“You Gotta Have Heart”

By Jude T. Feld

“When your luck is battin’ zero
Get your chin up off the floor
Mister you can be a hero
You can open any door, there’s nothin’ to it but to do it
You’ve gotta have heart
Miles ‘n miles n’ miles of heart…”

Van Buren in Damn Yankees


I don’t want to hear about “the curse of the billy goat.”

Don’t mention a black cat running across the field.

Steve Bartman can return to “the friendly confines” as far as I am concerned.

None of them had anything to do with the “mighty” 2008 Chicago Cubs being swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Cubbies were totally outwitted, outplayed and outlasted by Joe Torre’s boys in blue.

The Cubs’ pitchers were wound up like eight-day clocks.

Ryan Dempster, is usually so loose, he has been known to ask the bartender at the Dark Horse Tavern, just down the street from Wrigley, “Have you seen my pants?” But on opening night of the three game series, the Cubs best pitcher looked like he was about to pass a kidney stone.

Game two featured Carlos Zambrano just being Carlos Zambrano – huffing, puffing, slamming his glove, stomping his feet, pissed off at the home plate umpire, pissed off at his teammates, pissed off at Lou Pinella. The guy would have been a perfect character in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He might be the most talented pitcher in baseball but until he learns to be Carlos “Zen”brano, he is about as reliable as a 1954 Edsel.

Cool, calm and collected Canadian Rich Harden worked out a plan prior to game three. He was just going to go out and pitch like it was any other game – A nice theory, but difficult to put into practice. He tried to pitch perfectly instead of just pitch and by the second inning you couldn’t drive a toothpick up his ass with a sledgehammer.

You can’t just point your finger at the pitching staff as the source of the Cubs’ woes.

Alfonso Soriano was slump-shouldered three games in a row. He looked like a guy from single A facing Sandy Koufax with a fungo bat, not one of the best leadoff men in Major League Baseball.

Aramis Ramirez’s maple was so cold you could pour gin over it, add an olive and have a martini.

An exhausted and hitless Kosuke Fukudome was ceremoniously replaced for game three in a pitiful attempt to turn things around, but we all know how well that worked out.

The only hitter with any swagger left was the normally laid-back Derek Lee. He actually looked like he thought the Cubs had a chance to win a game or two and seemed to be enjoying being on the field, but one player does not a team make.

The Cubs sucked defensively too.

Six errors is just a ticket to doom in post-season play – especially in a short series. When all four infielders made an error in one game, you could see the handwriting on the ivy-covered wall.

Some Cubs fans will blame Lou Pinella. After all, his two Cubs teams have scored a mere 12 runs in the DCS games he has managed and they have seen more brooms than the Wicked Witch of the West.

Sweet Lou was the only guy on the North Side who said the Cubs’ season would not be for naught if they didn’t win. He tried to keep the intense Chicago pressure off his boys and kept things as loose as he could in the clubhouse without distributing syringes of heroin prior to game time.

He sat on the bench during game three, peering out at the field, looking like a man watching his ship go down with no ropes and no life preservers to throw to the crew.

As for the Cubs, they never even tried to swim to shore. They drowned in the sea of self-defeat.

They had no heart.

Forget the billy goat, the black cat and Bartman, the only curse this season was being a Cubs fan.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 7:44 am and is filed under Featured Articles. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.