If you missed it, and because it was in whatever is left of The Sporting News, you probably did, the once esteemed publication picked the Cubs to win the World Series.
This season.
I know. Fuck them, right?
The Cubs have made great strides in the last three years, but a passel of good young prospects and one proven starting pitcher doesn’t a World Series champion make. They’ve finished in fifth place for five straight years for a reason. That won’t go from that to this in a heartbeat:
The Cubs are going to be better. Hell, we’re all excited about the season because it should finally be watchable baseball, but even the most deluded among us don’t think it’s going to end a century of futility quite yet.
But here’s what really pisses you off. The Sporting News doesn’t really think the Cubs are going to win the World Series, they just want to sell magazines or get hits or whatever the they hell they still publish these days. They just wanted some attention so that people would stop thinking they no longer exist.
Well, congratulations, people know you still exist.
And, that you’re all fucking morons.
Oh, what’s the harm in an irrelevant media outlet saying the Cubs rebuild is so complete that they’re going to win big right now?
The problem is that Cubs fans are just dumb enough to believe it, and expect it to happen.
We’ve talked about this for 18 years here (seriously, we’ve been kicking this cat around since 1997). Most Cubs fans are idiots. Morans. Whatever.
In their deluded little minds, stuff like this means that the Cubs are supposed to win now. You don’t believe me? Wade into the cesspool of creeps who attend the Cubs Convention next weekend. Allow me to let you in on a little secret. Not every Cubs fan is as smart, thoughtful or attractive as we are.
There’s a reason the odds in Vegas of the Cubs winning the World Series went from 40:1 to 12:1 in a few days after the team signed Jon Lester. Cubs fans started betting, heavily. Casinos set odds at the level where they can get the most action at the least risk. Vegas didn’t think the Cubs odds of actually winning really improved that much with the signing of one guy, they realized they could tighten up the odds and still get idiots to put money on it.
Yesterday, Jake Johnson, the guy who plays Nick on New Girl wrote a piece for Grantland on the curse of the Cubs. We’ve seen so many of these awful things that Huey ripped it without actually reading it. I read it. I didn’t think it was awful, in fact, I think our weirdo actor friend is pretty much right. None of us believe in that Goat Curse shit either.
The ’69 Cubs lost because Leo Durocher only trusted five guys on his whole pitching staff and rode them into the ground. The 1984 Cubs lost because Jim Frey tried to set up his rotation so that Rick Sutcliffe would start game one of the World Series and Scott Sanderson and a still drunk Dennis Eckersley pitched the first two possible clinching games in San Diego (and Leon Durham…bend the fuck over!) The 2003 Cubs lost because Dusty didn’t trust his bullpen with an ELEVEN RUN LEAD in game two and spent too many of Mark Prior’s bullets to get him through to the end in game six. The 2008 Cubs lost because Ryan Dempster took a shit on the mound in game one and every infielder made an error in game two.
What Jake’s point in the end was, is that now the curse is the panicky nature of the fans. Of us. I would not have believed that until 2008. But we’re the worst. We are so accustomed to something going calamitously wrong that we suck the air out of the stadium waiting for it to happen. His whole point was that the curse has never been real, but now, not only are Cubs fans and the media guilty of perpetuating the idea of it, but we create a weird physical manifestation of it.
Now, I’m here to tell you that none of it really matters. You only have to look back 24 years to see the perfect example of it. The Sox had choked in 1983, the Cubs had choked in 1984, the Bears had won in 1985 but then pissed away a dynasty in 1986 and 1987. Chicago sports fans in general were used to our teams gagging when it counted. The 1991 Bulls kicked away the first game of the NBA Finals on a Sam Perkins three pointer and the feeling was there. It was palpable.
It lasted two days. The Bulls had Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. They took everyone’s palpable angst and squished it into a little ball and blew out the Lakers in game two and then won all three in LA. The Blackhawks have Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane.
Peter Gammons summed up this ‘curse’ bullshit best in 2004 when the Red Sox finally won:
In the end, the cliches and pagan incantations about The Curse turned out to be as real as rumors that spacemen from Mars had landed in Webbs Mills, Maine. The curse, as most everyone now realizes, was management and pitching, and all it took for the new management to reverse the past was not a deal with Asgaya Gigagei — or any other Native American god — but to trade for Curt Schilling and sign Keith Foulke.
The Cubs are building a team to crush our self-inflicted curse. They’re doing it the only way they can. To make it so good that it can’t get fucked up. And in a playoff series, something can go wrong and everybody in the stadium will start to hyperventilate, and the players won’t.
Actor boy is mostly right. The perpetuation of this curse is our own doing. It’s not the reason the Cubs haven’t won.
Just like the Bulls, Blackhawks and Red Sox before them, they just haven’t been quite good enough. Those three teams not only broke through, they showed that once you build a core good enough to do it, you can do it more than once.
The Cubs curse, like the Red Sox before it, is management and pitching, and for the first time since you had to parallel park a horse and not a car, they’re fixing it. They’re not there yet, and most of us realize that, but the dumbest among us will expect this shit to happen immediately. Immediate has never really been a Cubs thing. But they’re building a real pitching staff, which is key.
And this guy won’t hurt, either:
