8/25/2004 09:17:00 AM by Rob

Everything is bee-youuuu-tee-fullll

The sun is shining bright, we're looking at the wonderful world of Cubs baseball through our rose-colored shades, sipping our tall, icy glass of Cubbie Blue Kool-Aid!



Coming in today, I came up with seven (7) names of Cubs who are playing their best baseball right now. They're playing so well, I could just cry.

The names I came up with are the names of people I have ripped in the past, has-beens or never will-bees who are just doing wonderfully right now, five position players and two pitchers...

...and that's all I am going to say on the matter. For I, the Uncouth Sloth, am in touch with my Cubness. Like Donald Sutherland said to Billy Baldwin in "Backdraft", I have "seen the fire". And I know, if I spend today heaping praise on these seven men, they will all go out, as one, today and keel over dead. I will not identify these seven latter-day heroes, and I just hope in the most hidden recesses of my heart that they continue to play for the rest of the year like they have played the last week.

And NO, the Great Sam-Me Sosa is NOT one of the people I am thinking of. He still sucks, but the Cubs have been winning games IN SPITE of his big selfish washed-up mangy butthole.

You just know I'm going to piss on the picnic table.

OK. Two weeks ago, when we were losing miserably to SF, LA, and SD, our main wild-card competition, we were all out here bellyachin' like inmates having to eat oatmeal for the fortieth day in a row. Dusty can't handle a bullpen, Dusty stays too long with HIS guys, Dusty's batting order is all screwed up, we have no leadoff guy, the middle of the order is dragging us down, why isn't Walker playing?

Now, that we're winning, what has Dusty done differently?

Not a god damned thing.

The Truly Kool-Aid Swilling amongst us would accept this fact as PROOF that the Dusty Baker Experiment of "letting them play" and "treating them like men" works well. The proof of the theorem is, they would say, that losing was the aberration, that if Dusty sticks to his guns, they would start winning sooner or later. They do every year, it seems.

Ah, yes, the great Dusty Stat: In his ten+ years of managing, he has managed only 3 "meaningless" games, defined as games when they were out of the playoff picture.

There is nobody out there that can get his team to the playoffs like Dusty Baker. That is just plain fact.

But what about games 6 & 7 of the 2003 NLCS? Games 6 & 7 of the 2002 World Series? How about the 1998 Play-in game, when Dusty's boys couldn't solve the Great Steve Trachsel?

When it comes to The Big One, the truly BIG ONE in all-caps, bold, italics and quotation marks, sitting back and letting the boys recreate doesn't work. I maintain that the losing out west is no exception to the rule, that you are just as likely to lose as you are to win, regardless of the talent, if strategy, situations, and common sense are ignored.

We won what we won last year, and we are where we are this year, because of superior trading prowess made possible by the insane astronomic profits pulled in every year by this particular Tribune Corp. profit center. If we had the talent that Pittsburgh or Cincinnatti has, Dusty would lose 112 games with his toothpick chewin' half asleepin' managin'.

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