Hire Jim Essian

When I was growing up, baseball was my love. I couldn't wait for summer, when my "baseball friends" would replace my "school friends" and we'd sweat out long, hot Chicago afternoons in our Riverside Yankees uniforms, taking on the surrounding towns like LaGrange Park, Brookfield, Berwyn, and our arch-rivals from South Cicero. We'd take our place in our third-base dugout, not because the Cubs did it, but because the first-base dugout backed up against the forest preserve, which backed up against the Brookfield Zoo, which made it a paradise for swarms of mosquitoes. Our dugouts had no roofs. They weren't dug out of anything. They were, more or less (usually less), an aluminum bench that got blisteringly hot in the sun.

Is sixteen games into the season too early to take stock? Marlon Byrd and his .070 batting average are no longer Cubs. Ryan Dempster, the (shudder) longest-continuous-tenured Cub, and Kerry Wood, the longest-tenured Cub who everyone doesn't hate are both shelved with injuries. Alfonso Soriano has eleven hits so far, and not a one of them went for extra bases. David DeJesus and Matt Garza are wondering just what the fuck they're doing in Cubs uniforms. The best hitter on the team is Bryan LaHair. The recently-exonerated Starlin Castro is already setting pace to prove that, yes, he can actually hit. He's third in the NL with 23 hits so far, he's fifth in batting average at .365, and under the aggressive Dale Sveum, he's already nabbed seven bases. He stole 22 all last year.

You're so stupid, Cubs fans. At the end of last week, Mark DeRosa, a man who played fewer than 300 games in a Cub uniform, got a very warm reception in yet another of his returns to Wrigley Field. He was a nice player. He hit .289/.373/.451 with 31 home runs and 159 RBIs. He's an anti-Cub like Reed Johnson. He hit better in Chicago than he did in any other city. He wasn't involved in a single Cub playoff win. In fact, some might say that he was squarely in the midst of a pretty annoying playoff loss.

With "Play Ball!" Day rapidly approaching, fluff pieces about bunting tournaments and Alfonso Soriano leading off are giving way to real news. Like Ryan Dempster getting another Opening Day start despite Matt Garza being a far better pitcher, comedian, and human being.

The headline writers at the Chicago Tribune generally do a pretty good job coming up with descriptions of Phil Rogers' nonsense that actually make the nonsense seem readable. But there are times when no amount of creative juice can hide the fact that Phil Rogers is a terrible writer during the full swing of the baseball season, so during the offseason he has to write dreck like, "A year later, what was point of Garza trade?"

The interwebs are all aflutter about the possibility of the Cubs playing their home games in U.S. Cellular Field throughout the 2013 season. Why? Because the internet is full of lunatics. Despite what Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer say about the 2012 season being a "building" not a "rebuilding," it's a rebuilding. They're not going to be good. Don't get me wrong, I'm likely going to watch more Cubs games this season than I have in the past two seasons combined. I'm excited to watch a team that's been so drastically revamped. I'm loving this offseason, so I'll say it right now. The only thing that would make Theo's first season in Chicago a bigger success would be if they finally admit that putting Band-Aids on Wrigley Field isn't going to work. Rebuild the team; rebuild the park.

Well, this is a gift from the heavens. Also, from 'Duk. One of the greatest pitchers of all time went all hipster on us over Christmas, and the results are both glorious and meme-worthy. Have at it!

Today, a lot of stupid people are celebrating the fact that Carlos Zambrano is no longer a Cub. I'm not. Whether or not one thought Big Z needed to go (he almost certainly did), the end of the right-hander's amazing Cub career should have been met with "thanks for the memories and good luck, Z!" Rather than remembering the big lug for the incredible things he did in a Cubs uniform, too many people are gleefully dancing on his Cub grave and pretending that paying Chris Volstad $18M to pitch for the Cubs is WAY BETTER than paying Carlos Zambrano $18M to pitch for the Cubs. It's not, and I LIKE Volstad.

A funny thing happens when one includes active players on a list of Cub-killing baseball players that takes over four and a half years to complete. Statistics CHANGE. So, when I compiled the T79 and started it way back on- June 24, 2007? Holy shit. Anyhow, Xavier Nady was a reasonable choice back then. There were guys higher up on the T79 whose statistics changed, and whom I was able to swap in and out of the lineup. Ryan Theriot comes to mind. But now that I'm at the top 20, I think I have to grin, bear, and just go for it. On my sealed master list of T79ers, buried in a vault beneath the McDonald's parking lot across from Wrigley Field, I made myself just one note: "absurd OPS vs. Cubs." It's no longer absurd, but my sheer stubborn will causes Xavier Nady to stay at #14 on the list of the Top 79 Cub Killers of My Time.

It's hard to imagine that Neifi Neftali Perez was a bigger liability to the Cubs when off their roster than when on it. When last we left Neifi over four years ago, he was being honored as the second-worst Cub of my time. Now here we sit, eagerly awaiting his official retirement from baseball so that his Hall of Fame eligibility clock can begin its insistent ticking. Surely, a man with a career .297 OBP will not get a call from the Hall of Fame. He would, however, if the BBWAA considered only Neifi's statistics against the Cubs. His career pursuit of those numbers caused Neifi to scrap his way all the way up to #18 of the Top 79 Cub Killers of My Time.