CUBS PREVIEW 2017: NOW WHAT

Those maniacs did it.  And now, after more than a century of ineptitude, a litany of specific playoff humiliations, an angry, mustard-flecked mob that has driven a nebbishy-looking baseball fan to the underground, an intentional reduction of the team to baseball molecules where fans were invited to pay exorbitant prices to watch Junior Lake strike out hundreds of times, and a mythical World Series run that involved the Rebirth of That Beefy Lad Kyle Schwarber from a sausage chrysalis and an impossible Game Seven where the Cubs, in prime Cub position and ready to implode in front of the only other team that can live in their baseball misery zip code had the heavens themselves open up and refuse to allow the Cubs to do what I had predicted they would do for hours in a number of increasingly frenzied and embarrassing text messages.  They won. They had the parade and everything.  And then baseball had to go and continue to exist.

What happens now?  There are rapacious Baseball Alexanders and Yankees fans for whom a single title is not enough and demand them with their unrelenting bobbling the ball gestures while a large, angry man screams fuck you fuck you fuck you behind them.  Sure, the Cubs should be really good this season.  They've got as good of a shot as anyone.  But after a postseason where every single pitch carried with it the portent of doom, where the echo of death so shrouded the team that Wrigley Field itself was turned into an impromptu chalk memorial for fallen Cubs fans unable to wait out a championship drought literally decades longer than the entire existence of the Soviet Union, it's hard to be upset when John Lackey gets knocked around in the 2017 Division Series.

The Cubs have long made hay from romanticizing their failure.  But there's no nobility in watching a profoundly wretched baseball team.  If there's anything that can be taken from the Cubs' century of failure it's that it was incredibly funny-- a wealthy team, boasting a national fanbase from early cable television, bolstered by a charming historical ballpark teeming with tourists indifferent to the often putrid play on the field manages only to perpetuate a remarkable run of baseball ineptitude where the team's rare appearances in the playoffs more often than not culminate in grandiose, impossible choke jobs and then everyone blames the whole thing on a literal goat. 

One of the dumbest legacies of the contrived billy goat curse is 
the fact that the goat was ever there in the first place. It should 
have been called the "curse of the reasonable stadium barnyard 
animal policy"

The 2017 Cubs face an impossible task of following up last season.  They face another long, grinding schedule, a host of reinforced rivals, and the unhinged lunacy of playoff bullshit that has made it rare for teams to repeat as champions.  And they do so after getting over America's greatest sports hump and in the face of inevitable backlash and overexposure that has already involved an absurd article naming Theo Epstein the world's greatest leader and David Ross dueling Mr. T on some sort of geriatric dancing program.

Mr. T is no stranger to televised competition, as 
shown by his entry in the Toughest Man In The 
World contest in the film The Toughest Man 
in the World where he plays the Toughest 
Man in the World, a bouncer who according to 
IMDB was "conned into taking over a youth 
center" also Mr. T performed the theme song 
called The Toughest Man In The World

The 2017 Cubs will not be able to break the longest championship drought in American sports, inspire a montage of crying grandmothers, or feature World Series games that start with ten minutes of Joe Buck cackling over footage of crypts and graveyards.  They will merely be an excellent baseball team, and watching them will still be the same pleasant waste of time that comes from watching any other baseball.  And from a person who wasted hundreds of hours citing Jake Fox's AAA numbers and watching Tony Campana desperately attempt to reach first base more than once a week, it's a welcome change.

THE CUBS FOR SOME REASON WILL PLAY BASEBALL THIS SEASON

The Cubs, fueled by their young bats, bring back the vast majority of last year's team.  They still have Rizzo and Bryant and Russell in their infield along with World Series MVP Ben Zobrist.  They can, at any time and without warning, deploy Javier Baez, who was scientifically designed to always do the most delightfully reckless thing possible on a baseball field. Baez will take extra bases and try insane, physics-defying slides.  He will always make that ill-advised throw or barehand play and somehow make it work a shocking number of times.  He is incredibly good at tagging, which I had no idea was something someone could be good at.  He will try to hit every ball he sees into the Upper Peninsula enough times that baseball's cold water pouring statistics brigade can toss out their well actually Javy Baez is not really that great of a baseball player articles because he strikes out so much that he might qualify for a federal wind farm tax break to which I say to this straw man have you seen him do the no-look tag.

