The SCOREboard: Skipping The Preseason

"Cub fans, do not feel ignored by this." -- Bruce Levine, Saturday morning on Inside the Clubhouse

Sorry, Bruce, but I'm beginning to feel that way. This week, it was what I consider the dumbest story of the year, Adam LaRoche's retirement after the White Sox kicked his 14-year-old kid out of the clubhouse. Discussion of this nonstory dominated the Score's baseball talk this past week, hence Levine's comment.

To a larger point, Levine (with this week's co-host Mark Grote) goes so far out of his way to be evenhanded to both Chicago teams that he runs the risk of turning off Cub fans with too much Sox talk, in my opinion. The Sox have their own station now (WLS 890) and I would advise the Score to remember that and shift the focus more to the Cubs as the regular season approaches.

It has become more and more evident that promised expanded coverage of the Cubs and an expected improvement over what WBBM gave us is not going to come during the spring games. This was clear on Friday as WLS aired the Cubs-Sox tilt while the Score did not. 670's decision to only air weekend games remains somewhat annoying. And on the weekend games, Mark Grote did not provide any pre- or post-game coverage that I heard (admittedly, I fell asleep before Saturday night's late game was completed). He did appear with Len Kasper and Jim Deshaies during the game on Saturday. I'll have more on Grote in a later post, but I do find him annoying and inadequate doing play-by-play.

On the plus side, Pat Hughes finally made his debut on Sunday's game vs. the Royals (while Len and JD did the game on WGN-TV). The regular season opener is just two weeks away. I am not going to keep killing the Score for preseason shortcomings, which have been multifold. We'll see if they make up for the lost spring when the regular season rolls around next month. In this listener's opinion, they have a lot of making up to do.