The Chicago Cubs Have Spiraled Into The Toilet Zone

It is a quirk of American professional sports where many teams are heavily incentivized to be bad, and avaricious owners and their penny-pinching henchmen in the front offices can sell the move as strategic.  For several years, the Cubs pursued an active Being Bad policy, refusing to compete in the open market for superstars, riffling through the bargain bin for washed up veterans, and selling off any useful parts for prospects.  Watching an intentionally bad or even unambitious and mediocre team for a season is mildly infuriating as they putz away another meaningless year that is one of the finite ones you have on this planet but it is at least comforting that the wins and losses don't really matter.  

On the other hand, watching a team that has been very good suddenly and inexplicably nosedive into an active volcano while being hunted for sport by a rival team that is enjoying an endless series of the most sports movie-ass walkoff victories is one of the shittiest sports experiences that exists and one that makes me wish my TV provider had a "you sure about that?" warning every time I try to record another three hour festival of stranded runners, bullpen collapses, and glassy-eyed ballplayers striking out and then staring wistfully into the outfield like they have just sent all of their sons off to fight in the Civil War.  

The once baby-faced Counsell is aging like an American President in his second year with the Cubs 

The Cubs are miserable and frustrated. The best offense in baseball has instantly vanished.  The entire team is on a two-month long slump to the point where the only explanation for what has happened that makes sense is some sort of coordinated industrial action.  They've got Kyle Tucker-- a man who is boring to the point of it being some sort of avant-garde art project, a guy so stoic and devoid of personality and emotion that I am convinced that if he were to undergo questioning by Jack Bauer and his array of rusted implements and car batteries and jumper cables that are just lying around, Bauer would still only manage to get a "we just you know need to keep seeing the ball out there" from him-- throwing his helmet in the dugout and bellowing FUCK after striking out.  It's harder to tell if he's more upset that he can no longer play baseball or that he is costing himself tens of millions of dollars from his free agent contract with the Dodgers next season.

The Cubs' Terminator-style plunge into melted steel has marred what had been the Cubs' most promising season since at least 2018.  Tucker was playing like a star, unheralded free agent lefty Matthew Boyd was mowing people down, Carson Kelly inexplicably became an offensive weapon and, most importantly, Pete Crow-Armstrong turned into a superstar.  Crow-Armstrong is a live wire, the best Cubs center fielder I've ever seen who pairs his speed with a rakish daring on the basepaths, and for most of the season his Baezian swing at everything approach was connecting as he bashed home runs.  He also is 23 years old and clearly having the time of his life being a star for a good cubs team in a rocking Wrigley Field and instantly became every single 10 year-old's favorite player; every time the Cubs have had a walk-off win he starts running on the field from the dugout before the runner has even crossed the plate because he's so happy his teammate did something cool.  If he played in the early 1990s he would already have a Costacos Brothers poster of him casually hovering 45 over a fence robbing a home run dressed in goth makeup and a leather jacket on a shoot with the most amount of smoke machines that can be legally operated in a photography studio with the legend "The Crow Flies." 

By my estimates, PCA has struck out in 95% of his plate appearances in the last six weeks.

Crow-Armstrong has filled the rare Cubs archetype of "infuriating baseball goblin" for opponents

The Cubs went from a comfortable lead in the division to giving up an insurmountable lead to the impossibly annoying Brewers who by now have probably called up a sickly Depression-era child who can barely manage to lift a bat out of the stands to pinch hit who immediately blasts a walkoff home run four times in the past week. They are technically in the Wild Card race but at this point even if they manage to cling on without being overtaken by the Reds their postseason prognosis seems to be two futile, punchless losses before an offseason with the departure of Tucker all but certain. Right now, the state of the Cubs is just Craig Counsell sitting pinch-faced in the dugout making his signature "we're not going to challenge that" gesture that looks like a toddler refusing to eat a single piece of broccoli for three hours every day.

On the other hand, baseball vibes can change quickly.  It wasn't that long ago that the Cubs were having a ball smashing home runs everywhere and winning games and not sweating out 2-0 losses to the Pirates. In 2001, with the Cubs in a similar slump, rookie backup first baseman Julio Zuleta decided to invent some rituals to unlock the bats based on a holy spiritual text, the 1989 movie Major League. According to this wonderful Sports Illustrated story from 2001, Zuleta's ritual sprang from the most perfect use of Ballplayer Brain that I've ever seen:

The next afternoon Zuleta gathered two oranges, an apple, a banana, sunflower seeds and a tube of the analgesic Flexall. He placed the items on a white towel in a sunny spot in the Cubs' dugout. Then he took a bat from each member of that evening's starting lineup and stacked them atop the mishmash. "I can't explain it all," says Zuleta, "but I thought that maybe the bats were hungry, so I gave them some fruit. I put them in the sun so we could get hot."

