I know it’s early for this, and it’s a HUGE if given the team but if the Cubs win the World Series this year (or next or whenever) does this make Theo Epstien a baseball god?
For those that don’t know, Theo is the general manager of the Cubs who was previously the GM of the Boston Red Sox. While in Boston he brought that team from the doldrums and into the WS, and if he can win a WS for the Cubbies too and can say he won championships for the two most hopeless causes in all of baseball…that has to make him some kind of baseball god right?
I only ask because he’s new enough in his tenure with the Cubs that I don’t know how much can be attributed to him, or if he has Jimmy Johnson syndrome and is riding on player that the previous GM already had in the system
According to Wiki he took over with the Cubs in October of 2011. So four years? Yeah that makes it his team by just about any stretch. Even so, if the Cubs when under his watch, he can say whatever he darn well wants. You know why? Cause he will flash WS rings for the two franchises that were the poster children for hopelessness in baseball, and quite possibly all sports. It really is the ultimate scoreboard moment.
Will it happen this year? Maybe. But it is the Cubs, so they could still screw it up in some historical fashion.
I’m not sure what the definition of a “baseball god” is. For one thing, I’m almost certain Epstein would still be required to die at some point. However, I can’t think offhand of any executive who had a comparable acheivement.
The thing is that the Cubs and Red Sox were very unlucky for a long time, but they both always had large fan bases; there was no structural economic reason why they SHOULDN’T have been good, they just weren’t. Those large fan bases are also why their struggles were so mythologized, compared to the woes of, say, Indians fans. I think it would be much more impressive to do this with, say, the Pirates and Twins, even though their World Series droughts are much shorter.
Luck played a part, sure, but poor scouting and drafting and coaching played a bigger one. Tom Yawkey was idolized in Boston, but that was the result of a long series of stories told by reporters who were also his drinking buddies - reporters who weren’t couldn’t do their jobs and got pulled. Yawkey was a vicious racist and so were his “good baseball men” - his team was the last in MLB to integrate (even the *Bruins *integrated before the Red Sox), and the racial atmosphere there kept a lot of black talent out of the organization. Also, the architecture of Fenway Park kept him from recognizing the importance of pitching, especially lefties, adequately, and they never developed more than a handful of top pitchers ever. Only when the estate finally sold the franchise did it become clear that the “curse” was of Yawkey, not the Bambino.
There isn’t a similar single explanation for the Cubs, but their problems do have to be laid on a history of front-office incompetence. The lack of lights at Wrigley may play a role (Dennis Eckersley says he became an alcoholic there because *all *of his evenings were free for nightlife), but that isn’t the whole story.
Some of it comes from the presence of so many self-important writers in Boston and Chicago, who built up much of the myth out of simple bullshit. That Harvard-centered clique, tied together by pretending to be Red Sox fans so they can fit in with each other, is also responsible for the ancient nonsense about Boston fans *wanting *to lose, not just expecting it. The same bunch of fans followed the Celtics and Bruins and didn’t have the same attitudes there, now did they, Mr. Updike and Ms. Goodwin?
Thing is, despite the failings of Yawkey and company, the Red Sox were good, far more often than the Cubs. The dynamic was very different.
Since the last Cubs World Series appearance (the loss in 1945), and before the Red Sox victory in 2004, there were played fifty-eight seasons of Major League Baseball.
In that span, the Cubs amassed a total of fifteen winning seasons, three first-place finishes, four second-place finishes, and four postseason appearances.
In the same span, the Red Sox produced forty-one winning seasons, seven first-place finishes, thirteen second-place finishes, and nine postseason appearances, four of which were classic World Series that went the distance. And all that was playing in a league or division which yielded twenty-five Yankees pennant teams.
The Red Sox were in actual contention more often than the Cubs could just keep their noses above water. The Red Sox dynamic was mostly about being pretty good, occasionally great, getting close and never quite there. Apart from Ron Santo and Ernie Banks, the Cubs dynamic was mostly about sucking.
Jim Leyland was a manager, not an executive. Among executives I guess you’d have to bring up Branch Rickey, who presided over the Cardinals’ first four world championships and then moved on to draft the nucleus of World Series winning teams for the Dodgers and Pirates, both of whom had been bad for a long time when he arrived. He didn’t keep either of those jobs long enough to actually see them win the Series, though.
Pretty sure that’s a reference to Dave Dombrowski, who was in charge of title wins in Florida and Detroit, and was in fact the man that hired Leyland in those places.
