Goin' For The Hundy!

Spring has sprung here in Chicago,and hope once again is born on the north side as the nation's most hapless collection of professional mopes strides to the plate in another misguided attempt to wipe out 100 years of misery. Will 2008 be any different than the previous 99?



Nope.



I say this with no glee in my heart. Truly, it pains me to see the sorry spectacle begin again for the 47th straight year of my life. Already the legions of sorry fans, who expect nothing more from their baseball dollar than a crumbling field with ivy covered walls and an unbroken, unparalleled record of failure, have purchased 2.8 million tickets to watch a team that is congenitally programed for failure. Nothing will change, because nothing ever changes at Wrigley.



The Cubs are where careers go to die, famously disastrous trades are made, and billy goat curses stand in as stooges for the greatest string of incompetent management to ever occupy the offices of any business, any where at any time. Just in my lifetime the '69 Cubs collapsed in spectacular failure (see the above black cat "cursing" the Cubs as it strolls by Ron Santo), Leon Durham's Gatorade sodden glove missed a simple grounder in the '84 unraveling against the Padres, and of course, the awful Bartman incident of '03.



Cubs fans though accept this fate. Hell, they flippin' embrace it and it's damned embarrassing. Somehow, the legions of deluded fools have convinced themselves that this spectacular record of failure is not an indictment of a knowledge-less fan base that refuses to hold an incompetent front office accountable for misdeeds that border on the felonious. Oh no, in the bizarro world of Cubs fans, spectacular incompetence equals lovability!


Don't you just feel it? Instead of Take Me Out To The Ballgame perhaps Cubs fans would be better off singing the refrain of the great Offspring song, Self Esteem, "The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care. Right? Yah!"


I never thought about it, but perhaps they were Cubs fans too.


Ah, I admit it, I too used to belong to this sorry group, but '04 was the final straw for me. After the Bartman collapse literally took the life out of the team - it was just one bad play for heaven's sake - I saw that it would never be. Not then. Not now. Not ever. I swore off the Cubs for good back then and related my defection in this post (can't find it, move on), and there is no turning back.



So, against all hope I wish the Cubs my best, which, against their historic ability to snatch failure from, well mediocrity, gives them absolutely no hope. But hey, the ivy will grow, Ronny Woo Woo will, um, "woo woo", crusty old grannies who have been sitting in the bleachers since "nineteen forty and two" will continue to molder in the sun, and the beer will flow. And most importantly a fresh crop of new Cubs fans will born and cursed by their insane parentage with a love for all things "Cubbie". One or two will even be named Wrigley and be forced to bear witness to their parent's psychosis throughout their entire life. Yup, things will be just as they always have been.



See the circus comes to town every year because as P.T. Barnum said, "A sucker is born every minute".