Of all the things that have happened in 2021, what I’m about to bitch about is by far the least important crisis, if one can even call it that.
With legal access to abortion dying overnight in Texas, the flooding decimating the East Coast from a not-hurricane or even a tropical fucking depression (coupled with the death of an infrastructure bill that could have alleviated some of those issues thanks to a Great Value anime cosplayer and a West Virginian dinosaur), the horrifying conclusion to 20 years of an imperialism-fueled quagmire now resulting in the foremost humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and the continuing shitshow that is the COVID-19 Pandemic thanks to motherfuckers in states like my very own Georgia, the topic of this rant which I’m about to vomit out onto this blog pales significantly in comparison. But thanks to said pandemic and the moral inability of me to venture out into COVIDia like a brainless halfwit zombie à la Walking Dead, I have dedicated far too much of my time to lamenting the end of an era that I truly did not cherish enough when it was happening in real time.
A few months back (this might as well have been years at this point), I wrote the following words after my beloved Chicago Cubs were ousted from the 2020 “playoffs”:
The club’s two biggest sparkplugs, Javier Baez and Willson Contreras, at times seemed unfit to play Double-A let alone the show. Their combined postseason output of 2-for-12, one walk, a HBP and 5 strikeouts (all Baez with the last one being a called third following a Heyward leadoff double in the 9th inning) suggests that perhaps they need new approaches at the plate or new jerseys in a different organization…
Never in my wildest dreams did I actually think the Cubs would literally back up the truck in 2021 – and at one point, it truly looked like this team would compete in spite of Jed Hoyer’s designed chaos.
When they traded Yu Darvish for a collection of teenagers and the world’s most useless Zach, Hoyer condemned this team to a slow, painful death. The rotation was a sieve without a worthwhile ace captaining the proverbial ship, and thanks to a series of lowball offers to the three most important remaining members of the 2016 squad, it was inevitable that the Cubs were going to lose some combination of Javier Baez, Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo.
They limped out of April with a repulsive record and awful offensive numbers heading into May before becoming the hottest team in baseball. They were hitting. They were scoring runs. The starters were doing just well enough to win thanks in most part to the lights-out bullpen trio of Andrew Chafin, Ryan Tepera, and the resurgent Craig Kimbrel.
And then June came around and……..they died.
The team fucking died.
A back-breaking 11-game losing streak sunk the team’s fleeting playoff hopes, and the entirety of July was one slow death march to deadline day.
It happened in stages. First came Joc Pederson. The former Dodger slugger signed a one-year deal with his hometown club before being unceremoniously dumped onto the laps of the Atlanta Braves (Cobb County to be technical, but you get the picture). Next came Chafin, sent packing to the A’s for a couple of…let’s just say he was traded. Then Tepera was sent across town to the White Sox in a rare crosstown deal that wouldn’t be the last.
And then, on an unassuming afternoon in the middle of a conversation with my mother on the couch, I got a text message from my dad that shattered my world.
Anthony Rizzo to the Yankees.
In that moment, I was absolutely stunned. Yes, the impasse he reached with the front office was nothing to ignore, but would they REALLY send the face of the team since 2012 out of town with all the pomp and circumstance of an Irish goodbye?
Well, yeah, pretty much.
The next day, I went shopping for a pair of shoes when the Bryant and Baez trades went down. Kimbrel was dealt to the South Side, and in one fell swoop, the greatest era of Cubs baseball died a pitiful and worthless death.
The pit in my stomach grew over the next few hours as I turned 29.
While I was on the treadmill getting in my 10,000 steps for the day, I couldn’t help but be fucking infuriated with the way this all had gone down. Rizzo and Bryant didn’t even get one last game in front of the Wrigley crowd before being peaced out.
The prospects they got back are all, best-case scenario, five years away from the major league club. And while I was trying to find like-minded individuals who were as devastated and forlorn about the impending future futility we are already returning to in Wrigleyville, I was instead greeted with a bunch of dipshits participating in what can only be described as the world’s largest circle jerk.
