No Hope, No Change: A Swing and a Miss

I can’t bring myself to read the Sports section anymore. I just can’t do it. Everyday I see an advertisement that embarrasses me, and I’m sorry, but I just can’t deal with it anymore. I cannot manage to enjoy my morning paper at breakfast without a constant reminder of the embarrassment that the Chicago Cubs organization brings to my fine city. It’s not so much that their incessant losing is a disgrace, rather than the way they toy with the emotions of many of my fellow Chicagoans year after year, who frankly speaking do not know any better. It’s just not fair to take advantage of those people that aren’t able to fend for themselves.

The people in my city who are subject to heartbreak every summer, and if not the summer, surely October (although this really doesn’t happen all that often), are known as Cubs fans. Their Mecca is known as Clown Town, although they are apt to call it Wrigleyville. The owners of the Chicago Cubs have so taken advantage of these poor clownies, that they have convinced them that a ticket to a stadium complete with bathtubs in which one can relieve himself alongside other clownies, with technology that  the likes of Benjamin Franklin would yawn at, with a plentitude of dining options including a hot dog or a hot dog, and with the probability of inching ever so slightly towards an ulcer while trying to find parking is worth $70 minimum. Now as terrible as all of this sounds, in the strange world we live in these days, all of this could be justified if these crazy people would potentially get the enjoyment of watching the team they love so dearly win. Sadly, more often than not, this is not the case.

But what’s that you ask, why don’t the Cubs ever win? Well, I’m afraid that I can delineate the pity that is the Chicago Cubs over the last century, but the reason for the sheer atrocity that is the Cubs, is inexplicable. The Cubs have not won a World Series since the year 1908. Currently, the people who were even alive at this time are few and far between. The Cubs have not appeared in a World Series since 1945. Now I don’t know how their marketing team did it, but in order to cover their incompetent asses, they have actually convinced their fan base that the past decades of disappointment and despair are due in one way or another to a Billy goat. Go figure.

Now although it is a rare feat, the Cubs do manage to make the postseason every once in a while. In 2003, they were poised to make the World Series. Up three games to two over the Florida Marlins in the National League Championship Series, with a 3-0 lead in the game, and a mere five outs away from staring face-to-face at their first World Series appearance in oh-so-long, the Cubs found a way to do what they do best, mess up and blame something or (someone) unworthy of blame. When an opposing team’s player hit a foul-ball directly into foul territory, one that Cub’s left fielder Moises Alou may or may not have caught, lifetime clownie Steve Bartman did what most ordinary sports fans would do, he reached out to catch the ball, unbeknownst to him that he may or may not have been a hindrance in the Alou attempt to catch the ball. While Bartman’s act certainly did not help the team, the act alone resulted in the way every other foul ball in the history of the game has resulted, as another strike. Still ahead 3-0 and still five outs away from the World Series, the actual players on the Cubs somehow managed to let their fans down again, letting a crucial, but nonetheless routine double-play ground ball through their legs, and losing again the next night at home. Sure enough, the Cubs’ Public Relations team managed to convince the entire fan base that yet another devastating loss was not due to errors on the field or an absence of timely hitting, but rather was due to the mistake that one of their own had made the night before. Efforts thwarted once again, the Cubs made up some utterly insane excuse in order to hide the degree to which they flat out came up short, this time alienating one of their own lifelong fans.

But the decade does not end in 2003. With a top-5 payroll in the league year after year, the Cubs did manage to scrounge two more playoff appearances in 2007 and 2008, where surprisingly to them, but unsurprisingly to the rest of the nation, they were swept in the first round each year.

But why am I so annoyed that I have to look at Cubs advertisements in the paper? Shouldn’t I just laugh at the failure they call an organization? No. Failing to win is ok. It happens to the best of us. But the Cubs even fail at failing. They are so money hungry and excuse-oriented that they will not even let the fan base view it as failure. They market themselves as the freakin’ “Cubbies”. Not as a dignified organization that has had a history of unpleasantness, but rather a spectacle that is not expected to succeed. They have their fans view them as “lovable losers”. People, there is nothing lovable about losing. That is only a marketing ploy that this team uses in order for you to not feel so bad about handing them an extraordinary amount of your hard-earned money so that they can blow it on Milton Bradley and Kosuke Fukudome. They figure that paying unheard of sums of money to watch incompetence at its finest and to elevate your heart-rate to near heart attack pace is ok because the Cubbies are “cute” and “lovable” when they lose. And guess what Cubs fans, they succeed at stealing your money year-in and year-out.

So at the end of the day I can’t read the Sports section, something I really love to do, not because of the disaster that this joke of a franchise brings to a city that doesn’t deserve it, but because this joke of a franchise robs many of the city’s inhabitants of exorbitant amounts of money and healthy years of their lives. It’s not the fan’s fault really, they just don’t know any better. As the great businessman P.T. Barnum once said, “There is a sucker born every minute”. Unfortunately, it appears that a large sum of them live in Chicago.