A Whole Lot of Bad Balls

I was poking around the Cubs’ website earlier to get my fix of Spring Training news. The most noteworthy news item involved Alfonso Soriano and his finger. The Cubs left fielder fractured the tip of a finger catching a routine flyball near the wall. He’s expected to be out three to five days.

The slender leadoff man said, via Cubs.com, “‘It’s OK – three, four days. I’ll be back.’”

I agree with The Goat Riders of the Apocalypse on this one, and I’m not too worried. The black cloud that floats (or maybe I should say “Goats”) over the Cubs’ heads would normally dictate that Soriano be shelved for three to five months. Amazingly, he’ll be back on the field soon. In the meanwhile, give the man a couple of days off to keep his legs fresh.

The end of the article gives a round up of the other nagging — and frankly, odd — injuries around camp:

“The Cubs have had a variety of injuries this spring. So far, infielder Mark DeRosa was hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat, pitcher Jose Ascanio had a bruised face after getting punched in a robbery attempt, and outfielder Felix Pie missed a couple of days early because of a twisted testicle. Third baseman Aramis Ramirez remains sidelined with a sore right shoulder.”

Sorry. Felix Pie did what? He missed a few days due to a “twisted testicle”?

Uh, ouch.

Notice how that nugget of injury news was nestled between the other weirdness that’s been going on at Cubs camp? Carrie Muskrat is so sly.

But more to the point, what exactly is a twisted testicle? I mean, I can imagine what it is, but how do you do that? I’ve had a sack swinging proudly for more than 25 years. It has, at various times, been kicked, exposed, punched, racked on a bicycle frame and rubbed vigorously (wink wink). It’s been twisted a little bit, but, like a swing at a playground, it always spins back around to face the right direction.

So how do you twist a teste? Shouldn’t it be a package deal? Did Pie get too close to the washing machine while it was in spin mode? Was he riding the merry-go-round too enthusiastically? Has the man got a fetish for tops?

I hope, for the sake of all the future Pie’s, the ball looks like a four seam fastball instead of a sweeping hook from a junk-throwing lefty.

Incredibly, this isn’t the first twig-and-berries related injury from the Cubs, it’s just the latest. Have you forgotten the 2006 season when Michael Barrett made every man in the world cringe and introduced the phrase “intrascrotal hematoma” to the common nomenclature?

I still haven’t.

Finally.

The Cubs are playing their first game of spring training today.

This morning I went out to my car and dug out my old baseball mitt. I always keep a glove and a few hardballs in my trunk because you never know when someone might say, “Hey, want to play catch?” I put it up to my face and breathed in the smell of perfectly aged leather, dust and warm air.

Things couldn’t be better.

Bad Omens too Early in the Spring

This morning I did something stupid. I stood up in the middle of my office and made an announcement. I spread my arms and let everyone within ear shot know that the Cubs’ pitchers and catchers have reported.

Spring is here.

Like every year — and every Cub fan — I proclaimed that this was our year. I wasn’t alone. Ryan Dempster made a similar announcement this morning.You think we’d both know better.

Arms still spread, still standing in the middle of the row, I smiled. Warm weather; the Windy City Classic; days of 90 degree heat in the right field bleachers; ivy in full bloom – it’s all a just a few weeks away.

Then it happened.

I was away from my desk for 20 minutes and when I came back, it was broken. My Aramis Ramirez Fannie May edition bobblehead was in pieces on my desk. His head was shattered. There was a note explaining it was an accident.

But the damage had been done. The shattered (bobble)head coupled with the prediction… This has to be an ill omen. Does it mean that Ramirez will be more fragile than usual and not put up .300/30/95 numbers? It’s too soon to tell, but it reminds me of my encounter with the man from the future last winter.

I can only hope, Cubs fans, that this isn’t a bad omen of things to come.

Broken Bobblehead

Originally uploaded by packyourlunch.

Why the Cubs are killing me

This is an excerpt from an email I sent a friend last night. It was late and I was tired. But I had just finished watching the Cubs loose to the Braves late in the game and I had to get some thoughts about them down on paper.

The email picks up in the middle. I’m talking about a trip I took to Wrigley while I was in Chicago.

One thing I did get to do was go to a Cubs game with my dad. Which was amazing. It was the first one I’d been to in two years. So, fuck yeah. I saw Zambrano pitch against the Pirates but loose the game after Z exited. Which was pretty typical at the time. Lately has been a different story though.

The past week has been pretty encouraging. They lost late to the Braves tonight after Dempster’s wild pitch, but they’ve still won 4 of 6 or 5 of 7. I want to get excited about them but it’s tough because, let’s face it, they’re still the Cubs. Although, Rich Hill was filthy the other night and Soriano is starting to rake. If Derek Lee snaps out of his mini slump tomorrow, things will get interesting. If Soriano and Lee carry the team for the next 5 or 6 days — until A-Ram feels better — I’ll buy in because Ramirez will hit like he always does. You can just see it. The guy has the chance to be Manny Ramirez-like. It looks like he doesn’t have a thought in his head, but once he gets going he just doesn’t know how to stop. I’d bet 100 bucks he’ll still end up with 30+ homers and between 90 and 100 RBIs. With the three of them hitting the ball, the Cubs are going to put 4 or 5 runs up a day.