Since the deadline, Cubs fans online have done nothing but fawn over the newcomers. They’re celebrating the organization fielding a top-10 farm system like they did in the halcyon days of the 2012 Theo Epstein rebuild. They excitedly ring the bells of a bunch of nameless teenagers I don’t care to learn about nor study other than what’s regurgitated by the excited minor league pundits on Bleed Cubbie Blue and Bleacher Nation. Apparently, they’ve been bored by the lack of talent in the minors for the past five years that now it’s just great for them to be watching fresh new faces with glowing scouting reports once you get past the fact that all are either too young to legally get a fucking drink or are currently nursing a dead shoulder or some other “minor setbacks” like being unable to fucking hit a breaking ball.
I guess competitive MLB competition became such a bore for these people that they needed something NEW and EXCITING.
Nick Madrigal, considered the pièce de résistance of the Kimbrel deal, tore his hamstring in June, and won’t be playing with the Cubs until G-d knows when because he TORE his FUCKING HAMSTRING (the White Sox said he’d be ready by Spring Training). Bear in mind that one of Madrigal’s greatest assets is his speed, and before he was injured, he was considered a “fine, not great” infielder with concerns about his ability at the major league level. Also bear in mind that when that phrase is thrown at any infield prospect, it usually applies to an up-and-coming shortstop, the more difficult of the middle infield positions. They were saying this about Madrigal as a second baseman. And as a former (barely amateur) second baseman myself, I can personally proclaim that you must have to suck an exorbitant amount of dick defensively for baseball-knowers to look at you as a second baseman and think, “Meh, he’s not very good”.
Admittedly, even if my knuckle-dragging take on Madrigal, a highly-regarded prospect since he was drafted fourth overall in 2018, turns out to be completely off-base, let’s not forget that it was a torn hamstring that plagued Ken Griffey Jr. for the remainder of his illustrious career. Thankfully for Nick, he’s just 24 whereas Junior was 31 when he suffered the first of two hamstring tears that literally hamstrung him till the very end. And if history serves as a guide for what can happen in the future, well, it’s not great.
Don’t tell that to Cubs fans already clamoring amongst themselves that this won’t be a five-year rebuild like before.
Why, just ask Tom Ricketts! The man who personally stopped spending money on this team after 2018 sent out a long bullshit letter to the season-ticket holders assuring them that a good, competitive team would soon be coming back to Wrigley Field.
Never mind that officials around Ricketts have reportedly blabbed to Phil Rogers that not only is that bullshit, but that he intends to ride out the next three years with this collection of retreads and fringe AAA doofuses that weren’t good enough to be in professional baseball but will almost certainly make it to Chicago because Tommy Nebraska won’t put any actual investment into the team.
Like any good Republican leader, Ricketts has decided that in order to improve the situation, he will not spend any money until the team pulls itself up by the bootstraps and turns the tide of suck.
In other words, this is it.
This is the plan.
Let 29-year-old “rookies” who weren’t good enough to crack their respective previous organizations populate the Cubs roster and then watch them beat up on the Tigers, Reds, Twins, Pirates, and the phony-ass Milwaukee Brewers and then watch as one fucking nobody inexplicably wins NL Rookie of the Month and then bequeath him the cute nickname of Frank The Tank.
And then let the fanbase do the rest.
While Javy is currently getting ostracized by vengeful and miserable New York fans known for their shall we say acerbic attitudes towards anyone who isn’t a bonafide star for their team, delirious Cubs fans can’t wait to fellate this new band of little engines who couldn’t as they hit the ball slightly better than the three guys who, you know, won a fucking World Series for this carcass of a franchise just five years ago.
Gone are those selfish prima donnas who dared to ask for a raise even though their GQP-loving owner all but demanded they take insulting “offers” which amounted to unrealistic hometown discounts even by greedy sports owner standards. And in their place are a collection of never-wases getting the chance to be real boys!
