The cracking of balls meeting barrels. The snapping of balls snatched by leather. Peanut shells at our feet. Mustard stains on our teeth. Organ music dancing in our ears.
The baseball season is here again. Isn’t it wonderful?
Ah, but: abject futility on one side of town, and a wanton unwillingness to go all in on the other. Isn’t it not very wonderful at all?
The baseball season is here again. You decide.
With one team, the White Sox, best case, we’re hoping for a finish far enough from the bottom of the major leagues that we can pull the paper bags off our heads. With the other, the Cubs, we go in hoping — realistically — for an existence close enough to the top that we can at least posture as though the North Siders are vaguely in the hunt for the World Series.
One personnel boss, the Cubs’ Jed Hoyer, needs a playoff team for the first time in five years on his watch or else he’ll likely be kicked to the curb. The other, the Sox’ Chris Getz, needs to avoid another 100-plus-loss season or else, well, nothing will happen.
One manager, the Cubs’ Craig Counsell, must lead a playoff team or else he’ll be two years into the richest managerial deal in baseball history with nothing to show for it. A train wreck will arrive outside Wrigley Field with his, Hoyer’s and chairman Tom Ricketts’ names on it if it doesn’t happen. The other, the Sox’ little-known Will Venable, has a more modest outlook. If, by the end of the season, anywhere close to half of Chicago sports fans have stopped putting an “S” on the end of his name — as in “Venables” — it’ll be a victory.
The baseball season is here again. Oh, joy.
The bad news with the Sox is they’re coming off a season in which they danced with a record 120 losses and finally dipped it and kissed it on the mouth. The good news is they’re not projected to lose even 110 games this time. Can you feel the excitement?
With the Cubs, things are better but more muddled. Two seasons ago, they collapsed late and missed the playoffs by one game, which Hoyer now characterizes almost as an unfortunate coincidence because the team had been better than expected and really wasn’t yet in a winning window. But last season, expectations were higher and went unmet. Now, though, it’s supposed to be a different story, even though the Cubs — baseball’s fourth-most-valuable franchise, according to Forbes — aren’t even a top-10 spender in payroll and aren’t in the top 10 of teams most likely to win the World Series, according to a consensus of betting sites.
“I think we’re in a competitive window,” Hoyer said at the start of spring training. “I think we’ve gotten better each year. I think we’re in a place where we have a chance to be really good and try and really maximize our resources within our budget to make sure that we can do that.”
Indeed, “within our budget.” Despite all the riches under the Rickettses’ mattresses and in their piggy banks. Support the fecklessness of the Cubs if you wish to. Just know there are a number of franchises valued far lower that are spending much more in efforts to win.
And just know newcomer Kyle Tucker, on the last year of his contract — and maybe the best pure hitter to don a Cubs uniform since before anyone in the World Series core of 2016 — might not be paid to stick around beyond 2025. The clock on his stay is already ticking.
And just remember, Cubs ownership spends untold dollars on ventures surrounding Wrigley but refuses to use any of the revenue therein on the product in between the white lines.
On the South Side, it’s bleaker. At spring training, Getz wouldn’t even guarantee the Sox will be better than the worst team ever.
“You look at our record last year, we want to win more games this year,” he said. “What exactly is that amount? Time will tell. All I know is from an infrastructure standpoint, from a talent standpoint, we’re in a much better place.”
Talent? It might literally be impossible to see how that’s true compared to this time last year. Speaking of, does anyone out there want to trade for Luis Robert? The Sox will listen.
“Player performance will dictate a lot of the timeline of [when] we’re more competitive on our major-league club,” Getz said. “With that being said, you can’t get too far in front of yourself. You can’t. As an organization, we know where we’re at and we still have a lot of work to do.”
Cue up 100-plus losses for the dudes in black.
Cue up an effort to outpace the slightly more-than-mid-80s wins projected by the leading analytics sites and the gambling sites for the dudes in blue.
The baseball season is here again. Shouldn’t we be doing better than this?