Cubs are the luckiest team in baseball – Chicago Tribune
With Jake Arrieta pitching, Joe Maddon managing, and rookie sensations Kyle Schwarber and Kris Bryant on their team, you would think Chicago Cubs fans might finally stop whining about how unlucky their team is. Don’t bet on it.
Arrieta, maybe the best hurler in baseball, was obtained by the Cubs in a trade with the Baltimore Orioles for pitcher Scott Feldman and catcher Steve Clevenger. Most baseball fans have probably never heard of those two guys. And the Cubs also got a pretty decent relief pitcher in that deal named Pedro Strop. Arrieta not only led the Major Leagues in wins this season and threw a no-hitter, but set an all time record with a .075 ERA in the second half of the season. Nobody in the history of the game had done that, which is simply amazing.
Speaking of Cubs luck, the most valuable member of this team may well be manager Maddon. Maddon was signed to manage the Tampa Bay Rays of the American League this season. But there was an opt-out clause in his contract, a clause he says he was unaware of, that allowed him to leave the Rays for another team of its general manager left. Tampa’s General Manager Andrew Friedman signed a huge deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, making Maddon a free agent in 2015.
I would argue that no other manager in baseball gets this Cubs team into the playoffs. Maddon moved the team’s shortstop to second base after benching him. He took the likely rookie of the year, Bryant, who plays third base, and shifted him to left field, center field and right field, just to see how that would work out. It worked out just fine.
Schwarber, the rookie catcher, started in right field in the wild-card game, hitting a massive two-run homer after driving in the first run of the game in a 4-0 victory.
If Schwarber had misplayed a fly ball that allowed the Pirates to win that game, you had better believe Cubs fans throughout the country would have been moaning about their bad luck, talking about the curse of the Billy Goat and might have been blaming Maddon for the next 50 years for the team’s failure to make the World Series.
Every move Maddon has made in 2015 has turned to gold and while I thought Cubs fans were nutty to give the guy a standing ovation before his team had won a single game, I have to acknowledge he’s been a genius in the dugout. Poor Cubs fans. How unlucky they are.
Speaking of that wild-card playoff, a few days before that game a lifelong Cubs fan was moaning how unfair it was.
“You play a whole season, 162 games, and one game determines your fate,” he whined. “It’s so unfair.”
I mentioned to him that only four years ago a team that finished third in its division wouldn’t have made the playoffs. The Cubs were lucky Major League Baseball expanded the format in 2012. Did he celebrate the good fortune of his team? Nope. He just kept on crying that if the Cubs lost that one game, it wouldn’t be fair.
I’m a lifelong Sox fan, and for years I thought I hated the Cubs. Some time back, I realized it wasn’t the Cubs baseball team I disliked, but the constant crybaby attitude of the team’s fans.
“We haven’t won a World Series in 100 years,” they would tell me.
The Sox had gone about 87 years without winning a World Series until 2015, but nobody called the South Siders lovable losers. Fans didn’t blame any curse. It was bad baseball, poor hitting, awful pitching, terrible ownership, and inept managers and we knew it. Our team was responsible for the worst scandal in baseball history, the 1919 Black Sox threw the World Series, players were banned for life, but I never heard any old Sox fan claim that was unfair (although some claimed “Shoeless” Joe Jackson got a raw deal) or that our team was jinxed.
Our guys took bribes and, being from Chicago, it wasn’t all that astonishing. For the next several decades we had to watch Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and other Yankees dominate the American League and the Sox, and never once considered the possibility we might be cursed.
By my count, the Chicago Cubs have made the postseason 17 times from 1906 until 2015. The Chicago White Sox have made it about half as many, nine times. And that’s not all ancient history. Since 1984, the Cubs have played meaningful baseball games after the regular season ended seven times, while the Sox since 1983 have made the postseason five times.
Yes, we did win the World Series in 2005, which gives the South Side fans bragging rights in a city that ought to be shamed by its lack of championship flags.
I told my fellow fans back then that it might be the last World Series we see for another 80 years and they just laughed. They were certain we would return in 2006, 2007, 2008 and for years to come.
In the last few years, as the Cubs were being rebuilt, the Sox were just terrible. I confess that I thought the Theo Epstein era was a giant scam. The chances of any of those minor league baseball stars ever performing well at the Major League level seemed slim at best. But you know what, the Cubs got lucky. Really, really, lucky.
No one on the North Side will admit to their good fortune. If they lose this series to the St. Louis Cardinals it will be because of an error, fan interference, a lightning bolt striking a pitcher, but not because they got outplayed.
The Cubs just can’t catch a break, they will groan.
Wrigley Field is a national treasure. I grew up watching baseball games in a cavern of a baseball stadium that smelled of beer and urine called Comiskey Park, probably best remembered for Disco Demolition Night. And for all of my life I had to hear announcers proclaim how beautiful the North Side ballpark was, read novels and short stories about the Friendly Confines and hear local Hollywood celebrities who grew up on the North Side talk about the wonders of the park.
When Ferris Buehler took a day off, he did not go to a Sox game. He went to Wrigley Field.
Those poor, poor Cubs fans.
Do you know the Cubs website lists about 40 former players in the Hall of Fame. The Sox website lists about 15, with five or more years playing for the South Side team. But some of those are fellows more closely associated with other franchises, such as Early Wynn, Carlton Fisk, and even Luis Aparacio.
Yes, some of the Cubs listed as members of the Hall also had significant careers with other teams, like Greg Maddux and Hoyt Wilhelm (really?), but there are also names such as Fergie Jenkins, Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ryne Sandburg and Ron Santo, that fans in Chicago can tell you they saw play with their own eyes.
About the only two guys in the Hall living Sox fans can lay claim to without someone disputing that notion are Nellie Fox and Frank Thomas,
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