Thursday, March 3, 2011

Here's a Discouraging Sign

How often do you see teams hold dugout scuffles and end up having success? That's an interesting question, and since I'm guessing a metric hasn't been invented that measures frequency of inter-squad fights to winning percentage, I'd say the answer is not very often.

The Chicago Cubs have a different strategy all together. Apparently their plan is to begin fighting so early that come the regular season all the fight will be drained from them leaving only enough energy to finish fourth in the NL Central. Bold strategy lets see if it works out for them.

Leave it to the lovable losers to think outside the box when it comes to viable tactics for winning baseball games. Their idea so far this spring: commit as many errors as possible, 14 in four games, then have two players, whose levels of dedication are questionable at best, go at in the dugout. What's the end game? Perhaps to strike fear in the hearts of opponents. If they're willing to fight each other what will they do to us? Perhaps Aramis Ramirez and Carlos Silva were looking for an early beginning to their seasonal DL stints. We still get paid if we hurt right? Why not just hurt each other bro? Whatever the reason, that's the type of outside the box thinking I've come to expect from a team that wrote the book on finding new and creative ways to lose.

Ramirez seen here playing with his bat. Don't worry he still got paid.

What I hate to hear, and I heard it from at least three different sports writers and Mike Quade insinuated it as well, is that this fight is somehow a good thing. People have this good-ole-boy understanding of sports like a dust up's all they need to light a fire under them boys ... YEEEHAHHH. If professional athletes need a fire lit under them for any reason, that team and those players have a problem. The eight million dollars they make a year should light one hell of a fire already.

These fights solve no problems; they reveal them. The Cubs obviously don't have enough chemistry and team leadership to prevent violence. Many of their veterans are not high character people, and this fight only shines light on their two glaring weaknesses: lack of team leadership and player apathy. Yes apathy because if these two cared about winning games they wouldn't go after key members of their team.

Ramirez is the poster-boy for everything wrong with the Cubs. Though he may be the longest tenured Cub, he seems to have no leadership skills whatsoever. But more importantly, I have never seen a player who looked as if he cared less than Ramirez. When I see him jogging to first or riding pine with another injury, I can't tell if he's playing baseball or shopping for window treatments. He seems that disinterested, and for some reason people are unwilling to call him on it.

It's not looking great for the Cubs again this year. They have talent. They have money. They play in a winnable division. I wish they had the baseball fight in them. But it seems all they can muster is the energy for a school-girl sissy slap session in the dugout. What kind of fire could that possibly light?

For more on this so-called fight see:
http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/news/article.jspymd=20110303&content_id=16802916&vkey=news_chc&c_id=chc

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