Cubs As Essential As Sox And Yanks?

By Adam Ruggiero
Love of Sports Correspondent

Let’s all remain calm.

Actually, let’s get a little angry. Especially you, Lou.

After the Cubs’ highly anticipated, though still surprising loss in Game 1 of the NLDS, Chicago manager Lou Pinella sounded like a man who’d seen his own grisly fate, dumbfounded and hopeless.

“We’ll see,” Pinella said of potential lineup changes. “We’ll see tomorrow. I’m not sure. Let’s wait until tomorrow and see … I don’t know, how many did we walk today? Seven, eight? That’s not a formula to win, and we didn’t win.”

You can say that again. But for the tens of thousands of North Siders and Cubby fans nationwide please don’t … at least not yet.

This year marks the grand centennial of the birth of Chicago’s “Lovable Losers,” 100 years since the Cubs last won a World Series. One hundred years of disappointment, disbelief, agony and now, curse.

But has it not also been 100 years of anticipation, comedy, solidarity and pure passion? The Cubs have all the renown and appeal of the Yankees and Red Sox, but bear none of the animosity. In their century of on-field failure, the boys of Wrigley have accumulated generations of off-field lore. No team is more talked-about when they’re good and less-criticized when they’re bad – in that respect the Cubs are the perfectly balanced team.

It is for this reason that, as a baseball-loving nation, we need this rag-tag bunch of Ivy-lovers to soldier on and rebound to knock off the Dodgers. We need to be in the stands and cheering from our living rooms to boost them beyond the NLCS and into the World Series. And then, for the good of our national pastime and the generations that will carry it beyond our lifetimes, we need another inexplicable Cubby collapse.

Imagine if Tom ever beat Jerry to the mouse hole, or if Wile E. Coyote ever devoured the Road Runner. What then? It’s the chase, the struggle, which keeps us coming back for more. Victory is no fun, but near-victory is irresistible.

What about the Red Sox, you say? Sure, the Sox persevered through their own legacy of failure and are still relevant today, but that’s because they still have the Yankees. Boston will forever be intertwined with New York and therefore will always have a reason to win. The Cubs, on the other hand, have only one reason to win: the fact that they always lose. If they ever finally triumphed, they would actually lose their only reason for winning.

Understand, this is not anti-Cubs propaganda. This is for the good of every real fan who stares death in the face on dollar-a-dog night by quadrupling their own cholesterol, or who screams ’till they’re hoarse and claps until their palms are numb. It’s the tradition of futility that draws us all to the Cubs – and to baseball – year after year, decade after decade and century after… century?