The Cubs are like an immature person who only lives for today and never thinks about the future and can’t hold onto money. They are the kind of team that, if it were a married person, would give up its spouse and kids over lunch with a high maintenance new broom and give that a whirl.
They have never dreamed up a plan to serve their needs down the road. If the Cubs were parents they would be the worst kind. They would spoil their kids with overpriced toys that are booed and thrown across the room, while hopelessly compensating out of guilt for being miserable parents. The free agents they sign annually for no reason other than to make us happy are these toys.
We are the children of the Cubs, but there is no worthwhile heritage in this family. There is no commitment or loyalty to players except when the terms of their contracts have become tiresome. Their only farm system is the repeat process of sending one of their own down to Iowa for rehab assignments. They occasionally take fan polls to make moves, but that is just the inmates running the asylum.
The Cubs are insecure to think that we insist on winning. They would be better served as a team of longevity made from scratch kept together ten years. Developing a winner could take forever, or in mathematical terms half as long as their championship drought is today. They need commitment to farm system and young players found in school. These would be pure Cubs, and we as their children might respect them enough to quit binge drinking in their presence.
The term “lovable loser” has grown into disfavor, but that is because when you build a team overnight you only play to win. It would be acceptable for a team that has been together for several years to be lovable losers if that is how we have come to appreciate them. That’s called an identity, and the Cubs don’t have one. Without identity, they can only be losers, not lovable losers.
The 1969 Cubs consisted of core players who had been with the team during the ‘sixties. Their legend would not otherwise exist. The 2011 Cubs do not represent this decade, whatever name this decade is known as. The “tens” sounds lame. Maybe the Cubs will roar in the ‘twenties. The Cubs applied another Band Aid in signing a temporary first baseman who supposedly will be replaced next year by a used up Albert Pujols. This does not sound like an organizational plan. It sounds like something Arthur from the Dudley Moore movie would think of while racing a sports car around an empty track.
By Rob C. Christiansen
