Ten Foot Mailbag: Do The Bears Respect Marc Trestman?
By Tim Baffoe-
(CBS) I wrote a poem, darn it.
"Unrequited in the Outfield"
Forty/Forty Club
where everyone wanted to dance with you
136 million, one for every starving soul
that would eat Woo Woo's underpants
for a title
Baseball been berry berry
Good to you
But you toted no boombox, no
Catchphrase or commercials
But love for you was tangled in
Left Field's ivy
Of a contractual albatross
You tried your best to fly for them anyway
But I appreciated you
And your hop that was free
And now you've jumped
The Shark mourns
Sayonara, Fonzie
I will dance for you
Weekend. The last of July.
On to your correspondence.
[tweet https://twitter.com/thedaveotto/status/360119277648478209]
They're making a comeback actually. I don't remember them being very popular when I was in high school 15 or so years ago, but in the past few years I've noticed a few in the hallways at school or mistakenly left under a student's desk.
None ever actually take flight in my presence, though, since one of my rules is "If an item goes airborne, you go airborne… academically." (I have to qualify all my threats with "academically" because all these puppy poop parents won't let a teacher threaten violence with their kids anymore. But, hey, rap music and pierced Adam's apples and stuff. THANKS, OBAMA.)
As far as Trestman goes, I have a really hard time believing all the players—veterans especially—are going to be so gung-ho with his make-a-new-friend-today tactics as he described at a press conference on Wednesday.
''He's got high expectations,'' Jay Cutler (who, if paper airplanes were to be thrown, would be the primary manufacturer, I'd bet) said. ''He's very smart. He knows offense, defense. He knows the direction he want to go into. I think with him being in the NFL for so long and being out of the NFL, when he got back in he got his chance he definitely wanted to do it his way and head in a direction he thought was right. Guys are buying in. Not everybody's bought in, but that's OK. We still have a lot of time. Hopefully by the time the first game rolls around, we've got everyone on the same page.''
Look, this is the NFL. Team building exercises? Leave that stuff to seminars for ambiguous companies ending in –ex or –col and cookie cutter tapioca super coachy books. Unless Trestman gets the offense to put up 30 points a game, we won't be talking paper airplanes.
At home, not a week goes by with me making two of my favorite things to eat in the world. The first is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Note: anyone who hates on PB&Js is an awful person who deserves to be electrocuted. There is nothing not good about a standard PB&J.
Mine's not standard, though. Wheat bread goes in the toaster, some peanut butter goes in the microwave to get it to a more liquid consistency. Hot peanut butter then goes on two still hot pieces of toast. Another piece of toast gets raspberry jelly/jam/preserves, and another gets blackberry. Sometimes this is two separate great sandwiches, or sometimes it becomes a double-decker drippy stack of awesomeness if a special mood of domination strikes me. Licking the drippage from the plate is a must or move to Canada.
The other bestest sandwich in the world freaks people out because people are weak. Half pound of bacon. Barbeque sauce, hot sauce (Sriracha), and mustard mixed in your preferred ratio. Pickles (I shouldn't have to specify dill, but I will because some people are bread and butter pickle terrorists who need waterboarding). The bread choice is insignificant because it really just acts as riot police working to contain the storm of greatness. Fry bacon. Put it on the bread or bun or your significant other. Lump on pickles. Slather sauce. Yell The Star Spangled Banner at a small child. It's the BBP, an acronym standing for "freedom, freedom, freedom."
"But how can you--" Shut up. Don't question the BBP. Sometimes I tweak it and add a hamburger underneath the bacon and punch an endangered species.
Now add that to your list on TheHonestBrew.com where you also post a podcast with questionable guests.
The ones who don't get it are just stupid and selfishly unwilling to give in to a process. Luckily they are also few and far between. Any time you make a proposal about anything to a large group of people you'll get at least one person who hates it. You can publicly express how it's wrong to starve an infant, and someone will say, "Who are you to say that?"
I think most understand what the organization is trying to do and how there is a grand plan. The hardest part about all this is twofold. For one thing, it's extremely difficult to be told to wait, 100+ years of losing or not. The Cubs brass knew last year, this year, and maybe next year that winning isn't at the top of the agenda.
No matter how many times one hears that, it doesn't get any more pleasant. The other tough part is watching a game and trying to tell yourself it means nothing, win or lose. I lose myself in every game and curse at the badness and celebrate the good stuff without consideration of any great meaning—I still want to enjoy a baseball game. So I try not to hate too much on people getting angry that Darwin Barney can't hit or thinking that Dioner Navarro's bat is something extra special so long as it's within the context of the nine innings.
But when the game is over, it's back to the big picture—trading for future pieces, how are Starlin Castro, Anthony Rizzo, and Jeff Samardzija progressing, can I have Junior Lake's baby, etc. until the next first pitch where I can turn on the emotion over reason and make bad jokes on Twitter again for a few hours. You may critique the moves by management so long as you do so in the context of a legit shot at a World Series in 2015. Otherwise, shut up.
And here's your Angry Penn State Fan of the Week:
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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. E-mail him at tenfootmailbag@gmail.com. To read more of Tim's blogs click here.
