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. 

What is to be done?

First off, a note that the New York Times preview of Northwestern is up at their college football blog, The Quad. They have Northwestern ranked #47 going into the 2009 season, above #105 Indiana, #62 Minnesota, and #57 Michigan. Paul Myerberg's preview is excellent and accurately assesses the 'Cats strengths and weaknesses going into next season. Although Northwestern does not play Michigan this year, the home games against Indiana and Minnesota will be vengeance games: Northwestern will be looking to reconcile its disappointing loss in Bloomington, and Minnesota will try to avenge the Wildcat walk-off and walk-out interception that saw that the Gophers would never win in the Metrodome again.

Alexandre Dumas, literary patron saint of
vengeance, vows revenge on Henri Meyer for
this
unflattering caricature

SECOND HALF CUBS PREVIEW

Instead of running away with a flawed division as predicted by most media outlets and at least three of Milwaukee's racing sausages, the Cubs are desperately fighting for third place in a miserable division behind Milwaukee and a St. Louis team that is winning because Albert Pujols is playing like Bugs Bunny against the Gashouse Gorillas. As they would say in the title of three-fifths of everything published in nineteenth century Russia, what is to be done?

Chernyshevsky, Lenin, and Tolstoy, all authors of works
entitled What is to be done presented here in beardal order

The Cubs' struggles on offense this season have been well-publicized without a good explanation; should a Cub manage to safely reach base, his teammates immediately begin striking out, popping up, waving their bat around like they are trying to put out some sort of broom fire, and suffering Jose Cardenal-like problems with depth perception.

Cardenal had problems in his Cubs
career with mysteriously shut eyes,
renegade grasshoppers, and inferior
baseball cap technology

The amazing thing about the Cubs has been the curious synchronization of slumps. Both Alfonso Soriano and Milton Bradley are having their worst years since 2001 and 2002, their first full seasons in the bigs (considering that Bradley has only played in more than 100 games three times in his ten year career, I'm counting 98 games as a full Milton Bradley season, much like a full Milton Bradley injury does not count unless he's being restrained or surreptitiously sedated for plane travel). Bradley, at least, is getting on base, whereas Soriano's OPS is currently identical to utility man Geoff Blum and backup catchers Chris Coste and Gregg Zaun, who at least has an amazing webpage combining Rush with a searing hatred of unjust commandantes.

Mike Fontenot, who put up a .909 OPS in limited duty last year has become nearly useless, and Geovany Soto has been unable to stand up to the pressure of his rookie of the year season and the WBC's reefer madness witch hunt. Of the healthy Cub regulars, only Derrek Lee is producing at almost his exactly his career average. By OPS+, only Lee, Theriot, and Fukudome are producing at league average (and Fukudome only because of his insanely hot April and May is balancing out a terrible June and fumbling July). So what is to be done?

The only logical solution is that the bats, they are very sick. The Cubs should call in a professional. Facing a similar crisis in 2001, rookie Julio Zuleta grabbed an armload of apples, oranges, sunflower seeds, and Flexall and attempted to cleanse the bats using a dark art he invented called "zoodoo." According to this SI story, Zuleta explained his thought process combining his mastery of alchemy, sorcery, and occult books with ornate yet sinister cover designs: "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." Fortunately, blasphemy does not appear to be a part of the zoodoo process: "I don't practice voodoo. I am Catholic, and I believe 100 percent in God. But the way we were losing, something had to be done," he said as he ordered his manservant to attack Indiana Jones.

Zuleta is currently a free agent after a successful career in Japan with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks and the Chiba Lotte Marines, earning three all-star appearances, his own supporter song, and the nickname "Samurai." Zuleta was last seen playing for Panama at the WBC where he went 0 for 8 with 3 Ks, which fits him in perfectly with the Cubs' team concept.

Zuleta bats for Panama at the WBC adespite also qualifying to play for an army of
the undead that he raised by his reckless use of incantations from the
Necromonicon to try to change the clubhouse sunflower seeds from regular to
barbecue flavor

TRACKING DOWN THE APOCRYPHAL

I recently came across this odd article for the New Statesman written in 2000 by Nina Khrushchev about her grandfather's famous shoe-wielding outburst at the UN. In it, she claims never to have seen evidence of the incident and wonders whether it might be a too-perfect story designed to inflame cold war tensions:

The shoe banging, it seemed likely, was an anecdote created by public demand, consistent with the political needs of the socialist-capitalist division. In short, I was almost sure it had never happened. My grandfather was innocent, and I had no reason to be ashamed.

Khrushchev sought to test out the process of historical myth-making in an age of mass-media, where apocryphal stories continue to flourish. After all, apocryphal attribution seems to be the source of 99% of material related to Winston Churchill, very possibly including the phenomenal dick joke found at the bottom of this page (an entire web page, for example, exists to debunk the famous "up with which I shall not put" quote, displaying the sort of pedantry, oddly enough, that Churchill would probably not put up with after consulting with his gin cabinet). Khrushchev's search, however, came less from a duty to historical accuracy and more from an understandable desire not to see her grandfather as a shoe-waving maniac, a view with which I cannot empathize.

Mr. K: You ain't tough enough for me

The Khrushchev article did lead me to examine the news coverage of the incident, which happened at the U.N. on October 12, 1960. Khrushchev was already on edge, having confronted an uppity Spaniard the day before who had refused to applaud him. The New York Times described Khrushchev's outburst as "a brief but vivid display of finger-shaking and recrimination," noting that he "indicated his disapproval of the Spanish delegation with a series of vigorous arm gestures." The same day, he threatened delegates by claiming that Soviet factories were producing rockets "like sausages," a combination of factors resulting in an all-time great article subheading:


The shoe incident itself earned another ace headline from our friends at the Times:

Benjamin Welles described the scene: "Mr. Khrushchev thereupon pulled off his right shoe, stood up and brandished the shoe at the Philippine delegate at the other side of the hall. He then banged the shoe on his desk." The story continues, under the subheadline "KHRUSHCHEV ADDS SHOE-WAVING TO HIS HECKLING ANTICS AT U.N.": "Later...Mr. Khrushchev alternately shouted, waved a brawny right arm, shook his finger and removed his shoe a second time." I'm grateful for the attention to detail that indicates Khrushchev goes to his right for all shoe and arm-waving as well as the author's robust vocabulary for describing Soviet outbursts.

Was Khrushchev a madman or did he have another purpose? The article provides further analysis to his motivations: "Serious observers here believe Mr. Khrushchev has a deadly serious purpose in his histrionic excesses. They noted that a standard Communist practice, whenever the Communists believe they cannot win in a court of law, is to destroy the prestige and sanctity of the court."

One thing that Khrushchev did not do at the U.N. is threaten to bury the West or declare that anybody's grandchildren will live under communism. The burial threat occurred in 1956 at the Polish embassy in Moscow as the Western delegates retreated under a hail of abuse, as chronicled in this excerpt from Time, although the New York Times comes through again with the headline "KHRUSHCHEV TIRADE AGAIN IRKS ENVOYS." The idea of grandchildren living under communism comes from an exchange that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson claims he had with Khrushchev. Here's the anecdote in his own words that is apparently being played during what appears to be a 2008 Republican primary debate as the delegates stand silently demonstrating their displeasure with the Soviet Union, a hot-button issue in the 2008 election.

Perhaps if Zuleta's bat rituals fail, the Cubs can turn to some godless communists to cook up a five year plan for getting some hits or they will be forced to endure vivid displays of finger shaking a recrimination and histrionic excesses from disappointed fans.