Cubs At The Break

We're a little over half way through the baseball season, and I've been very remiss in my update on the status of my favorite team, the Chicago Cubs. And there's one very good reason why; they stink. They've been bad on an almost epic scale, and may post the worst record in franchise history. For the first few months of the season they were no fun to watch, as the offense struggled, the pitching was a roller coaster ride of agony, and Starlin Castro and Bryan LaHair were the only two bright spots on the team. The last few weeks, however, have seen an uptick in both the teams intensity and record, and I'd like to place all that on rookie Anthony Rizzo, but the truth is just about everyone on the team is performing better. Except LaHair, of course. Bryan, a 29 year old journeyman who's getting his first real chance to start in the big leagues (I think he played for the Hebrew Oilers a couple seasons ago) started out on fire, earning a trip to the All-Star game  and kudos in the national press. But of course he's come back to earth recently, and I'm about to get a Kickstarter campaign going to hire Glenn Close to wear a white dress and stand up during his next at bat. Knock the cover off the ball, kid.

Rizzo, the much-heralded rookie who came over in an off-season trade with San Diego, has been pretty amazing in his first few weeks as a Cub, although I dread the inevitable "Rizzo The Rat" headlines in the Sun Times when he signs with the Mets as a free agent in 2018.

It's nice to see Ryan Dempster on a contract/trade me to a contender drive, putting up 27 consecutive scoreless innings over his last few outings. I'll miss that guy when he's gone, he's a class act, plus his daughter was born on the same day as my son, so it'll be real cute when they get married in 20 years. I'm setting up a play date for the off-season.

New manager Dale Sveum is...well, it's hard to tell what he is. He's been handed a bunch of fringe-y players, and you'd like to think he's getting the best out of them, but with a .388 winning percentage it's hard to make that claim. Still, he hasn't snapped and killed anybody in the dugout yet, so good on him.

I've got my stomach all tied up in knots just thinking about this crap, so I'm going to go snort some Valium and try to stay positive about the second half of the season. At least they're not in last place.

Here We Go Again

I wanted to get this one in under the wire, get my prediction on record, and since first pitch is less than 20 minutes away, it'll be thank-fuck this is quick.

I've been a Cubs fan since before I was born. I was fortunate to have a grandfather with the good sense to root for the Cubs, even though he grew up in Arkansas and was closer to St. Louis than Chicago. He infused his love for the Cubs into my dad, who instilled it in me. Now I get my hopes crushed every year, and if nothing else it has taught me to be resilient in the face of setbacks.

This year, I'm predicting a sub-500 record, the pitching should be o.k., but that offense looks terrible. 78 wins, if they're lucky.

Now Is the Summer of Our Discontent

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures."

Richard III

The months from November to March really do their best to kick me in the ass (or punch me in the nose, take whichever Breaking Glass lyric suits you better). It always seems like everything stinks just a little bit more and I know why I feel this way, it's not a big mystery why these months bring me down, it's because I hate cold weather and I hate Christmas and I hate snow and I hate icy roads and I hate not being able to feel my toes for 5 months. So there.

Of course, like an idiot, I've lived my entire life in the middle of this Great Country of Ours, places where it's really cold in the winter and really fucking hot & humid in the summer a lot, too, thank you very much. Why didn't I ever move to somewhere like California or Arizona? Who the hell knows? A great man once said, "I am the most capricious zephyr, blown upon the wind I know not where." That about sums it up, I think.

Plus there's less light this time of year, and when I had a job, it really didn't help my disposition to wake up when it's pitch black outside, and drive home when it was already dark, that lack of sunlight disorder sure feels like it's real to me. Bleh.

To top it off, I'm supposed to be writing something for a friend of mine and it's just not coming along the way I want it to, and I've been sick so I've been putting off fixing it, but now I'm feeling better so I REALLY need to go in and fix it, and my wife had some minor surgery on her hand, so of course it makes it difficult for her to help with the boys for another month or so, so yeah, Winter can just fuck right off.

There is reason for being positive though, since my cold cleared up and I was pretty productive this weekend, and I recently finished reading the Harry Potter books, which was good fun, all thanks to my local library. Mary Shelley's Frankhole came back on Cartoon Network a couple weeks ago and has been loads of laughs again, and we're inching ever closer to the day when baseball starts again and I can turn this blog into nearly daily bitching about the Cubs. Hooray!


Original blog entry title? "Winter can go fuck itself". I don't know, maybe I should've gone with that instead of trying to class this place up a bit.