August not the best time to give up on Baseball

First appeared on August 22nd, 2010
in The Lebanon Reporter

After much thought and intense Phil-Jackson-like soul searching, I’ve decided to make one of the boldest predictions in the history of part-time pretend sports columnists. I am ready to say, with a record of 20 games under .500, the Cubs won’t be winning the World Series again this year.


Just writing those words alone has forced me to call upon every power I have as both a writer and Cubs fan. It’s like Ronald McDonald eating a Whopper or Neil Armstrong admitting he never went to the moon.

With their baseball season lost for another 8 months, Cubs fans now find themselves on the hunt for a new sport to fill their downtime. Meaningful football is still a month away which means we’ve entered an uncomfortable lull in the world of sports. And, with officials breaking up the Cockfighting ring in Shelby County earlier this summer, another option has been eliminated for those of us who lack a social conscience or have gambling problems.

Perhaps like me, most Cubs fans turned to Shark week on Discovery to fill the void a combination of quality starts and anemic run production has left within us all. Shark Week taught us a lot. Like the fact the male Bull Shark’s testosterone level is a staggering 900. Knowing the average human's level is closer to a measly 40 suddenly makes cleaning the Gulf look far less pressing.

It bears mentioning the last time I had it checked my doctor said, instead of a Bull Shark, my testosterone level was somewhere closer to that of a wildebeest; a rabid wildebeest with access to performance enhancing drugs and a vendetta against a high school English teacher who once compared his writing to something off a Bazooka wrapper no doubt.

With 125 reported shark attacks last year off the coast of South Africa alone it’s clear the campaign launched by Great White’s everywhere to restore the despotic reputation Jaws helped them build in the seventies is going well. Forget the 8,000 miles one must travel to get there or the fact you don’t fill a bathing suit as flatteringly as you once did, now there are 125 more convenient reasons you should never swim off the coast of South Africa.

Gambling requires money, Euchre requires thought and playing sports requires actual physical activity. I need a sport I can watch that allows me to achieve a state of vegetativeness while remaining as horizontal as possible. That sport was baseball until I gave up on the season.

If there’s a silver lining anywhere it’s the fact the Cubs aren’t the only ones playing meaningless baseball this late in the season. Currently there are six Major League teams who are more than 20 games out of first place.

So it is in a Bermuda Triangle of apathy Cub fans must remain adrift until real football arrives. Another depressing September and fruitless October await. We can only hope ours will be a fall full of warm temperatures, bright foliage and highlights of anyone besides the Yankees or Cardinals.

In the meantime I suppose my free time will be filled tackling the insurmountable task of potty training our 2 year old. Exciting, maddening and unpredictable-it contains all the elements of sport and, at the rate we’re progressing currently, chances are he will keep us busy until opening day 2011 anyway.

Given the progress we’ve seen to this point, one must wonder which will happen first; his shedding his last diaper, or my beloved Cubs hoisting another championship banner. Here’s an insiders tip straight out of Vegas- My son is more stubborn than me, smart money rides on the North-Siders.