FanShot

The Gray Lady on the Cubs Blues

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New York Times writer Barry Bearak, an admitted Cubs fan, addresses the team's sad situation in today's paper. My recommendation when reading this article is: Be patient. Although it starts out seeming like the same depressing rehash of the team's long history of failure, he actually winds up doing a pretty fair assessment of our current predicament. Perhaps the biggest plus of the article is that he gets both the goat and Bartman stories right. How often do we see that in the mainstream media? The article also contains a whopper of a quote by Tom Ricketts, which I've never noticed before. Really, Tom? It's easy to build an 83-win team that wins at that rate for a decade? I don't want to get too caught up on the number but...I'd scale it down to perhaps "It's easy to build a 70-75 win team." I'm filing that quote under "Another Ricketts PR stumble." Getting back to the author, I'd ding him a little bit for not mentioning that the Chicago Cubs of the 1930s. They were, in fact, a dynasty of sorts. (Granted, a championship-less dynasty...maybe that's an oxymoron.) And I don't completely agree with his final point about payroll. Spending just to get to a "respectable" dollar amount is not going to adequately change the team's fortunes, in my view. Anyway, despite its initial appearance, this article is worth a read -- especially now that the Cubs-Yankees has been delayed a day. (Life ain't nothin' but money and Fanshotz, b&*@#es!)