inescapable.  Despite sitting nearly 100 miles away and in another state, Chicago's a Notre Dame town only because of some weird quirks like the Fighting Irish dominating college football for the vast majority of its existence.  Meanwhile, only a few miles up the road, Northwestern toils in front of braying Nebraska fans, tarps, and no one, even in winning seasons.  The last win was the beginning of a great Northwestern team announcing its presence; this was a greater upset as the sputtering 'Cats regained their mojo.  

Two wins for bowl, one win for Hat, and zero wins left for chaos to reign.   

NIT and WBC

Northwestern's crushing loss to Minnesota in the Big Ten Tournament on Thursday ended their slim hopes of making it to the NCAAs for the first time in school history. The 'Cats had an opportunity to win the game late, but were again unable to close the game out. Despite the disappointment and the national attention (even Sports Illustrated had a blurb about Northwestern in the last issue), the 'Cats will almost certainly play in the NIT. For many schools, the NIT is a booby prize, and it's a bit of a bitter pill to swallow considering how many of Northwestern's losses came from heartbreaking collapses, but the Wildcats are a young team, and making the NIT is a significant step for a school with a basketball legacy as successful as the Gruber brothers' futile attempts to kill off John McClane.

There are two schools of thought on the use of the phrase
"Die Hard" in everyday conversation. On the one hand, Die
Hard can be used exclusively to refer to John McClane, as in
"did you see the part when Die Hard hanged that enormous
German blond German guy with those iron chains." Alternately,
Die Hard can be used as a verb to describe the vengeful killing
of all opponents in an unnecessarily gruesome way. Examples
of die harding involve driving vehicles indoors, uses of rocket
launchers, most impalements, and anything having to do with
helicopters; therefore, the best venue for die harding is almost
certainly a helicopter blade, railroad spike, and dynamite factory
located next door to either a bottomless pit or a crocodile farm.

The loss to Minnesota is payback for 2003, when a twelve-win Northwestern team unexpectedly upset the Gophers and knocked them off the bubble. Minnesota was led that year by Rick Rickert, who left for the NBA after his freshman year in order to fulfill the childhood dream of getting pummeled by Kevin Garnett. Rickert now plays for the New Zealand Breakers of the Australian NBL, who are currently sitting at third behind the South Dragons and the Melbourne Tigers. The NZ Breakers are led by Tony "Bear" Ronaldson, who is the Brett Favre of Australian basketball, missing only 15 games in his 19 year career, including a 324 game streak.


The Breakers game day experience involves the Moppets,
their youth mopping squad who dance with the Mizone
Breaker Girls and antagonize their Mascot Cheeky the Kea,
who according to the website, "spent countless hours
each day learning the Superhero force from the masters.
He studied ancient teachings that heightened his intelligence,
trained tirelessly to sculpt his muscular physique and
developed combat techniques to make the enemy tremble
in terror."

HONKBALLERS UNITE

The World Baseball classic delivered on one of the greatest upsets in the history of international sports when the Netherlands beat the Dominican Republic twice to advance the second round of competition and knock the powerhouse Dominicans out of the tournament altogether. The Netherlands beating the Dominicans was like the Miracle on Ice only twice and without the spectre of mutually assured nuclear destruction hanging over their rivalry. When the Netherlands meets Venezuela in Round Two, however, there are grave political overtones.

As mentioned in the the last post, the Netherlands team is made up of several players from the Netherlands Antilles. Three of the islands, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, are located just off the coast of Venezuela, and President Hugo Chávez has in recent years been doing a bit of saber-rattling there. In this 2006 Spiegel article, Chávez attacked the Netherlands foreign minister as a "Washington stooge" and accused the Dutch of allowing the U.S. to use the islands as a staging area for an invasion of Venezuela. In 2007, a Dutch public radio broadcaster staged an elaborate hoax, reporting that Venezuela had invaded Curaçao, setting off a mild panic.

Chávez decries Yankee imperialism while a
V.I.L.E. henchman skulks in the background.
You must be on the right track!

HONK FOR FREEDOM

The Dutch Antilles formed a minor theater for a proxy war against Portugal in the the Netherlands' war for independence from the cruel Habsburg yoke during the Eighty Years' War fought from 1568 to 1648. The global scope of these naval battles during the Early Modern period is remarkable as the Dutch and Portuguese clashed in the Caribbean, Goa, Jakarta, the Gold Coast, and Macau during the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

The more exciting action of the Dutch Revolt, however, took place on the Continent. The Spanish sent in the Duke of Alba to pacify rebellious Dutch noblemen which was the early modern equivalent of bringing a gun to a knife fight. The "Iron Duke" quickly endeared himself by ordering an impressive array of public decapitations in his "blood court." Though Alba's mission involved cracking down on Protestant heretics, he also found the time to decapitate loyal Catholic nobles in an attempt to end their unacceptable reign of tolerance.


The "Iron Dukes" Alba (left) and Wellington, progenitors of the Iron tradition
of rule

The Dutch hero was William of Orange (The Silent, not to be confused with the William of Orange who took the English throne in 1688), who led the rebellion until his assassination by Balthasar Gérard in 1584 after Phillip II put a bounty on William's head, calling him "a pest on the whole of Christianity and the enemy of the human race." Before Gérard, Juan de Jáuregui attempted the assassination on behalf of his boss, a vengeful Spanish fur merchant who was tempted by the bounty. Though de Jáuregui wounded William, he struck down by Royal Halberdiers. Unfortunately, Gérard and de Jáuregui did not team up to take down William of Orange and Klaus Kinski as the Hunchback. Instead, Gérard's elaborate plan involved walking into the palace and shooting the Prince, and was remarkably successful. He planned to escape via moat by using a pigs' bladder as a makeshift water-wing, but was caught and condemned to an elaborate series of gruesome tortures described with a slightly creepy amount of relish on his Wikipedia page.

Gérard attacks a vulnerable William as he takes refuge at an institute for
the gaping-mouthed

The Dutch face a similar uphill battle to advance in the Classic, facing not only their political archrival Venezuelans but also the Yankee Imperialist Americans in next round of group play. The Wildcats will find out about their NIT fate, I assume, sometime after selection Sunday. The 'Cats have been good enough this season that a run in the NIT would certainly be less shocking than another Netherlands win in the WBC, although it would be slightly less inspired by Habsburg treachery.