The pitching just needs to synch up. Hill, Lily and Marquis threw out of their minds for the first two months. Then Hill and Lily went cold back to back. Marquis was amazing for a couple more starts, but he came back to earth. Zambrano has been a mystery all season but it looks like he’s getting his shit straight. Part of me wonders if his mom saw what happened and bitched him out. Imagine that scene:

Carlos: Hi Ma.
MamaCarlos: What did you do tonight?
Carlos: (shuffling feet) N-Nothing.
MamaCarlos: You hit that poor white boy right in the face! What did I tell you about picking on people smaller…and stupider than you?
Carlos: Carlos was hungry. Besides, he told everyone I like to wear women’s underwear.
MamaCarlos: If I ever see you do that again I swear to Ozzie Guillen I will… Did you say women’s underwear?
Carlos: No?
MamaCarlos: Are you ever going to do that again?
Carlos: No. In fact, I will forget that anything before this day has happened! From now on I will devote my life to hunting down the man who killed my father: Ugeth Urbina!
PapaCarlos: Hi.

Anyway, if we can keep two pitchers hot and one guy decent while the other two struggle, we’ll win games. If the bullpen can hold on to leads and be reliable, we’ll win the division. But that’s a lot of ifs.

Ted says hello.

Chicago — The return

I got back to my parents house around 11pm last night. It’s already been a surreal trip. I haven’t been home for more than a day since Craig and April got married last October.

That makes it eight months since I’ve last been home for any extended period of time. In that time it’s like I got amnesia about home. I’m reaching for light switches where there aren’t any. I’m forgetting names of streets I used to drive every day.

Maybe the hardest thing to handle in the past two days is how isolated my parents house is from anything. They don’t live miles down some private drive. It’s actually the opposite. They live in a 50 year old subdivision, three quarters of the way down the row of houses. On the right. Red brick. Really, you can’t miss it.

But that’s part of the problem, too. No one in the suburbs does anything at night. In Boston, if I’m on my front porch for more than five minutes – and it’s not 3am – people walk by, cars drive by. I might have a conversation while I’m out there.

Last night I went outside to sit on the porch and there was nothing. And it was dark.

Living in the city for so long has made me forget what it’s like to be dark at night. In Boston you can barely walk down a street without a street lamp flickering on once you get 15 feet past it.

Here, an old gas lamp was putting out a feeble light and everything was still. It almost felt like I had gone blind. It’s weirdly relaxing. But as I was smoking on the porch last night, I swear I could hear an anonymous neighbor just moaning.

Enough about that.

Today, I made it into the city proper to watch my beloved Cubbies lose to the Pirates 6-4. Zambrano got shelled in the first, giving up three runs. Matt Murton dropped a routine fly ball and made a throwing error. The Cubs offense came on three home runs. Aramis Ramirez and Angel Pagan hit solo shots and Michael Barret hit a two run, pinch hit homer. That was it.

But Wrigley. Oh, Wrigley. My dad and I were sitting 19 rows up from home plate and were behind the netting. I took about 40 pictures but I left my USB cord in Boston, so you’ll have to wait until I get home to upload them.

One of the best parts of the day was getting to the game. If I was going alone or with friends, I would have taken the Metra to the Davis Street CTA stop in Evanston. I would’ve transferred over to the Purple line and ridden it to Howard then switched to the Red line and gotten off at Addison – aka, Wrigley Field.

But going with my old man? Two hours on trains? “The hell with that,” he succinctly said. Instead, he decided to drive down to the Howard Street El stop, leave the car and ride the El the 12 stops to Wrigley.

I asked him how long it had been since he had ridden public transportation in the city of Chicago. He couldn’t remember.

Once he said that, I knew this was going to be the most fun I’d ever had on the El. And I wasn’t disappointed. Dad looked at map above the doors after every stop. I could tell he was counting down.

I tried to point out the Riviera and the Aragon, but he was too busy staring at a guy who was getting on the train. He was wearing ear buds and listening to his iPOD so loud that we could hear it from the other side of the train car. (I tried to explain the iPOD revolution to my dad, but he didn’t get it.)

I saw the “what’s that noise” look on my dad’s face. (Growing up, I learned to recognize it early.) He opened his mouth and went to stand up. I had to put my hand on his shoulder to stop him from saying something. Later, he asked about a smell. I laughed a lot. Then the two of us got shit faced at the ball park and I laughed some more.

I’d go into more detail, but this one, I’m keeping to myself.

End of day one and a half from Chicago.