Baffoe: Your Guide To Baseball Panic, One Game In
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) If I've learned anything in my three-and-a-half-years since winning the Score Search, it's that sports are all about microcosms. The games we love aren't marathons or intricate tapestries of large sample-sized advanced analytics. Everything boils down to the singularity, the one shining moments, the first impressions that you only get one of.
Opening Day is basically the Super Bowl of baseball beginnings. Game 1 of 162 presents the absolute best shape your favorite team will be in, and it can only go downhill from there.
Thus, Chicago baseball fans find themselves spiraling out of control after the Cubs and White Sox were both embarrassed in their first respective showings of 2015. You should be afraid, very afraid. The team you root for has a winning percentage of zero, and you don't need fancy sabermetrics to let you know that's bad.
The Cubs and White Sox have combined for one run scored through one game each. These are supposed to be un-small ball squads. If you're a South Sider, at least the White Sox scored that run Monday, so they have the most recent run scored for Chicago baseball, just like the World Series. How's it taste, Cubs, yeah!
Still, the tank that runs on Cubs schadenfreude reaches empty pretty quickly (unless you live in Mt. Greenwood), so White Sox fans need to worry about mowing their own lawns first. And landscaping is what Dan Jennings needs to go back to, because pitching sure isn't his thing. I thought general manager Rick Hahn fixed the leper colony of a bullpen. And then Kyle Drabek goes out there trying to hold the Kansas City Royals' lead to seven runs and pitches exactly like his dad. His 52-year-old dad.
White Sox right-hander Jeff Samardzija has that nastiness about him, plunking guys when angry and showing them he's not going to take homers from a non-homer team lightly. Like Hawk Harrelson (maybe the only guy out there in midseason form) said in the broadcast, it shows a new attitude from this team, and Hawk and I love it, even if "attitude" is psychobabble that isn't tangible to scoring runs.
But does Samardzija still have too much residual Cub on him? He only had one dang strikeout Monday — would there be more if he had a contract extension? The Boston Red Sox gave Rick freaking Porcello four years and $82.5 million on Monday, but we're stuck with typical cheap Jerry Reinsdorf.
Speaking of folksy analysis that's easily disproved by logic and math, it's obvious that the absence of Paul Konerko equals a lack of leadership here. If he's in that dugout, Micah De Aza Johnson isn't a moron on the basepaths. I'm open to anyone else grabbing the reins for manager Robin "Steven Wright" Ventura, but if someone doesn't step up, the question then becomes how is this the fault of Adam Dunn?
It wasn't all bad for the White Sox on Monday. Jose Abreu homered, but that's so last year and gets old really quick. How about him mixing in a few more singles and giving others the opportunity to drive him in? There isn't much motivation stepping up to the plate with empty bases. This is America, the land of democracy. Chris Sale also reportedly looked decent in a minor league start and is scheduled to start for the White Sox on Sunday, but the Sox could well have reached the point of no return by then.
Now on to the North Side, where it's another day, another World Series-less tenure for the magical Theo Epstein. Yeah, yeah, "The Plan," blah blah blah. My baseball biological clock is ticking and has no plan, thank you.
For all the cute soundbites and laid-back attitude from aging rock star Joe Maddon, is his baseball Buddhism a detriment to these youngsters? The last thing Starlin Castro's head needs is Scientology. Maddon sure as heck doesn't have the fuego of Rick Renteria (speaking of small sample sizes, number nerds).
Jon Lester certainly didn't earn his gigantic contract Sunday night. And he better get his butt in the cage for a few extra hours a week if Maddon's going to pull this New Age garbage of disgracing the game with a pitcher hitting eighth.
Speaking of hippies, urine. Urine everywhere. We're used to the Cubs wetting themselves early on figuratively, but it was as if Ronnie Woo Woo spent time in every corner of Wrigley Field that night.
"With 35,000 fans showing up in the ballpark tonight," Cubs spokesman Julian Green said of a bigger catastrophe involving pee than the movie Waterworld, "we were simply not prepared to handle guests during peak (peeing) periods. We have high standards for service and we missed the mark tonight."
Seems like a lot of fans didn't miss the mark and actually have pretty good target aim.
Yet here the Cubs are paying Edwin Jackson a king's ransom to spray into the wind. Why weren't reliever Brian Schlitter and his super-absorbent paper towels commissioned to soak it all up? Probably would've violated one of Maddon's vegan laws or something. I expect a Depend diaper billboard with Tony Siragusa across the street forthcoming.
I can tell you from personal youth baseball experience — you're never going to win when everyone is laughing at you after one game.
And how the heck does a baseball team have a hot dog bun crisis? The only saving grace is that thousands of St. Louis Cardinals fans were inconvenienced and have an epic tale to regale for years the forty-something kin living together in their shanties.
But at least the Cubs hitters did the organization the favor of not hitting any homers. That way the viewing audience was minimally reminded that the bleachers aren't finished and that Ernie Banks is still dead.
Mike Olt's batting average stands at .000. Kris Bryant's major league average is .---. The math is there, but Bryant isn't. And with an 0-for-13 showing with runners in scoring position Sunday, it stands to reason that maybe the Cubs were just one hitter away from making a game of it.
Some of you may choose to waste your time by riding out this garbage storm of Chicago baseball for a hundred or so more games, and I can't stop you. But if you choose to wise up and accept your fate, I'll be over here salvaging my summer and questioning Derrick Rose's toughness and waiting for Corey Crawford's nervous breakdown.
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.
