As noisy as the Cubs bats were tonight — and it was like a friggin’ Linkin Park concert on steroids — they couldn’t quite drown out the silence of Cincinnati’s, who failed to produce a single base hit (not a little squib, not a dying quail, nothin’) against the super-hero arm of Jake Arrieta. You’ve heard of the zone? Well, wherever the hell that is, Jake’s smack dab in the dead center of it.
To be honest, I felt a little sorry for Cincinnati tonight. I mean, not sorry enough to feel bad; sorry in a way that I wanted to spare them the embarrassment of stepping into the batters box against this guy right now. Plus, it was just a colossal waste of time. It woulda been easier for everyone if, instead of stepping into the batters box, they just penciled in a strike out, or weak ground ball or pop out in the score book and then headed back out on the field. (Probably would have made Rob Manfred, MLB’s official time-keeper, happy.)
Likewise, instead of pitching to the Cubs tonight, it woulda been easier if Finnegan had just turned around and thrown the ball into the gap, or over the fence or something. 16 runs on 18 hits. In tennis that would be called “abuse of ball.” Love it.
I feel like I oughta be drooling over the offensive production more, and normally I would. But holy crap!, Arrieta has 2 no-no’s in his last 11 regular season starts. And … AND … the Reds haven’t been no-hit in the regular season since 1971, which I’d guess is long before most of you were born. That’s 7,110 games.
And tomorrow, we get to play these guys again.
Joe
Off to Cincinnati today for 4 days of fun with the Red Stockings. This is a club — not unlike the Cubs — with a long, colorful past; one full of intrigue, deception, and moronic moves that rival anything the Cubs have been able to pull off during the longest championship drought in professional sports history. Still, the average guy on the street can’t tell you much about the Reds. Yeah, everybody knows about Pete Rose, but Reds knowledge basically starts and ends with his whining buttocks gettin’ broomed from the game, with some Big Red Machine thrown in for good measure. On the other hand, the same guy who flunks Reds 101 can recite in painful detail incidents like Bartman, and the black cat, and the billy goat, and Lee Elia’s meltdown, and tradin’ Greg Maddux, and a bunch of other things that have helped define the Cubs as the door mat of the National League over the past century.
So, to brighten my day, and maybe make you feel like we’re on an even playing field — historically speaking — I thought we’d have a little Red Stockings history lesson.
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Let me start by saying that I love ESPN. I’ve been an addict since way back, back, back, back, back when Chris Berman could still see his toes. Since before ESPN 2 and ESPN 3 and Deportes. Since before Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser started yelling at each other, and before Keith Olbermann became such a ginormous a-hole. My first words were “DaDaDa. DaDaDa.”
However…
I was pickin’ up an ice cold sixer of Old Style today, and while scanning the mags at the check out line (Hey, did you know the bitter marriage between Barack Obama and his wife Michelle continues to fall apart in the wake of the president’s womanizing?) when ESPN The Magazine’s cover grabbed my disbelieving eyeballs like a Fabricio Werdum guillotine.
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Unless you’re from another planet (Mets fans, I’m talking to you), you understand that the Cubs have a pretty friggin’ good chance of making the Series this season. We’ve lost Schwarber to a freak accident which ain’t good, but still, outta the billions and billions of stars out there I’m thinking there’s only one or two that are out of alignment. I’d almost be willing to say it’s our destiny to win the last game of the playoffs this year. Almost.
There’s still this very small but nagging thing in the back of my head, though. It’s like when you’re eatin’ a PB&J sammy and you get a raspberry seed stuck between your teeth. It’s delicious, but you can’t fully enjoy it cuz of that stupid seed. And you can’t get it out. It drives me friggin’ nuts. It’s Bartman. I know, I know, there was no sign of him last year, but I can just see him lurking in the shadows … with his mitt.
The missus says I’m like a dog with a bone with this Bartman thing, and that I’m cuttin’ years off my life by letting it stew for so long. She’s right, I know. But then, if the fully loaded barge of encased meat products I’ve eaten, and that cheese sauce on the ball park nachos (it looks like it’s radio active or something) haven’t corked up the old arteries yet, I think I can handle a few more years of pointing the finger at Bartman. I’ll get over it one day. Maybe. But for now, keep your eyes peeled. And if you do see him, please give him the official Bartman Welcome.
Joe
Hey there, Ouija boards, Joe Schlombowski here with a little analysis of why Addison Russell was destined to be the hero of last night’s come from behind thumping of the Reds.
