Welp, it looks like I’m going to have to make fun of more people who actually get paid to write fact-free, mythical nonsense. This latest idiocy is from esteemed steemed shitty ESPN writers Jim Caple and Eric Neel. You know the drill. Their nonsense surrounded by quotes, curses, and wizard’s potions. My retorts surrounded by reality.

By Jim Caple and Eric Neel

The Cubs must go down. It must be gruesome, painful and tragic. They must, like Icarus and his wax wings, come tantalizingly close, and then, like Wile E. Coyote and his ubiquitous anvil, plummet to the canyon floor.

How in God’s name did the word “ubiquitous” sneak past two “professional” writers and, presumably, a score of editors? What the fuck are you talking about? Do you even know what the word “ubiquitous” means? You do? So, you’re saying that Wile E. Coyote’s anvil is omnipresent? Really? Wile E. Coyote’s anvil is all around us. That’s what you’re saying. Unless you have The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show running on a looped DVD in your office, that’s the most unnecessary adjective I have seen since I started reading your ubiquitous article. See how that makes no sense?

Also, Icarus plunged into an ocean, not a canyon floor. Might want to watch your sentence structure.

You guys are off to a great start. Tell me. When you put your heads together on this group project, which one of you got to eat the paste and which one of you was forced to use the green-handled scissors?

Don’t get us wrong. We like the Cubs.

I don’t believe you.

We love the Cubs.

Okay, now I believe you. Good use of repetition there.

We love Soriano slamming one onto Waveland,

Agreed, but “slamming” is such a Chip Caray thing to say.

Zambrano firing from the mound,

Agreed, but “firing” is getting even more Chippy.

Lou exploding at an umpire,

How much would you say your eyebrows weigh?

B-list celebs singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,”

Only B-list fans like the “Celebrity Stretch.”

Ronnie Woo-Woo wandering the bleachers

Seriously? The only thing worse than Ronnie Woo-Woo is the collection of assholes who call him over to their seats so they can take pictures with him and think that he is a part of the “Wrigley experience.” As lame as the Cubs pep rally was, far lamer was the fact that Woo-fucking-Woo drown out half of John McDonough’s speech with his mind-numbing routine. The fact that that homeless retard has been to every single Cubs home game that I can remember FOR FREE really warms my heart when I’m sitting in a virtual waiting room trying to earn the privilege of overpaying for a lousy playoff ticket.

and, most of all, we love Wrigley Field.

Of course you do. And I’m sure you’d be horribly offended if ever the Cubs DARED to suggest destroying such a monument to the game, even if it meant earning more revenue, meaning signing better players, meaning achieving more success for the Cubs. If you love Wrigley so much, go sit in the stands in February, assholes.

If foreign tourists had only one afternoon to capture the quintessential American experience, we would slap a bleacher ticket in one hand, a beer in the other and point them to the Friendly Confines.

If I had only one afternoon to spend in America, I would slap you.

And it’s because we love all this about the Cubs that we want to see them fail. It’s because we love them just the way they are that we want them to flame out in the 2007 postseason, just as they did in 2003 and 1998 and 1989.

Good logic. I think that’s the same argument that chronic wife beaters use.

Let us explain.

Oh, do. I’m all atwitter.

Baseball, unlike the other sports, is deeply rooted in its history, its folklore. What happens today matters because of what happened yesterday and last year and the year before that and the year before that and on and on all the way back to when your great, great grandparents were yelling at Frank Chance to get the piano off his back. (“Peerless Leader, my ass!”)

This is such a fundamentally stupid argument, that I have to believe your editor FORCED you to write this article. Ask the 2007 incarnations of the White Sox and the Cardinals what happened yesterday. Ask the late-80s, early-90s Yankees about how their past successes naturally led to continued success. Hell, the Cubs were once a dynasty, which you’d know if you could be bothered to pick up a book about the history of baseball. Past failure is nothing more than a convenient excuse to lower fan expectations, achieve the bare minimum or worse, and blame all of your team’s failings on a scapeGOAT.

Thanks to this, two great story lines developed over generations.

1. Sportswriters are lazy idiots.
2. The Red Sox are teh hawtness!!!!

One was that the Red Sox, no matter what, would always fail tragically in the end, and usually to a New York team.

Congratulations, ESoxPNNY, it took you all of three full paragraphs to mention the Red Sox and the Yankees in your article about the Cubs. You know they’re not even in the same league, right?

The other story line is that the Cubs, no matter what, will always fail. Sometimes it’s painful failure (the Steve Bartman game) and sometimes it’s comic failure (the College of Coaches), but usually it’s just plain old failure.

Is there a rulebook circulating among sportswriters regarding the Cubs?

Rule 1: Talk about curses.
Rule 2: Mention Steve Bartman.
Rule 3: Try to steer article toward the Red Sox and Yankees.
Rule 4: Profit!

We came to trust in these story lines. They comforted us.

You guys need girlfriends.

In a world in which Britney goes from fresh-faced ingenue to rehab flameout in the blink of an eye, the Cubs and Red Sox were steady certainties, things we could believe in.

