Choke

It's October and that can only mean one thing, for me it's post season baseball. The time of year when you separate the men from the boys, where bit players in the grand scheme of the season come alive and make big things happen, where rookies rise to the occasion on the big stage, where the Cubs, if they are still playing, put on another fantastic display of choking. It's just like driving up the highway and seeing a bad car accident, you know there might be a bloody stump of a human on the side of the road, and you don't want to, but you look. It's really almost embarrassing to watch, and you kind of feel bad for them.

Just for fun, I had to go to the Tribune website and view the carnage first hand. Here's a sampling of some of the headlines in the sports section.

"Do-or-Die Turns into Slow Death"

"Are the Cubs Choking Away the NLDS?"

"Now you're one loss away from 101 years"

"Curse removal backfires on Cubs"

Mike Downey had this to say in one of the articles. "But the way they played Thursday night, they couldn't have won a Little League World Series.

I haven't seen a team kick this many balls since World Cup soccer. It was like watching a "Bad News Bears" movie. The entire Cubs infield just qualified for baseball's new Bill Buckner Award.

It was a travesty—a Cubbie comedy of errors."

I love it, the hits keep on comin'. Here's a few quotes from the players.

Cubs Manager Lou Pinella said this before the game. "Do or die? If we lose tonight, well, we might as well just stay home and forfeit the game in Los Angeles."

Dodger outfielder Matt Kemp said that it felt "like a cemetery in Wrigley."

Former Cardinal great, turned traitor, or should we call him saboteur, Jim Edmonds said the following. "I've never seen it before, We have a good team and pretty good athletes, but this is a tough place to play sometimes. The ball takes funny bounces, and that's just the way the game goes. I've been a part of a series where the good team (Cardinals) makes all the errors and the other team doesn't. So nothing surprises me these days."

If the Cardinals can't be there this year, I'm more than willing to watch the Cubs suffer. I discovered an unusual statistic. We'll it's not necessarily a statistic, more of a coincidence, but it's a telling one nonetheless. The Cardinals have missed the playoffs three times this decade. 2003, 2007, and 2008. Each of those three times the Cubs have made it to the post season.

How could we forget 03, the Bartman incident? The Cubs were five outs away from the World Series before a fan reached over the wall to catch a ball that Moises Alou probably wouldn't have caught anyway. As Alou threw a temper tantrum on the field, you knew that the Cubs chances were over, you know that the unsuspecting Marlins, a team that nobody figured would even be there let alone beat the Cubs, would do just that. They came back from an improbable 3 games to 1 deficit to upset the lovable losers. Losers they are indeed.

In 2007, the Cubs where swept by the Arizona Diamondbacks after winning the NL Central title, who were then swept by the Colorado Rockies in the NLCS, who where then swept by the Red Sox in the World Series.

That brings us to 2008. Will the Cubs blow it again, or will they come out of a 2 games to 0 hole and win the next 3? That my friends is something only the Yankees did in 2001 against the Oakland A's. They were coincidentally managed by the current manager of the Dodgers, Joe Torre. I say Dodgers in 4.

I love Chicago, I really do. As long as it's June through August and the weather's nice. I love the food, the architecture, the El, the buses, the sights and sounds. I've even been to Wrigley once, I got to see a full two innings of a Cards/Cubs game before the rain washed away the day. I got hammered on Old Style under the overhang and took it all in. It's quite an impressive ballpark. I'm actually envious of it. I'm very nostalgic when it comes to baseball. While nice, I don't particularly care for the new Busch Stadium. It's like a Wringling Brothers circus. It's like watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. "Bazooko's Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday nights if the Nazis had won the war. This was the Sixth Reich." I actually wish the Cardinals still played at Sportsman's park. While I'm too young to have seen it, I'm sure it was quite similar to Wrigley. There wasn't any fancy scoreboard, there were Cigarette ads, ads for soap, gum, and a giant neon AB Eagle that would flap its wings when someone from the home team hit a home run. The players also played for the love of the game, not money.

As it turns out, we have Busch the III. It's okay with it's fake brick fascia, and advertising covering nearly every square inch. It's certainly more attractive than the giant bowl that stood next door. We've been lucky to be fans of the Cardinals, while we've had to suffer heart break, winning makes you forget those bad times, if not for just a little while. The year Busch III opened we won it all. The Cardinals have won 10 world Championships over the years, more than any other National League team. Second only to the Yankees and their 26. Coincidentally, we won our first championship in 1926 at Yankee stadium, the first World Series ever clinched there. Oh yeah, they had Babe Ruth back then, and he hit 4 home runs in that series.

We're lucky to have been around such a great baseball team, with such a great tradition of winning. We might get Chicago's sewage run off, but we've won 17 pennants and 10 World Series championships since their last one in 1908. There must be something in the water. Pitchers and Catchers report in five months and another season begins full of heartache, surprises, and elation.