storms

The Cubs lost again last night, 4-2. They continue to sit 20 games under .500 and all year speculation about whether and at what point they should fire Dusty Baker has swirled, yet Baker continues to manage and the Cubs continue to lose and make goofball mistakes that bring an immediate sense of nostalgia to anybody that grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s when players like Ken Reitz and Mike Lum paraded the grounds of the dingy and aging Wrigley Field to mostly empty stands while Dick Tidrow and Ken Kravitz glumly threw up offerings to other, more competent teams.

There was no team less competent than the Cubs and I worshipped Dave Kingman and thought Ivan de Jesus was underrated.

De Jesus slugged .233 in 1981 and was second in plate appearances and at bats for the Cubs that year. Now we have another de Jesus and his name is Neifi Perez.

The other day the Cubs pulled off something not even the 1981 Cubs were able to do, they gave up two grand slams in an inning. That inning they gave up 11 runs and a game they had once been winning 5-0 was lost 13-7. In true Cubs fashion, the grand slams by Cliff Floyd and Carlos Beltran were divided by a David Wright two run shot. Todd Walker tried to take the blame, but once again you couldn't help but notice the hand of Baker placing his pawns in the path of the rooks and bishops the Mets lined up. Why would anybody, in a game that, at that moment it occurred, you were winning 5-3 with one out in the sixth inning, would you bring in your worst reliever with runners on base and your four best relievers, that you paid untold millions to just sitting there? Is that Todd Walker's fault?

And the constant grousing about what Todd Walker can't do when he's been one of the best hitters on the club and has been willing to go wherever the Cubs put him has been nearly criminal. Meanwhile Neifi Perez, until very recently when his awfulness has reached atomic brightness that can be seen even from outer space, received at bat after at bat. For Neifi they shouldn't be called at bats, they should be called weak grounders. The Cubs off the record complaining about Walker is kind of like the slob complaining about the messy couch but it's consistent with a regime that has no idea at all how to construct talent in any meaningful way. Witnessing their attempts to build any kind of team following a coherent philosophy is like watching a dog with Legos.

When the Cubs make some kind of move, occasionally it has some utility and you think, wow, these guys are figuring it out, but then they do something so asinine you know that it was kind of like a monkey making a sentence, the next line will more than likely be nonsense. Such was the case this off-season, they had suffered through a couple seasons of Nomar Garciaparra being injured and decided he wasn't worth a risk anymore. Better not to give an incentive-laden contract because hey, fool me once right? Some Cubs fans here might protest, "well, remember we had to see if Ronny Cedeno was the real deal," please remember then that the Cubs wanted to give Rafael Furcal tens of millions of dollars. The Dodgers were lucky enough to get Nomar but as penance, they ended up with the fruits of Furcal. Nomar is batting .345.

Furcal, who the Cubs wanted, has seen his performance falter, though he's had a decent last month, kind of.

If you have a Cedeno and you want to see what he can do, but you want to try and win, why not sign Garciaparra, who will probably miss at least some time with injury, and he has, and then have Cedeno there to spell him. Cedeno will still get enough playing time not to regress and might actually develop better in such a situation. WIth the Cubs it's sink or swim, with predictable results.

And what is clear from all that is that the last thing the Cubs should have been wasting their off-season on was trying to sign Rafael Furcal. It took luck to keep the Cubs from throwing even more money into this pit of listlessly played baseball.

And then there was the Juan Pierre deal which the Cubs made because they never figured out how to work with Corey Patterson, who has had an excellent year in Baltimore after the Cubs fussed, fidgeted and complained, again, about what he couldn't do, for the last few years. They gave him chances to succeed, then they kicked at him while he was out there and failed, yet again, to help develop him as a player. In the end they punted him for basically nothing and then gave up two excellent pitching prospects and a serviceable pitcher in Sergio Mitre for Pierre who replaced Patterson. It was bad on both sides and in the end they went backward and backward.

I think this is one reason the Cubs end up with amazing players surrounded by useless ones. They have no idea how to develop a player, but if a player comes who's so good it doesn't matter, even they can see that once in awhile. How do you fuck up a Zambrano? You don't - although the Cubs at one point seemed to think his future was probably as a reliever.

The team is run by apologists who fail to maximize what player talent they do have because they don't want to risk being put up for criticism by a media that appears to think baseball is still being played in the dead-ball era.

The morons that cover this team glory in little things like hitting behind the runner, bunting and the stolen base. Manufactured runs gleam like fools' gold to them, while the three run homer, unless hit by the elegant and wonderful Derrick Lee (and I mean that), are eschewed, as if they had been hit by some fat man with a beer in his hand at a 16" tourney. They spent so much time talking about Todd Walker's errors in the Mets game that you would have thought he hit the Mets homeruns, and at least one of those errors, the one Beltran reached on before later hitting his grand slam, would probably have been an infield hit anyway. The ball was hit slow and Beltran was flying, after all, unlike the Cubs, he had a game to win.

It's painful to watch the Cubs wallow so miserably, there's Zambrano out there, seemingly oblivious to the negative nabobs who surround him, when he pitches there's some transcendence, it is the assertion of poetry and exhuberance that this game continues to give to the soul.

And then there's Maddux, the greatest pitcher of his, or any, time. How does one even begin to explain him? That's for another time. Sometimes he has seemed to me the lone man, surrounded and beset on all sides (after all, he is a Cub), but as a pitcher he is pitiless.

They deserve better. This team is embarrassing.