Let me preface this by saying that I believe baseball teams can neither be impeded by curses nor guided by destiny.
Yesterday the Cubs hosted the Colorado Rockies. The wind was howling out at Wrigley and the Rockies threw their best starter (by the numbers one of the best starters in the NL) Aaron Cook up against Ted Lilly. After 3 innings the Cubs were down 7-0 and Ted Lilly was pulled (8 H, 7 R, 4 ER, 3 K, 2 HR). John Lieber replaced him for 3 2/3 innings and gave up another 2 runs, so going into the bottom of the 6th inning the Cubs were down 9-1.
That’s when it all started.
Micah Hoffpauir (who???) hit a ball to center that stuck in the top of the ivy. Ground rule double. Kosuke Fukudome hits a home run the other way to make it 9-3. Jim Edmonds, who is somehow still ambulatory, follows up with a solo home run in the next at bat. Two ground outs and a Jon Lieber strike out later, the Cubs leave the inning within earshot at 9-5. It should be noted that, immediately after the Jim Edmonds homer, I thought long and hard about sending out a text to all my Cubs peeps predicting a Cubs win, but thought better of it.
Lieber stayed in the game and faced 4 batters in the top of the 7th only yielding one hit.
The Cubs offensive craziness continued in the bottom half. Soriano lined out. Jeff Blauser Mike Fontenot singled and Henry Blanco (oh…did I forget to mention that Derrek Lee and Geovany Soto were pulled after the 5th???) hit a home run. Now it is 9-7. Micah Hoffpauir (who???) singled, Fukudome singled and the amazingly ambulatory Jim Edmonds doubled which scored Hoffpauir (who???) and Koskue to tie the game. Then the super-sub-who-plays-every-day Mark DeRosa homered to center to give the Cubs their first lead of the game and twenty-somethingist straight game where they held the lead. After the end of the 7th, the Cubs lead 10-9.
Carlos Marmol, who is fucking sick, struck out the side (all looking) in the 8th and Kerry Wood, who has been far and away better than I expected in the closer role, got a double play ball and fly out to get his 13th save.
Again…I don’t think the Cubs are cursed and I don’t think they are a team of destiny, but they are definitely a lot better than I thought they would be. My preseason prediction of 88 wins was not based on the quality of the team itself as much as it was what I perceived to be a lack of quality in the division. After one third of the season, though, the Cubs are “on pace” to win 102 games.
I’ll still take the under on 102, and there is still a lot of baseball to be played, but good breaks and good luck and unexpected performances from unlikely sources are the kind of things that make teams into champions.
Maddona’s “Hung Up” is a fucking triumphant masterpiece of pop music that makes me want to move my Goddamned ass until I collapse in a heap of awesome dancing pain.
FUN FACT ABOUT THE VIDEO:
Madonna looks pretty Goddamned fuckable for an AARP member.
Well that is what Brian Hanley of the Chicago Sun Times is reporting, anyway. Aside from looking like James Woods, Collins has a fairly decent coaching resume, but no title to his name.
I suppose this is a better move for Paxson than getting some experienceless assistant off of a bench somewhere. Collins has been announcing NBA games for TNT since his last coaching stint and I doubt the game has passed him by and he should have a good amount of familiarity with the league as currently constitued.
Now the only question is – will Derrick Rose get him fired?
I didn’t grow up with many pets. Not because my family is not animal-loving, but more so because we are slovenly white trash and any animal that could not be contained in a cage or tank at all times would certainly be dead within hours of eating any sort of toys or food or other random substances that were laying about on our floors or furniture. So when I fell in love with and married a woman who not only grew up with and loved animals, but went to school to make a career out of helping sick and injured animals, it made me start to want a dog. Alas, our apartment complex did not allow dogs, but we daydreamed about someday owning our own home with a big back yard and a couple of dogs. I dreamed of owning a border collie or greyhound and naming it Strangelove. Going for walks. Playing in the park. Running around and enjoying the companionship from a four legged friend that I never had growing up.
Well, due to circumstances beyond my control, I have now lived with two dogs for the past 4 months. My Mother in-law’s dog and my Brother in-law’s dog. Both are mutts that were rescued from shelters – an act that I find highly commendable. After 120 or so days living with Scruffy P. and Ranger, I have come to a conclusion.