And Cubs fans couldn’t be happier.
So while I rail against this group of nobodies like an insane person for apparently having grown accustomed to watching a not-shitty ballclub try to win championships, Cubs fans were apparently just waiting so long to be loveable losers once more.
And try as I have to ignore this team, it doesn’t help when you live with a true believer. No, Dad’s not happy with the team. He won’t even go to Wrigley until our shithead owner decides he doesn’t want to be a shithead owner anymore (which is pretty much never gonna be the case at this point). But even as he advocates for a Blackhawks-esque boycott, he still watches this fucking team.
And sadly, he’s not alone. The only difference between my father, a smart man, and every other Cubs fan with Stockholm Syndrome is they are joyfully watching a dead team in a dead season win meaningless games with utterly useless “baseball players”. Thus, this collection of shit-eating yokels, hicks and nimrods will be the single reason that Ricketts will get away with conning this idiotic fanbase into giving his fuckhole organization unearned attention.
Yes, I am a joyless piece of shit for ragging on underdogs like Frank Schwindel and Rafael Ortega finally getting their chances.
But I don’t care.
I don’t care about a bunch of fleeting September streakers who will be DFA’d before next April when they prove they cannot hit against top-tier pitchers and real major leaguers.
Against my better judgement, I’ve willfully watched these motherfuckers for the better part of 29 years. I have wasted my youth and my energy on this deadbeat baseball team that takes 108 years between winning World Series because the owner spends money on the park but not on the roster. I have at this point chosen to actively NOT WATCH this team while simultaneously trolling the comments section to rag on people who choose to spend their time watching this colostomy bag when the season will be over in a few weeks. In my fairness though, I like reading about that particular website’s coverage of the Bears and Bulls, two other hapless franchises whom I’ll more than likely be bitching about (again) in a couple weeks’ time. At this point, it’s my choice and I probably should not let them piss me off this much. Certainly my dog would appreciate it if I’d stop blowing up every time I see those cocksuckers on TV the very few times my father, currently battling a literal fucking kidney stone, DARES to watch his favorite team IN HIS OWN HOUSE!
I don’t have to ask Reddit if I’m the asshole, because I readily acknowledge that yes, I AM THE ASSHOLE HERE!
With that all being said, I’m allowed.
I’m allowed to be blindingly enraged with my all-time favorite sports team for taking the one champion I’ve ever seen in 29 years, mismanage the shit out of it with dipshit trades and inexplicably awful free agency signings, refuse to fix the actual problems plaguing this team, and then scrapping it like a fucking dilapidated warship.
But as I’ve already pointed out about 20 paragraphs ago, I asked for this.
When I wrote that piece in October, I LITERALLY wrote this fucking phrase:
The Cubs need to shed so much of this roster while also adding just the right number of contact-first hitters, fire-balling pitchers all while balancing the budget to re-sign the right guys. And as of this moment, I couldn’t tell you who those people even are.
As armchair GM, that’s way above my pay grade.
So, my message to any Cubs fan that just so happens upon this blog is the same thing I’m telling myself now as I look into the mirror 11 months after the fact:
“Be careful what you wish for.”
You may be tempted to be thrilled about this team’s chances in 2023 with Pete Crow-Armstrong’s one good arm and Alex Canario’s .247 batting average in Single-A, and drool over the prospect of a bunch of high schoolers one day growing up to be the nExt GrEaT cUbS RoStEr, a phrase that I once actually read and immediately made me want to drink bleach.
Before you even dare give that piece of shit a dollar again, just consider that maybe Tommy and Fam should pull themselves up by their five-billion-dollar golden parachute and make this team competitive.
Because if they aren’t willing to invest in the on-field product, don’t be surprised if you die before the next great Cubs roster is assembled.
Diary of a Mad Millennial 