That hurt

Add comment March 31st, 2008

You can’t win ‘em all, but that would have been a good one for the Cubs. Fukudome’s heroics are wasted.

Most disappointing is that Kerry Wood and Bob Howry didn’t get the job done today. Those two and Carlos Marmol are supposed to be the strength of the bullpen. Starter Carlos Zambrano and Marmol got it done today. Wood and Howry didn’t.

Well, I can’t obsess about every game. 161 to go.

That’s how legends are born

Add comment March 31st, 2008

Kosuke Fukudome just homered in the bottom of the ninth to tie the Cubs-Brewers game at 3. He was 2-for-2 with a walk before he hit the three-run dinger.That’s the kind of start he needed to get off to. Cubs fans will forgive his base running blunder earlier in the game and a few mistakes in the future after that shot.

Clutch homers are how players go from ordinary to stars to superstars to legends. Too early for such talk, but it sure is a nice start to No. 1’s career at Wrigley.

Why are they playing in Chicago?

Add comment March 31st, 2008

Glad to see the Cubs officially get their game in — and for Carlos Zambrano to look so dominant. But why was this game even played at Wrigley Field? Good thing Bud Selig isn’t a travel agent. He’d send you to Alaska in February and to Florida in August. Baseball has seven teams that play in domed stadiums and the Commish had five of them opening on the road. The other two hosted Texas and the L.A. Angels.

Cub fans don’t want Chicago playing their opener in Milwaukee every year. Fine. Chicago deserves to open every other year — weather be darned — at home. But at least have them playing another cold weather, non-domed team, like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. Instead, baseball goes out of its way to schedule miserably cold, wet early-season games. The Blue Jays at Yankees game got rained out in Yankee Stadium when they could have been playing indoors in Toronto. The Cubs are lucky the same didn’t happen to them. — Matt Trowbridge

Rain, rain go away

Add comment March 31st, 2008

I’ve been looking forward to this baseball season more than any other. I really think this could be the year the Cubs snap 100 years of futility. What scares me is that a lot of the “experts” think so too.

The most recent one I heard was John Kruk on ESPN. Kruk predicted that the Cubs would play the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. I’ve seen a couple of other folks predict the Cubs and Detroit Tigers. I just hope Sports Illustrated keeps them off the cover.

Today’s forecast doesn’t look too good for baseball. It doesn’t look good for anything except flooding.

Maybe there will be a long enough break in the rain that the Cubs and Brewers can get today’s game in.