“Blink of an eye”? The Spears death march has been slogging on for ages, fellas. Get with the program. Also, do all of you assholes have to try to make pop culture reference like Simmons does? Because his shtick was old years ago. Or are you Page 2 writers all secretly the same guy? Simmons would call that “The ESPdopplegaNger” and would certainly tie in some hilarious connection with Uncle Joey from Full House.

We didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, but we knew it would suck for the Cubs and Sox, and there were days when knowing that was all that kept us from the nihilistic abyss.

I’ll help.

SPOILER: Tomorrow, you will wake up with the same sense of failure with which you woke up this morning. You will slide out from under your stained bedsheets and wander through your living room, which has the horrible reek of a mixture of Glade air fresheners, stale pizza, and dirty laundry. You will open your refrigerator and find only three High Lifes, a box of baking soda, and 36 Taco Bell sauce packets. Forgoing the shower (What’s the point, right?), you will first sniff, and then pull on a pair of jeans and an ironic t-shirt which you find on your bedroom floor. You will roll into work on your bicycle with one of those one-strap backpacks generally reserved for women, Eurotrash, and “artists.” You will then spend the next 8 hours “spitballing” (because you insist on using that word) ideas in a room filled with smoke, stench, and like-minded idiots. You’ll spend the last hour of your day penning a statistic-less, thoughtless, humorless piece of shit article that millions of drones will read in the morning. Back home, it’s time to watch Survivor, forgetting that the Cubs-Diamondbacks game is on until it’s already in the fourth inning. Off to bed by the sixth inning, because anything you could see on TV will be in the paper in the morning, anyhow, right? Besides, depression makes you awfully tired. Masturbate, sleep, and repeat.

Well, we lost one of those story lines in 2004 when the Red Sox rallied from a 3-0 deficit to embarrass the Yankees in the ALCS and then went on to win the World Series for the first time in 86 years.

Yep. You lost that story line and stopped covering the Red Sox for good, turning your attention to some team from New England I’ve never heard of which you call “The Nation.”

For Red Sox fans, this moment rearranged their perception of how the world worked and gave their lives new, optimistic meaning.

Yet the obsessed assholes still managed to chant “Yankees suck!” at their World Series pep rally. Optimists.

For the rest of us, it just meant we lost a great part of baseball’s folklore and gained another group of obnoxious, arrogant fans plus Jimmy Fallon in “Fever Pitch” and a “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” makeover of the Sox. This was as bad a deal as Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen.

I agree. Except Jeff Bagwell’s goatee was as queer as they come.

Losing the Red Sox to, well, winning, was painful. While their fans rightfully celebrated and danced and poured across the borders of Red Sox Nation like East Germans following the Wall’s collapse, the rest of us felt frightened, saddened, abandoned.

Don’t speak for me. I haven’t watched a World Series since Dusty Fucking Baker got depantsed by Mike Scioscia. Also, if you’re going to use bizarre and inappropriate historical references, effectively trivializing the historical event and making yourselves look like assholes, don’t be coy. Just go all out. I’ll help.

“While their fans rightfully celebrated and danced and poured across the borders of Red Sox Nation like emancipated Holocaust survivors pouring out of death camps to feel the sweet caress of sunlight on their pale skin, sunken ribs, and hollow eyes, the rest of us felt frightened, saddened, abandoned.”

Better?

While their fans bragged and bought souvenir caps in every imaginable color (did we really need pink?), the rest of us mourned in black, sat shivah and buried our Boston jerseys and caps in shoe boxes beneath backyard flower beds.

Oops. Sorry about the Holocaust image.

And in our time of suffering, we held tight, tighter than ever before, as tight as the yarn covering the inner core of a baseball, to the Cubs.

Tight as a baseball core in, say, 1961, or tight as a baseball core in, say, 1998? I’m not accepting a half-assed commitment here.

The Red Sox proved no different than the Yankees, slaves to the ring, soulless grubbers for fame and fortune. But the Cubs are special. They hold to a higher (by which we mean, lower, of course) standard.

Were you paying attention this past offseason? Never mind. Silly question. The Cubs threw around money like you guys throw around hyperbole.

You don’t develop tales as rich as the Cubs’ misery overnight. Sure, Cleveland has gone 59 years since winning the World Series. The Giants haven’t won the World Series since moving to San Francisco. The Astros have never won the World Series, period. And we know their fans have suffered mightily and cruelly (Jose Mesa, Scott Spiezio, Geoff Blum — these are names that have the same convulsive effect as Steve Bartman’s). But as long as those agonizing droughts have been, they still don’t compare to the Cubs.

Possibly because those teams have far smaller fan bases than the Cubs do, so you imbeciles can’t be bothered to waste your time playing up those “curses.” Did I just blow your minds?

Their story is 99 years in the making. Ninety-nine years! It predates the computer, television and 24-hour talk radio. It’s as much a part of American folklore as Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed and Jesse James. This story has been forged as surely and steadily as any railroad spikes driven by the mighty John Henry (though Chicago’s were usually driven directly into the heart).

