What is this, football season already?! Kinda sounds like it when you’re playin’ Cincinnati.
To clarify, so far this season, Chicago has outscored Cincinnati 46-7. Ouch! If this was September you might think I was talkin’ about the Bears and Bengals (except for the fact that baseball kick’s football’s ass, and I’d rather get a colonoscopy from Dr Jack Hammer than talk about football). Nope. It’s the Cubs and Reds, pal, and in football parlance we’re barely into the 2nd quarter with these guys.
At the current pace, the Cubs are gonna run up 156 runs over the course of our 17 meetings with Cinci this year. I know a lot of you are thinkin’ that we can’t sustain that pace. But I say, if the Warriors could damn near run the table this year, then why not the Cubs? Yeah, they have Stephen Curry … But we got Arrieta, Lackey, Bryant, Rizzo … hell, I could sooooo go on. And look at their history; a very Cubs-like futility on a basketball court. Plus, we’ve got the law of averages on our side; we’re due. Past due. Way, way, way past due.
And as far as football goes, they have cheerleaders, we don’t. That’s the one thing I have to tip the Joe lid to, and is the second thing I think (Hey, Womanfred, are you listening?!) the Commissioner could do to improve the game. The first thing would be to get rid of that sissy Designated Hitter crutch. Have you seen Arrieta hit?! Case closed, pal.
Joe
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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