Baseball is a sport full of superstitions, right? I mean, you got guys that put on the uni exactly the same way — every item in the same order — when they’re on a hot streak. You’ll also see guys step over the chalk when they’re running on or off the field (which never made sense to me cuz when they’re actually playing they don’t give a crap if they step on the lines). And then you got people like me, who never ever change their underwear in the middle of a winning streak. (The way things are going so far this year, it looks like I’m gonna get a little crispy, now and then.) You also got the curse of the billy goat, and the black cat thing at Wrigley … and let’s not forget Steve Bartman.
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Chicago. The second city. The windy city. Whatever you wanna call it, I agree with The Chairman; “It’s my kind of town.”
Chicago has the best architecture. Period. We also have the best hot dogs and the best pizza (deep dish, my friend). There’s the Art Institute, the Bean, and a river winding through downtown that not only changed the direction it flows, but it turns green every year for St. Patrick’s Day. We’ve got Harry Caray’s in Chicago, the Miracle Mile, Rush Street and the El. We used to have Ed Debevic’s and the Sears Tower. Now: no Ed’s and the tower is called Willis Tower. To anyone from Chi-town, though, it’ll always be Sears.
Anyway, we got a lot of great stuff here, pal, more than most cities. But on the very tip top of the pile — above the fact that Michael Jordan became Michael Jordan here, above Mr Mike Ditka and da Bears, above the Green Mill or Buddy Guy’s or Second City — sits the Chicago Cubs and the hallowed confines of Wrigley Field.
I bring this up because today is the home opener between the 5 and 1 north-siders and the who-cares-what-their-record-is Cincinnati Red Stockings. (I like calling ’em by their given name cuz it’s, you know, weird.) Man, it’s nice to have baseball back in Chicago again. And by that I don’t mean it’s nice that it’s baseball season again. (Although it is.) What I mean is that it’s nice to actually have a Major League caliber ball club that calls Wrigley home.
Will this be our year? Does Howdy Doody have wooden balls?
Joe
Hey there, rag tops. Not to deviate from the fact that we capped off our road trip with yet another win (7-3 over the snakes … thank you) but I just can’t let this trip slide by without commenting on the abomination that is the D-backs uniforms.
I totally admit that after a game my t-shirt looks like Jackson Pollock attacked me with an economy sized French’s bottle. So who the hell am I to be pointin’ fashion fingers at anyone, right? In my defense, though, I think we all know that encased meats are messy (and delicious) epicurean delights, especially when properly overflowing with every item from the condiment bar. Therefore, getting a little dirty … well … that’s just part of the game, my friend. And I hasten to point out, accidental. (Hey, how’d you like that $10 word, “epicurean”, back there. Didn’t even have to look it up.)
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Alright, full disclosure: I was advocating for nabbing Greinke in the off season. But six years at $206+ million? Jesus Christ isn’t worth that, and he could walk on friggin’ water!
Well, my friend, it turns out that, so far, Greinke’s not worth it either. He got hit pretty hard by the Rockies this week and tonight, after we disposed of him for our 4th win in 5 games, his ERA is an odoriferous 9.90. To be fair, the former Dodger, Angel, Brewer, Royal did run into the carpet bombing offense that is the Cubs. But hey, if you’re making $31 million (this year) to work every 5th day, and you only gotta do that for 7 months, I think your ERA ought have nothing but zeros in it. Know what I’m sayin’? Anything higher than that and you better be able to do the walk on water thing. Or change water into wine. Better yet; Old Style.
Joe
You know, when I was a kid, my parents used to get National Geographic. I used to thumb through it (for the articles, pal) and now and then there’d be a piece on volcanos. There were these awesome photos and fancy diagrams explaining how all this pent up raw power, buried inside the Earth, has to get out once in a while. And when it does, you got yourself a major league natural disaster.
Well, my friend, I think what we’re lookin’ at with this year’s Cubs is exactly that: the geological equivalent of Mt. Vesuvius or Mount St. Helens or Krakatoa or something. I mean the Cubs have been dormant for 107 years. Yeah, we shook up the Richter Scale in 1945, and had a few minor rumblings over the last 30 years, but it wasn’t until last year that people started wondering if the tremors on Chicago’s north side are for real. Based on pure scientific observation so far this season, I’d say it’s time to sound the Amber Alert system, cuz it’s looking like there’s a Prince Fielder-sized butt-load of molten Fowler, Rizzo, Zobrist and Arrieta that’s starting to explode on the rest of baseball.
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