Day: October 4, 2004

If you believe the consensus at ESPN.com, the winner of the World Series will be the Boston Red Sox. Out of the 16 predictions they list, Pedro’s team has the plurality.

For all the talk about how all eight teams could possibly win, the experts don’t think it’s very likely that most of them will win. It’s 13-3 against the Braves, 14-2 against the Twins, and 15-1 against the Dodgers. Braves (Buster Olney) and Twins (Jim Caple) have single votes for making it to the World Series, but none of these three apparently have a hope of winning it all.

Half the experts pick (or wishcast) a Yankees/Red Sox rematch – much more surprising is 62% picking a NL Central rematch, and no one picking Braves/Dodgers.

I think I’ve committed to Twins, Red Sox, Cards, Braves, Red Sox, Braves, Red Sox, but I’ve got a few hours left to change my mind.

So. How was your week?

Mine was all sorts of agony. Nothing especially dramatic, just the kinda aggravating real life adventures in the category of “stuff I don’t talk about here” which kinda put a stressful damper on my mood. The kind of week where you hope to be able to escape your day to day drudgery by throwing yourself into your favorite sporting team’s glory.

That did not quite work out.

I don’t know if I want to spend ten words talking about the last week for them or ten thousand – not confident in getting out what it feels like either way.

I kind of feel guilty in even wallowing in despair ⁽¹⁾, because I know there’s been other teams in other years who had it just as bad or worse; that Toronto team, the ’67 Phillies, the ’51 Dodgers all had bigger leads and bigger collapses than this 2 game drop. Even this year, it’s not like Oakland fans and Giants fans aren’t feeling great, and it’s not like this even unique in the Cubs history (the ’69 collapse everyone’s comparing it to this week ⁽²⁾ and the 2001 collapse no one ever talks about.)

But, as much I want to step back and take it all in dispassionately, never using ‘we’ and objectively justifying all I say, I can’t manage to put any rational perspective on this. We should still be playing and we’re not and I don’t understand why it was allowed to happen. Some problems we were dealt (injuries), but a lot of the problems were self-caused or ignored. Jim Hendry made great moves by picking up Nomar and Derek Lee, but did he get the bullpen help we so obviously needed throughout the whole year? Dusty might have gotten one whole more win out of this team this last year, but he made tactical mistake after tactical mistake down the stretch and ran any hot reliever he had into the ground while turning the rest of his bullpen to rust, and for all his talk about doing research on matchups and trends, why didn’t he ever seem use that knowledge during the most obvious situations; even the most banal college drunk figured out Remmy couldn’t get out a left hander out when he needed to, but Dusty kept throwing him out there regardless of the numbers.

It’s all such a depressing wasted golden opportunity. For all the talk – reassuring talk in the face of darkness – about this being part of a long run of contending teams, who knows if that’ll actually happen. Pitchers aren’t stable things, and there’s no reason to be sure they’ll all get it better next year than they did this year, assuming they even find a fifth starter. Without a massive influx, the offense sure isn’t getting better. You can’t be sure you’ll ever get another chance to make it all work, and certainly not as good a chance as the Cubs had here, and it all was wasted.

The fans of ’69 had to wait 25 years to get another playoff team. It shouldn’t be that long, with an extra playoff birth available (and in 25 years, I’m sure they’ll be more Wild Cards given out than that), but you never know. 2001 had one less win than this team, and completely fell to pieces the following year. You don’t know.
Like I was going for, four tangents ago, most of me wants to wait to talk about this in any rational degree until my thoughts by this aren’t dominated by depression of our failure and anger/hurt feelings for the reasons causing the failure. I don’t what fragments of the team are going to be left if I do wait, though, because the huge aftershocks of the collapse: the whole Steve Stone mess (what scares us all is everything Steve said was absolutely 100% correct, and the club is treating him like an insane heretic), Chip Caray deciding to go to the Braves ⁽⁴⁾, and Sammy’s No Show, bridging the gap from this nightmare season to next nightmare’s season, where Sammy’s pending free agency ⁽⁵⁾ is the Sword of Damocles above all. Assuming it even makes it that far: this situation has all the makings of my favorite player leaving my favorite team before next season. There’s a lot to talk about