By Marty Gangler
We here at The Cub Factor have found local scribes’suggestions for new Cubs owner Tom Ricketts to be just about as lame as the Cubs lineup. If you pay attention to any of these lists floating around, Tom, pay attention to ours.
1. Hire the best loophole-savvy contract lawyers you can find. Even better if they specialize in outfielders.
2. Bring back the Gatorade cooler but spike it with Prozac.
3. Send Carlos Zambrano, Milton Bradley and Alfonso Soriano on a three-hour tour of the South Pacific. We hear the accommodations on the S.S. Minnow are pretty good.

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Posted on August 24, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
You could almost swear the Sox don’t really want to take the division. You know in your heart they do, but you have to wonder sometimes if maybe Sox players see the likely Death At The Hands Of The Yankees outcome of a theoretical ALDS as not being worth the so-called effort required to get there. How else to explain the reluctance to win easy games, or the general folding under the pressure of playing the absolute nobodies who come to town these days?
There is still some encouragement to be found in the competition, some solace in the fact that while the Sox haven’t gained any ground for a month, they haven’t lost any either. But that line of thinking is dangerous: what we’re rooting for is not for the Sox to win, just for them not to lose. Our collective devotion risks spiraling into a weird, Hawk Harrelsonian abyss of counterlogic and anti-cheering, and any season predicated on the idea of “as long as they can be less bad” is surely doomed.

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Posted on August 24, 2009

By George Ofman
I’m plunked down on my couch the other night watching the Cubs game. No nachos and no beer. I’m 55 and nachos plus beer equal a long night, and not on the couch. You’re probably assuming I’m a masochist watching this team play, but I figure this is probably going to be more entertaining taking in Anderson Cooper 360. I’m wrong. It’s not more entertaining. It’s more aggravating.
Fine, call me a masochist.
I like watching baseball. I just don’t like watching bad baseball. And that’s not just a Cubs thing; it’s the same with the White Sox. Think I enjoy seeing balls go through Alexei Ramirez’s legs? But I digress.

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Posted on August 24, 2009

By Mike Conklin
This has been a lively off-season for journalists covering pro basketball and hockey in Chicago. Between Derrick Rose’s SAT test revelations and Patrick Kane’s taxicab adventures, there have been entertaining, better-than-average sideshows for local fans. They’ve been nicely inflamed by radio talk show hosts.
By far, Rose’s apparent role as an academically ineligible player at Memphis State University is the most significant development. Hockey players have been getting drunk and disorderly forever, but fallout from MSU having an ineligible player on its Final Four team is truly big stuff.

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Posted on August 22, 2009

By Thomas Chambers

If you’ve ever seen a TV news anchor in action, you’d be convinced that they’re little more than cue-taking actors who can read the teleprompter and display three emotions: serious, relieved and amused.
I saw it once a long time ago at Channel 5. I swear that anchor guy walked in and sat down no more that nine seconds before he was due to go live. He tugged his suit jacket, took a quick look at the papers on the desk, and the minute he got the cue he sat up razor sharp and started reading the story. It was awesome. And jarring.
It’s that way with some horseplayers, especially the ones who still swear by using the human tellers. They wait until there is a minute to post and head for the window. Most of the time, they get their bets in, but sometimes they get shut out. I’m convinced that when the old-timers get shut out, they almost want to.

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Posted on August 20, 2009

By Dan O’Shea
All is not well in the City of Big Shoulder Pads. After one pre-season game, in which he had neither his starting tight end nor his starting running back to throw to, and in which his primary target was a guy whose biggest recommendation as a wide receiver was that he has been “ridiculous!” as a return man, Jay Cutler’s initials were found to actually stand for his own name, and not for “Jesus Christ.”
As a fantasy football team owner (or in any sort of fantasy league), you have to take some cues from exhibition games, but try to avoid getting too worked up about whoever did or didn’t do well in the first game of the pre-season slate. After this one game, I can’t say my opinion of Cutler’s draft position has changed. Yahoo!’s Player Ranker, in which members of all leagues can vote, has him ranked 10th among QBs. I’d put him at 7th, right after Kurt Warner and ahead of Tony Romo, Matt Ryan and Donovan McNabb.

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Posted on August 19, 2009

By Mike Conklin
It’s hard to believe the Cubs’ gendarmes identified the wrong man at Wrigley Field last week in arresting that beer-tossing fan. There could not have been a lack of photos of the incident. In today’s world, everyone’s a photographer. Ballplayers cannot hit a loud foul these days without a thousand flashes. The news media has come to depend on this, turning their staff camera people into endangered species.
The Wrigley Field incident brought to mind the most famous beer-in-the-face photo of all time. This was taken in the 1959 World Series in Chicago, when a fan accidentally knocked his glass of beer into the face of White Sox left fielder Al Smith making a vain attempt to catch a home run sailing over the wall. The photo gained worldwide attention, but there are two back stories to the picture that still are not widely known.

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Posted on August 18, 2009

By Jim Coffman
The guy I worry about in the aftermath of the Bears’ exhibition opener Saturday is our man Devin Hester. No entity has been a bigger fan of the Ridiculous One than The Beachwood Reporter but Hester crammed a bunch of butt-ugly plays into an awfully brief appearance in Buffalo.
Jay Cutler simply couldn’t throw him the ball enough. In what was it -14 plays with Cutler? – Hester appeared to screw up one route, give up on another and fail miserably to even contest the up-for-grabs pass that became Cutler’s interception.

Beachwood Baseball: The White Sox Report The Cub Factor

Then again, Hester did run one very good route that could have gone a long way to making up for the others. After the Bears moved inside the 10 during the starting quarterback’s last drive of the night, Hester made a good feint to the outside and got a little separation as he began to cross the end zone.
But as Fox network analyst Erik Kramer pointed out, Cutler, who some criticized after the exhibition for getting rid of his passes too quickly in order to avoid any chance of being hit and injured, chose this moment to hold the ball too long. By the time he zipped his pass toward Hester, a linebacker had managed to drop back far enough to tip it away. But even if Cutler had delivered the pass on time and Hester had hauled it in, the Bears have to have more consistent execution from their best receiver if their passing game is to click.

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Posted on August 17, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
Preseason football is underway, and not a moment too soon. Not that I’m an especially avid Bears fan, but every second of airtime, every inch of newsprint and every pixel of internet real estate that once set its crosshairs on White Sox baseball can now be focused on more pressing concerns like what some other team in some other sport might achieve. To anyone still invested in the 2009 White Sox, this is a good thing: if they tank the season, no one will notice; if they pull off the “miracle” rally to the playoffs, we can all celebrate their grindiness and general ability to never give up or whichever cliche folks latch on to this time around.

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Posted on August 17, 2009

By Marty Gangler
If you’ve been any kind of Cub fan for any kind of time period you know that there comes a point in almost every season where you “tune out.”
This occurs when you decide that the Cubs don’t really deserve as much time as you have allotted them.
Quite a bit of the time this happens around June.
Sometimes in September and even some years in April, but it happens quite a few more seasons than it doesn’t.
This “tuning out” typically goes down in three-inning increments. If you usually watch every inning of every game, you’ll start to watch six innings. If you watched around six innings, you will start to watch just three – be it the first three or the last three.

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Posted on August 17, 2009