I assure you Cub fans that half of the Yankees fan would cheer for you to win if they played against you. That would be history, instead of the Yanks winning every other year.
In 65 years, you could not have found your way into a World Series? I do not make fun of Chicago. I am not from Chicago. My parents lived there and thought it was kickass when they lived there in the 1950’s. It seems like a good place. John Hughes educated me on the rich folks in Chicago…
Why haven’t the Cubs won a World Series in 102 years. Or the Bears since 1985. If anyone asks me who was the best NFL team of all time, it was the 1985 Bears. This team would rape you, sodomize you, and spit in your face and you still love them. That team was so KICK ASS. They lost the Miami game because they were too hungover to play. Fuck it, let’s sit on the beach, drink and do whatever. Just show up tomorrow.
The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908 and haven’t even been IN one since 1945 because to quote David Letterman “The lovable loser image gets them more tail than Sinatra.”
No, really it’s because they suck so bad.
It is an honored baseball tradition that they suck so bad every year except for certain years when they don’t.
In fact, it is an honored baseball tradition that in certain years they will play well, nay excellently, at times fucking magnificently until they enter the playoffs and the entire city becomes pre-orgasmic until the moment when they suddenly suck so badly they blow everything and Wrigley Field is hushed in stunned disbelief.
We take our honored baseball traditions seriously on the Northside of Chicago. Besides, the White Sox have become insufferable since they won the series awhile ago.
How do you think Clevelanders feel? We’ve had the longest no-championship drought of any American city that has a major sports team. At least the Bulls have had championships in living memory.
You had Kosar and the Kardiac Kids! That counts for something.
But yeah, I felt bad about my two home towns (Houston & Denver) until a major league franchise won something. (NHL, NFL, NBA) Why do we put ourselves through that stuff?
INMO the lack of success w/regard to the Cubs and Bears falls at the feet of club ownership. This is especially true of the Bears. While they’ve signed some exceptional players through the years, most players and coaches have been second rate. Think back…when was the last time the Bears had a really good QB? Billy Wade, maybe? The coaches have always been financial bargains. Yet through all this, the fans keep coming and the bucks keep rolling in.
They pack the ballpark on every game (and it is a magnificent ballpark, you must admit). It would take an expenditure of mucho dinero to craft a team that could win a world championship. But would that team bring in any more profits then they currently do? Not likely. They already sell out every seat, and max out their TV revenue.
So there is no incentive to win a championship: expenses would go up, revenues would not. Nothing is likely to change. And the “lovable losers” persona will endure.
I don’t know that that is necessarily true - the Boston Red Sox are a very good comparable to the Cubs, and they managed to break their Curse. I think the quote that Brian Epstein gave was that he wanted to make the Red Sox a “$100 million dollar player development machine.” What that means is to take the philosophy that allows a team like the Rays or the Twins to win and couple it with the revenue that a market like Boston provides.
The problem with the Cubs in recent years is that they haven’t been willing or able to go all in with a player development program. Complaints about them not spending enough money are spurious, in my view; the problem with the Cubs over the past ten years is that they’ve gone through a couple of high-spending quick fix periods. This has gotten them into the playoffs - they made it two years in a row just a couple of years ago after all, and made it to the playoffs early in Dusty Baker’s time as well. But those teams weren’t built for the long haul.
Can the Cubs build the development machine that they need? If they decide to dedicate the resources to it, yes. It’s not that much money to develop guys, it just takes smarts and the realization that no one will appreciate the effort until it bears fruit. And maybe not even then - people will most likely misattribute the reasons for success. Is Hendry the right guy to do this? I’m not sure - I think he’s done what the ownership has told him to do - go for the quick fix. Now that ownership is settled, things might change…
Sid Luckman. He is still the Bears’ all-time passing leader (yardage, anyway), and he last played 60 years ago.
They’ve gotten a few good years out of some quarterbacks (Wade, whom you mention, plus possibly McMahon and Eric Kramer), but, yeah, QB has not been a glamor position for the Bears.
Back when Favre was the Packers’ QB, I was entertained by the comparisons that the Tribune would run, showing just how many different starting QBs the Bears had used during Favre’s tenure.
The Cubs have the third-highest payroll in MLB (or, at least, they did as of opening day; their current salary base is likely considerably lower, having traded away a number of veterans recently).
While they have been historically noted as being penny-pinching, that hasn’t really been the case for most of the past decade or so. The issue seems to be more that they don’t know how to spend wisely.
The fact that I don’t believe in the curse is the ultimate twist of the knife for a Cubs fan. I mean, a curse would explain everything, right? The whole sad enterprise would make perfect sense if I could just ascribe it all to cruel destiny.
Take it from me–the irony isn’t all that comforting…
Note that the 1908 win was before the dominance of the gummy family - well known as the cheapest owners in baseball. Also note that, in 1945, most baseball players across the league that were able-bodied enough to walk on their own were enlisted in the military. Forget the baseball draft… Those Cubbies were playing against guys even the Army rejected as unfit for military service during a World War - and they still lost.
The real secret here is that the team was - for many decades - comparatively inexpensive to run, playing baseball exciting enough that fans could see them do something interesting now and again (i.e., they weren’t the Royals), and the team was still a money-making enterprise. If you make money, it doesn’t really matter whether you sorta suck most of the time. For those instinctively rushing to defend the team against the S-word, read the first paragraph again and repeat - 102 years.