The Cubs, aided by what they called Zudoo ("I don't practice voodoo," Zuleta said in the SI article. "I am Catholic, and I believe 100 percent in God. But the way we were losing, something had to be done.") had an offensive explosion and a 12-game win streak that briefly catapulted them into first place.  "Look, I don't know what the heck Julio's doing, but as long as he's not killing any chickens in his hotel room, I'm not going to complain. Winning is winning," third baseman at the time and current Cubs radio analyst and Sandwich Uncle Ron Coomer told Sports Illustrated.  I can imagine Coomer telling Pat Hughes that he was rubbing his bats with a gyros spit until an umpire complained about the flies while Zach Zaidman maniacally cackles in the background.  Perhaps it's time for one of the Cubs to try something from Major League II or even Major League: Back to the Minors.   

So it's possible that sometime between now when it's too late, the Cubs will manage to get their shit together and remember how to play baseball again. Or they will continue to spiral into one of the most depressing collapses in recent Cubs history and the ballpark will be so miserable that you can get into Wrigley without having to take on an onerous personal loan and hope to see the token one win they get in each series.

I WILL NEVER STOP BELIEVING THAT THE BEARS ARE WHO I THOUGHT THEY WERE

The motto of this Bears season is not officially This Time It Will Be Different, but that's what it might as well be.  The Bears went out and got the hottest coach on the market in Lions madman offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, they are entering the second year with Caleb Williams under center, and they brought in a tight end and receiver with their first two picks after spending a great deal of free agent money to bring in a new group of offensive linemen who will hopefully prevent Williams from spending the majority of the season buried in the turf. Inept henchman-coach Matt Eberflus and his rotating collective of flunky assistants either in the process of being fired for incompetence or for vague and unspecified acts of "inappropriate behavior" that may or may not have involved an FBI investigation is gone. The Bears are behaving like a serious football team and not the Chicago Bears.

I have never seen a coaching move funnier than Matt Eberflus, asked about how after a disastrous and inept season where no one could figure out why he wasn't fired and why he should be trusted to work with a number one pick quarterback, appeared back at Bears camp with the explanation "I have a beard now." Eberflus is now the defensive coordinator for the Cowboys and his move for this season is "Now I'm wearing glasses. I'm learned. I know about the existence of time outs." 

But you will have to forgive me if I am reluctant to believe that this new Bears regime will bring about the never-seen holy grail of Bears football: a competent, functioning offense.  The Bears have, with the exception of a year under Ron Turner and that one year when Marc Trestman had Josh McCown playing out of his mind for a few games while Jay Cutler was injured, never had anything resembling a passing offense.  For my entire life no matter who is on or running or coaching the Bears there has been one kind of good Bears team, the one where the majority of touchdowns are scored by linebackers.  

Already, there have been some disturbing signs from camp.  Reports from beat writers describe an offense in disarray.  While GM Ryan Poles spent the offseason revamping the interior of the offensive line, the all-important left tackle spot remains up in the air, and a lot of playing time is now going to an undrafted free agent who played Canadian college football.  There was a video of Caleb Williams unable to throw a ball through a net and being mad.  The Bears also face a brutal schedule, not only having to get through their own meat grinder division but also having to play the brass knuckle enthusiasts of the AFC North.

Adding to the unease, ESPN reporter Seth Wickersham's book on quarterbacks includes revelations from Caleb Williams's overbearing Sports Father about how he didn't want his son to go to the Bears because it's "where quarterbacks go to die" as well as claims that the Bears left Williams alone to watch film with no instruction. These reports, excerpted to ESPN, stoked a brief local outrage, although I don't understand it-- I also would not want someone I cared about to become the starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears and would have encouraged Caleb Williams to pull an Eli Manning-style power play or play in the Canadian league or fake his own death and change his name, reemerging as a promising Mountain West quarterback named Kraydon Armgun rather than play for the fucking Bears.  