Baseball's greatest feat of derring-do

At some point, it is possible the Baez magic will wear off.  Baez gained a cult following because of his playoff hot streak, most notably his solo, game-winning home run against a seemingly-unhittable Johnny Cueto at Wrigley, but that's not his typical hitting profile. He will likely remain frustrated by his greatest nemesis, the breaking ball so far outside that it's practically in the on-deck circle that nevertheless compels him to swing.  I'm willing to live with that.  Baez dwells in baseball chaos, and if his irrepressible desire to do the coolest thing possible turns him into an Infield Kingman, that's all well and good.

The Cubs will not have my other favorite player from the Cubs farm system, Jorge Soler. They traded Soler to the Royals for closer Wade Davis.  Soler, along with Baez, embodied the era of Shadow Cubs, where tales of their feats against hapless future insurance adjustors served as the happy counterpoint to whatever sad spectacle was happening to the actual Cubs on a daily basis.   Baez had footage of moon tower home runs; Soler came with reports of attempting to singlehandedly charge an entire opposing dugout.  Soler arrived on a tear in 2014 with a homer in his first at-bat, and the rhapsodies continued from there.  Joe Maddon referred to him as "like Vladimir [Guerrero] with plate discipline;" this came coupled with some delightful Maddon nonsense. "The fact that he doesn't really understand or speak English very well could work in his favor right now," Maddon said, Maddonically. "He's a beautiful man. I really, really enjoy the way he is."

Soler instead had trouble with plate discipline and spent a large amount of time lingering on the disabled list.  His greatest asset, to me, was his greatest drawback-- the fact that he is built like the Colossus of Rhodes and it seems stunning when he doesn't launch every single pitch back to the nearest Spaulding manufacturing plant as a warning to future baseballs. To watch Soler hulk in the batter's box, his ominous shadow lurking towards the dugout in the afternoon sun and then whiff feebly on the low and outside slider that we all knew was coming or stab ineffectively at balls in the outfield, or spend all of his free time nursing soft-tissue injuries made his struggles as a kind of OK baseball player harder to take.  Soler is still only 25 and escaped from an impossible logjam of prospect prodigies that have passed him by.  I hope he can put it together and mash some enormous moonshots out of Kaufman Field when he gets healthy.  He'll begin the season on the disabled list.

Farewell to Jorge Soler, whose throw to third after a league-wide shame campaign peer-pressured
Jon Lester into throwing to first is one of my favorite recent Cubs plays

The Cubs' most damaging departure is Dexter Fowler.  Fowler came in and did what almost no Cub did during Theo Epstein's years-long purge of competent baseball players for rebuilding purposes by getting on base a ton.  He became so integral to the Cubs' offense that he got his own catchphrase ("you go, we go"), and became one of the most likable Cubs of my lifetime.  Last year, Fowler had apparently signed with the Orioles and then dramatically popped up in Cubs' spring training to save the day. Now he is gone-- not safely ensconced in the American League, but on the hated Cardinals to torture the Cubs 19 times a season.  It's a testament to Fowler's popularity and the general, hazy euphoria that now accompanies all things Cub, that few Cubs fans harbor any hostility toward him (most of the Fowler TRADER references I could find on twitter were either sarcastic or referencing what appears to be a British soap opera), but we'll see how that progresses when he starts slapping hits all over Wrigley Field the Right Way in a pennant race.

The 2016 Cubs hit and pitched well, but they also owed their success to a historically great defense. They will certainly not be that good again partly because that sort of blip is unsustainable, but also because they will start a lumbering moose in left field.  Kyle Schwarber may be the most popular Cub because of his world series heroics, his propensity for mashing enormous home runs, and because he is a beefy, genial man in a city of genial, beefy people.  The question is not whether Schwarber can acquit himself well in left, but it's how much his prodigious bat can offset his oafish outfield stumbling and occasional inevitably-disastrous catching cameos.  As long as he is a Cub, loud, nasal calls will echo across sports radio for him to be traded to the American League, where he can whack moonshots in peace without having to ineffectually flail at baseballs in front of the entire country on a nightly basis.  That is unfathomable to me. 

