Do You Remember What You Were You Doing The Last Time The Cubs Lost At Home?

Posted by Mike D.
Posted on June 23, 2008

I do. I was helping my buddy Mike move out of his townhouse in South Elgin. He and his wife were moving to Arizona. Everything was packed, so of course we had no TV or radio to follow. I had checked in to the game and heard the Cubs winning 3-1. Big Z was on the hill, and things looked good. Even Pat and Ron were looking ahead, which should have been my sign that I didn’t deserve to be surprised when, at the end of moving day, I learned that they had lost.

And that was the last time the Cubs have lost at home. Mike has raised a family, put his kids through school, and retired since that day. Or so it seems. A fourteen game-winning streak, over the span of over five weeks can really make it feel that way.

As impressive as the Cubs dominance at home is (32-8), the fact is that overall, home or road, they’re a very hard team to simply beat. Their recent sweep at the hands of the Tampa Bay Rays–which marked their first three-game losing streak of the season, the last team to endure such a streak–was punctuated by one of the few suspenseless finishes for a Cubs victor. If you look at their last thirteen losses, they have lost by one run in eight of those games, by two runs twice, and by three runs once. The only two losses in that span by more than three runs are the Tampa disaster and the game two weeks ago when Zambrano blew his top in Chavez Ravine–and even in both of those games, the Cubs had been winning going into their opponent’s half of the 7th inning. In other words, if you’re going to beat this team, you’re going to have to be in the game for all 27 outs.

I had the good fortune to go to last night’s game. Good fortune not only because I was sitting in comfortable temperatures while watching the Cubs sweep the posers from the South Side, but because this meant that I didn’t have to subject myself to the homicidal bleating of that clueless self-fellating cockwad, Joe Morgan. However, it has been brought to my attention that, after Eric Patterson’s 5th inning basket shot off of Vasquez, Joe couldn’t help himself and made a reference to “Banks Boulevard”, which, in Joe’s world, is the basket that supposedly snared many of Mr. Cub’s 512 home runs. I’ll just point you to a piece Dolan wrote last offseason that basically demonstrates what a bullshit-filled gasbag Joe Morgan is.

Ernie Banks played for the Cubs from 1953-1971. He hit 512 homers. Of those 512, Joe thinks that a lot of them landed in the basket at Wrigley Field. He’s implying that without the basket, Ernie wouldn’t have hit so many homers.

In 1970 and 1971, Ernie only played in 111 games for the Cubs. Why is that important?

Because the basket wasn’t installed at Wrigley until May 1970. Banks hit eight home runs at Wrigley Field in those two seasons, but one of them was in April of 1970 before the basket went in.

So, of Ernie Banks 512 career homers, the most that possibly could have landed in the basket was seven. Actually, we’ve all seen the replay of his 500th homer, and he hit that on May 12, 1970 and that didn’t end up in the basket, so I guess it’s six.

Six of 512 means that a little over one percent of Ernie’s homers could have possibly ended up in the basket. Now you can see why they called it Banks Boulevard. Can’t you?

Yes. Yes, I can. Because Joe Morgan is an iredeemable dipshit.

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