Williams could have hired the people that made this hideous and unconvincing disguise for Eli Manning when he did a stunt try out for Penn State for some dumb marketing purposes that I can't remember 

I like Caleb Williams, enjoyed watching him in college and his rare moments of magic on the Bears last season and don't think he is bad, no matter how much a lot of the national media inexplicably seems to want him to be.  I also, despite a general discomfort with the offensive mastermind guys with Wermacht haircuts who form the current state-of-the-art in NFL coaching, have no reason to think that Ben Johnson doesn't know what he's doing.  I want both of them to succeed.  But I have watched enough Bears football where I need to see them actually throwing the ball like a normal NFL team for a whole season before I can believe it's possible.  

The Bears, as sclerotic and stagnant an organization that exists in sports, have undergone some change. Team matriarch Virginia McCaskey passed away at the age of 102, and her son George who looks like a kindly train conductor on a children's TV show and probably should have been put in charge of do-gooder charity projects so that you could see a few special parking spaces at Soldier Field reserved for EVs and the Virginia could say "oh George did that" to visiting football dignitaries, has been feeling himself a little more; for example the Bears are not wearing their orange uniforms and now the end zones are navy blue for the first time. Reportedly, team president Kevin Warren who you last saw putting 45 new teams in the Big Ten, has taken on a more active role in football operations. The notoriously tight-fisted organization spent an enormous amount of money to get the top coach on the market instead of a cheaper Matt Eberflus type. They will likely soon announce that they are building their dumb, domed Xanadu out in Arlington Heights after years of releasing Hypothetical Stadium Renderings in various Chicagoland locations. George McCaskey would love to not have his usual once every three to four years press conference after firing the head coach and/or front office to say "well everyone involved has made terrible decisions again but this time I swear the exact same people will not make that mistake."

Fortunes change quickly in the NFL. It's not unheard of for a team to go from five wins to vaulting into the playoffs.  But there are some teams for whom this does not happen, the joke meme teams who always suck no matter what they do that can never get their act together-- teams like the Browns and the Jets who are always surrounded by dysfunction led from their idiot owners and their inevitable collection of bumbling, malevolent sons.  The Bears have been living in that territory since they fired Lovie Smith.  It will take more than hiring a coach and drafting a quarterback for me to think they can overcome their tendencies and be a normal football team instead of The Bears. 

Potemkin Stadium

  

At some point they must have played a football game. But at Northwestern’s opener against Miami on Saturday, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was the hastily-constructed pop-up stadium built on a soccer field. I have been skeptical about what seemed to be a desperate and hare-brained scheme that had Northwestern scrambling to find somewhere to play the majority of its home games despite the fact that they had been planning to tear down Ryan Field for two years and had been locked in legal combat with a lawn sign army the entire time. And yet, by all accounts, they seemed to have pulled it off. They played a football game there and the bleachers did not collapse, the turf didn’t roll up, and no gangs of bloodthirsty pirates besieged the stadium with cannon fire, boarded the stadium, and menaced David Braun with a cutlass.

The temporary stadium looked spectacular on television. The game kicked off on a picture perfect late summer afternoon with the sun shining, the lake shimmering, and the sky clear enough to see the skyline of Chicago, the city that I would like to remind you that Northwestern is the official Big Ten Team of. It is wild that it sits so close to the lake. Cameras showed boats cruising on by carrying Northwestern and Miami flags. The stadium is close enough to the water that it is possible for a team to literally take a boat to the stadium. I am not sure about the logistics of transporting nearly one hundred of the largest people that we can produce on a fleet of ships, but I think that would be a spectacular entrance, one that would only be matched by running out of a blow-up tunnel that features an annoyed-looking partially deflated panther and some smoke machines.

PJ Fleck learning that he doesn't play Northwestern this season and can't literally row into the stadium

The stadium looked so good that I immediately started to see calls for Northwestern to abandon the ridiculous $800 million sarcophagus that Pat Ryan is building to carry his name and permanently stay on the lake in a cozy little stadium. This would be a disaster. 

 

The fact is that Northwestern is not meant to play in a fun lakeside stadium any more than a brand new palace on the ashes of the old Ryan Field. The school already had its own ideal stadium: a dilapidated shithole. Northwestern is not somewhere fans should be able to go watch football and marvel at the views. It should be a half-filled pit where no one would ever want to set foot. 