I am so fucking over dogs. I am sick of dogs. Dogs suck. I cannot do a Goddamned thing in this house with some stupid dog with his or her stupid dumb dog face looking up at me stupidly. They are trying to trip me while I am carrying drinks or food or knives. They are trying to eat my food. They are trying to eat my Daughter’s food out of her lap when she is in her high chair. They are trying to wake up my daughter while she is sleeping by barking at phantom predators at our door step. They are trying to drive me batty by whining and whining and whining and whining whenever I lock them up away from me because, aside from when they are sleeping in/stealing my spot on the couch, they are inevitably being compulsively fucking annoying or bad – i.e. knocking down my daughter in an attempt to go beg for someone’s french fries or eating my wife’s bowl of spaghetti and meatballs that she put down for 30 damned seconds. They are always looking up at me with this pathetic look on their faces that is all like “Please help me. I am an idiot and that dog food you bought for me is awful and I need to eat all of your gyros,” and I’m all like “Hey…asshat…piss off. You’re not getting a Goddamned bite of my gyros.”
Where the fuck do these dogs get off? Their DOGS. They are not entitled to anything of mine, yet they feel that everything of mine is theirs and nothing of theirs is good enough for them. All the while, if I stopped giving them their damned fresh food and water they would shrivel up and die. If I didn’t open up doors for these little pricks they would never get where they wanted to go (NOTE: Dogs always want to get to the other side of what ever door or obstacle they are behind). Do they care? Are they thankful? No. They just continue to annoy me and piss me off…like it is their only purpose in life. What God was to Job, dogs are to me. Testing me. Trying my patience.
I am not Job, though. I have caught myself flipping the dogs the middle finger on several occasions. Not sure what kind of indicator that is. I don’t really care, though. If the damn dogs weren’t so annoying, I wouldn’t have to flip them off.
In all honesty, when the dogs are being calm and not all up in my shit I enjoy playing and snuggling and all that good shit. I probably will get that dog of my own someday and I will just hope that if I train it, and make sure that it knows it is a dog and not a person, maybe I won’t have to flip the bird because, instead of being a total fart in my soupbowl, that dog will be my friend and companion.
I am watching the Indy 500. Not sure exactly which lap, but low 100s somewhere. Marco Andretti just went low on race leader Tony Kannan in the turn which pushed Kannan up into the wall. and after coming off the wall Kannan was hit in the front left tire by Sarah Fisher. Both Fisher and Kannan are out for the race now. Kannan and Andretti are teammates and they went to Mario Andretti in the pit for a reaction. In addition to being the team owner, Andretti is also…you know…Marco’s Dad, so you could tell it was an awkward situation for him. One one hand, he has his team’s best driver leading the race just past the halfway point taken out by an aggressive pass that one might argue should only be attempted in the last few laps of the race. On the other hand, he has his son, whose new asshole he does not want to tear on national television. In an attempt to be diplomatic, the elder Andretti said it was “a tough call.”
*update*
Andretti just overtook Scott Dixon for the race lead with 79 laps to go.
Anyway, ABC analyst Eddie Cheaver wasn’t afraid to make his thoughts on the incident know when they went to Andretti’s radio communication live.
Marco: “Tell him I’m sorry.”
Crew cheif: “You had a clean run at him. Just focus on the task at hand.”
Cheaver: “Clean run…I’d like to get some clarification on what he means by that.”
Cheaver was fairly obvious in his assessment in real time when he said that “If you do that (pass low in the turn) it gives the driver you are passing nowhere to go but into the wall.”
I pretty much agree with Cheaver that Andretti’s pass was probably unnecessary at this point in the race, but I don’t like Tony Kannan because he looks like Vin Diesel, so I am happy with it.
The biggest loser in this whole thing is poor Sarah Fisher who is not only the driver but team owner and may not be able compete in her next scheduled race due to not having the budget of the bigger teams in the game. In an interview after being medically cleared, Kannan described Fisher crying in the ambulance and trying to console her. Her interview saw her only able to get out a sentence or two before breaking down once again.
I posted not so long ago about the Cubs. Singing their praises and all full of Cubbie glee. That is because they were in the midst of a 10 game home stand in which they would go 8-2, including a 3 game sweep of the Arizona Diamondbacks, one of the best teams in the Majors this year. Yes, I was taking big gulps of the Cubbie Kool Aid, and while Jim Jones hasn’t gotten a hold of the Kool Aid (yet), I must admit that the ugly 3 game series at the Juice Box in Houston that followed the 10 home games enabled me to put down my cup of sugar water in favor of a bottle of Goose Island IPA and realize that, yes, the Cubs suck on the road. Home cooking has been good to the Cubs, as they have posted a 19-8 record at Wrigley and a paltry 9-11 record on the road. The only road series they have won was against a dreadful Pittsburgh Pirates, which is where they open up a weekend 3 gamer tonight with Carlos Zambrano stepping to the mound in attempt to stop the Cubs 2 game skid against once-thought-to-maybe-someday-be-good-but-now-we-see-he-is-just-another-bad-Pirates- left-hander Zach Duke.