Jason Heyward remains a mystery.  Heyward, last year's prized free agent signing, spent last season futilely gesturing with his bat in the general direction of a pitch and hit something like 15,000 soft grounders directly at the second baseman.  Still, he remained a valuable fielder and baserunner, and evidently a master of locker room rain delay oratory as evidenced by his World Series rain delay speech the Cleveland Urinal Address. Heyward's batting woes remain a fascinating look at how, even for an athlete as gifted as Heyward, his mind can be at war with his body.  His every plate appearance featured a series of ticks and timing gestures of a guy who floundered and kept adding mechanisms and hitches to the point that his swing resembled a Rube Goldberg machine of limbs and tendons.  This offseason, he has gone on a baseball vision quest to try to find a new swing, tinkering for months until he came up with something that has been roughly as terrible in spring training than whatever he was doing last year. 
 
Heyward's swing enters its Mark IV prototype phase using top baseball science  

The Cubs have an old, creaking pitching staff.  They have inexplicable ERA leader Kyle Hendricks, who somehow dominated Major League players with an 88 mile per hour fastball and a mound presence that can best be described as impending visit with the vice principal.  Every one of Hendricks's pitches last season felt like watching an increasingly elaborate con, waiting for someone somewhere to figure out that he was not throwing hard and exposing the ruse with a series of blistering line drives.  Baseball analysts don't know what to do with a guy like him. especially when he looks like a social media intern.  They give them nicknames like "The Professor" or "Dr. Brainzo" or "Chest Concave, Doctor of Baseball Flim-Flammery" while he beguiles people by winning the pennant and the World Series.  I have no idea if Hendricks will continue to contend for a Cy Young this season, but his mere existence in a baseball system that demands nothing but musclebound giants who break radar guns is a minor miracle.

Kyle Hendricks's theme music is "Sweet Emotion" 

There are few things in baseball less fun than rooting for a team with John Lackey.  Lackey, a grizzled, anthropomorphic swear word, has managed to gnaw his leg off from whatever bear trap that's ensnared him for the offseason and crawled into another spring training.  Lackey started off as a fat young guy who bellowed the word FUCK and has evolved his game to become a skinny old guy who yells FUUUCCCCKKK while hitting himself in the head with a baseball.  He's a mean ol' cuss who not only throws at guys who have the temerity to smile after hitting one his ineffective fastballs to Tucumcari, but stalks them in the offseason while doing pullups with the words "BAT FLIP" tattooed on his knuckles. Lackey was a good pitcher last year during the regular season and a not insubstantial part of their success, but he's also the least enjoyable Cub whose starts promise hours of peevish irascibility seethed through clenched, enormous teeth.

Jon Lester was great last season.  He does not throw to first.

Leaked footage of Joe Buck's intro to the Cubs-Cardinals game

SPORTS AFTER THE IMPOSSIBLE

I didn't think I'd ever see the Cubs win the World Series or Northwestern play in the NCAA Tournament, and they both happened within months.  I would say that this will change how I view sports, but then again the vast majority of teams don't carry with them impossibly long, mythical droughts that make it impossible to watch them on television without a graphic showing the price of bread and at least one old-timey vehicle.  

Here's an Old-Timey Base Ball Image to remind you of the many years that the Cubs 
afflicted their Fans with Substandard Base Ball-manship

The end of these absurd droughts has taken away single dominant narrative that surrounds everything they do.  It has also liberated them to exist as sports and not, in the case of the Cubs, a vaguely baseball-related doomsday cult.  The Cubs' 2017 season has no end other than baseball itself.  There will be questions about Jason Heyward's revamped swing whether Baez should be starting and whether Willson Contreras can catch Jon Lester.  These are normal baseball concerns, not a haunting Joe Buckmanship or invocation of the occult. 

No one wants to hear about long-suffering Cubs fans anymore.  The television networks and newspapers and, hell, even the Cubs themselves hauled it out to make their dollar and bludgeon every other baseball fan into oblivion with it every time the Cubs so much as threatened to finish over .500 for as long as anyone has been alive.  The baseball world has had enough of them and the inevitable Red Sox-like descent into sports villainy will begin on Opening Day.  That is when the World Champion Cubs will open on Sunday to defend their World Championship that they won in the World Series. 

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.