Northwestern will never play Big Ten home games– I don’t know how small of a stadium you would have to build to stop Chicagoland’s tens of thousands of Big Ten alumni from flooding every single structure Northwestern could play in but it is certainly less than the 12,000 of the lakeside stadium’s capacity– so the stadium should remain a fortress dedicated to the misery of opposing fans. I don’t want to see people rooting for Wisconsin sitting in sun-kissed bleachers watching a parade of sailboats blooming like flowers on a glittering lake. They should instead be pelted with sleet and spend the entire third quarter waiting in line for a hot dog only to be told they are out of buns and be handed a loose frank in a paper cup. Ideally, Northwestern should play in a stadium that is rigged to explode at the end of every conference game.

OK FINE HERE'S FOOTBALL

 

Last week’s post highlighted the stark changes in Northwestern’s football team, but one thing stayed the same: the Wildcats won yet another punt-driven 13-6 slog marked by dominating defense. The result is very good; Miami is coming off an eleven-win MAC championship season, the game was only as close as it was because of an ill-timed goalline fumble, and Northwestern’s untested secondary largely held up and kept the RedHawks out of the endzone. A team like Miami would have likely defeated many recent vintages of Northwestern Wildcats in the type of game where Pat Fitzgerald would have immediately been loaded onto a barge after the game and sent to Door County after being mistaken as a live mascot for a cherry orchard. At the same time, it would be nice to see a brand new offense headed by a dynamic quarterback who is electric running in the open field manage an offensive opener more exciting than The Mick McCall Gambit.

If Northwestern can't break 20 points Mike Bajakian will have to file another lawsuit against Northwestern, this time for plagiarism

This week, Northwestern will face off against Duke with an absurd eight pm kickoff on a Friday night. This game will be on national cable television for the benefit of the most degenerate college football fans possible and football maniacs who are too cheap to shell out for Peacock to watch the Packers and Eagles play in a venue even more ridiculous than the lakeside stadium. This game will undoubtedly be a blow for Chicago’s restaurants and nightclubs as late night revelers stay home to watch these two teams try to secure a vital win that will make it easier to qualify for the Spirit Halloween Novelty Dracula Fang Bowl.

Duke and Northwestern have been playing an awful lot lately, and Duke has been running away with the series. They’ve beaten the ‘Cats five consecutive times. Despite the fact that these two schools historically operate in the same sad dregs of the power conferences, I don’t think that playing them every year has congealed this series into a rivalry. But I also know that I am sick of watching Northwestern lose to Duke in football. I would like to see the Wildcats get a decisive win and then start a new tradition where they make the opposing mascot walk the plank into the unforgiving waters of Lake Michigan.

 

Northwestern lures the infamous Coach K Sheffsky into the stadium only to march him straight to the plank while he makes those hideous death mask faces that he used to make if the official dared to call a foul on his team

Between staff moves, the transfer portal, and the last of the Covid era players lingering for their ninth-year dissertation defenses, it is incredibly difficult to tell how good a team will be year by year.  Duke has a new staff headed by Florida journeyman Manny Diaz and a new transfer quarterback.  They beat an FCS team called "Elon" handily.  Northwestern is playing at home and will outnumber whatever Duke fans manage to float in.  It is at this point very difficult to figure out how confident I am in a Northwestern win and even whether we should Throw Out The Record Books for this quasi-rivalry that is now being played for The Basketball Legacy of Ryan Young.  Looking at the dragons that lurk on Northwestern's Big Ten schedule, they need this one badly.

CHICAGO BEARS FANS HAVE HOPE AND I'M TERRIFIED

Look, the Chicago Bears don't have quarterbacks.  My entire life they have sent out some new jabroni to throw for 167 yards while the Bears lineback the other team into submission.  For a long time, the Bears didn't seem to even care about the position; their approach to quarterbacks seemed to mirror a gang of street toughs menacing Jean Claude Van Damme in that each of them would do a couple of moves before falling down or getting thrown through a plate glass window.  The Bears now have the most hyped rookie quarterback since Trevor Lawrence, a full complement of competent wide receivers, and an offensive coordinator whose previous experience didn't watching Aaron Rodgers run around for 15 seconds and then heave a perfect pass across his body to a wide open guy and then saying "I told him to do that."  I genuinely don't know what to do.

