101 Years of Futility and Counting? Boycott, Cubs Fans

CHICAGO -- Tuesday night, in keeping with masochistic tradition, 40,000 fans will file into an ancient ballpark, ignore the reality of the standings and root for the Cubs to beat the Washington Nationals. They'll do so even though the Nationals, I dare say, might be better than the Cubs these days. This would be the ideal evening to boycott the one sports team in America that never, ever gives its diehards a reward for their loyalty, a franchise headed toward a 101st consecutive season without a World Series title.

But they can't revolt. They don't have it in them. They're mad, sick and just delusional enough to think a victory will send the Cubs on a hot streak that leads to the October glory they know is just around the corner, one of these decades or centuries or eons. So don't you mock them, OK, when their boys steal a 4-3 win over those pesky Nats, allowing fans to launch into a rocking chorus of "Go, Cubs, go! Go, Cubs, go! Hey, Chicago, what do you say! The Cubs are gonna win today!"

This is what I've lived with for 17 years. This is what the natives have lived with for generations. But 2009 seems to carry a particular gloom, at least among Cubdom's scattered realists. Management spent a whopping $140 million on the payroll, most in team history and tops in the National League, only to see the more efficiently-run Cardinals carry an eight-game divisional lead while the Cubs struggle to stay over .500. Every offseason move made by general manager Jim Hendry has turned to manure, from the failings of closer Kevin Gregg to the trade of versatile leader Mark DeRosa to the ill behavior and shaky performances of Milton Bradley.

In fact, Hendry's blunders date back the last several years, when he paid $136 million for the now-feeble Alfonso Soriano, $48 million to overhyped Kosuke Fukudome, $10 million to a former Notre Dame wide receiver (Jeff Samardzija) who should have played in the NFL and $91.5 million to psycho pitcher Carlos Zambrano, who recently called himself "lazy" about working out between starts and should be traded to the first team that wants to inherit his contract. If you count $75 million for perpetually injured third baseman Aramis Ramirez and $52 million for Ryan Dempster, a 7-7 pitcher who missed a month when he broke a toe trying to jump over a dugout fence to celebrate a victory, well, this would be one of the ugliest dollar-for-dollar teams in baseball history. Worse, Hendry has had much trouble developing serious prospects at everyday positions, requiring him to overspend for veteran talent and ultimately underachieve.

I've said it before. I'll say it again. The Cubs will not win a World Series in any of our lifetimes, if anyone's lifetime at all.

"It does gets painful watching this," said manager Lou Piniella, the latest would-be Wrigleyville savior who eventually will depart in disappointment. "That's a good word for it: painful."

"It's hard to be out there playing sometimes," admitted shortstop Ryan Theriot, who, at $500,000, is one of the few players earning his salary.

While the Cardinals were fortifying another NL pennant run with terrific acquisitions -- Matt Holliday, John Smoltz and DeRosa (plunge the dagger) -- the Cubs couldn't do much of anything at the July trade deadline. Why? Oh, they were stuck in the spin cycle of a sale process that began almost 2 1/2 years ago and finally may have ended, emphasis on "may," last Friday. That is when the Tribune Co., which bought the Cubs for a mere $21.1 million in 1981, announced an agreement to sell 95 percent of the Cubs and Wrigley Field to the billionaire Ricketts family for $845 million. It's less than the $1 billion desired by Tribune boss Sam Zell but still established an all-time record for a major league transaction, beating the $700 million purchase of the Red Sox by John Henry's group in 2001.

The Ricketts clan, which founded online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, should not be confused with Mark Cuban. The flamboyant owner of the Dallas Mavericks would have been a perfect win-and-party owner for the Wrigleyville scene, but commissioner Bud Selig wanted no part of him. Nor did White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, an old fart who didn't want to compete in Chicago against Cuban's youthful zeal and helped hand-pick a family from Omaha that will conform to Bud and Jerry's fuddy-duddy ways. At least Tom Ricketts, a forty-something who will run the team while daddy Joe pumps in the money, has a romantic history with Wrigley: He met his wife in the bleachers and once lived across from the park. But the question will be whether he knows any more about winning championships than the Tribsters, on their way to an 0-for-29 showing, or the Wrigley chewing-gum dynasty before them.