After the 3 in the Steel City, they come back home to host the Dodgers and Rockies for 3 and 4 respectively before heading West for 3 and 4 against the Padres and then the Dodgers again. In my opinion it is still too early to be assigning too much importance to any one game or series, but if the Cubs road trend continues it may portend bad things for later in the season.
The Cubs have only 9 home games in September – the last month of the season – and of the 25 games they play that month, only 4 (on the road against the Mets) are against a non-divisional opponent. My hope is that they will have clinched their playoff spot long before then, but baseball is a wacky game and who knows what kind of importance those 12 divisional road games may have.
The Chicago Bulls defied the odds and won the NBA draft lottery yesterday. They now feature the first pick in the draft which will take place…well…I don’t know when. Sometime relatively soon, I assume. Anyway, I will go ahead and admit that I am an NBA novice. In addition, I really could not possibly care less about NCAA basketball. Too many Goddamned players in college and most of them are bad, so I don’t watch. That shit all happens during hockey season anyway.
The overwhelming belief at this point is that the Bulls will have to decide between two players. Derrick Rose from Memphis and Michael Beasley from Kansas State. Beasley is a forward and Rose a guard. Both project out to be very good NBA players, but, unfortunately, the Bulls can only take one of them. The Bulls are currently without a head coach, without defined roles for their current crop of players – most of whom are bad, and, most importantly, without any sense of direction or purpose. This Bulls team is mired neck deep in shit and either Beasley or Rose is going to be expected to pull the franchise out of the doldrums of NBA mediocrity and hang a banner.
So which one?
Bulls GM John Paxson said that the positions the players play is not a factor and that the Bulls are evaluating talent alone. I really don’t have a problem with that statement, considering the team is currently bad at every position, so either player will be an dramatic improvement.
In my opinion, and it is a completely uneducated and uninformed one, Derrick Rose is probably the way to go. I like Beasley’s size and explosiveness a lot, but when I think about it…position does matter. If you take the 3 Bulls who compose the point guard rotation (Hinrich, Gordon and Duhon) and you combined all of them, that hybrid point guard would still be smaller, slower, dumber, less athletic, worse defensively and more foul prone than Derrick Rose. Derrick Rose – at very worst – would bring some definition and semblance of order to the Bulls back court. You would now have a smart, instinctive and athletic point guard. Hinrich can sit his ass on the bench while Rose dishes and dunks and when he needs to be spelled, Captain Kirk can come in and get his 3 fouls in 8 minutes and then sit down again. It sends Ben Gordon into the only role he belongs in on an NBA team – shooting guard. Chris Duhon…well…he can just go away.
So the team will have their star player. Their go-to man. The guy around whom they have to build the rest of the team. Time will tell whether or not Beasley or Rose will be the better pro player, but given the current state of the team I think that a bona-fide point guard is the right choice for a team that has a young, big, athletic question mark at forward named Tyrus Thomas. We know they are bad and small and bad at guard…shore up the most important position on the floor and hopefully in 2 or 3 seasons Derrick Rose is the guest of honor at a party in Grant Park.
Team batting average: .284 (2nd MLB, 1st NL)
Team slugging percentage: .447 (3rd MLB, 2nd NL)
Team on base percentage: .372 (1st MLB)
Team runs scored: 255 (1st MLB)
Team hits: 438 (3rd MLB, 2nd NL)
Team total bases: 688 (3rd MLB, 1st NL)
Team bases on balls: 201 (2nd MLB, 2nd NL)
Ryan Dempster is 5-1 as a starter with a 2.35 ERA.
Kosuke Fukudome is the smartest and most instinctive ballplayer to put on blue pinstripes since Sandberg.
Ryan Theriot is batting .331
Geovany Soto – .321/.429/.607 with legitimate ROTY consideration.
Carlos Zambrano is 6-1 with a 2.45 ERA and is hitting .267
Mike Fontenot has a Jeff Blauser mullet.
Alfonso Soriano is in the midst of a streak where he is hitting .525 with like a billion home runs.
Ronny Cedeno is hitting like triple what he did last season.
I am getting scared at how much I am enjoying and believing in this team. It’s just…not…right.
The Chicago Bulls defied the odds and won the NBA draft lottery yesterday. They now feature the first pick in the draft which will take place…well…I don’t know when. Sometime relatively soon, I assume. Anyway, I will go ahead and admit that I am an NBA novice. In addition, I really could not possibly care less about NCAA basketball. Too many Goddamned players in college and most of them are bad, so I don’t watch. That shit all happens during hockey season anyway. 