Bears fans have been through the ringer with their last two great quarterback hopes.  Mitch Trubisky was such a pud that he was booed by fans on draft night and spent the entirety of his career here being reminded that he was drafted over Patrick Mahomes.  Justin Fields, handed a nonexistent offensive line and a cadre of wide receivers that were made up of kick returners and XFL players, produced some of the most incredible highlights I've ever seen from a Bears quarterback, but never found rhythm in the passing game.  I put a lot of hope into Fields, who was an absolute monster in college and a person who seemed to bear the inept management of his career that looked almost like sabotage with an admirable grace.  I still am very defensive about Fields and instinctively lash out at anyone who dares to call him a glorified running back.

The 2024 Bears hype has been fueled by their first appearance on Hard Knocks, the HBO and NFL Films documentary series that follows a team in training camp.  I have no idea if this is how Hard Knocks is or because Bears ownership mandated that they remove all of the swearing, but this TV show was unbearably boring.  The NFL Films crew does a great job filming game and practice action-- a sequence from the final episode that seamlessly stitched together a bunch of Caleb Williams practice throws was delightful-- but there is little the gravelly voiced NFL announcer can do to get you hyped up to watching a bunch of guys in athleisure talking in meetings.  It doesn't help that the Bears management and coaching staff have zero personality.  Matt Eberflus, one of the most baffling and oafish coaches I've seen whose blundering through the first half of last season made me astonished that he had not yet been fired, made a dramatic offseason change by growing a beard and getting a new haircut and apparently in NFL logic this makes him good now.

Eberflus had a dramatic beauty transformation from a "find me the girl" henchman to a "get me the launch codes" henchman

Caleb Williams has an enormous amount of pressure.  Bears fans are not just expecting the first good quarterback they've had in most fan's lifetimes, they are expecting a superstar and fast.  It is unlikely that a rookie, even one as talented and magical as Williams and with his supporting cast of star receivers, will be that good that quickly.  Williams, for his part, seems to welcome the hype.  Fields, cast in a similar role, seemed to bear the psychosis of generations of quarterback-scarred Bears fans belching giardeniera into sports radio call lines with a stoic determination.  Now he's trying to win the grimmest quarterback battle in the league against a chalk outline in the shape of Russell Wilson.  As Fields knows, Williams may never be as popular in the city as he is right now.  A lifetime of experience has hardened me against hope that the Bears will ever have a functioning passing attack. 

 

Chicago is already a rabid Bears town above all other professional sports, but the Bears optimism has reached a deranged pitch because the rest of the city's professional sports scene is dreadful.  The Cubs have been floundering all summer making their last desperate lunge for an unlikely wild card spot.  The Bulls have traded their two best veterans for underwhelming returns including a deeply flawed and unpopular young player and seen their two all-stars turn into untradeable albatrosses that have no interest from the league; they need to desperately lose as many games as they can so they don't lose their 2025 draft pick.  The Chicago Sky are still several players away from building anything around their two exciting rookies.  I have been told we have a hockey team here and it is also bad.

But it is impossible to frame how bad professional sports teams are in Chicago without talking about the White Sox.  The White Sox have already lost 109 games.  They seem to win a game once every two weeks.  They are inept in ways that defy belief-- in a recent game their entire outfield and left side of the infield collided in the shallow left field, allowing two runs to score on a routine popup hit by a guy who started the season playing for them as the DH because he was somehow worse at fielding than that.  The 2024 White Sox will finish the season the worst major league team in modern history.  They are run by a cadre of fools led by Jerry Reinsdorf and somehow immortal croaking corpse Tony La Russa, both of whom seem like they would rather have this team become a national laughingstock than find someone who has a functioning understanding of baseball in 2024.  I understand that Reinsdorf is very old and rich enough that he never has to interact with anyone who isn't going to flatter him, but I do not understand why a person would want to continue owning sports teams in a city where the possibility that you might have some weird emergency that requires you to leave your house without a retinue would instantly result in a mob of sports fans trying to capture you and parade you around the city in the type of restraints made famous by the late, great Hannibal Lecter.  To me, that sounds like a bummer.

This city needs a winner badly and they are counting on a rookie quarterback on the team that destroys quarterbacks for as a reflex.  It is natural to go into this Bears season in a defensive crouch, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But life is hard enough as it is.  If Caleb busts, he busts.  If the Bears stink, they stink.  Why not at least have hope, for both football teams that play on the lake.