"Our family is thrilled to have reached an agreement to acquire a controlling interest in the Cubs, one of the most storied franchises in sports," Joe Ricketts said. "The Cubs have the greatest fans in the world, and we count our family among them."

They are fans no more, of course. What the real fans want to know is whether the family is prepared to fire Hendry, who happens to hail from Omaha. No, it wasn't his fault that his hands were tied at the trade deadline -- though, if they weren't, you wonder if he would have botched that, too. He has been too erratic throughout the decade, with no detectable improvement in the farm system, to warrant continued employment despite the four-year extension he signed last offseason. "I hope [he stays]," Ramirez told the Chicago Sun-Times. '"He's done a great job. We won the division back-to-back. We haven't played the way we'd like to in the playoffs, but that's not his fault. He's done his job." My first thought: Naturally, Ramirez wants him to stay after Hendry rescued him from Pittsburgh and handed him a fortune. And the little comment about not performing well in the playoffs? Um, two straight years, the Cubs played well in the regular season, only to be ousted in first-round sweeps in roughly 72 hours. That means the Cubs weren't built for playoff baseball. Which means Hendry has to go.

"We've had a high payroll the past few years," Hendry said. "The way we went about our business after '06, we spent a lot of money and signed a lot of good players to some high-end deals. Unless you're going to be the Yankees, you just can't do that every year."

My preference would be to steal Theo Epstein from the Red Sox. Or one of the young major league GMs who are faring well, such as Jon Daniels of the Rangers. Word is, Selig will push hard for one of his guys, Sandy Alderson, who is so 20 years ago and isn't the right answer. Cubdom must hope the Ricketts family trusts its own instinct and doesn't become a conduit for Selig's whims. And while they don't have to spend $140 million every year, Tom and Joe are the stewards of a major-market franchise with high ticket prices and fans obsessed to win a championship. They can't do this on the cheap -- and that includes spending as much as $500 million on building a new grandstand at Wrigley before the current one falls down.

"Hopefully, they are in this to win and not just to say they own the Cubs, and they're willing to keep the payroll the way it is and we can do what we need to do," first baseman Derrek Lee said.

If Laura Ricketts can produce a championship, hundreds of thousands of fans surely will show up for the next Gay and Lesbian Pride parade."Now we can go get Roy Halladay," Ramirez said.

Maybe, maybe not. But there is this twist: One of Joe Ricketts' kids, Laura, is a lesbian. Technically, then, she will be one of the Cubs owners. "If that's not enough of a reason to buy a bleacher seat to a Cubs game, I don't know what is," wrote Trish Bendix as part of her "L-Blog" page on Chicago Now, the Tribune's blog site.

At this point, Cubdom doesn't really care who owns the ballclub. If Laura Ricketts can produce a championship, hundreds of thousands of fans surely will show up for the next Gay and Lesbian Pride parade. All anyone knows is, the White Sox spend a lot less money and have more to show for it. You don't have to like Ken Williams, but the crosstown GM is embarrassing Hendry with his smart, efficient pickups (Gavin Floyd, John Danks, Carlos Quentin) and his scouting heists (Gordon Beckham, Alexei Ramirez). And when it was time to spend, Williams convinced Reinsdorf to fork out a guaranteed $52 million for former Cy Young Award winner Jake Peavy and a guaranteed $59 million for outfielder Alex Rios.

Meanwhile, the Cubs quickly are becoming fat, complacent and old. "I really don't see it," protested Piniella, who will acknowledge run-scoring constipation. "I haven't seen resignation. We've just got to figure out a way to put runs on the board. [A comeback] can be done. We've dug ourselves a hole, but it can be done. You can see what Colorado did [in 2007]. So it can be done, but you've got to put together a winning streak now."

He says he's coming back in 2010. "I've said all along this is my last managing job. I'm going to go home and I'm going to enjoy my life [after this]," Piniella said. "But I'm still competitive. I still come to the ballpark, and the losses hurt. If the losses didn't hurt, then I know it would be time to leave. That's the biggest telling thing for me. If it wasn't painful, then I don't belong in this business."

Come to think of it, such is the definition of masochism: the enjoyment of what is painful and tiresome. If change is supposed to be a constant in the world, tell me: Why does life never change at Wrigley Field?