More pop culture references, though these are a bit dated. Also, you guys are starting to sound like Dane Cook.

Think of what’s lost if the Cubs win the World Series.

I’d say “your virginity,” but I think it’s going to take something bigger than the Cubs winning the World Series.

History takes a beating.

Worse than the beating it took when you compared the Red Sox winning the Series to the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Something truly unique, something so deep and rich in pathos, it wordlessly bonds fans throughout the country and around the world, shrivels up and dies.

I guess Leitch isn’t the only “professional” sports writer who dabble in emo poetry.

Winning is no bond. Winning is as fleeting as post-coital bliss; a breathless flush in the cheeks, an endorphin rush to the neurons, and then it’s gone.

You forgot, “five minutes of apologizing, ten minutes of excuse-making, fifteen minutes of crying, and a lifetime of shame.”

Losing abides. Losing lingers, painfully, yes, but constantly. Winning might bathe you in glory, but it does not define you. Someone snatches it away too quickly for that. Losing, more than something you do, is something you are. The Cubs are losers. This isn’t sad. It’s noble. It’s brave. It’s timeless.

Is this like when my mom said, “They’re only laughing at you because they’re jealous”? Because it turns out they were laughing at me because I had a bit of a mullet and I wore those glasses that had the rims that looked like a tiger’s coat.

But this isn’t just about us and our selfish wishes and emotions (though admittedly, it mostly is).

So, I guess that sentence was a waste of my time.

It’s about Cubs fans, too. Not even Cubs fans should welcome what would follow a world championship. The team is already for sale. A championship banner would only drive up the sale price, resulting in faceless, corporate owners so lacking in humanity that it would make the Tribune Company seem like volunteers at a homeless shelter.

But we’d still have the banner, right?

To cover the purchase price, the new owners would squeeze every bit of revenue out of the team.

I have no idea what that would be like.*

*This Fifth-Third Bank snarky comment has been brought to you by True Value, part of the power at Wrigley Field.

And you know what that means. A leap up in ticket prices so staggering — midweek games in April would be reclassified as gold premium while weekend games against St. Louis in August would be Velvet Rope Secret De-Coder Ring Platinum — that you could attend games only if your children married into the Bill Gates family. And even then, you would be sitting behind a post.

Yeah, I’d miss those blissful days of paying only $50 for a bleacher seat.

Worse, changes would be made to Wrigley. First, the ivy would be ripped off and replaced by advertising for Halliburton, Wal-Mart and Starbucks. Next, the hand-operated scoreboard would be torn down, the scorekeepers callously thrown into the unemployment line and everything replaced by a gigantic, noisy video screen showing animated Oprah races between innings. Then the bleachers would be replaced with luxury suites for United Airlines executives.

Can I see those blueprints you have?

And then would come the ultimate blow, the saddest of possible words. The owners would demand a new billion-dollar stadium. Citing a need for revenue streams as wide as the Amazon, they would take a wrecking ball to Wrigley Field. Your ballpark, your Fortress of Solitude, your home for nearly a century, would be turned to dust for the sake of an owner’s bank account. And not only that, you, the hardworking taxpayers of Chicago, would have to pay for it. Perhaps worst of all, while waiting for Blackwater USA Field to be built, the Cubs would need somewhere to play. And you know where it would be. Yes, that’s right, Cubs fans. You would have to pay money to sit in U.S. Cellular Field (formerly the “new” Comiskey Park) for a couple years. Oh, the horror. Oh, the humanity.

Holy Christ, I seriously wrote this as I went and didn’t read ahead to see if you would say this. I can’t believe you actually said this. I would sit in your depressing-ass, halogen-lamp-lit, musty-smelling studio apartment if it meant watching a winning team take the field.

Do you really want that? Is any championship banner really worth all that?

Yes. Yes.

Oh, if push comes to shove, we suppose we would accept the Cubs reaching the World Series. Cubs fans have suffered enough to deserve at least that much. (Putting up with Todd Hundley alone should have earned it by now.) After all, Cleveland and the Giants have each been to the World Series three times since last winning it, and it’s only added to their own compelling backstories. So we could accept the Cubs finally winning the pennant for the first time since World War II.

I’ll let Lou know that two pencil-dicked Page 2 reporters give him permission to reach the World Series. He’ll be thrilled!

But that’s it. No further. There is too much to lose. After all, how amazing will it be to have the 100th anniversary of your last World Series championship next year? You don’t get to celebrate the 100th anniversary of anything like that very often. Not even the White Sox got that far. Safeguarding the possible souvenir T-shirts is reason enough for the Cubs to hold out at least until next fall.

I thought you guys were anti-money-grubbing? What happened?

Of course, we’re not suggesting that any fan actively root against the Cubs for the greater good. Not at all. For one thing, that’s asking too much. It’s like asking a parent to pray their child gets in a car accident while wearing torn, dirty underwear.

Your parents are fucked up.

More importantly, we don’t have to.

The Cubs will lose anyway.

Those last two “paragraphs” were dramatic.

I can just tell.