you know, i gotta take a second to have my own hot take on
the smarminess of the current cubs administration regarding sosa, hearkened by
his recent sit-down with the Father of the Year.
back @ mark prior's debut in 2002 a wise man at wrigley (who had me in a choke hold up against a concourse-stairwell wall) once told me "hey burrito you listen and you listen good: you're at a cubs game, you wear a cubs jersey-- preferably sosa-- or an urlacher jersey or you go the fuck home" for the indelible crime of wearing an expos vladimir guerrero jersey to cubbie pride night (mark prior's MLB debut). those two words, preferably sosa, communicate the fact that "we lost but sammy hit one" was an inexorable part of cubdom for a better part of a decade/+ -- if wrigley is the world's largest (outdoor?) beer garden then sammy was arguably its main attraction for damn near 10 years. the cubs were in the sammy sosa business for a pretty good chunk of my (baseball) lifetime, and they're still the cubs last time i checked.
but now the creepy ricketts clan has bought the team executed THE PLAN(TM) and won a world series, so they're "above it all" to such an extent where tom ricketts is going out there and stumping for sosa to fess up to [his obvious] steroid use if he wants to be a part of the nu-cubs world? you might not have technically owned the team when it enabled/emboldened the roid-ridden monster that was/is sammy sosa, but you still bought the team that did it. dude, if i bought a nazi/SS uniform and tossed it on it's not like people seeing me walk down the street in it are gonna go "hey it's not like it was his uniform during the holocaust so no big whoop" they're gonna go "OMFG LOOK AT THAT NAZI MOTHERFUCKER WALKING DOWN THE STREET IN HIS SS UNIFORM!!!!!!!!!!" because the thing i bought carries with it the weight of its past. evidently this doesn't apply to baseball teams, especially when you've won a world series.
whether ricketts wants to acknowledge it or not, the baseball team he bought was in the sammy sosa business for a good ~10/+ years, and the previous owners lined their pockets with profits raked in from being in the sammy sosa business. beyond that, "we lost but sammy hit one" is an indelible part of cubdom that you look like an ass denying because you wanna act holier than thou about some squeaky clean "WE DO THINGS
THE RIGHT WAY AROUND HERE" self-propagated image that sanctimoniously wield to try and offset any potential "damage to your brand" by MONETIZING. EVERYTHING. throughout wrigley field + wrigleyville alongside the usual ticket price hikes. try as you might to convince everyone that hiring theo and enacting THE PLAN(TM) was 100.0% done "to do things the right way" it's not like you didn't stop and consider that enacting THE PLAN(TM) was a clever way to get fans to not just merely buy into but moreover champion having a top-3 MLB market team slash payroll by 100s of millions of dollars over a ~4-5 year period, surely-coincidentally coinciding with your efforts to further monetize your new toy during the first ~5yrs of ownership.
i'm not faulting the ricketts clan for doing their due diligence in MONETIZING. EVERYTHING. and/or enacting "the plan" -- i am, however, sick of the sanctimony that comes with the whole concept of "doing things the RIGHT WAY" and acting like they're "just like us" in going about their business for purely ethical/baseball reasons and acting like that makes them some good and just moral authority who can turn around and preach what sammy sosa needs to do to be a pepper too in this brave new world/era of nu-cubdom. seriously tom, you bought a team that had concrete chunks of the stadium fall from above the seats so they put up netting to catch future falling concrete; it's not like you bought the vatican. stop trying to act like a moral authority and talk about what sammy owes us in order to get back in your good graces like you're some moral arbiter "voice of the fans" bullshit cuz, as we all know, the one true "voice of the fans" is 670 AM Der Schnorr.
i'm not even a cubs fan, but i think that despite being a raging penis ("ernie banks has a statue and not me? wtf?") sosa "did enough" for the cubs/brand that you can toss him a WS ring and honor him out on the field to be like "yeah 20yrs ago we made bank off of this science experiement having a HR derby with mcgwire" cuz when you buy a team and run campaigns like "100 years of history at wrigley field; THE PARTY OF THE CENTURY!" you're not just a fool but furthermore an asshole to act like sammy sosa didn't play a huge part of a pretty decent little chunk of that century just because the asshat doesn't wanna formally admit that he discovered steroids once he got bored of his 30/30 necklace.
and even tho you didn't formally own the cubs back then so you didn't technically personally condone his actions, ex post facto moral outrage only makes you look like a sacrosanct penis who is trying to put yourself over as some "moral authority" as opposed to someone who really gives a shit if sammy was juiced to the gills when he crushed all of those weak fastballs and hanging sliders back in the day. hell, if you're "a cubs fan just like us back in the day" the odds are you were also saying "we lost... but sammy hit one!" with a pissy beer in your hand so why the fuck are you trying to act like you're so above it all nowadays other than the same reason supermasochist bob flanagan gave when he was asked why he did things like nail his dick to a board 12 times over: "because [you] can" ??
tom ricketts, who ya crappin!?_________________
Curious Hair wrote:
Les Grobstein's huge hog is proof that God has a sense of humor, isn't it?
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