Get Your Goat: In Defense Of 'Bad' Cubs Writing
By Stephen Gossett in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 13, 2016 2:20PM
Photo: Tyler LaRiviere
The Wednesday morning after the Cubs tore through five Giants relievers for four runs in an unforgettable ninth-inning rally to win the NLDS, the New York Times couldn’t help but lean in on several old warhorses—the kind that tend to elicit a massive collective eye roll from progressive-minded fans:
“As pitch after pitch played out, the goblins of past heartbreak began to creep back. If tales of goats, a fan named Steve Bartman and past playoff collapses and curses began to be revisited, another very real specter appeared in the head of Joe Maddon, the manager of the Chicago Cubs,” led off writer Billy Witz, referring at the end to would’ve-been Game Five starter Johnny Cueto. (Emphases ours.)
Just as goblins of past heartbreak were rising up — tales of goats, black cats and Bartman — the Cubs rose up, too https://t.co/TlczOvyMER
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 12, 2016
It’s a familiar approach to be sure, and Deadspin, for one, was not amused: “Are You Ready For The Flood Of Bad Writing About The Cubs?” they grumbled later that day. Tom Ley wrote:
“This does not bode well for baseball fans who would prefer to live through these playoffs without choking on the supernaturalized hooey that sportswriters love to serve up whenever a team like the Cubs makes it to the postseason. If this is how the Cubs are getting written about at this stage of the playoffs, imagine what we’re going to get when they win a game that would actually merit more than a footnote on the commemorative World Series DVD collection.”
The subtext, of course, gets at the false binary that’s become equally as hoary in baseball circles over the last several decades: analytics vs. narrative. Call it the sports version of C.P. Snow’s famous—and now equally clichéd—“two cultures” conundrum, in which over 50 years ago the British chemist posited an intellectual rupture between the scientific and the literary.
Truth is, there may have never been a better series in which to play out both impulses than this year’s NLDS. Aside from the aforementioned usual-suspect “curses,” we had the reemergence of the Giants’ ballyhooed Even Year Bullshit and, even better, the dreaded Taylor Swift voodoo.
On the analytics side, the Cubs are simply the belle of the ball. As Chicago magazine calculated, the Cubs were the third best team overall since 1962—when both leagues began playing 162-game seasons—when weighted with fancy stat Wins Above Average. Their gaudier-than-Mar-a-Lago +252 run differential is the best in the Wild Card era; and their defense is so proficient that The Ringer and Baseball Prospectus had to team up to create a new statistic to properly gauge their infield prowess, dubbed Flex Score.
But the same folks who published that new metric also offered up Michael Baumann’s lovable defense of baseball’s Old Time Religion, in a must-read called “God Is Dead — and So Is #EvenYearMagic.” He wrote:
“Maddon and Theo Epstein breaking the 108-year hex on the Cubs would feel like the apotheosis of sabermetrics, the final triumph of empiricism over hokum, and proof of concept that there’s no bogeyman we can’t outsmart……Now the Cubs are eight wins away from killing God. FiveThirtyEight says they’ve got a 39 percent chance of pulling it off, but what if they do? Once you kill God, what’s next?”
Yes, Baumann cops to having rooted against the Cubs in the NLDS, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, as sick as we may be of Bartman and goats and a hundred years of this and that, those things will nevertheless be featured in the 30 For 30 when the Cubs ultimately do win it all. And they should be—just as Flex Score and Wins Above Average should be too. So let the “goblins” of small minds take some space beside the spreadsheet, because no team has ever felt so both.