Cubs Lose

Please proceed to Mark DeRosa's blog on the "Cool Blogs and Things" sidebar. He accurately sums up the terrible feeling pervading so many people intimately connected to this team this year.

Having been an Angeleno for the majority of the 2008 Season, and having lived two miles down Sunset Blvd. from Dodger Stadium, and having seen the spiritual 180 that Manny Ramirez brought to that team on July 31, I am not all that surprised, but I do feel foolish for always wishing for a Cubs vs Dodgers playoff series. Last night after the final pitch was thrown to my personal savior, Alfonso Soriano, and the celebrations began, I made a mischievous remark that of all the teams I would like to see win in the National League besides the Cubs, it was the Dodgers, so a very small part of me was happy for them.

That does not change the absolute pain that so many are feeling now. The point in this case is, an excellent season, one of the best seasons they've ever played, period. The best season I've ever seen them play. The year they look better than every single other team. And they get swept, and in three games, after a long, long, extraordinarily well-played season, it's all over.

I would like to say that Alfonso Soriano seriously let me down. He is the only player I have a jersey for at the moment, and I am a bit ashamed of the way he played in the post-season. He did have an extremely encouraging leadoff single in game 2, but that is old news and doesn't matter now. I'm very upset by the way he played, particularly last night, when there were many, many opportunities to make up the small two-run deficit to force a game 4. But it's all over now, and it's not even worth talking about, much less worth blogging about. Consider this an elegy for the Cubs of 2008 the same way a fairly recent post was an elegy for David Foster Wallace mixed in with a sense of true optimism for this baseball team that will surely never fail to live up to its legend. If the Cubs win, it is almost a disappointment in a way that they won't have that special quality that has defined them for ages now. If the Cubs had won the World Series, we might truly feel that the apocalypse was upon us, particularly as things get tense politically and economically in this country. It's just a shame, though. I sent a message to Joe Biden right after he was named Obama's running mate. I told him to go see Rage Against the Machine and Jello Biafra at the festival going on at the DNC in Denver, CO this year, and I told him that the Cubs would win the World Series, then Barack would get elected President, and then Chicago would be named the host city for the 2016 Olympics. I'm always very disappointed when I make predictions and they don't come true. It makes me feel like even more of a failure. At least I am in good company back in Chicago. This is the best place in the world to be proud of being a loser.