By David Rutter
1. Ronnie, WTF?
WTF’s mercenary staff – several Hessians and two Carthaginians – admits to never possessing the emotional bond to Ron Santo that friends and neighbors did. Guess you had to grow up here to catch Santo Fever. But, Holy Crap, Batman! This summer will not be the same and that will be because he is gone.
Santo’s honest pain as a fan gave the current Cubs meaning, however slight and ill-conceived. Without Santo bleating out his angst watching a terrible team be terrible, what real reason can there be to pay any attention?
Via con dios, Ron.
2. Cubs, WTF?
The Cubs and their zillionaire owners were looking for the cheapest living person they could hire to play first base. Ronnie Woo Woo was a candidate. But they decided instead to give free agent Carlos Pena a $10 million one-year deal after a year when he hit .196 (WTF) but did hit 28 homers. (Might have taken Adam LaRoche who batted .261 last year with the Diamondbacks and is a slick fielder with good power.) The $10 million essentially is a one-year lease.
Here’s why the Cubs have such a lousy rep in these deals: Pena is aiming for a rebirth year to get him big bucks/multiyears in 2012. If he has a bad year for the Cubs, it’s $10 million wasted. If he has a great year, they’ll never be able to afford him the next year. In either case, how does it help resurrect the Cubs?
3. The White Sox, WTF?
Here are simultaneous facts that make fans go WTF nuts:
For about 24 hours, it appeared the White Sox didn’t want first baseman Paul Konerko and his $12 million salary anymore.
But before GM Kenny Williams all but said adios to Paulie and his 39 homers,111 RBI and .312 average last year, Jerry Reinsdorf was reported to have stepped in to stop the insanity.
What logic – logic? – was at work. The Sox decided to spend $15 million on whiff-or-homer slugger Adam Dunn but were willing let their captain take a hike? They paid Konerko about what he had sought, so the bluff was unnecessary. The Sox insist Reinsdorf stayed away, but there is no explanation for how the deal happened.
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Here’s a random thought. Curious why was there no discussion about the Cubs wanting Konerko? Isn’t stealing from a rival still a good thing? Even if the Cubs knew it wouldn’t have worked, it would be a smartly delivered nose tweak during the coldest months when no one is thinking about the Cubs. It also would have been a fabulous bargaining chip that would have made the Sox pay almost anything to keep their man.
Maybe it’s just an oldtimey gentleman’s agreement against poaching in your neighbor’s garden.
Plus, the Cubs are so good they don’t any real improvement. WTF. Anybody awake in there?
4. The Spire, WTF?
The always-planned, never-delivered 2,000-foot-tall Spire in downtown Chicago has now become an official hole in the ground into which money has been dumped. It’s a hole. This is the metaphor that was invented to illustrate the point. And to this moment, Anglo Irish Bank Corp. is in that hole for $77.3 million. That’s some expensive hole. The Corp is trying to get its money back before going out of existence as a free-standing entity.
There is nothing in the latest financial minuets to hint the building is any closer to being real than it ever was. Now the process has devolved into scavengers haggling over tax liens, silverware and bed linens, like Scrooge’s pending funeral. There’s a reason Ireland had to nationalize Corp, its biggest bank, and though the Spire project isn’t the cause of Ireland’s current financial meltdown, it is emblematic of its weak real estate projects.
On the up side, the spherical void is quite a large, resplendent hole near the Lakefront. You can never have too many big holes.
5. DePaul, WTF?
There are three ways to look at the furor at DePaul over denied tenure a pattern of female professors of color being denied tenure. Take your poison, Blue Demons. None of the options makes the school look good.
A) The school is essentially discriminatory. For any school, that’s a crummy rap, but even more so for a Catholic university whose motto is Viam sapientiae monstrabo tibi. That’s a Latin phrase from Proverbs: “I will show you the way of wisdom.” (Subtitle: It’s not a good way, but it’s our way.)
B) If the recent tenure denials are not discriminatory – thwarting the usually reliable if-it-quacks rule – then the university is hiring good professors, but hanging them out to dry in the highly political tenure-track process. Universities can groom tenure candidates or leave them to twist slowly in the wind. When a high proportion of those failures are minorities, the wind-twisting is either deliberate or merely a sign of managerial incompetence.
C) DePaul simply hires inferior candidates who don’t deserve tenure but make the school look good on minority hiring reports and brochures aimed at minority students.
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David Rutter is the former publisher/editor of the Lake County News-Sun, a Sun-Times Media property. He welcomes your comments.
Posted on December 10, 2010