Baffoe: Chicago Baseball 2012, In Memoriam
By Tim Baffoe-
(CBS) Well, the 2012 baseball season in Chicago has come to an end. For some, mercifully. For others, disappointingly.
Regardless of your opinion of the season or how your favorite Windy City team ended up (they're both golfing, so the same really), you cannot say the season on both sides of town didn't prove interesting. So before we throw the dirt on the 2012 baseball coffin, let's stumble back down memory lane and drink in the major and mostly the minor events that helped shape the season that was.
- April 6 Prior to his managerial debut, Robin Ventura buries the legendary hatchet with Texas Rangers executive Nolan Ryan by playfully kicking Ryan in the groin and dumping his heart medication down a sewer.
- April 10 A drunken Jim Hendry is found wandering the employee parking lot at Wrigley Field and denying he keyed Theo Epstein's car.
- April 18 Less than 14,000 take advantage of the White Sox promotional giveaway of Ventura's spoken word album Hose of Pale.
- May 3 Big Hurt Beer claims the life of a third person.
- May 17 The Ricketts family must deal with public and media scrutiny after it is revealed that family patriarch Joe has funded an anti-Obama Super PAC and donated to an organization that advocates the feeding of orphans to racing greyhounds.
- May 20 Michael Bay purchases the rights to produce and direct the disaster film The Return of Koyie Hill.
- May 25 670 The Score White Sox Pregame and Postgame host Chris Rongey begins a weekend suspension for pointing and laughing at a child with a lazy eye during a live broadcast from U.S. Cellular Field.
- May 30 Radio color man Keith Moreland admits he finds it disturbing that play-by-play man Pat Hughes keeps asking him to wear Ron Santo's old cologne and toupee.
- June 2 Carlton Fisk Replica Statue promotional giveaway provides years of nightmares for thousands of young White Sox fans.
- June 5 An otherwise pleasant day and 10-0 win over the Milwaukee Brewers is marred when, during the customary welcomes and birthday wishes between innings, a message denying the Holocaust is accidentally posted on the electronic center field scoreboard at Wrigley Field.
- June 21 Though the Cubs are off that day, Crane Kenney does not take a break from being a tremendous stroke somewhere probably.
- June 23 Legendary organist Nancy Faust returns to U.S. Cellular Field for the first time since retiring in 2010 and wows the crowd with her rendition of "Gangnam Style."
- June 26 Highly touted prospect Anthony Rizzo is called up from Triple-A Iowa. Despite petitioning, Commissioner Bud Selig refuses to hand the Cubs the World Series trophy then.
- June 27 White Sox honor the fiftieth fan torn rotator cuff of the year at the fast pitch game on the outfield concourse with a statue.
- June 30 Rizzo hits his first homer as a Cub and feeds thousands in the stands from a single pretzel.
- July 1 After learning of his All-Star selection, Bryan LaHair does some celebratory peyote and spends the rest of the season on a Vision Quest.
- July 11 Hawk Harrelson is escorted from a local Whole Foods after uncontrollably yelling about "the sabermetric conspiracy and gluten."
- July 13 After one of their broadcast team's always interesting musical discussions, Bob Brenly silently passes a note over to Len Kasper telling Kasper that if he ever criticizes Brenly's love of Air Supply during a broadcast again that Brenly will shiv him.
- July 14 Ventura spends an entire pregame session with the media chanting "Bunt bunt bunt bunt bunty bunt bunt bunt."
- July 17 Manager Dale Sveum comes under further pressure to discipline the oft-out-to-lunch Starlin Castro after Castro takes the field in a pair of Crocs.
- July 22 Hundreds of Cubs fans flock to Cooperstown, NY to honor the induction of a dead guy into a pretentious museum that also equally honors Bill Mazeroski and for which Pedro Gomez voted for Bill Mueller.
- August 3 Even after being given the wrong directions, Luis Valbuena still makes it to the game vs. the Dodgers, unfortunately.
- August 5 Two new messianic figures arrive for the Cubs in Josh Vitters and Brett Jackson. Cubs change name of stadium to "Wrigley Field Presented by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
- August 12 Fed up with his broadcast partner's awful in-game anecdotes, Steve Stone decides to hold up his 1985 spread in Playgirl magazine every time Hawk Harrelson begins with "I tell ya, Stone Pony…"
- August 17 Chicago Tribune Cubs beat reporter Paul Sullivan comes dangerously close to submitting a game recap that is entirely euphemisms for genitalia.
- August 24 Ronnie Woo Woo completes 50 years of research for his University of Chicago doctoral thesis examining the propensity of idiots to have affection toward a homeless screaming mental defective.
- August 26 A brave Chris Rongey admits in his column in The Daily Herald that sometimes when the lights go out at U.S. Cellular Field and everyone has gone home for the night, he likes to sit in the empty park, eat a churro, and have himself a good cry.
- September 1 Unconfirmed rumors begin to swirl around the ballpark that White Sox mascot, Southpaw, has fathered eight children with four different women and one Harold Baines.
- September 5 Former Cub Adam Greenberg makes headlines for endorsing a documentarian's campaign and petition to get Greenberg one more major league at-bat despite not earning his way onto a major league roster. Greenberg subsequently provides a great lesson to America's children that if things don't go your way, just guilt trip the sadly sizable segment of society that wishes Disney movies were real.
- September 21 After mentioning the color man's infamous four-error inning, Bob Brenly has Seventh Inning Stretch guest conductor Rob Schneider killed. Police rule it as self-defense.
- September 23 Following a sweep at the hands of the Angels, Ventura purchases Rosetta Stone so that he can yell at the team in motivational gibbering Spanglish. On the North Side, in honor of Kerry Wood Day at Wrigley the Cubs finally answer the debate and speculation by retiring Steve Clevenger.
- September 24 Adam Dunn hits a guy complaining to his friend about Dunn's strikeouts in the head with his 41st homer of the season.
- October 1 Cubs lose their 100th game of the season to a team that already has 106 losses, is switching leagues in 2013, and did this. On the other side of town, following the White Sox elimination from playoff contention, Chris Rongey decides to conduct pre- and postgame shows for the rest of the season wearing "nothing but my Cardinals codpiece and a helluva ton a bourbon."
The 2012 Chicago baseball season. Let us never speak of it again.
Tim Baffoe attended the University of Iowa and Governors State University and began blogging at The Score after winning the 2011 Pepsi Max Score Search. He enjoys writing things about stuff, but not so much stuff about things. When not writing for 670TheScore.com, Tim corrupts America's youth as a high school English teacher and provides a great service to his South Side community delivering pizzas (please tip him and his colleagues well). You can follow Tim's inappropriate brain droppings on Twitter @Ten_Foot_Midget , but please don't follow him in real life. He grew up in Chicago's Beverly To read more of Tim's blogs click here.
