Baffoe: The Start Of Not A Cubs Season But An Era
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) This is weird.
It shouldn't feel so uncomfortable. Damn near everything we were told by executives Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer and the rest of the contractors brought in to demolish and rebuild the historical eyesore that was the Chicago Cubs happened. It's one of the rare times important sports people pitched an honest plan with fair transparency and did exactly what they said they'd do -- and on schedule. Knocking down a house and building a new one hardly happens with such clarity and genuineness.
Yet here we are, on the cusp of the 2016 season in Chicago baseball staring down the barrel of a gun. Because as much as we've clamored for the Cubs to reach the status of being the consensus pick to play postseason ball well into October, we're the dumb dogs chasing the speeding car that finally stopped. And now we don't know what to do with it. Our cerebral scar tissue starts showing.
Every bit of logic speaks to the Cubs probably being a really good team this year, save for the roster being infected by the plague. But Cubs fandom defies logic. And no matter how intelligently we tell ourselves that curses don't exist …
That talk of inevitable forever annual futility no matter what is foolish and non-mathematical …
That pesky St. Louis Cardinal haters and napoleonic White Sox trolls are just noise to cover their own worst fears realized …
We still. Don't. Feel. Right. Right. Now.
Rian Watt at BP Wrigleyville wrote -- in an ode to hope, no less -- on Sunday:
It's hard to know what to write on this, the eve of the most hopeful of Chicago summers. There is nothing left to be done, this offseason and this Arizona spring. The team looks as good as it possibly could, as good as any team this 2016 season possibly could. And yet it could still disappoint us. They all could have. Many did, in the end. It's hard to know what to write because as you feel hope burgeoning out of that place in the soul where it sleeps, you feel as well the voice of reason, the voice of experience, saying, "Don't love too hard. Don't care too much." That voice has helped you grieve before. Has steeled you, cynical and hard, against what you know will probably come.
Sure, we're excited. We appreciate manager Joe Maddon's T-shirts and culture of relaxation. Cool is the slow dissolution of the always-terrible "Next year is here" clownish slogans and general culture of naivete and suck. Certainly, we've read all the glowing writeups and season previews. Those help suppress the nervous giggling-turned-sweating, for a while.
Fifty of the 55 writers at Fangraphs have the Cubs winning the National League Central. No other MLB team possesses the nerd number odds of making the playoffs, winning the division and winning each playoff series that the Cubs do. Vegas really,really likes the Cubs.
But the postseason talk in March and April has grown bothersome. Nothing has been played, let alone won. Anything can happen. It's a long season. And insert some other cliche for the Rule of Three.
"Right now, we're really hungry to get going," Anthony Rizzo told the Tribune on Sunday. "If anyone in this clubhouse is thinking about the World Series right now, we're in the wrong spot. We need to think about winning the game, think about dominating April and every game in April and keep focusing on the small steps."
And he's right. Talking endgame now is pointless at best and retroactive spite fodder at worst.
A dirty little secret is that it's entirely possible -- more likely than not even -- that the Chicago Cubs don't win the World Series in 2016. And if they don't win it all, the columns will be written reaffirming the columns that are probably popping up today or over the weekend from various salty scribes (I'm not looking for or pointing you toward them) that anything short of a ring is failure in 2016, which is stupid thinking by vacuous people who refuse to understand what the Cubs are right now. Just as they refused to accept the whole process that got us here to this fever dream of the North Siders being the game's best team on paper right now.
Insulating for another year of paradelessness helps to keep the big picture in perspective. Yes, right now the Cubs are capable of winning a championship. But more importantly right now, they are a team capable of winning multiple championships spread out over the rest of this decade and into the next. Not winning it all this season is as uncrucial as not winning in 2015, stinging as it was at the time.
The immediacy of wanting the Cubs to win right now is understandable. And it's a tough fight to try to convince fans and observers who only know of a Cubs World Series title in reference works that one more year isn't a big deal.
But that is to again forget what we were told back in 2011 when Epstein was hired.
"That doesn't happen overnight and it certainly doesn't happen because of one person," Epstein said when he was introduced as president of baseball operations. "Over time and together we will build a solid foundation that delivers sustained success for the Cubs. That starts with a commitment to scouting and player development."
Sustained success. This team as comprised isn't about just reaching a holy grail of ending the most famous drought in American sports. It's about winning a lot. Not feeding the hungry but gorging.
The Cubs -- with a core of players like Rizzo, Jason Heyward, Kris Bryant and Addison Russell under control for a while and with aforementioned scouting and development that's night and day from any prior era in franchise history -- are contending for World Series titles every year for the foreseeable future.
Failure isn't coming up short of a trophy this year. Failure would be some mass collective regression that's next to impossible to happen or it would be five years from now still not having a trophy. But it's not cramming years of future potential in one season's assessment.
We aren't witnessing the beginning of the 2016 Cubs season. This is the commencement of an era, one which will cause a generation of kids to have no concept of the Wrigley denizens as lovable losers.
So you might as well savor the weird. Remember how awkward you're feeling right now as this slow, methodical march to multiple Octobers starts. You might come to miss these pit sweats and butterflies and strange giddiness that also makes you queasy.
Because starting a year from now, these grand preseason expectations are going to start feeling really normal. Whether we're referring to the defending World Series champion Chicago Cubs or not.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
